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.

Hume’s readers love to hate the Sensible Knave. But hating the Knave is like hating a messenger with bad tidings. The message is that there is a gap, on Hume’s account, between our motivations and our obligations to just action. But it isn’t the Knave’s character that is to blame, for the same gap will be found if we turn our attention to alter egos, such as Robin Hood, the benevolent “Prince of Thieves.” Replacing self-interest with benevolence not only does not make the gap go away, it makes it harder to bridge. Of thetwo, it is benevolence, not self-interest, that actually poses the more serous challenge to Hume’s account of justice

: William James's "The Will to Believe" has been criticized for offering untenable arguments in support of belief in unvalidated hypotheses. Although James is no longer accused of suggesting we can create belief ex nihilo, critics continue to charge that James's defense of belief in what he called the "religious hypothesis" confuses belief with hypothesis adoption and endorses willful persistence in unvalidated beliefs—not, as he claimed, in pursuit of truth, but merely to avoid the emotional stress of abandoning them. I argue that James's position in "The Will to Believe" can be defended provided we give up thinking of it as ethics of belief and think of it instead as an ethics of self-experimentation. Subjective data are relevant to rational consent to participation in research

Norton argues on pragmatic “Deweyan” grounds that we should cease to ask scientists for value neutral definitions of “sustainability,” developed independently of moral and social values, to guide our environmental policy making debates. “Sustainability,” like human “health,” is a normative concept from the start—one that cannot be meaningfully developed by scientists or economists without input by all the stake holders affected. While I endorse Norton’s approach, I question his apparent presumption that concern for sustainability for the future is at odds with and ought to trump concern for enhancement in the present of public opportunities to access the goods nature represents. I argue that the two are not separable in practice. I argue for Passmore’s position that unless we take care to enhance equitable access to the good and services nature represents in the present, we cannot succeed in promoting sustainability for future generations.

Aldo Leopold's holistic land ethic principle, ‘‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community … wrong when it tends otherwise,’’ has seemed to many philosophers indefensible in light of any of the traditional normative theories of character and conduct that have been central to Western moral theory since the early modern period. J. Baird Callicott has long disputed this assessment, arguing that in fact, Leopold's land ethic is best understood and defended as the conclusion from the application of an essentially Humean moral outlook to the human exploitation of nature. Callicot'ts defense of Leopold's land ethic has been criticized for being grounded in an interpretation of Hume's moral philosophy that the texts do not support. But while the criticisms pose a serious obstacle to acceptance of Callicott's own strategy for constructing a Humean defense of Leopold's position, they leave open the possibility that other strategies might prove more successful. There are at least two ways that a more successful defense could be constructed. The attitude toward nature encapsulated in Leopold's land ethic principle could either be defended as an inborn, natural virtue or, alternately, as a novel species of artificial virtue inculcated for its personal and social utility. If this correct, Callicott's suggestion that we look to Hume for a defense of Leopold's position merits serious consideration, both for the light it may shed on the particular question of the defensibility of Leopold's land ethic principle and on more general questions about whether Hume's virtue theory can be a useful resource for ethical and social policy debates about the environment.