Beyond Intrinsic Value: Undermining the Justification of Ecoterrorism

Author(s): Charles S. Brown

Source: The American Journal of Economics and Sociology , Jan., 2007, Vol. 66, No. 1,
The Challenges of Globalization: Rethinking Nature, Culture, and Freedom (Jan., 2007),
pp. 113-126
Published by: American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27739623

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Part II: Rethinking Nature; Globalization and the
Challenges of Environmental Ethics

5
Beyond Intrinsic Value
Undermining the Justification of Ecoterrorism
By Charles S. Brown*

Abstract. Both Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" and Arne Naess's "deep
ecology" have been criticized as providing intellectual justifications for
both a misanthropic ecofascism and a policy of ecoterrorism for
environmental activists. This chapter argues that each of these two
approaches to providing a ground or framework for an environmental
ethics is subject to the charges of ecofascism or ecoterrorism only to
the extent that each is committed to the notion of "intrinsic value" as
a nonnegotiable moral absolute or, as Kant puts it, "a value beyond all
price." This chapter begins by describing shared value experience
between humans and animals and then points the way to an alterna
tive and pragmatic concept of value that can better guide environ
mental thinking on matters of law, policy, and activism. This concept
of value emerges from an experiential and epistemic understanding of
the inherent rationality of value experience. A description of value
experience reveals that the lived significance of value experience
exhibits a meaningful and referential structure in which anticipations
of future experience are either satisfied or frustrated in future expe
rience. This meaningful structure of value experience, in which value
experiences point to their own confirmation or disconfirmation, con
stitutes a self-correcting tendency or a prima facie rationality inherent
in value experience. The result is a pragmatic conception of value that
takes all value intuition and attribution to be intrinsically r?visable in
light of future experience. As such, value experience is always subject

*Charles S. Brown is Professor of Philosophy at Emporia State University. He is the

co-editor of Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself '(SUNY Press, 2003) and author
of many articles on intentionality, value theory, and environmental ethics.
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 66, No. 1 (January, 2007).
? 2007 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

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114 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

to negotiation, dialogue, and the weight of future experience. This

conception of value undercuts the intellectual, psychological, and
moral justification for ecofascism or ecoterrorism.

According to recent public declarations by the FBI, animal rights and

environmental activists are emerging as a serious domestic terrorist
threat in the United States.1 The FBI estimates that two organizations,
the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, have
committed over 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996,
resulting in damages in excess of $43 million. Although no humans
have been killed in any known case of environmental activism, the
suspicion that environmental activists may be willing to kill innocent
human beings to promote their pro-nature political agenda finds some
support among environmental philosophers who have suggested that
highly respected attempts to ground and articulate an environmental
ethics, such as Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" and Arne Naess's "deep
ecology," lead to an anti-human ecofascism.2
Leopold's moral maxim, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong
when it tends otherwise,"3 would seem to support massive human
depopulation by any means necessary. After all, if it is permissible to
kill individual deer to preserve the underlying ecosystem, and if
humans are plain members and citizens of the ecological community,
then it should be permissible to kill individual humans for the good of
the whole. According to Tom Regan and others, the requirement that
individuals be sacrificed for the good of the whole makes the land
ethic into a form of ecofascism.4 A similar charge may be made against
an environmental ethics rooted in deep ecology. In their list of deep
ecology's basic principles, Bill Devall and George Sessions state that
all life on Earth has intrinsic value, that humans have no right to
reduce the richness and diversity of life except to satisfy vital needs,
and that the flourishing of nonhuman life requires a decrease in
human population? Murray Bookchin, in particular, has drawn the
connection between this kind of thinking and that of John Foreman,
Earth First! founder, who has welcomed famine as a means of limiting
the population, and others who have declared humans to be a plague
or a cancer on the planet.6

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 Brown on the Justification of Terrorism 115

