Iowa State University
Does the Iowa Prairie Have Intrinsic Value?
Yes: Dr. J. Baird Callicott
I have been asked to address the question, Does the Iowa prairie have intrinsic value? Philosophers prefer to generalize specific questions such as this. Suppose someone asks a philosopher, Is Socrates Thermopolous - who is, let us hypothesize, a contemporary Greek-American who owns a restaurant in Ames - mortal? She asks first, Are all men mortal? Addressing that question with inductive logic, she draws the universal conclusion that indeed all men are mortal. And then observing that Socrates is a man, she returns to the original question and confidently concludes that, yes, Socrates is mortal.
So, does the Iowa prairie have intrinsic value? Proceeding according to the pattern just illustrated, let's ask more generally Do prairies have intrinsic value? -- whether they be in Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, or wherever. But even that question is not general enough for environmental philosophers to want to try to address. Moving up another rung on the generalization ladder, we might ask, Do biotic communities have intrinsic value?
The next thing that philosophers are wont to do after generalizing the questions posed to them is to define the terms in which they are formulated. In the textbook example, "men" does not refer to male as opposed to female human beings; it refers (in a notoriously gender-biased way) to human beings irrespective of sex. And - leaving open another question, the question of lift after death - "mortal" refers to somatic, not psychic death. Similarly, in respect to the present question, I need to indicate what the term "biological wholes" refers to and what intrinsic value means. Intrinsic value may be defined in contradistinction to instrumental value. The instrumental value of a thing is its usefulness to something -- or to someone -- else. Tools are paradigm cases of things the value of which is exclusively instrumental. When a tool wears out, it becomes totally valueless, except perhaps as material to be recycled. Each one of us human beings believes that is or her own total value exceeds his or her instrumental value - his or her usefulness to family members, to friends, to employers, and to society. Each of us believes, in other words, that he or she has intrinsic in addition to his or her instrumental value. Thus a first approximation of what intrinsic value is this: Intrinsic value is the value left over after we subtract someone's or something's instrumental value. What gives some things, but not others, value over and above their instrumental value? Various answers to this question have been proposed in the past. If some things have been created in the image of God and others have not, then a good case might be made that those so created have intrinsic value and those not so created have it not. But "the image of God" is a property the possession of which cannot be ascertained by empirical means. Historically, Western philosophers have sought a more secure and universally persuasive justification for their own claims, and those of their "fellow man," to possess intrinsic value. But at the same time they wished, self-servingly, to rule out claims made on behalf of non-human beings. Preferring to follow not Moses, but Aristotle, who characterized "man" -- that is, the species more formally named Homo sapiens -- as the "rational animal," many Western philosophers (Immanuel Kant is a noteworthy example) attributed intrinsic value to all rational beings. Thus God, if God exists, the heavenly host of angels, if they exist, the immortal souls of somatically dead human beings, if they exist, and somatically living human beings - all have intrinsic value, because all are putatively rational. Everything else has, conveniently for us human beings, at best only instrumental value.
Unfortunately, not quite all human beings are in fact rational. Human infants, severely retarded, profoundly demented, and abjectly senile people are not. Therefore, if rationality is the intrinsic value-conferring property, we should be able, within the bounds of morality, to treat these so-called "marginal-cases" of humanity as we do all the other beings who are instrumentally but not also intrinsically valuable. We should be able to perform painful medical experiments on babies, hunt the retarded and demented, and make dog-food out of the senile. But even to suggest such things is outrageous and obnoxious. And I would not have dared to do so except dramatically to make the point that rationality is too narrow a basis for intrinsic value. In order to include the human marginal cases in the class of beings that have intrinsic value, some philosophers (Peter Singer most notably) have recently suggested that the capacity to suffer is better and more inclusive intrinsic value-conferring property. More inclusive indeed, because if all sentient beings have intrinsic value, then not only will the human marginal cases have it, so will a very wide range of animals. And that, of course, is exactly what Singer had in mind.
Singer's powerful ploy set other philosophers with even wider concerns to thinking. Why draw the line between beings that are sentient and those that are not? Non-sentient animals and plants have interests, have goods of their own, which they try to fulfill. And their interests can be frustrated whether they consciously suffer therefrom or not. They too are striving, potentially thriving beings no less than are we. Should not we therefore admit that they too have intrinsic value?
