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Naturalizing Sentimentalism
for Environmental Ethics
T. J. Kasperbauer*
Jesse Prinz and Shaun Nichols have argued that within metaethics, sentimentalism is the
theory that best accords with empirical facts about human moral psychology. Recent findings
in experimental moral psychology, they argue, indicate that emotions are psychologically
central to our moral concepts. One way of testing the empirical adequacy of sentimentalism is by looking at research on environmental values. A classic problem in environmental
ethics is providing an account of the intrinsic value of nonhuman entities, which is often
thought to be inconsistent with sentimentalism. However, no supporters of sentimentalist
accounts of environmental values have evaluated the empirical adequacy of their claims.
The relevant evidence falls under two broad categories: (1) responses to nature itself and
(2) moral evaluations of environmental behaviors. The evidence indicates that both valuing
and disvaluing nature are ultimately grounded in emotions.
I. INTRODUCTION
Jesse Prinz1 and Shaun Nichols2 have argued that within metaethics, sentimentalism is the theory that best accords with empirical facts about human moral psychology. Recent findings in experimental moral psychology, they argue, indicate
that emotions are psychologically central to our moral concepts. Their support for
sentimentalism is part of a broader movement to “naturalize” the domain of ethics,
or to account for ethical facts in a way that coheres with facts about the natural
world. Naturalizing metaethics helps to adjudicate between competing ethical claims
while also making ethical values less mysterious. Testing the empirical adequacy of
sentimentalism in this way is thought to be essential to building a comprehensive
metaethical theory.
In this paper, my aim is to naturalize sentimentalism for environmental ethics.
Research on environmental values provides illuminating test cases for the empirical
adequacy of sentimentalism. One key challenge comes from the concept of intrinsic
* Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Rolighedsvej 25, 1958
Frederiksberg C, Denmark; email: [email protected]. Kasperbauer’s research interests include applied
ethics (particularly animal and environmental ethics), moral psychology, and philosophy of psychology.
He is grateful to have received helpful comments on various drafts of this paper from Clare Palmer,
Gary Varner, Linda Radzik, Katie McShane, and David Wright. Kasperbauer is the co-winner of the
2015 Holmes Rolston, III Early Career Prize for this paper.
1 Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jesse
Prinz, “Measuring Morality,” in Reflecions on Naturalism, ed. José Ignacio Galparsoro and Alberto
Cordero (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2013), pp. 43–59.
2 Shaun Nichols, Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (Oxford
University Press, 2004); Shaun Nichols, “Naturalizing Sentimentalism,” in Moral Psychology: The
Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 255–74.
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value. A classic problem in environmental ethics is providing an account of the
intrinsic value of nonhuman entities, which is often thought to be inconsistent with
sentimentalism. Within environmental ethics, the classic sentimentalist account
comes from J. Baird Callicott,3 and more recently, Katie McShane4 has argued
for a revival of sentimentalist theories for environmental values. Both Callicott
and McShane argue that sentimentalism is compatible with the intrinsic value of
nature, but do not evaluate the relevant empirical evidence for this claim, nor for
the emotional basis of environmental values more generally.
I argue that the empirical evidence does indeed support the centrality of emotions
in environmental values. I classify the relevant evidence according to two broad
categories: (1) responses to nature itself, and (2) moral evaluations of environmental
behaviors. With regard to (1), I review evidence indicating that awe, wonder, and
fascination cause positive valuing of nature, and that aversion to nature is driven
by fear and disgust. The evidence relevant to (2) can be broken down into evaluations of one’s own environmental behaviors (self-regarding emotions) and the
environmental behaviors of others (other-regarding emotions). I argue that guilt
drives moral disapproval of one’s own environmental actions, while evaluations
of others are determined by the so-called CAD emotions: contempt, anger, and
disgust. In short, the evidence suggests that both valuing and disvaluing of nature
are ultimately grounded in sentiments.
I proceed as follows: before discussing the relevant empirical evidence, in
section two I provide a basic outline of sentimentalism, and discuss how classic
debates over intrinsic value within environmental ethics have led many to resist
sentimentalism for environmental values. Sections three and four then present the
evidence in favor of sentimentalism, as discussed above. In section five I consider
possible objections to my account. In particular, I defend sentimentalist theories of
value in environmental ethics against recent criticisms raised by neosentimentalists.
Neosentimentalists argue that the merit of, or justification for, moral emotions is
central to our moral concepts (e.g., as found in Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson,
“Sentiment and Value,”5 and in an environmental context in the work of Katie McShane6). I argue, in opposition, that merit is not central to our moral psychologies,
and that it causes problems for the psychological plausibility of neosentimentalism.
3
J. Baird Callicott, “Intrinsic Value, Quantum Theory, and Environmental Ethics,” Environmental
Ethics 7 (1985): 257–75; “On the Intrinsic Value of Non-Human Species,” in The Preservation of Species, ed. Bryan Norton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 138–72; “The Philosophical
Value of Wildlife,” in Economic and Social Values of Wildlife, ed. Daniel J. Decker and Gary Goff
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 214–21; and “Can a Theory of Moral Sentiments Support
a Genuinely Normative Environmental Ethic?” Inquiry 35 (1992): 183–98.
4 Katie McShane, “Why Environmental Ethics Shouldn’t Give Up on Intrinsic Value,” Environmental Ethics 29 (2007): 43–61; Katie McShane, “Neosentimentalism and Environmental Ethics,”
Environmental Ethics 33 (2011): 5–23.
5 Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson, “Sentiment and Value,” Ethics 110 (2000): 722–48.
6 McShane, “Why Environmental Ethics Shouldn’t Give Up on Intrinsic Value”; and “Neosentimentalism and Environmental Ethics.”
