Jennifer Welchman

Though nearly 400 pages, Benjamin Richardson’s The Art of Environmental Law, Governing with Aesthetics, will not tell you everything you always wanted to know about aesthetics and environmental law but were afraid to ask. What it will give you is a fascinating overview that is remarkably readable despite its considerable length.Richardson’s opening chapter explains that his objective is to show “how insights from aesthetics can enrich the study and understanding of environmental law.” (p. 5) Strictly speaking, what he draws upon are insights about aesthetics rather than from aesthetic theories, philosophical or otherwise. Richardson does occasionally draw upon philosophical texts, most frequently those of Allen Carlson and Glenn Parsons, Arnold Berleant, Yuriko Saito, and Emily Brady. But this is a work of applied aesthetics, aimed at an interdisciplinary audience. Indeed its greatest strength is its interdisciplinarity. Richardson draws on studies of environmental law and landscape management, biodiversity conservation, museum practices, advertising, ecotourism, environmental restoration, land art, and environmental activism, as well as philosophical environmental aesthetics. The result is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the many different avenues through which aesthetic values, broadly construed, can enter into the development and application of environmental law.

Natural Goodness is an important new book from Phillippa Foot, a central figure in the revival of ethical naturalism and character-based ethics. A longstanding critic of the emotivist and prescriptivist theories that arose following twentieth-century analytic philosophy’s linguistic turn, Foot attacked reigning versions of noncognitivism according to which moral language and judgment made no meaningful claims about moral agents or their actions but were instead misleading expressions of a speaker’s attitudes. In classic papers such as “Moral Beliefs,” “Virtues and Vices,” and “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives”, she argued that such accounts misrepresented both the content of moral evaluation and its use. The “logical grammar” of moral evaluation did not support claims that it referred primarily to internal states of particular moral agents. On the contrary, usage indicates that our evaluative judgments are offered and understood as making confirmable claims about the sort of character and lives we have reason to try to achieve. Her new book develops and extends her earlier critical work with a new account of practical rationality and its relation to human good that is meant to show how we can go from descriptive generalizations about human life or flourishing to action-guiding prescriptions that we have reason to adopt even at the cost of substantial personal sacrifice.

In the first book on the development of John Dewey's ethical thought, Jennifer Welchman revises the prevalent interpretation of his ethics. Her clear and engaging account traces the history of Dewey's distinctive moral philosophy from its roots in idealism during the 1890s through the pragmatist approach of his 1922 work, Human Nature and Conduct. Central to the development of Dewey's ethics was his lifelong conviction that the realms of science and morals, facts and values were reconcilable. This conviction, Welchman demonstrates, drove Dewey to reject the orthodox ethics of his day in favor of radical alternatives?first absolute idealism and later pragmatism. She reveals how Dewey came to adopt and subsequently to modify idealist ethics of self-realization. Welchman then explores the transformations in Dewey's conception of science that exploded the fragile truce between fact and value that he had negotiated as an idealist. Finally, she examines how Dewey developed his own instrumentalist accounts of moral value, conduct, and character that culminated in his best-known work of ethics, Human Nature and Conduct.

John Dewey began his career as an absolute idealist, holding that the universe is a construct of an absolute mind in which human minds participate; human ideas are true when they reproduce the absolute's ideas; and human conduct is right when it realizes the absolute's goals for human progress. Twenty years later Dewey had abandoned idealism for instrumentalism, asserting that ideas are instruments for the manipulation of human experience and that conduct is right when it generates a satisfactory relationship between agents and their environments. However, scholars disagree about when, why, and how this transformation of Dewey's thought occurred. I review the development of Dewey's moral epistemology from 1884 to 1908 to answer these questions. ;In chapters I and II, I examine the sources and nature of Dewey's early idealism, relating it to the views of contemporary idealists such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, G. S. Morris, and to the views of A. Comte. By the latter Dewey was inspired to seek a reconciliation of physical science and morals, despite the reservations of his fellow idealists. In Chapters III and IV, I discuss Dewey's first two ethics texts , each an attempt to overcome idealist objections to reconciling ethics and science. Both were critical failures, forcing Dewey to rethink his position. In chapter V, I argue that collaboration with experimental psychologists at the University of Chicago transformed Dewey's understanding of science. He then came to see scientific ideas and principles as instruments for manipulating human experience and, gradually, all ideas in the same light. By 1902, Dewey had abandoned his earlier idealist notions for instrumentalism and begun to construct new arguments for reconciling science and ethics. In chapters VI and VII, I explicate and defend the reconciliation Dewey achieved through use of his new instrumentalist moral epistemology in his 1908 Ethics