Whatever the merits may be of the charge that deep ecology and the
land ethic lead to ecofascism, the connection between ideology and
terrorism is more worrisome simply because terrorism does not
require the kind of top-down totalitarian governmental structure that
any form of fascism does. The possibility of ecofascism is only a dim
and distant threat, while ecoterrorism is not only an ever-present
possibility but also a steadily emerging temptation to some activists. It
is not simply the holism per se of deep ecology and the land ethic that
drive these forms of thinking toward Draconian and violent solutions
to environmental problems. The problem lies rather in the underlying
notion of "intrinsic value." Ethical holism becomes pernicious only
when two conditions are met: (1) when the good of the whole is
thought to override or trump the intrinsic value of the individual, and
(2) when the intrinsic value of the whole is judged to be intrinsic in
the strong metaphysical sense of being an atemporal fixed property
inherent in the whole?a nonnegotiable moral absolute or, as Kant
puts it, "a value beyond all price." As long as value is judged to be a
nonnegotiable moral absolute, the possibility and temptation of eco
fascism and ecoterrorism exists.
Environmental philosophy needs a pragmatic and nonmetaphysical
concept of value that can guide environmental thinking on law,
policy, and activism while resisting the temptation of ecofascism and
ecoterrorism. In the following pages I hope to develop a notion of
value to serve this need, that is, a notion of value not based on a
metaphysical interpretation of value as a property of things?God,
humans, or nature?but rather as an experiential and epistemic under
standing of the inherent rationality of our value experience. This
pragmatic understanding of value takes all value intuition and attri
bution to be intrinsically r?visable in the light of future experience. As
intrinsically r?visable, value experience is always subject to negotia
tion, dialogue, and the weight of future experience. In this way, value
experiences point toward their own confirmation or disconfirmation.
This self-correcting tendency of value experience constitutes a prima
facie rationality inherent in intentional experience in general and
value experience in particular.
The account of value defended here is rooted in a philosophical
anthropology that unites a Darwinian conception of moral instincts

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116 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

and a phenomenological conception of moral experience. I offer a

phenomenological analysis, that is, a description and interpretation of
value experience, to show that value experiences exhibit an inten
tional structure through which value experience anticipates its own
confirmation in future experience and thus contains a measure of
rationality.7 What explicitly renders value experience rational is its
revisability in the face of new experience. This will be brought out by
describing the inherent intentionality in value experience.
The idea of an evolutionary account of moral sentiments was first
developed by Charles Darwin in his The Descent of Man, where he
gives an account of the naturalistic origin of what he calls humanity's
"moral sense."8 The implications of Darwin's attempt to sketch an
evolutionary origin of morality have been developed by natural sci
entists such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, and Frans de Waal
and philosophers such as J. Baird Callicott. Common to these thinkers
is the idea that our so-called moral sentiments of empathy, affection,
and sympathy are evolutionarily shaped responses that are selected
because they make social groups more efficient, more stable, and
more permanent. The claim that morality is made possible by the
linguistic conceptualization of inherited social feelings is on the right
track but overlooks an important phenomenological fact about moral
experience. Moral experience or moral phenomena display an inten
tional structure not captured by the view of morality as instinct plus
language. What is missing from the received view concerning a
Darwinian account of morality is a theory of intentionality. Our basic
dispositional ways of behaving as humans, our basic possibilities, are,
no doubt, prefigured in our genes and in our kinship with other
animals. The fundamentals of our moral psychology may start out as
gut instinct, but these basic proto-moral sentiments are not just
reactions to outside stimuli. They have the quality of being directed to
something or are about something. Empathy is not only a feeling with
someone or something, but a feeling that has the phenomenal quality
of being directed toward some object or state of affairs. Altruism is
aimed toward the other. These moral sentiments are experienced by
humans not as raw, unstructured feelings but as referring to the other
in an attitude of compassion and solidarity. These are psychological/
somatological moments directed to an empathetic other and exhibit,