Environmental philosopher Paul W. Taylor, on the basis of such reasoning as this, concluded that all living beings have "inherent worth," which is only another name for intrinsic value. But also on the basis of just such reasoning, Taylor explicitly and strictly limited inherent worth to individual living things. On this account, biological wholes, such as species and biotic communities, lack intrinsic value. Other philosophers have tried to extend Taylor's account of intrinsic value to species and to ecosystems on the decidedly shaky supposition that species are spatially and temporally protracted supra-individuals and that ecosystems have interests. But the weight of opinion in evolutionary biology and theoretical ecology does not support such eccentric characterizations of species and ecosystems.
So, returning to our original question, Does Iowa prairie have intrinsic value?, this line of argument leaves us not only with a negative conclusion, but with an implausible alternative conclusion: In general, all individual living things have intrinsic value, but no biological wholes have it. Therefore, the prairie communtiy has no intrinsic value. Neither has its several species -- such as big bluestem, Indian grass, compass plant, round-headed bush clover, lupine, and butterfly week - to mention a few. But its individual components have it: this stalk of big blue stem, this stalk of Indian grass, this compass plant, this bush of round-headed clover, this sprig of lupine, and this particular butterfly weed.
Therefore, we had better back up and take another tack. First let's diagnose the problem with the foregoing tack, and ask how it leads to the implausible conclusion that all biological specimens - individuals - but no species or biotic communities -- wholes - have intrinsic value? Each step seemed sound enough: the image of God is not an empirical criterion; rationality is too exclusive; non-sentient living things also have interests and good of their own. Perhaps we are looking for intrinsic value in the wrong places, in the valuees, instead of in valuers.
A cornerstone of modern science and philosophy is the proposition that objective nature is value-free. If we imagine that all subjectivity, all consciousness, were obliterated at a single stroke, then all value would disappear with it and only impassive phenomena would remain. Value is a verb first and foremost, and a noun only derivatively. Nothing actually has value - either instrumental or intrinsic. Rather things are valued -- either instrumentally or intrinsically. Under this interpretation, the difference between instrumental value and intrinsic value is this: Someone or something is instrumentally valueable when he, she, or it is useful to someone else; someone or something is intrinsically valueable when he, she, or it is valued for his, her, or its own sake.
Now each of us human beings values himself or herself intrinsically. That is, whatever it may mean to say that each of us values himself or herself instrumentally (to the extent that we are useful to ourselves?), it is crystal clear what it means to say that we value ourselves intrinsically, that is, for our own sakes. More problematic is whether we value anyone or anything else intrinsically. I think we do. Some fervent anti-abortionists seem genuinely to value each and every human embryo and fetus intrinsically (though some anti- abortionists - judging by their views on welfare, high taxes for quality education, and capital punishment - seem to cease to value each and every child after it's born). Animal rights advocates value animals intrinsically. And some environmentalists value biological wholes - species and ecosystems - intrinsically.
We may value anything or even everything intrinsically. But, as a matter of fact, we don't actually value just anything or everything intrinsically. What is the general principle of discrimination? I submit that it derives from the fact that we are social beings. The bond, the glue, holding protohuman tribes together, Darwin suggested, were altruistic feelings of sympathy for fellow-members and loyalty to the group as a whole. As time went on human societies grew in size and complexity and with that process of social evolution, step-for-step, human beings recognized more and more fellow-members and larger and larger communities.
Today, all human beings belong to a single human community - the global village - as well as to a variety of more circumscribed human communities. Those among us who are vividly aware that the most inclusive of our nested human communities is now global in scope are moved to intrinsically value all our fellow human beings (irrespective of race, creed and nationality), humanity as such, and human civilization.
But how does all of this help us address the general question with which we began, now reformulated in light of a more scientific understanding of intrinsic value: Are some biological wholes, as well as some biological individuals, intrinsically valuable? Human beings and sentient animals are biological individuals. And Darwin helps us to understand why, upon recognition of various social ties, upon recognition of various bonds of fellowship and community, we would, and should, intrinsically value them. But what about species per se and ecosystems as such? More particularly, what about such species as big bluestem and silphium, and what about ecosystems like the Iowa prairie?