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II. SENTIMENTALISM AND INTRINSIC VALUE
(2.1) BRIEF OVERVIEW OF SENTIMENTALISM
As outlined in Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton’s classic
essay,7 sentimentalism can be classified as a variety of sensibility theory, in the
tradition pioneered by John McDowell,8 David Wiggins,9 Allan Gibbard,10 and
Simon Blackburn.11 Sensibility theories are labeled as such because, on these
accounts, morality is understood on analogy to other senses. This analogy is usually explicated in terms of secondary qualities: the properties of moral entities are
response-dependent—they are contingent in an important way on human perceivers—but those properties are no less really out there in the world than are sights,
sounds, smells and a variety of other objects of sensation. Just as color is thought
to be a real property of objects, moral entities are thought to have real properties
as well.
The sentimentalist accounts of Nichols12 and Prinz13 draw from these earlier
sensibility theories but place special emphasis on sentimentalism’s descriptive
accuracy. For instance, brain-imaging studies have indicated strong emotion
processing during moral judgments,14 and other experiments have demonstrated
that priming emotions can alter moral judgments.15 These and many other studies
provide empirical support for sentimentalism.
In The Emotional Construction of Morals, Prinz argues that the empirical evidence
supports a particularly strong relationship between emotions and moral concepts.
He argues that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for perceiving moral
properties in the world and for making moral judgments. Consider his use of Richard
Shweder et al.16 and Paul Rozin et al.’s17 CAD theories of moral emotions. CAD
7 Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton, “Toward Fin De Siècle Ethics: Some Trends,”
Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 115–89.
8 John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in Mind, Value and Reality, ed. John McDowell
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 131–50.
9 David Wiggins, “A Sensible Subjectivism,” in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of
Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 185–214.
10 Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
11 Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998).
12 Nichols, Sentimental Rules; and Nichols, “Naturalizing Sentimentalism.”
13 Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals; and Prinz, “Measuring Morality.”
14 Jorge Moll, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Ivanei Bramati, and Jordan Grafman, “Functional Networks in Emotional Moral and Nonmoral Social Judgments,” Neuroimage 16 (2002): 696–703; Bryce
Huebner, Susan Dwyer, and Marc Hauser, “The Role of Emotion in Moral Psychology,” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 13 (2009): 1–6.
15 E.g., Simone Schnall, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald Clore, and Alexander Jordan, “Disgust as Embodied
Moral Judgment,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1096–1109.
16 Richard Shweder, Nancy Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park, “The ‘Big Three’
of Morality (Autonomy, Community, and Divinity), and the ‘Big Three’ Explanations of Suffering,”
in Morality and Health, ed. Allan Brandt and Paul Rozin (New York: Routledge, 1997).
17 Paul Rozin, Laura Lowery, Sumio Imada, and Jonathan Haidt, “The CAD Triad Hypothesis: A
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here stands for “Community-Autonomy-Divinity” and corresponds (coincidentally)
to emotional responses with the same acronym, “Contempt-Anger-Disgust.” Very
briefly, this account holds that moral contempt is elicited by harms committed against
the community, including violations of social hierarchies; moral anger functions as
a response to harm done to individuals, primarily to oneself; and moral disgust is
elicited when people feel as if they have somehow been contaminated by the deeds
of others or by violations against the natural order of things. Judging something
to be morally wrong, on Prinz’s account, consists in feeling a certain emotion in
response to violations of the corresponding category of moral transgression. The
CAD emotions are discussed in more detail in section (4.2).
(2.2) RESPONSE-DEPENDENCE AND INTRINSIC VALUE
The idea that moral values are response-dependent has met some resistance from
environmental ethicists. A classic problem in environmental ethics is providing an
account of the intrinsic value of nonhuman entities.18 There are different conceptions of what this problem amounts to. I focus on two claims about intrinsic value
that seem to raise obstacles for a sentimentalist account of environmental values.19
One way intrinsic value is often understood is as a claim about non-relational,
objective value. For illustration, consider G. E. Moore’s famous “Last Man” or
independence test for intrinsic value. Moore states that “saying a thing is intrinsically good . . . means it would be a good thing that the thing in question should
exist, even if it existed quite alone, without any further accompaniments or effects
whatever.”20 Something possessing intrinsic value, according to Moore, has that
value regardless of any other relationships it might possess to other things. So
if a certain tree has intrinsic value, it doesn’t matter if that tree is amidst a large
flourishing forest or is the last living entity on the planet. It also, importantly, has
that value regardless of the existence of human perceivers. If human beings were
to go extinct, the tree—if it truly possessed intrinsic value—would continue to
have intrinsic value. This conception of intrinsic value is incompatible with sentimentalism because it claims that the value of at least some entities in nature is
response-independent. Sentimentalism, however, holds that all value is dependent
on the emotional responses of human perceivers.
A second conception of intrinsic value that might seem to conflict with sentimentalism is non-instrumental value. An entity with instrumental value has that
Mapping between Three Moral Emotions (Contempt, Anger, Disgust) and Three Moral Codes (Community, Autonomy, Divinity),” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76 (1999): 574–86.
18 Callicott, “Intrinsic Value, Quantum Theory, and Environmental Ethics”; Tom Regan, “The Nature
and Possibility of an Environmental Ethic,” Environmental Ethics 3 (1981): 19–34.
19 For a fuller discussion of issues concerning intrinsic value and the environment, see McShane,
“Why Environmental Ethics Shouldn’t Give Up on Intrinsic Value”; Clare Palmer, Katie McShane,
and Ron Sandler, “Environmental Ethics,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 39 (2014):
419-442.