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 Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 111

as we shall see, a prediscursive intelligibility and a prima facie

rationality.
Moral theory and moral philosophy may be a uniquely human
activity, but we are not alone in our basic capacity to respond to the
world in an attitude of concern. Other social mammals are very much
like humans in this respect and share with us, at least in some basic
way, a moral or proto-moral openness to the world. Many people
believe that dogs are our closest animal companions, and the age-old
dog-human relation is, in part, built on our commonalities as well as
our differences. I offer the following moral fable to illustrate the moral
openness to the world shared by humans and dogs and to locate our
moral nature in our animal nature.9
Imagine that my canine companion, Lily, and I are playing in my
backyard, which is separated from my neighbor's backyard by a large
privacy fence. Because of this fence, Lily and I cannot see into the
neighbor's yard where another dog lives. Further imagine that one day
the dog in the adjacent yard is terribly injured and Lily and I hear the
dog's cries and howls but we cannot see him. Lily and I share a
common response to the other dog's suffering. We hear and under
stand his pain and suffering in his howls. We both experience a
considerable anxiety and an empathetic concern directed toward the
injured dog. We both experience a sense of dread over what will
happen next. We know something is wrong. We share the immediacy
and urgency of the situation. Lily feels she needs to do something, but
she doesn't know what. She feels frustration on top of an anguished
concern for the dog. I know Lily feels that because I feel it as well. I
see her behave very nervously, running to the fence, pawing at it,
running back and forth and around in circles; she looks at me and
seems to be frightened; she whines and barks. I can hear the agitation
and concern in Lily's sounds, and she can hear it in mine.
Skeptics will claim that my interpretations of Lily's experience are
mere projections, yet I believe Lily and I share a feeling with a similar
intentional structure, a similar cognitive directedness toward the
injured dog with similar anticipations. One large difference is that I
interpret my anguish at the dog's pain through numerous millennia of
linguistic history and the metaphysical categories that dominate those
worldviews. But the basic way of experiencing the suffering of the

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 118 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

wounded dog is not so different between Lily and myself. We do not

have direct access to the dog's pain, but we seem to have something
close to, if not identical to, direct access to the dog's suffering, just as
we have with humans. Both of us experience a sense of urgency, that
something is wrong now, and a sense that something must be done
now, as well as the frustration of not knowing what to do. I believe
this kind of response is a part of human moral psychology that we
share with many mammals and primates.
The Darwinian view of moral instincts that I have just been sketch
ing undermines the traditional anthropocentric view, which holds that
humans are the source of all value. Not only do nonhuman species
activate my moral sentiments, but other species also share those
sentiments. Anthropocentricism may, in some ways, illuminate human
dignity, but it also masks a larger and more comprehensive vision of
moral experience by establishing a hierarchical conception of moral
phenomena and, with it, a logic of domination that is often used to
support more particularistic forms of anthropocentricism such as
patriarchy, racism, nationalism, classism, and speciesism?each of
which appeal to their own conception of intrinsic value as an atem
poral metaphysical property. Anthropocentricism encourages us to
dismiss any moral sentiments we may experience toward nonhumans
as subjective and irrational.
I am always amazed at the stories of scientists who, under the sway
of Cartesian dualism, performed vivisections on animals while inter
preting their cries and howls not as genuine expressions of suffering
and distress but as mere unmeaning mechanical responses. Even Lily
knows better that this. Surely, if we look at and listen to such cries and
howls not through the distorting lenses of anthropocentric metaphys
ics but in a spontaneous openness to the world, we are confronted not
with mechanically produced sound and motion but with an immediate
and natural expression of pain and suffering.
Both Lily and I share an attitude of concern and empathy toward
the other's suffering. We share an immediate intuition that some
thing is wrong. This intuition is as much somatic as it is cognitive.
We feel, as Hume would say, in our "breast" as much as we project
it toward the howling dog. My own human response to the howls
of the hurt dog?the somatic anxiety dreadfully directed to the