Darwin noticed that the proper objects or targets of some of our altruistic moral sentiments are social wholes. Indeed, according to Darwin, our most basic and primitive moral sentiments were community-oriented. "We have now seen," he notes, "that actions are regarded by savages, and were probably so regarded by primeval man, as good or bad, solely as they obviously affect the welfare of the tribe, not that of..an individual member of the tribe." We can sympathize and empathize only with our fellows, only with other individuals, but we mostly identify with and feel loyal to the communities that we recognize ourselves to be members of.
Respect is a moral attitude that we hold only for entities that are ends-in-themselves. We do not respect automobiles and other things, which, though highly valued, are valued only as means. That is, we respect only intrinsically valuable entities. As Aldo Leopold wrote, "It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense." And by "value in the philosophical sense" Leopold could only mean what we philosophers call intrinsic value."
Does the Iowa prairie have intrinsic value? It doesn't have intrinsic value in the same way that it has a deep root system. As I understand it, value is not an independently existing objective property. The Iowa prairie is, rather, intrinsically valuable, something that we can and should value for its own sake. Why? Because it is a type - and a very paradigmatic type at that - of a biotic community. And, from an ecological point of view, we human beings are members of hierarchically organized biotic communities, no less than we are members of hierarchically organized human communities. Most of us intrinsically value the latter - our families, our hometowns and cities, our countries and global human civilization. And to the extent that we are biologically literate, to the extent that we have absorbed the wider implications of the theory of evolution and the principles of ecology, we intrinsically value the former: forests, prairies, lakes and streams, marine communities, and the biosphere itself in which we live, move, and have our being.
No: Dr. Lilly-Marlene Russow
Professor Callicott has argued that prairies such as the ones found in Iowa have intrinsic value; they are biological wholes which we can and should value for their own sakes, not just for their usefulness to something or someone else. I wish to disagree, and to identify two major problems serious enough that we should not accept Callicott's conclusion. Thus, I think that the prairie does not have intrinsic value.
To claim that something has value (of whatever sort) in this context is not just to claim that some valuer attaches importance to it. Callicott speaks of the proper objects of moral sentiments, and insists that the prairie is something we can and should value. But if we want to make claims like this, we will have to give reasons to support them. Thus, we must be prepared to support our ascriptions of value to prairies, to explain why they should be valued. The need for good reasons is especially clear in dealing with someone who fails to recognize its value: the developer who sees a prairie as a fine place for a housing development, shopping mall, or well-manicured golf course, for example. However, this special need should not obscure the fact that even among like- minded people who rarely require us to justify ourselves, there still must be some reason which supports ascriptions of value.
Callicott has not told us the whole story about his reasons for thinking that the prairies has intrinsic value. He has told us why he thinks we can value them: because it is a community in which we live. But I'm sure he does not think that any community in which we live should be valued, so there is more work to be done. It's easy to find example of social communities that are so repressive, chaotic, or simply inimical to human flourishing, that its members might be quite justified in refusing to value them. The immediate biotic community in which I live consists mostly of soybeans and corn, interspersed with patches of Kentucky bluegrass, pavement and houses. Should we say that this isn't really a community, or that it is not a community that should be valued?
Nonetheless, reasons for valuing the prairie are not hard to supply. Some of the reasons are straightforwardly instrumental: they place fewer demands on our water supply, provide the habitat in which species we wish to preserve can survive. Others are instrumental in a less transparent way: prairies remind us of how small we are, how the land has been changed by human influence, how big the sky is, how complex a system of interconnected long range life cycles nature can devise. A prairie provides a combination laboratory/museum for us to study some of there life cycles. It teaches us to avoid superficial, rigid, and anthropocentric judgments such as `fire is bad'. But these reasons have a common theme. In one way or another, the prairie is valued because it teaches an important lesson. That is, it has value for the same reason that a good textbook has value - instrumental value, not intrinsic.
What about those reasons that seem to impute intrinsic value in a straightforward way, such as the claim that prairies are beautiful? A useful tactic in such cases is to ask what would increase or decrease the alleged intrinsic value; in doing so, we can often become clearer on why we value a particular thing.1 There are many ways to make a thing more or less beautiful: variations of color and symmetry are two obvious factors. However, proposals to introduce the color are immediately rejected on the grounds that such tampering would (a) choke out less aggressive native species, and (b) simply not be authentic. These objections reveal that it is not beauty per se that grounds our appreciation of prairies, but something else: a desire to restore an authentic prairie, with species that might not otherwise survive. These considerations are variations of considerations that earlier turned out to be instrumental: making us feel more connected with our historical roots, and so on.