20 G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. 42.
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value in virtue of being a means to certain ends.21 An entity with non-instrumental
value, by contrast, is valuable regardless of how it might serve any further ends.
To truly value the environment, then, it could be argued that one must value it
non-instrumentally. But sentimentalism requires that nonhuman entities serve at
least one further end in order to be valued—namely, evoking certain emotions in
human perceivers.
I think sentimentalism is neither incompatible with these two conceptions of
intrinsic value nor a challenge to proper valuing of nonhuman entities. First, let’s
consider the independence test. Using this test against sentimentalism would seem
to conflate an objection concerning the source of one’s values with an objection
to the content of one’s values. It is consistent with sentimentalism for people to
value the existence of things in times and places that they will never inhabit, and
wish that those things continue existing when they are gone. This is furthermore
compatible with the claim that the source of this valuing is one’s sentiments. For
the sentimentalist, it is enough if currently existing sentiments dictate that the destruction of nature is a loss in value. It is thus still possible for nonhuman entities
to have value on sentimentalist grounds, even if human beings were to go extinct
in the future, for instance. Future extinction has no impact on the content of current
sentiments.
Non-instrumental value also need not conflict with proper valuing of the environment. In fact, many ethicists have argued that attributing non-instrumental value
to an entity may come about precisely because of how that entity is used.22 As I
discuss below, many people come to value wild nature because of past experiences
in nature, and many of those experiences would be classified as instrumental uses
(e.g., through tourism, camping, and hiking). We come to value aspects of nature
partly for their own sake but also, as Christine Korsgaard has described it, “under
the condition of their instrumentality.”23 This is consistent with the idea that an
intrinsically valuable entity should not be used inappropriately. Pristine nature is
often attributed intrinsic value because it is untouched by humans. But intrinsic
value is also attributed to non-pristine aspects of nature precisely because they are
enjoyed or experienced in some way.
In summary, sentimentalism is not only consistent with the idea that different
aspects of the environment have intrinsic value but in fact seems important for
explaining why people continually find value in nature. Traditional conceptions
of intrinsic value as non-relational and non-instrumental ignore how our relationships and experiences often lead to strong valuing of nature. In the next section, I
argue for the centrality of emotions in creating these values. After discussing the
21 John O’Neill, “The Varieties of Intrinsic Value,” Monist 75 (1992): 119-37; John O’Neill, Alan
Holland, and Andrew Light, Environmental Values (New York: Routledge, 2008).
22 Shelley Kagan, “Rethinking Intrinsic Value,” The Journal of Ethics 2 (1998): 277–97; Christine Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 169–95; Wlodek
Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, “A Distinction in Value: Intrinsic and For Its Own Sake,”
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 115–30.
23 Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” p. 185.
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relevant empirical research, I consider potential objections to my arguments here
about intrinsic value.
III. RESPONSES TO THE ENVIRONMENT
In this section I review evidence for the emotional basis of both affinity and
aversion to nature, and the moral values that arise out of these emotional responses.
(3.1) PROENVIRONMENTAL SENTIMENTS
Perhaps the most discussed emotional response to the environment is biophilia,
first popularized by E. O. Wilson24 and developed by various authors in Stephen
Kellert and E. O. Wilson’s The Biophilia Hypothesis.25 Biophilia has been proposed
as supporting our proenvironmental attitudes and perhaps being a source of progress
in environmental ethics.26 Thus, even though biophilia has never been included in
any official taxonomy of emotions, it is worthwhile to think about it as such.
Biophilia can most plausibly be defined as a proclivity for living things. More
specifically, it can be defined as an affinity for features that indicate animacy.
Animate entities are typically identified as self-propelled and goal-oriented.27
These features, of course, are shared by many non-living entities as well, but the
biophilia hypothesis holds that affinity for non-living animate things is derivative
of an evolved function of affinity for living things. Some entities in nature are
highly animate (e.g., animals) and some are relatively less animate (e.g., plants),
but all of them elicit a biophilic response. For instance, plants do not move about
like animals, but over a relatively short time span we can observe that they are
growing and spreading without direct external assistance.
An additional feature of biophilia is the claim that living entities produce a pleasurable affective response in human beings. For instance, there’s evidence that feeling connected to nature is correlated with positive affect28 and with a wide variety
of measures of happiness and well-being (particularly long-term resilience in the
face of stress).29 One proposed explanation for these effects is that we feel at ease
24
E. O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984).
25 Stephen Kellert and E. O. Wilson, eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press,
1993).
26 Sanford Levy, “The Biophilia Hypothesis and Anthropocentric Environmentalism,” Environmental
Ethics 25 (2003): 227–46.
27 E.g., Yuyan Luo and Renee Bailargeon, “Toward a Mentalistic Account of Early Psychological
Reasoning,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19 (2010): 301–07.
28 Andrew Howell, Raelyne Dopko, Holli-Anne Passmore, and Karen Buro, “Nature Connectedness:
Associations with Well-Being and Mindfulness,” Personality and Individual Differences 51 (2011):
166–71.
29 Elizabeth Nisbet, John Zelenski, and Steven Murphy, “Happiness is in Our Nature: Exploring
Nature Relatedness as a Contributor to Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Happiness Studies 12 (2011):
303–22.
