Jennifer Welchman

In his Advertisement to the incomplete first edition of the Treatise, Hume justifies his decision to publish the first two Books separately on the grounds that “the subjects of the understanding and passions make a compleat chain of reasoning by themselves”.1 The Advertisement to Book 3 qualifies its predecessor slightly, stating that Book 3 is “in some measure independent of the other two and requires not that the reader shou’d enter into all the abstract reasonings contain’d in them”. Precisely which abstract lines of reasoning were complete by the end of Book 2, Hume does not say. As many commentators read T 1.4.6, personal identity seems a good candidate....

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.

Scientific cognitivists argue formalist aesthetics of nature are (i) inadequate for appreciating the full range of nature’s aesthetic values and (ii) too subjective to be useful for defending nature conservation. I argue that (i) is false because moderate formalists can appreciate nature for its performances, not merely objects and vistas. I argue (ii) is false because moderate formalists can argue that appreciation of beauty (including natural beauty) is a constitutive good of human flourishing, whose realization relies on access to a rich and diverse array of aesthetically rewarding experiences throughout a lifetime. On these grounds, moderate formalists (among others) can justify conserving distinctive natural entities and environs for our own and future generations’ good.

According to current definitions of civil disobedience, drawn from the work of John Rawls and Carl Cohen, eco-saboteurs are not civil disobedients because their disobedience is not a form of address and/or does not appeal to the public's sense of justice or human welfare. But this definition also excludes disobedience by a wide range of groups, from labor activists to hunt saboteurs, either because they are obstructionist or because they address moral concerns other than justice or the public weal. However earlier definitions of civil disobedience were not so narrow. I review the development of the current definition and the circumstances of its acceptance. I argue that the circumstances which help to explain the attractiveness of the Rawls/Cohen formulations in the 1970s are no longer applicable and that the question of civil disobedience should be revisited. I suggest a wider definition according to which at least some types of eco-sabotage would be civil disobedience.