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 Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 119

suffering dog, a gut reaction that something is wrong, a vague and

diffuse feeling that something should be done (I think I share all
this with Lily)?is integrated into my own linguistically based con
ceptual system and worldview. The prelinguistic intentional com
portment of my felt sentiment is conceptualized in ways that Lily's
is not. I suspect that Lily's prelinguistic intentional comportments, in
this case, an empathie openness to the suffering of others, come
and go, and play themselves out quickly. In my own case, the
symbolic power of language extends these sentiments by binding
them to longer-term projects.
While I think that Lily and I begin at a similar place, a mammalian
response to suffering, my own intentional comportment toward the
injured dog goes far beyond what I suspect Lily is capable of. Both Lily
and I try to get past the fence to access more closely what is
happening. The original experience of hearing those howls has been
extended into a seeking out of more information?we both look to
see what is wrong, we both anticipate and project. These anticipations
and projections may be confirmed or disconfirmed in future experi
ence. If we managed to come face to face with the injured dog and I
see that the dog is caught in a nonhumane wolf trap, I will search for
a way to release the dog. My recognition of the trap as a human
artifact opens my experience into new conceptual domains and
worlds, and these worlds bleed into my understanding. I don't think
Lily would understand the wolf trap. Her projections are more imme
diate. If we got through the fence and saw the dog was being eaten
by a lion, Lily would, I think, understand this. For Lily, all this would
unfold into projections of her immediate future. She would run from
the lion, anticipating trouble if she stays put, but her power to extend
her experience into the future or into other symbolic domains is cut
short by her lack of language.
The structure and content of human cognition, moral or otherwise,
is distinguished from that of other prelinguistic animals by the tem
poral range and symbolic worlds that language gives to our immediate
sentiments. As our moral instincts are folded into our conceptual
systems, they take on new meanings. I can imagine that if I came
through the fence and found the dog in an old and carelessly
discarded wolf trap, my empathie anxiety of shared suffering would

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 120 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

begin to take on air of moral disapproval as the trapped animal

opened up the world of animal trapping and that, in turn, opened up
the world of human domination of nature. This sense of disapproval
is largely cultural and conceptual, but it is made possible and sus
tained over time by the gut feeling, the moral instinct, that something
is wrong. We can hear that in the howls.
Because value experiences are intentional, they bring with them
their own procedure for confirmation grounded in the temporal
structure of anticipation and either satisfaction or frustration of such
anticipation. This anticipatory projection within value experience pro
vides or denies a justification for the sense of that lived experience.10
If I experience friendship or marriage as good, it is not simply that I
enjoy friendship or marriage; it is that I have a sense, even if
unarticulated, of how and why each is good. Even if we cannot
express it, we know that friendship or marriage extend our sphere of
concern while comforting us in ways that help to provide our lives
with meaning. To experience friendship or marriage as good is to
interpret and impose the sense of good on these relations, but it is also
to expect to continue to find goodness in these relations and to have
such expectations fulfilled. The very experience of positive values like
marriage and friendship is bound up with an implicit understanding of
the meaning of marriage and friendship. Our experience of these as
good is also subject to the possibility of breakdown, as the final test
of value is the test of time.
Experiences of positive value that we call "good" involve knowing
what to expect. It is this anticipatory structure that provides an
ongoing validation of our experiences of the good. If we initially find
friendship and marriage to be bad and fraud to be good, openness to
further experience will almost always correct this. That we find value
in friendship and disvalue in fraud is not arbitrary. Rarely do our
considered judgments about these things disappoint us. Our experi
ence continues to establish friendship and marriage as good in an
ever-evolving process of being open to the good. By grounding our
values and beliefs in the evolving wisdom of our collective experi
ence, we can avoid the perils of absolutism and relativism. We can
avoid dogmatic absolutism by understanding that our experiences and
conceptions of the good are always open to revision, and we can