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when surrounded by features of nature that provided benefits for our evolutionary
ancestors. Appleton famously proposed that contemporary humans imitate their
ancestors in seeking out natural environments that include the properties of prospect
(enabling greater vision) and refuge (being hidden from view).30 Savannahs, for
instance, possess these features, and there is evidence to suggest that people prefer
being in and viewing savannah landscapes.31
There are some problems with using biophilia as a source for a sentimentalistic
ethic, however. First, it doesn’t appear to be a discrete emotion. Discrete emotions,
such as disgust, anger, and happiness, have characteristic behavioral expressions
and physiological signals. Biophilia doesn’t seem to have any of these. The most
frequently described physiological response is a combination of positive affect and
relaxation, which is common to many other emotions, and the typical behavioral
expression is to approach and be attentive to nature, something also achieved by
many other emotions. Second, it’s not clear that being attuned to living things
would produce an appetitive or protective moral response. After all, nature is full
of threats. It would seem more likely, if one is attuned to nature, to be biophobic.32
So instead of biophilia, I suggest that sentimentalists look to other emotions that
better account for affinity to nature and proenvironmental moral behaviors.
Awe and wonder, which researchers generally treat as a single emotion, are
prominent emotional responses that tend to produce proenvironmental attitudes.
They have also been tied to positively valuing nature.33 Dacher Keltner and Stephen
Haidt34 suggest that two key features of prototypical awe-eliciting events include
perceiving things as being greater than oneself (what they call “vastness”) and the
inability to assimilate the experience into preexisting concepts and experiences
(what they call “accommodation”). Some examples they offer of environmental
events that fit this description include experiencing a tornado and viewing a grand
vista.
A study by Michelle Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman35 supports
this connection between awe and nature. When people were asked to describe past
awe-inducing experiences, the most frequently mentioned events were experiences
30
Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: Wiley, 1975).
For reviews, see John Falk and John Balling, “Evolutionary Influence on Human Landscape
Preference,” Environment and Behavior 42 (2010): 479–93; Yannick Joye and Agnes Van den Berg,
“Is Love For Green in Our Genes? A Critical Analysis of Evolutionary Assumptions in Restorative
Environments Research,” Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 10 (2011): 261–68.
32 As Yannick Joye and Andreas De Block point out, biophilia would also seem to dictate that we
destroy any aspect of nature that we find scary or threatening (which might include any non-savannah
habitat!). See Yannick Joye and Andreas De Block, “Nature and I are Two’: A Critical Examination of
the Biophilia Hypothesis,” Environmental Values 20 (2011): 189–215.
33 Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan, The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
34 Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003): 297–314.
35 Michelle Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman,”The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals,
and Effects on Self-Concept,” Cognition and Emotion 21 (2007): 944–63.
31
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in nature. As an ostensibly separate question, the researchers also asked participants
what they wished they could do after the experiment was over. Compared to people
in a different condition who described happy experiences, those in the awe condition
overwhelmingly desired activities in nature (such as going to a park). So not only
did nature elicit the emotion of awe but thinking about awe made people want to
be in nature.
Another important proenvironmental emotion is fascination. Consider a study
by Agnes van den Berg and Marlien ter Heijne,36 in which people were asked to
describe fearful encounters with nature. Surprisingly, of the twenty-seven incidents
reported, eleven included both the negative emotion of fear and the positive emotion
of fascination, while five actually didn’t mention fear at all (e.g., incidents such as
escaping a fast-flowing river or being lost in the woods). This study suggests that
threatening aspects of nature don’t necessarily produce fear, or at least not just fear.
Though awe was not measured in this experiment, one possible explanation for
a combined feeling of fear and fascination is that fearful encounters also include
perceptions of vastness (as described above). This connection could further explain
why some people continue to have an affinity for nature despite its various dangers.
One final type of emotional response that produces proenvironmental attitudes
is a positive aesthetic response. Biophilia theorists have placed heavy emphasis
on aesthetic responses to nature.37 However, aesthetics is arguably more closely
linked to ethics than is biophilia because of its connection to protective sentiments.
Just as we protect beautiful artworks, one might think we should protect beautiful
landscapes. The best-known emotionally based account of aesthetic appreciation
of nature is Noël Carroll’s arousal theory.38 Having a certain emotionally arousing
experience, on this account, is what leads us to judge aspects of nature as being
beautiful, for example.
One illuminating experiment related to aesthetic responses to nature comes
from the experiment described above from Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman. In one
of their studies, people were asked to think about a time they were in what they
would consider beautiful nature. They were then asked to rate what emotions they
were feeling. Contentment, awe, rapture, and love were the highest ranked emotions (in that order). Notice that awe is mentioned again in connection not just to
nature but specifically to beautiful nature. This ties together a number of different
nature experiences. Fearful nature, beautiful nature, and nature in general all seem
to elicit awe or awe-related emotions (such as fascination).
36 Agnes van den Berg and Marlien ter Heijne, “Fear Versus Fascination: An Exploration of Emotional
Responses to Natural Threats,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 25 (2005): 261–72.
37 Roger Ulrich, “Biophilia, Biophobia, and Natural Landscapes,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, ed.
Stephen Kellert and E. O. Wilson (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), pp. 73–137.
38 Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in Landscape,
Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp. 244–66.
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(3.2) ANTIENVIRONMENTAL SENTIMENTS
Biophobia, considered as the opposite of biophilia, is an aversion to living things.
It has been argued that our evolved response to nature should be more aversive
than appetitive, given the many threats presented by nature throughout human
evolutionary history.39 However, as with biophilia, the problem with biophobia is
that aversion to living things can be accounted for by a number of more specific,
discrete emotions. My discussion here focuses primarily on fear and disgust.
Recent theorizing about disgust has proposed two different types of disgust responses to nonhumans.40 The first, known as core disgust, protects against bodily
contamination.41 A wide range of animals trigger core disgust, but the most common
elicitors are rodents (e.g., rats) and slimy invertebrates (e.g., slugs and maggots).42
This type of disgust is likely to cause avoidance of nature because of the sorts of
things one finds there.
