Transcendental Idealism and the Fact/Value Dichotomy
Author(s)
Baldner, Kent
Abstract
Perhaps the most striking moral intuition reported by environmental ethicists is the belief that the value of natural entities must be seen as in some important way independent of human beings. It seems to many that we have substantive moral obligations toward nonhuman animals, plants, and perhaps even inanimate parts of the natural world, and furthermore that these obligations cannot be completely explained in terms of any duties we may have toward living human beings or future generations of human beings. And so it seems that environmental ethicists are committed to the claim that at least some nonhuman natural entities have a kind of intrinsic or inherent value. In this paper I will attempt a partial reconciliation of these two sets of intuitions. My goal will not be to defend any of the specific claims made by environmental ethicists, but rather to help establish the very possibility of a certain branch of environmental ethics by providing an account of value that allows for the possibility of natural entities having values apart from their relations to human beings. My claim will be that there is a sense in which values are, and another, different sense in which they are not dependent upon human cognition. Taking my cue from Kant’s transcendental idealism, I will argue that there are two very different senses in which values might be dependent upon us. Kant claimed that space and time were at once “transcendentally ideal” and “empirically real,” meaning that each is transcendentally but not empirically dependent upon human consciousness. I will argue that the same is true with respect to values.