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 Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 121

avoid relativism by recognizing that our experiences of the good

demand their own confirmation in future experiences.
The conditions for the possibility of moral experience are embed
ded in our animal nature and are greatly expanded by our ability to
conceptualize our moral sentiments and intuitions within our linguistic
and conceptual worldviews. Even though our moral categories and
concepts, rooted in our historically constituted worldviews, allow us
the power of abstract moral thinking and moral imagination, we are
too often closed off from a genuinely emancipatory moral conscious
ness because our thinking is too often dominated by the metaphysical
categories controlling our thinking. When the openness and tempo
rality of moral experience is reduced to the ahistorical categories of
God, humanity, or nature, the open-ended possibilities of experience
are eliminated in favor of a finite set of rules governing what can be
said or thought about moral experience. The anticipatory structure
of value experience demands that our sentiments and evaluative
responses to the world be understood as prima facie intuitions about
the goodness or badness of the matters at hand. A first glance always
requires a second look. Our various understandings of the good are
subject to continual assessment in light of subsequent experience, just
as we continually reassess our initial understandings of the real and
the true. Over our lifetimes and through the centuries the world has
unfolded in ways that have rendered our previous understandings of
the good as imperfect and parochial.
This analysis of moral phenomena is an experiential and epistemic
understanding of the inherent rationality of value experience rather
than a metaphysical interpretation of value as a mysterious or mystical
property of things. The goods we appreciate for ourselves and for
others are never given as absolute but always are provisional and
subject to the satisfaction or frustration of future experiences. Here we
find the deepest flaw of biocentric approaches to environmental ethics
such as the land ethic and deep ecology. To the extent that these and
other ecophilosophies understand intrinsic value as an atemporal
metaphysical property, biocentricism repeats the pattern of the other
centricisms by making its experience and conception of intrinsic value
into a metaphysical and moral absolute. Thus, to the extent that
biocentric thinking interprets our moral experiences around a

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 122 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

nonnegotiable ahistorical metaphysical and moral absolute, the door is

still left open to the temptation of ecofascism and ecoterrorism.
The logic of domination reenters the picture with the emergence of a
moral absolute.
The radical ecological project of unmasking ecodestructive ele
ments in our worldview does not end with the development of new,
alternative, and ecofriendly worldviews, but rather with the more
radical possibility of shifting power within our worldviews away from
the controlling authority of fixed concepts and categories and toward
an openness to how the world unfolds. To attempt to think without a
radical questioning of the historical and contingent nature of the
concepts and categories controlling thought is simply to articulate the
combinatorial possibilities of fixed semantic regimes. Rather than give
in to a prepackaged way of thinking, we must hold out for a kind of
thinking that is open to the world, a kind of thinking that is able to
take the world in, to be available to the revelation that the world may
offer. Such thinking accepts what the world offers but always takes a
second look. Such thinking is characterized by its intrinsic revisability
in the face of an always open future.11
Moral experience is always a dialectic between our animal senti
ments and our historically constructed worldviews. Neither our animal
sentiments nor our historically constructed value systems are infallible.
We live morally responsible lives only by playing one off against the
other. Moral experience is always directed toward a future that is yet
to come. The final categories of moral understanding are forever
postponed. Without final categories there can be no final answers, and
without final answers there can be no final solutions. Final solutions
are always based on metaphysical absolutes. Ecological philosophy
and environmental ethics will best be served by a notion of value that
recognizes the temporality and interrelatedness of all things. By
tracing our capacity for moral experience to the becoming of natural
selection and the historicity of our worldviews, we can learn to
interpret our various intuitions and experiences of value as a prima
facie understanding of goodness to be born out in future experience.
Such a prima facie understanding of goodness, worth, and value is
never absolute and final; it is always provisional and subject to further,
but never perfect, confirmation. As such, it would provide a poor