The second type of disgust response is less to animals as such and more to the
animality of human beings. Disgust researchers have found that being reminded
of one’s animal nature elicits disgust in human beings.43 This is generally known
as animal reminder disgust. Though the explanation for this phenomenon is much
contested, one common result of being confronted with the connection between
animalness and humanness is increasing thoughts of one’s own mortality. This has
led some to propose that thoughts of mortality present a psychological threat that is
alleviated by keeping one’s humanness separate from one’s animalness.44 Animal
reminder disgust is like core disgust in that it predicts avoidance of nature because
of what one finds there, but there is also some evidence to indicate that simply being
exposed to nature elicits mortality salience. For instance, people report increased
thoughts of death when in “wild” nature than when in “managed” nature or in a
39
Joye and De Block, “Nature and I are Two’: A Critical Examination of the Biophilia Hypothesis.”
Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt, and C. Richard McCauley, “Disgust,” in Handbook of Emotions,
3rd ed., ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett (New York: Guilford
Press, 2008), pp. 757–76.
41 Jonathan Haidt, Paul Rozin, C. Richard McCauley, and Sumio Imada, “Body, Psyche and Culture:
The Relationship between Disgust and Morality,” Psychology and Developing Societies 9 (1997):
107–31.
42 Graham Davey and Sarah Marzillier, “Disgust and Animal Phobias,” in Disgust and its Disorders:
Theory, Assessment, and Treatment Implications, ed. Bunmi O. Olatunji and Dean McKay (Washington,
D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2009), pp. 169–90; Pavol Prokop and Jana Fančovičová,
“The Effect of Owning Animals on Perceived Vulnerability to, and Avoidance of, Parasitic Diseases in
Humans,” Journal of Individual Differences 32 (2011): 129–36.
43 Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, “Disgust.”
44 This general psychological phenomenon is known as terror management theory. Jamie Goldenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Sheldon, Benjamin Kluck, and Robin Cornwell, “I
Am Not an Animal: Mortality Salience, Disgust, and the Denial of Human Creatureliness,” Journal
of Experimental Psychology: General 130 (2001): 427–35; Joseph Hayes, Jeff Schimel, Jamie Arndt,
and Erik Faucher, “A Theoretical and Empirical Review of the Death-Thought Accessibility Concept
in Terror Management Research,” Psychological Bulletin 136 (2010): 699–739.
40
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city.45 Thus, nature itself would seem to be capable of eliciting animal reminder
disgust, even in the absence of animals.
Both types of disgust predict aversion to the environment with further implications for moral values. With respect to core disgust, there is now a rich empirical
literature on the connection between physical contamination and moral disgust.46
Core disgust indicates that we will be less likely to attribute moral value to aspects
of nature we find physically disgusting.
There is also a great deal of research showing that animal reminder disgust leads
people to disvalue nature. Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon,47 for instance, found
that prompting people with thoughts of death led them to act more greedily with
respect to the environment. Participants were asked to imagine that they were in
charge of a timber company bidding for the right to harvest from a large forest.
They were also told that a high bid would be financially beneficial for them but that
doing so would entail the eventual depletion and loss of the forest. Those who were
prompted with thoughts of death submitted significantly higher bids than the control
group (twelve to thirteen acres larger, on average), despite having been told that
submitting a high bid would be detrimental to the environment. That is, prompting
people with thoughts of death led them to take actions that would eventually result
in severe destruction of nature. This would seem to provide good evidence for the
role of disgust in disvaluing nature.
Disgust toward nature also tends to operate in close conjunction with fear, another
important antienvironmental sentiment. Both types of disgust mentioned here are
positively correlated with fear of animals.48 People can experience fear in direct
response to things in nature as well toward contaminating, disgusting aspects of
nature. This makes sense, as both disgust and fear motivate avoidance and withdrawal.
For example, animal phobias are thought to be driven by both fear and disgust.
Animal phobias are the most common type of clinical diagnosis for specific phobias
(compared to, for instance, fear of heights and flying), with an estimated lifetime
prevalence of 3.3 percent among the general population.49 Phobias involve excessive fear and anxiety, far beyond what is called for by an object or situation, but
45 Sander Poole and Agnes Van den Berg, “Lost in the Wilderness,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 88 (2005): 1013–28.
46 Hanah Chapman and Adam Anderson, “Things Rank and Gross in Nature: A Review and Synthesis
of Moral Disgust,” Psychological Bulletin 139 (2013): 300–27.
47 Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon, “Of Wealth and Death: Materialism, Mortality Salience, and
Consumption Behavior,” Psychological Science 11 (2000): 348–351.
48 Robert Bixler and Myron Floyd, “Nature is Scary, Disgusting, and Uncomfortable,” Environment
and Behavior 29 (1997): 443–67; Bunmi O. Olatunji, Jonathan Haidt, Dean McKay, and Bieke David,
“Core, Animal Reminder, and Contamination Disgust: Three Kinds of Disgust with Distinct Personality, Behavioral, Physiological, and Clinical Correlates,” Journal of Research in Personality 42 (2008):
1243–59.
49 Richard Lebeau, Daniel Glenn, Betty Liao, Hans-Ulrich Wittchen, Katja Beesler-Braum, Thomas
Ollendick, and Michelle Graske, “Specific Phobia: A Review of DSM-IV Specific Phobia and Preliminary Recommendations for DSM-V,” Depression and Anxiety 27 (2010): 148–67.
