David Hume's moral philosophy and environmental ethics
Description
In this dissertation I explore the relation of David Hume's moral philosophy to environmental ethics. J. Baird Callicott argues that Hume's moral sentimentalism provides a subjectivist framework for respecting the intrinsic value of species and ecosystems. I agree with Callicott's subjectivist reading of Hume, but I question his decision to deploy Hume's moral sentimentalism directly in terms of value theory. Remaining as faithful to Hume's theory as possible, I reconsider his moral philosophy in the context of environmental virtue ethics and provide a Humean account of the moral significance of the more-than-human world. After explicating specific elements of his virtue theory---Hume's disjunction between the useful and the agreeable, his account of practical rationality, and his consideration of characteristics specific to moral evaluation, most notably the love of truth---I establish its relevance to the environmental virtue ethics. A common worry about environmental virtue theories is that they are anthropocentric because they entail that the value of species or ecosystems, for instance, is determined by their instrumental role in supporting character judgments. I argue that this view rests on a false disjunction between instrumental and non-instrumental values that cannot hold for strictly human-centered ethics any more than it can for environmental ethics. Instead, I propose that Hume's virtue theory offers a rich and under-explored moral framework in which to consider human conduct in relation to the more-than-human world. By attending to the free expression that Hume gives to the full spectrum of human values in moral life, I argue that Hume's moral theory belongs not only in the conversation on environmental virtues but supports the conclusion that knowledge of the ecological impact of our conduct will have to factor into character evaluation