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 Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 123

means for the justification for fascist or terrorist solutions to environ

mental or animal rights issues.
The account of value developed here runs counter to the uncritical
notion of "intrinsic value" prevalent in mainstream environmental
ethics. That notion of intrinsic value?a property inherent in the
thing-in-itself?falls out of a tradition interested in providing a meta
physical grounding of value. Such accounts will always be highly
speculative and subject to endless challenges. The account developed
here focuses on the dynamism and temporality of value experience.
This account urges us to understand moral experience as emerging
from social relationships?from the face-to-face openness to others
structured by compassion and care. Moral philosophy has been too
long dominated by an abstract, universalizing rationalism that takes
acting from abstract principle as the center of moral phenomena and
pushes sentiment and feeling to the margins. The account developed
here sees moral phenomena as emerging from relationships, from
particular contexts and particular situations.12 Moral phenomena, in
this understanding, is open-ended, in process, and ultimately,
although beyond the scope of this paper, in dialogue.

Notes

1. James F. Jarboe, "The Threat of Ecoterrorism." In congressional testi

mony before the House Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Forests and
Forest Health, February 12, 2002. For the full testimony, see http://
www.fbi.gov/congress/congress02/jarboe201202.
2. For two insightful essays concerning the possibility and threat of
ecofascism, see J. Baird Callicott's "Holistic Environmental Ethics and the
Problem of Ecofascism," in Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environ
mental Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1999) and
Michael Zimmerman's "The Threat of Ecofascism," in Environmental Philoso
phy from Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, eds. Zimmerman, Callicott,
Warren, Klaver, Clark (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005).
3. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1949), 220.
4. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1983), 262. Similar criticisms of the land ethic have been
made by K. S. Schrader-Frechette in her "Individualism, Holism, and Environ
mental Ethics," in Ethics and the Environment (1966) 1:55-69, and by W.

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 124 The American fournal of Economics and Sociology

Aiken in his "Ethical Issues in Agriculture," in Earthbound: New Introductory

Essays in Environmental Ethics, ed. T. Regan (New York: Random House,
1984), 247-288.
5. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature
Mattered (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Books, 1985), 70.
6. Murray Bookchin, "Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology." Socialist
Review 88(3) (1988): 11-29.
7. Charles S. Brown, "The Intrinsic Rationality of Moral Phenomena."
Skepsis XV/I (2004): 477-494.
8. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex
(New York: Heritage Press, 1972). This is a reprint of the 1874 second edition.
9. An earlier version of this moral fable appeared in my "Ecofascism and
the Animal Heritage of Moral Experience," in Dialogue and Universalism,
7-8/2005. The focus of that essay was on ecofascism rather than ecoterrorism.
10. Charles S. Brown, "The Real and the Good: Phenomenology and the
Possibility of an Axiological Rationality." In Eco-Phenomenology. Back to the
Earth Ltself eds. Brown and Toadvine (Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press, 2003), 3-18.
11. Charles S. Brown, "Respect for Experience as a Way into the Problem
of Moral Boundaries," forthcoming, in Boundary Explorations in Ecological
Theory and Practice, eds. Brown and Toadvine (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press).
12. Val Plumwood, "Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental
Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism." Hypathia 6(1) (Spring 1991):
3-27. Plumwood's criticisms of traditional moral theory are compatible with
the account of moral phenomena sketched in this paper.

References

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Review 88(3): 11-29
Brown, Charles S. (2003). "The Real and the Good: Phenomenology and the
Possibility of an Axiological Rationality." In Eco-Phenomenology: Back to
the Earth Itself, eds. C. Brown and T. Toadvine. Albany, NY: State
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-. (2004). "The Intrinsic Rationality of Moral Phenomena." Skepsis XV(I):
477-494.
-. (2005). "Ecofascism and the Animal Heritage of Moral Experience."
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 Brown on the fustification of Terrorism 125

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