Charles Hayes

Rewilding is often promoted and defended with eudaimonistic reasons, by appeals to living better, happier lives. It has long been argued eudaimonistic reasoning is hopelessly self-interested and, in an environmental context, anthropocentric. Holmes Rolston’s classic critique of environmental virtue ethics stands to challenge the rewilding movement’s increasing focus on happier lives, rather than intrinsic natural value. This critique misses the mark, however, by insisting on an impressively longstanding, yet unhelpfully rigid distinction between egoistic and altruistic ethical reasoning. In this way, Rolston’s critique serves as an example of some much older and larger tensions which haunt everyday ethical thinking, tensions between desiring the good and doing what’s right, between self-love and selfishness. This paper embraces Rolston’s lifelong love of our living world, while nuancing what it means to hope for a Good Life within it.

Steven Vogel and Albert Borgmann have much in common. Both thinkers agree we collectively and materially build our environment. Both also believe communal discussion is essential for constructing better environments. Yet Borgmann does not hesitate to speak of “eloquent things,” while Vogel insists on nature’s silence. This essay examines that disagreement, arguing Vogel’s position is made stronger by the inclusion of what Borgmann calls “deictic discourse.” Such discourse testifies to the goodness of things, but without being either straightforward first-person speech, or the kind of ventriloquism that worries Vogel. Deictic discourse does not eschew responsibility; it accepts a deep responsibility not only for the practices it advocates, but for the wellbeing of its subject. The essay concludes by arguing deictic discourse plays a crucial and ineliminable role in the type of transparent conversations about practice Vogel promotes.