There are many more plausible candidates for "reasons to value a prairie," and it would be impossible to canvass them all here. At this point, however, the burden of proof lies with those who defend the claim that the prairie has intrinsic value. Until a clear case for intrinsic value has been made, my conclusion is that our concern for prairies rests on the instrumental values: to remind us a valuable lesson, to illustrate the variety of biotic communities, and so on.
Reliance on instrumental rather than intrinsic value is not necessarily bad. Standard examples - tools, automobiles, lamps and bricks, might give the impression that instrumental value is always prosaic, mundane, and ultimately economic. But things may also be valued instrumentally because they contribute to or make possible something fine, spiritual, or otherwise "high minded." Libraries have great instrumental value just because they make possible what is best and finest in us; to conclude that something `merely' has instrumental value should not denigrate it. Nor does labeling something `merely' instrumentally valuable mean that it is somehow less important. Some things (e.g., food) have great instrumental value because they are absolutely necessary to sustain life. In such cases, we may justifiably sacrifice something of intrinsic value in order to obtain the food we need and value `merely' instrumentally.
There is a second serious obstacle that blocks the conclusion that prairies have intrinsic value. In order to say of any `X' that it has intrinsic value, one must have some solid idea of what `X' is, or at least how to identify it as an `X'. Thus we must ask "what is a prairie?" Callicott recognizes the importance of this question, but tells us that our understanding of prairies and biotic communities is clear enough for the present purpose. However, to see whether this intuitive understanding is sufficient, we need to understand the crucial role in Callicott's argument that is played by the concept of a `community.'
The notion of community is the glue that binds together a collection of individuals into a unit, a whole. That whole may be a family, a tribe, a nation, or an ecosystem. Prairies and other ecosystems are described as biological wholes; Callicott also speaks of social wholes as appropriate object of value.
The problem is that social, mixed, and biotic communities vary widely in the extent of their "wholeness," their own internally grounded integrity. This is easy to illustrate in social communities: contrast a nuclear family (however that is defined in a particular culture) with the communities formed when I arbitrarily break the students in my logic class into groups of six to work on a long range class project. Both are communities in a broad sense, but the latter has only minimal cohesiveness, integrity, or internal structure. The same range will be true of collections of plants and animals. A zoo or safari park is a biotic community, albeit one whose scope, boundaries, and members are for the most part determined by "outside" forces. In that sense, the park is more like my logic groups than like a family. It, too, lacks intrinsic or internal integrity, or wholeness. In the best of all possible worlds, all ecosystems would be more like families than zoos or logic classes. Indeed, the notion of integrity that I have been using plays an important role in both Aldo Leopold's and Baird Callicott's ethical theories. The dilemma, then, is this: Either we admit that not all communities have `wholeness,' in which case on Callicott's own criterion not all communities will be appropriate object of value, or else we should restrict the term `community' to wholes with internal integrity. Either way, prairies may not have the requisite integrity.
In order for Professor Callicott's argument (at least, the one he offers here) for intrinsic value to apply to something, that thing would have to be a whole, would need integrity in a fairly robust and self-sustaining way. Therefore, we need to ask whether prairies are more like families or zoos. Sadly, I think we must conclude that they are more like zoos. There are always some problems with defining and delineating an ecosystem, but prairies pose special problems. The prairies we have today are often restored - not original - and exist in small, isolated patches. Moreover, prairies may require human intervention to flourish and survive. Perhaps when Leopold looked at prairies, some were large enough and `original' enough to be complete ecosystems: not just a catalogue of plants, but the birds that feed on them and spread the seeds, the butterflies specially adapted to pollinate these flowers, the grazers that prevent the overgrowth of larger plants and the predators that the limit the population of grazers, and so on. But prairies as we have and value them today fall far, far short of this completeness and unity. The patches of prairie may have a few bobolinks and dickcissels, but they also have their share of English sparrows. The little pockets of prairies are inevitably surrounded by the suburban or urban environment that disrupts the `purity' of the prairie.
