Destroying important aspects of our environment such a lake o mountain is not good because it reduces the quality of our life . Vegetation is part of the environment. Cutting a tree that took 1000 years to growth has more consequences than cutting a young tree. We enjoy and depend on the oceans, what right do we have to deprive other generations of the same benefits. if we are to survive , we have to act responsibly towards our natural world. We also need to act with empathy with other animals that can feel pain and sadness like us. It is in our nature to be empathic and staying so is important for our survival as well.

I fully agree with you Louis. Do these things have intrinsic moral value, or is their value only instrumental, relative to our needs as human beings? If you say it is intrinsic, where does that value reside? What confers that value upon these things?

Bill,

Can we consider a mountain in itself? It is a whole with all its relationships. It sustain a local ecosystem and a global ecosystem. Through our relationship to the mountain, we can experience beauty and meaning. All that and much more is the mountain. There is no in itself for such big reality.

I'm not positive of what you mean. The fact that we have a word for it, e.g. "mountain" or "mont" means we can consider it as a whole, at least linguistically. You have answered my question by what you have used to explain one's experience of a mountain. You say "through our relationship to the mountain, we can experience beauty and meaning." Again, as above, I fully agree with you, but this is beauty and meaning relative to the human observer. Does it have intrinsic worth apart from these qualities which are humanly defined? Were there no humans to observe this mountain would it still have beauty and meaning? Would it have intrinsic moral worth and value if we humans were not present to recognize it? If we say "Yes.", then where does such worth and value reside? What grounds it? I am trying to find the locus of the moral worth of the non-human things which our intuitions tell us are morally valuable in themselves.

Bill,

The fact we have a word ''mountain'' is part of the problem for attributing an intrinsic value to a mountain. In our language and its use, a word such a mountain is in the category of things which have no intrinsic value. All acient peoples and the still today in the native cultures, the local mountain as all important aspects of the environment, the aspects on which the lives depend , are personalized into their myths. Cognitively, human attributed intrinsic value only to personhood. All the cultures which have not rejected the ancient myths have stayed closely in touch with Nature by giving personhood status with important aspects of nature. In my previous posts, I was trying to provide a personhood status to a mountain through its relationships which the thing-fication of our culture and language render very difficult.

Sorry Louis - I've been off RG for a while. I am having difficulty understanding what you take to be actual versus what you take to be helpful. From things you've said elsewhere I believe it is safe to assume that you don't actually believe mountains to be persons. Yet here you are saying this. Are you suggesting that although we know these things not to be aware, alive, or in any way relationally interactive, that we should behave as if they did have personhood, in order to invest them with dignity apart from the categories of the scientific?

Bill,

You always try to be clear in your narrative. My point is that if I try to be crreate this clear narrative, I am forced by the nature of the style of such modern narrative to leave out essential aspects of what a mountain is. A poet or a traditional native form of narrative do not force them to leave these aspects out. The more you ask clarification in this detached and logical mode of language and the more you render impossible the expression of what a mountain is in these mode of expressions. I hope that in the future, science and our language will evolve in such a way that it will allow clarity without automatic destruction of the poetic aspects of reality and so we can be poetic scientists.

Louis I am very much in favor of poetry, and I love the arts, but my question was whether or not there were objective standards, independent of human valuing (or "instrumental valuation" - e.g. "of subjective value or worth to human beings"), by which we could affirm the intrinsic worth of non-human entities? How can a "poetic aspect of reality" be an "essential aspect" of that entity? How can the figurative and imaginative (comparable in many ways to the metaphorical and analogical) be said to be "essential"? I do not think that we are involved in a scientific reductionism if we say that some aboriginal person's notion of a tree being a female person, and containing a nymph (usually referred to as a "dryad") is inaccurate and not really helpful if we wish to speak of the ontology of a tree. I do not think we can really speak of a tree spirit or a mountain spirit as being an "essential aspect" of tree or mountains. I usually find myself agreeing with most of what you say. But this time either we have a failure to communicate, or we have some philosophical difference about the nature of reality. When I am seeking to understand the "isness", the ontology of some entity, I don't regard aboriginal notions about their status to be real, true, or helpful.

By so saying I mean no disrespect to indigenous aboriginal belief systems. I simply mean that there is no empirical support or validation for such notions, so they cannot be "essential aspects" of the entities in question. I would never demean or ridicule such beliefs, but inasmuch as there is nothing about the nature of reality which corroborates or supports such notions, they are of no use in addressing the question which I have posed.

I think we all have intuitions that such entities (animals, trees, rivers, mountains, etc.)have intrinsic worth. The question is how do we give weight or substance to our intuitions? I don't find turning towards aboriginal myths to be a workable answer to this issue unless I believe such myths to have a basis in reality. I am still not certain that I understand your meaning Louis, because what I understand you to be saying about this doesn't harmonize with what I have heard you say in the past. I think I am missing something about what you are saying.

Bill,

First we should not speak of the aboriginal belief about a tree or a mountain. We should speak about their relationships with these entities. Their cultures is not about an accurate description of the tree or an accurate description of the mountain but about meaningfull relations with the tree and with the mountain. These meaningfull relations came to be stabilized into their oral tradition that goes back to thousand of years. Only the most meaningfull stories got selected in this process.

Is there a common ground between traditional humanistic culture, native or european or indian or chineese and modern philosophical and scientific culture?

In the enlightment we have created a scientific myth that it was possible to scientifically described the world as it is in itself. We have beleived in this story for a while. First the romantic phylosophers and poets without rejecting the validity of scientific knowledge have realized the limits of the objectivism myth. Science like every other aspects of human knowledge is participatory, about our relation with the world and not about the world in itself. We are gradually and slowly moving away from objectivism. Special relativity do not specify how the world relative to an observer, what is objective is not the world but observer-world relations. IN Quantum mechanics, the equations are about how measurements can be best predicted within an observer system relationship. A scientific theory is a participational belief system that we keep on improving. One such improvement will be how to harmonize cultural traditional belief systems with scientific belief systems. Deepening the scientific belief system along the post critical road traced by Polanyi and others is essential for our survival.

''I think we all have intuitions that such entities (animals, trees, rivers, mountains, etc.)have intrinsic worth. The question is how do we give weight or substance to our intuitions?''

First most oft these intuitions do not come from our scientific knowledge. It comes from our enjoyment of these entities , our direct appreciation and indirect appreciation though our common cultural testimonial about it. Our emotions are not about these entities in themselve but about our relation with them. Our life are all the relations we establish and maintain. We enjoy artworks and we enjoy beautiful aspects of nature. Is there a single man made artwork comparable in beauty to a mountain or a tree? If I look at a mountain from the point of view of economic activity, transforming the mountain into a gravel pit is the most exciting emotions possible and transforming the tree into logs is the most exciting prospects possible within this limited economic view. As a hunter, I do not want the mountain to become a gravel pit. As an urban dweller wanting to enjoy nature in the weekend I do not want the mountain to become a gravel pit but maybe if the mountain is far away and I have invested in the gravel pit company, I will not object.

What will motivate a person to keep the tree and the mountain is a narrative of the relations that will motivate the person more than the destructive narrative provided by our way of living and our associated way of thinking.

Okay Louis, now I understand. This is interesting. Unfortunately it is the week before finals and I have a number of meetings with students. I need to get off of here, but when things slow down a bit I will get back on here and look at this a bit further. Thank you for clearing things up for me.