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they are also indicators of general tendencies. For instance, a study of over 8,000
people in the U.S. found that 22.2 percent reported fear of animals, 5.7 percent of
whom had fear strong enough to be considered phobic.50 It’s likely that this fear
would transfer to nature phobia as well, since being in nature would make contact
with animals more likely.
A final antienvironmental sentiment is a negative aesthetic response. Ned Hettinger,51 for instance, suggests that predation is aesthetically ugly, and could turn
people away from nature.52 The consequences of ugliness likely depend on the
specific features possessed by the ugly entity. Predation, for instance, is likely to
elicit fear and disgust, which predict aversion and withdrawal from nature.
In short, the evidence suggests that valuing of nature itself—both positive and
negative—is ultimately grounded in sentiments. However, these are not the only
emotions serving pro- and anti-environmental behaviors. For example, biophilia
doesn’t dictate that we should blame or punish those who harm the environment.
Nor does awe or aesthetic responses to nature. These sentiments might constitute
our positive evaluation of the environment, which might be necessary for further
moral attitudes, but they do not capture many other aspects of our moral psychology. In the next section I fill this gap by focusing on more prototypical moral
sentiments—those that are self- and other-regarding.
IV. ATTITUDES TOWARD ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIORS
(4.1) SELF-EVALUATING SENTIMENTS
Arguably the two most prominent self-evaluating moral emotions are shame and
guilt. There is an important functional difference between them. Guilt generally
consists of blaming oneself for a transgression, which motivates reparative action,
while shame tends to lead to externalizing blame, which motivates withdrawal,
refusing reparative action, and feeling anger toward others.53 Both emotions are
important for environmental ethics, but I focus on guilt because of its closer connection to proenvironmental behaviors.
The literature on guilt and moral behavior is enormous. With respect to the
50 George Curtis, William Magee, William Eaton, Hans-Ulrich Wittchen, and Ronald Kessler, “Spe-
cific Fears and Phobias. Epidemiology and Classification,” British Journal of Psychiatry 173 (1998):
212–17.
51 Ned Hettinger, “Animal Beauty, Ethics, and Environmental Preservation,” Environmental Ethics
22 (2010): 115–34.
52 Also see Emily Brady, “The Ugly Truth: Negative Aesthetics and Environment,” in Philosophy
and Environment, ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 83–89.
53 See Jesse Prinz, “The Moral Emotions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed.
Peter Goldie (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jeff Stuewig, June Tangney,
Caron Heigel, Laura Harty, and Laura McCloskey, “Shaming, Blaming, and Maiming: Functional
Links among the Moral Emotions, Externalization of Blame, and Aggression,” Journal of Research in
Personality 44 (2010): 91–102; June Tangney, Jeff Stuewig, and Debra Mashek, “Moral Emotions and
Moral Behavior,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 345–72.
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environment, the basic phenomenon involves blaming oneself for harm done to
the environment. It could be more or less direct (e.g., littering as opposed to failing
to resist environmentally harmful legislation or policies) and more or less intense
in terms of the severity of harm caused (e.g., driving a gas-guzzling vehicle as opposed to dumping harmful chemicals in a river). In all of the relevant cases, feeling
guilt about the transgression is predicted to motivate reparative behavior toward
the environment.
These aspects of guilt are indeed born out by various experiments specifically
pertaining to environmental harms. Mark Ferguson and Nyla Branscombe,54 for
instance, found that Americans felt more guilt about global warming when they
were told that the U.S. was more responsible than other countries for contributing
to greenhouse gas emissions. When people reported feeling guilt, they were subsequently more willing to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. Nicole
Harth, Colin Leach, and Thomas Kessler found similar results in Germany.55 They
gave Germans newspaper articles that described Germany’s contribution to global
warming as being either harmful or helpful. Those who were led to believe that
Germany was responsible for negatively impacting the climate primarily felt either
guilt or anger. Those who felt guilt reported greater intentions to repair any damage
done to the climate. Those who felt anger expressed a desire to punish anyone who
harmed the climate (an aspect of anger discussed below).56
Guilt’s reparative qualities make it crucial for a sentimentalist environmental
ethic. An important aspect of guilt is how it relates to the positive emotional
responses to the environment outlined above. Prima facie, it would seem that
one would need to value the environment positively in order to feel guilty about
harming the environment. For example, we might think it puzzling if someone
who claims to feel indifferent toward nature also claims to be disturbed by global
warming, deforestation, loss of habitat, and massive species extinction. However,
I think this intuition should be resisted. One major feature of moral sentiments is
that they respond to rules.57 For instance, we can understand if we have broken a
moral rule such as “Don’t harm nature!” without actually endorsing that rule. We
can recognize when a transgression has been made. I might not be in awe of the
54 Mark Ferguson and Nyla Branscombe, “Collective Guilt Mediates the Effect of Beliefs about Climate Change on Willingness to Engage in Mitigation Behavior,” Journal of Environmental Psychology
30 (2010): 135–42.
55 Nicole Harth, Colin Leach, and Thomas Kessler, “Guilt, Anger, and Pride About In-Group Environmental Behaviour: Different Emotions Predict Distinct Intentions,” Journal of Environmental
Psychology 34 (2013): 18–26.
56 Interestingly, those who were led to believe that Germany had made a positive contribution primarily
reported feeling pride. This further correlated with a greater desire for Germany to continue leading the
way on climate change. However, when given a choice between types of policies they would support,
those who felt pride tended to support policies that would only benefit Germans. This suggests that
pride increases ingroup favorability (a phenomenon also found in Ferguson and Branscombe. “Collective Guilt”). Pride is not part of my discussion here, but is clearly important for a sentimentalist
environmental ethic.