The problem is not just size, however. Restoration even on a grand scale raises questions about unity, integrity, and identity. When an ecosystem evolves gradually and naturally, it "defines its own identity." Plants and animals in the system belong there, are legitimate members of the community. The species that are not represented are not really part of they system. On the other hand, when we set out to restore a prairie, we have to rely on historical records - often incomplete or inaccurate - and through an examination of the few bits of `original' prairie we can find. Even that assumes that we can recognize an original prairie when we find it, that we can distinguish the indigenous life from the exotics that may have contaminated it.
Finally, both restored and original prairies typically require human tending, outside intervention in the form of fires and weeding out exotics. The need for this sort of continued intervention also affects and undermines the identity of prairies as biotic communities.
To sum up, because many apparently intrinsic values turn out to be instrumental upon closer examination, and because it is not clear that prairies today have the sort of wholeness or integrity that makes them potential objects of value in their own right, I conclude that prairies do not have intrinsic value. That does not mean that we should not preserve and cherish them, but it does mean that we need a different moral foundation for that preservation.
Bioethics Institute Expands to Illinois
In May of 1994, the Iowa State University Bioethics Institute was recreated on the campus of the University of Illinois in Urbana, Illinois. Topics debated included: genetically engineered foods, with Martha Crouch and David Kline; controlling nature, with Peter Wenz and Richard Watson; the role of humans in the ecosystem, with Robert McKim and Baird Callicott; and, international justice, with Thomas Pogge and Chris Cuomo. Participants were required to read The Elements of Moral Philosophy, and James Rachels, the author, gave a lecture on moral theory. Gary Comstock assessed How ethics is like and unlike science and Robert Wengert provided one of several pedagogical sessions. Wengert spoke about Evaluating, and teaching students to evaluate, moral arguments.
Thirty food and agricultural scientists from the University of Illinois participated:
Susanne Aref, Agronomy
Wayne Banwart, Agronomy
Susan Brewer, Foods & Nutrition
Cleora D'Arcy, Plant Pathology
Lyle Fettig, Ag Economics
Don Graffis, Agronomy
Michael Gray, Ag Entomology
Harold Guither, Ag Economics
Bruce Hannon, Geography
Robert Hays, Ag Communication
Michael Hirschi, Ag Eng.
Thomas Jacob, Forestry
George Kieffer, Ecol, Ethol, Evol
James Kerjci, Edwardsville Extension Center
Gregory McIssac, Ag Eng.
Guillermo Mendoza, Forestry
Darrel Miller, Agronomy
Scott Morris, Food Science
Michael Murphy, Animal Science
Kenneth Olson, Agronomy
Randall Ott, Clinical Medicine
Jack Paxton, Plant Pathology
Wayne Pedersen, Plant Pathology
Gerald Pijanowski, Vet Bioscience
Lane Rayburn, Agronomy
Robert Reber, Food & Nutrition
Ann Reisner, Ag Communications
John Scott, Ag Economics
Deoki Thipathy, Vet Pathobiology
Gerry Walter, Ag Communication
Aaron Moore of the Agricultural Department at Illinois State University also participated.
Ethics Discussions Widespread in ISU Life Science Classrooms
The Bioethics Program at Iowa State University is having an effect on teaching and research. A recent survey showed that since 1991 more than 70 life science faculty members had introduced at least one hour-long period of discussion of ethical issues into over 220 ISU science and technology classes, reaching over 11,000 students. The program has also been successful in encouraging faculty to review their research programs in light of ethical principles, and in attracting the attention of the national news media. The Chicago Tribune ran a long story about the program on the front page of its Sunday Business section on April 10, 1994, titled "Bioethics Sows Seeds of Change in Ag Research," and the newspaper The Scientist printed a story in its October 4, 1993 edition titled "Iowa State Faculty Take Successful Bioscience Ethics Institute to U. of Illinois."
The program has also been successful in attracting external funding and the attention of other institutions. In 1993 the program won a $51,000 USDA Higher Education Challenge Grant award to transfer the Institute to the University of Illinois. Each of the Deans of four different colleges at Illinois contributed $500 of direct cash support per faculty member accepted into the institute from their college, for a total of $15,000. Finally, a major grant is pending at the National Science Foundation, a grant that would allow the Bioethics Institute to be extended for another year at Illinois and then to go to Michigan State University. As the ISU program prepares for another year, its effectiveness is being recognized by institutions and news media around the country.