The Good Green Life

This chapter addresses the book’s core distinction by contrasting the right and the good. It utilizes a thought experiment – the Parable of Wicked and Wild – to argue that the imperative of justification is paramount to building a viable environmental ethics. Such an environmentalism would seek to build a “viridian commonwealth” in which citizens and industries act with and for reasons that are or could be subjected to the scrutiny of all citizens.

The Green’s Gambit

This chapter argues that reasons are underdetermined and often left out of value-based discussions of nature. The chapter offers a rough sketch of Kantian moral theory – particularly the first two formulations of the Categorical Imperative – to suggest that the primary charge of environmentalism ought to be that of encouraging deeper justification of actions. It utilizes the Endangered Species Act, the argument from ecosystem services, and the case of a stolen kidney to suggest that cost-benefit analysis and related methodologies are insufficient for addressing the broad ethical considerations of environmentalists.

Return to the Paleocene

This chapter introduces the reader to philosophical and ethical inquiry by forging a distinction between descriptive and normative claims, as well as explanatory and justificatory arguments. It utilizes cases of paleontological discovery and climate communication to argue that “catastrophe reasoning” about climate change is not only politically but also ethically problematic. In this respect, it relies on the current climate discussion to frame the general argument criticized in this book: that the mere demonstration of nature’s value is enough to generate obligations to protect nature.

The Precious Vase

This chapter introduces the central trope of the book: that a key supposition of environmentalism is the idea that nature is valuable. It briefly explores questions regarding the nature of nature, but also introduces a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value. It utilizes cases of environmental direct action to demonstrate a range of value-based arguments prevalent throughout the environmental community.

Introduction

Apart from the time I substituted a cup of salt for a cup of sugar, one of my first cooking misadventures occurred in the early 1990s, on a Thanksgiving trip home from college. Filled with an arsenal of ideas and a mind for social change, I was home to proselytize, eager to persuade my family that a vegetarian diet was not only the right diet but the tastiest diet as well. It was my view then that each of us is obligated to do our part to undermine the negative impacts of factory farms. Not only are such farms cruel to animals, I thought, but they are also an extremely inefficient way of providing food. I was of the mind that each American bore the burden to change his or her behavior to help put factory farms out of business. And so I took it upon myself to demonstrate that a good, healthy holiday meal needn’t be propped up by honey-baked hams and richly stuffed turkeys....

The Voter’s Conundrum

This chapter seeks to make sense of motivating and justificatory reasons as different sorts of answers to “why” questions. The chapter uses the related problems of overpopulation and the irrationality of voting to first, examine the tragedy of the commons; second, to explore a response to causal impotence objections; and third, to establish the right as the justified. It also distinguishes between justification as a status and justification as a process.

The Wild and the Wicked

This chapter seeks to firm up a distinction between actions and events, eventually motivating a more important distinction between the right and the good. The chapter contrasts the bombing of Hiroshima with the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004 to suggest that actions and events are not as easy to compare as they may first appear. It then discusses decision trees and introduces “the case of the poisoning stranger,” to illustrate how difficult comparisons between actions and events can be. In doing so, it lays the groundwork to cover the distinction between the right and the good.

Rustling in the Bushes

This chapter proposes that nature often can be disvaluable, but that many modern conveniences and technologies mediate and temper this disvalue. The chapter utilizes a series of anecdotes -- including animal attacks against humans, illness from food borne pathogens, fears of cryptids, and scorched earth warfare -- to underscore the disvalue of nature and show how technologies often mask an underlying brutality in nature.

Postscript: The Right Thing for the Right Reason

The summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, was a time of increasing domestic unrest. The civil rights movement was well underway, Martin Luther King Jr. was in his final year of inspiring young upstarts to object peacefully to discrimination, the mantra that one should “make love, not war,” was emblazoned on hand-held posters and tattered bedsheets, and millions of mattresses, shorn of these selfsame sheets, were laying witness to the sexual revolution. We now know that the young man who was snapped by photographer Bernie Boston placing carnations in the barrels of automatic weapons was George Harris, a struggling actor heading off to San Francisco. Harris would later declare his homosexuality, assume the name Hibiscus, and help start a flamboyant drag troupe called the Cockettes. In the early 1990s, he would die of AIDS, a disease he contracted, arguably, thanks to the free love that had become a defining feature of his lifestyle....

The Axes of Evildoers

This chapter elaborates on earlier chapters by discussing various attitudes and orientations that interpreters of reasons may take with regard to actions and events. The chapter proposes that it is easy to think that actions should either be assessed from a third-person perspective or a first-person perspective – strategically – but it suggests instead that the second-person perspective may be a more appropriate stance from which to evaluate reasons for actions. It utilizes cases like the Two Elk fire, zombies, and the video game DOOM to distinguish between an orientation toward success and an orientation toward understanding.