A. Value based on moral standing & moral significance
1. Moral duties pertain to entities recognized to have moral standing. There is a philosophical question regarding the relevant criteria for moral standing: rationality, self-consciousness, sentience, etc. How we determine the criteria results in relatively narrower or wider spheres of moral consideration, e.g. anthropocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism, etc.
2. Moral standing has an indeterminate relation to moral significance, i.e. an entity may have moral standing but relatively very little moral significance, e.g. a tapeworm.
B. Value based on natural capitalist accounting: ecosystem services / natural capital
3. Provisioning Services: A provisioning service is any type of benefit to people that can be extracted from nature. Along with food, other types of provisioning services include drinking water, timber, wood fuel, natural gas, oils, plants that can be made into clothes and other materials, and medicinal benefits.
Regulating Services: A regulating service is the benefit provided by ecosystem processes that moderate natural phenomena. Regulating services include pollination, decomposition, water purification, erosion and flood control, and carbon storage and climate regulation.
Cultural Services: A cultural service is a non-material benefit that contributes to the development and cultural advancement of people, including how ecosystems play a role in local, national, and global cultures; the building of knowledge and the spreading of ideas; creativity born from interactions with nature (music, art, architecture); and recreation.
Supporting Services: Ecosystems themselves couldn't be sustained without the consistency of underlying natural processes, such as photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, the creation of soils, and the water cycle. These processes allow the Earth to sustain basic life forms, let alone whole ecosystems and people. Without supporting services, provisional, regulating, and cultural services wouldn't exist.
4. Issues with pricing:
Economic incentives to preserve resources, e.g. Gulf of Thailand mangroves.
$33 Trillion to buy the world’s ecosystems?
The cost of something that is irreplaceable, the water cycle.
The devaluation caused by putting a price on something.
C. Value connected to the concept of the Commons
5. We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
Concept of the Commons
“By the law of nature these things are common to mankind — the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shore of the sea. — Institutes of Justinian (535 A.D.)
6. The Commons: The sum of all we inherit together and should pass on, undiminished, to our heirs. The Romans distinguished between three types of property: res privatae, res publicae and res communes. The first consisted of things capable of being possessed by an individual or family. The second consisted of things built and set aside for public use by the state, such as public buildings and roads. The third consisted of natural things used by all, such as air, water and wild animals.
7. KEY FUNCTIONS OF THE COMMONS
Basic sustenance - supplies everyone’s food, water, fuel and medicines.
Ultimate source - of all natural resources and nature’s many replenishing services.
Ultimate waste sink - recycles water, oxygen, carbon and everything else we excrete, exhale and throw away.
Knowledge bank and seedbed - holds humanity’s vast store of science, art, customs and laws, seedbed of all creativity.
Communication - through shared languages that are living products of many generations.
Travel - the commons for land, sea and air travel.
Community - the village tree, the public square, Main Street, the neighborhood and the Internet.
8. E.g. Peter Barnes’ Sky Trust model: based on the premise that the sky belongs to everyone and must be held in trust for future generations. It requires polluters to purchase emission permits from a trust representing all citizens. The trust’s income can be used for public purposes and/or rebated to citizens through equal dividends. (based on the model of the Alaska Permanent Fund)
9. Spiritual Version: Indigenous View of the Environment as a Gift of Pachamama - to be cherished, protected, stewarded. A gift calls for gratitude and for sharing the gift.
D. Metaphysics of Value: Does value require a valuer?
10. Two contrasting intuitions:
Yes: Nature is valuable (a) only if valued by humans, (b) only if it would have been valued by humans had they been present, (c) only if valued by any human or non-human entities present.
The fact that different observers can value the same thing differently shows that the thing in question is value-neutral.
No: Sacredness - inherent value - exists independently of any specific valuer.
E. Value as an objective, measurable aspect of unfolding wholeness or system coherence.
11. Christopher Alexander’s systems-theoretic definition of value:
A system which is good if:
(a) any identifiable subsystems would be in good condition, and
(b) any larger systems which the system is a part of would be in good condition.
12. Transpersonal/Panpsychist view of value: Wholeness as a picture of the transpersonal self.
“How is it metaphysically possible for you as an individual self to feel (to be) related to the Whole
of the universe? The hypothesis: The I of your (personal) self and the I-ness or self-like feeling
of living structure are two aspects of one single, universal, timeless I.”
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