57 See Nichols, Sentimental Rules.
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local forest or value its aesthetic qualities, but I can feel guilty for, say, harvesting
its timber, and subsequently attempt to repair any attendant destruction. Even if I
personally don’t value nature, I can recognize that others do and respond appropriately when I can expect others to disapprove of my actions.
(4.2) OTHER-EVALUATING SENTIMENTS
The last, and arguably most important, category of proenvironmental sentiments
includes those used to evaluate the behavior of others. Though there are positive
emotions that could be included here (such as pride), I focus primarily on emotions
central to condemnation and moral disapprobation. Following Prinz,58 I focus primarily on the CAD emotions: contempt, anger, and disgust. All of these emotions
have a close connection to blaming and punishing others. As with guilt and shame,
someone need not positively value the environment in order to judge that someone
has transgressed against the environment. We can blame or punish others for their
harmful actions toward the environment, relatively independent from our own
environmental values, thus making CAD important for environmental ethics.
A straightforward demonstration of the role of CAD emotions in environmental
valuation comes from an experiment conducted by Gisela Böhm.59 She presented
people with a variety of environmental risks and then asked what emotions they
thought they would feel if those events came to realization (things such as the cutting of rain forest, chemical dumps, and volcanic eruptions). The most common
emotions when others appeared responsible for the incidents were disgust, contempt,
outrage, anger, and disappointment—just as CAD theorists would expect.60
As discussed above, CAD emotions respond to transgressions against the community, individual agents (primarily oneself), and the natural order of things. This
classification is interesting because it’s not clear which category encompasses the
most salient transgressions against nature. For instance, if undisturbed nature is
seen as part of the natural order (which seems to be a common view), then causing
harm to nature will elicit moral disgust. However, certain pieces of undisturbed
nature might also be valued by a particular community, in which case causing harm
would also elicit contempt and anger. Consider Paul Rozin and Shaon Wolf’s study
on conceptions of sacred land in Israel.61 They found that those who scored high
on sensitivity to contagion (a measure of disgust) were more attached to certain
areas in Israel and less willing to sell away that land. In this case, the land is valued
by a specific community of people. The study demonstrates that disgust governs its
58
Prinz, Emotional Constructional of Morals.
59 Gisela Böhm, “Emotional Reactions to Environmental Risks,” Journal of Environmental Psychol-
ogy 23 (2003): 199–212.
60 They also found that guilt and shame were common when people suspected they could have done
something to intervene.
61 Paul Rozin and Sharon Wolf, “Attachment to Land: The Case of the Land of Israel for American
and Israeli Jews and the Role of Contagion,” Judgment and Decision Making 3 (2008): 325–34.
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protection, but because of its values for a specific community of people, it is also
likely to be governed by contempt and anger as well. This fits well with Böhm’s
results and indicates that the CAD emotions form the core of moral disapprobation.62
Though much more could be said about contempt and disgust, I conclude my
discussion of other-evaluating emotions with a brief note on anger. Anger is primarily known as a punishing emotion, functioning to identify who is to blame for a
transgression and to motivate quick and effective punishment.63 However, anger is
also classified as an approach-motivational emotion.64 As such, being angry about
moral transgressions can also lead to constructive behaviors. For instance, in one
experiment outside of the environmental context, people who were angry about a
political conflict were more likely to propose solutions to ameliorate the conflict.65
Mical Tagar et al. polled opinions among Israelis about Israeli-Palestinian tensions
one week before an important peace summit in the region. They found that anger
was positively correlated with risk-taking solutions, hopefulness for a potential
resolution, and proposal of non-aggressive solutions. So while my discussion here
has focused primarily on CAD as contributing to moral disapprobation and punishment, anger is capable of producing solutions to moral disagreements as well.
V. OBJECTIONS FROM NEOSENTIMENTALISM
With the empirical evidence in favor of sentimentalism on the table, I now consider
some prominent objections. I focus in particular on criticisms from neosentimentalists. My main line of reply to neosentimentalists is that they make inaccurate
claims about human moral psychology.
The difference between sentimentalism and neosentimentalism can be illustrated
with an example. The sense modality for morals is generally thought to be a form
of affect. If we observe a group of teenagers torturing a cat (as in Gilbert Harman’s
famous example66), sentimentalists hold that the wrongness of that act results from
the particular affective response it evokes, while neosentimentalists hold that the
act’s wrongness results from the affective response it merits. We are justified in
feeling a sentiment of disapprobation toward cat torture, and that is why cat torture
62 Also see Cendri Hutcherson and James Gross, “The Moral Emotions: A Social-Functionalist Account of Anger, Disgust, and Contempt,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 100 (2011):
719–37.
63 John Darley and Thane Pittman, “The Psychology of Compensatory and Retributive Justice,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review 7 (2003): 324–36.
64 Eddie Harmon-Jones, “Anger and the Behavioural Approach System,” Personality and Individual
Differences 35 (2003): 995–1005.
65 Michal Tagar, Christopher Federico, and Eran Halperin, “The Positive Effect of Negative Emotions in Protracted Conflict: The Case of Anger,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 47 (2011):
157–64.
66 Gilbert Harman, The Nature of Morality: An Introcuction to Ethics (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977), p. 7.
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is wrong. As D’Arms and Jacobson say, “to make an evaluative judgment is not to
have but to endorse a sentiment.”67
Among environmental ethicists, the most prominent neosentimentalist account
has been proposed by McShane.68 Two different features she identifies serve to
criticize sentimentalism, as I have described it. The first is why anyone should
take the emotional dispositions of others to have any normative force, why they
make claims on anyone but those who already share their emotional repertoire.
This can be seen through the analogy between morality and secondary qualities.
