Benjamin Steyn

This book proposes that 21st-century political debates in AI, bioethics, and environmental policy are best understood as occurring along a new political spectrum: a zero-sum conflict between the intrinsic value of nature and technological progress. The political values spectrum is a simple conceptual tool that everyone already knows. However, many modern political debates are not adequately explained by traditional economic or social liberty spectra. Instead, they are better illuminated by this new spectrum, concerning technological mastery over the biology of our bodies, minds, functions and physical environment. By defining the metaphysical opposition of nature and technology, and building an original case for technology's intrinsic value as a form of physical liberty and collective human achievement, this broad work seeks to unify disparate ethical fields, provide clarity in political discourse, and show that the persistent struggles in philosophy of technology, environmental ethics and bioethics to draw a principled line between acceptable and unacceptable technological interventions is in fact a political problem of balancing competing intrinsic goods, not a failure of ethical reasoning.

A broad set of public policy debates concern the limits of humanity’s control over nature. Attitudes towards such topics are not well explained by the standard 2-dimensional political model favored by political scientists of i) a left/right economic spectrum and ii) a liberal/authoritarian social spectrum. I pose a new, orthogonal, political spectrum to fill the void. It is a spectrum of value held for, on the one hand, nature, and on the other, technological progress. This harks back to the 18th Century Enlightenment and Romanticism, but manifests again and again, including in recent debates about human enhancement biotechnology.

Environmental ethicists often make claims about the intrinsic value of nature or parts thereof. Advances in intrinsic value theory, most notably Ben Bradley’s ‘Two Concepts of Intrinsic Value,’ successfully cleave the concept of intrinsic value into two: a Moorean and Kantian variety. This paper seeks to classify and organize different environmental theorists within a Bradley-inspired framework, helping to bring clarity and charity to the claims of older and newer environmental ethicists. These two types of intrinsic value help explain why different thinkers have differing intuitions on e.g., culling cases. As well as valuing nature suis generis, the paper considers the value that might accrue from other relational properties in nature, such as beauty, biodiversity, and rarity.