As McShane69 and Lori Gruen70 point out, perceiving secondary properties, such
as color, is generally a matter of figuring out what normal perceivers perceive
under normal circumstances. If everyone agrees that grass looks green, then grass
is green. McShane and Gruen’s charge is that sentimentalism relies on a similar
process for moral perception. For example, if everyone agrees that wild nature is
nasty and should be avoided, then wild nature is nasty and should be avoided. But
this only tells us what others believe about wild nature, not what wild nature is
really, or why moral agents should take any particular perspective on wild nature.
As McShane expresses this worry, “Perhaps I like to go along with the crowd;
perhaps I do not. Perhaps it is good to respect the valuings of others; perhaps it is
better to challenge them. From the mere fact that X is normally valued, I cannot
draw any conclusions about what attitude I ought to take toward X.”71 On this first
feature, the value accounted for by sentimentalism appears relatively thin.
The second feature McShane identifies is the revisability of the value provided
by emotions. Consider Prinz’s sentimentalism for a moment. As discussed above,
Prinz holds that emotions are both necessary and sufficient for perceiving moral
properties in the world and for making moral judgments—no merit is required.
While Prinz draws attention to the way emotions dictate what we value, an observation neosentimentalists rely on is that we all experience moments where we
disagree with our emotional responses. More importantly, this disagreement at least
occasionally results in a change in our emotional responses, and with them our
moral judgments. In this way moral inquiry seems to be characterized by its openendedness (in the spirit of G. E. Moore), where whatever I currently am disposed
to think is right or wrong is, in principle, revisable. As McShane says, “the truth
(or aptness) of the claim ‘X is valuable’ still leaves it an open question whether X
is to be promoted/endorsed/protected/etc.”72
The features of morality identified by McShane, and neosentimentalists more
67
D’Arms and Jacobson, “Sentiment and Value,” p. 729 (emphasis in original).
McShane, “Why Environmental Ethics Shouldn’t Give Up on Intrinsic Value”; McShane,“ Neosentiumentalism and Environmental Ethics.”
69 McShane, “Neosentimentalism and Environmental Ethics.”
70 Lori Gruen, “Refocusing Environmental Ethics: From Intrinsic Value to Endorsable Valuations,”
Philosophy and Geography 5 (2002): 153–64.
71 McShane, “Neosentimentalism and Environmental Ethics,” p. 9.
72 Ibid.
68
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generally, suggest that the values espoused by ordinary sentimentalism are too thin
and are ultimately revisable. My response to these objections is that they are not
supported by human moral psychology. Consider Jonathan Haidt’s “moral dumbfounding” experiments,73 which Prinz and other sentimentalists have used to support
their theories. In these experiments, people were given vignettes describing acts that
tended to elicit disgust and subsequent moral disapprobation but did not involve any
harm. For example, one vignette described a case where a family eats its dead dog;
another described eating a dead chicken one has just had sex with. Participants in
these experiments tended to say that these actions were morally wrong, but, when
pressed by the researchers, they were incapable of cogently explaining why they
were wrong—they were dumbfounded. The explanation Haidt offers is that moral
judgments are driven by emotionally based intuitions, while other more reflective
processes factor in later and at the margins of our moral judgments. These results
are relevant to the revisability of moral emotions, which is fundamental to neosentimentalism. Haidt’s research indicates that the revisability of moral judgments does
not entail actual revision; reflection often leaves the content unchanged.74 That is,
even if it is possible for us to appraise our emotional and moral responses, it does
not mean we actually do so with any regularity, or that, when we do, any revision
actually ensues.
Moreover, Haidt contends that reflecting on one’s emotions sometimes only
reinforces their power and influence. Reflection commonly is used to justify our
initial reactions, rather than work to revise them. As Haidt explains the results of
his dumbfounding experiments, “The refutation of . . . arguments does not cause
people to change their minds; it only forces them to work harder to find replacement arguments.”75 So even at the margins of our moral lives, reason often fails
to actually lead to revision in moral beliefs and emotions. At the very least, even
if it is not the case that reflection enhances an emotion’s influence, it is unlikely
that reflection is capable of smoothly revising that emotion into something else.
Haidt’s research, and research from psychology more generally, indicates that
neosentimentalism does not cohere with what we know about human psychology. The merit criterion provided by neosentimentalism holds that moral values
require people to seek justification for their emotional responses and revise their
sentiments accordingly. I have suggested that this is not a prominent feature of our
moral psychologies.
One final criticism, related to those from neosentimentalists, comes from Patrick
Clipsham, who claims that “empirical evidence from the natural and social sciences does not make a substantial contribution to philosophical debates about the
73 Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral
Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–34.
74 Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir. “Morality,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed., ed.
Susan Fiske, Daniel Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey (Hobeken, N.J.: Wiley, 2010), pp. 797–832.
75 Jonathan Haidt, “Sexual Morality: The Emotions of Conservatives and Liberals,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 31 (2006): 218.
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psychological nature of moral judgment.”76 In support of this thesis, he examines
Nichols’ arguments against neosentimentalism and Prinz’s arguments for moral
relativism (which are strongly grounded in his sentimentalism). So Clipsham’s
claims might be taken as objections to my account here as well. However, he does
not actually go on to argue that Nichols’ or Prinz’s empirical research contributes
nothing, but that their research does not settle questions about neosentimentalism
or relativism. Neither Nichols or Prinz claim to have settled these issues, however,
and neither do I. Clipsham himself notes that Nichols and Prinz are committed to
methodological naturalism, which holds that these issues are open to confirmation
or disconfirmation by future empirical research. Similarly, I am only claiming that
current evidence strongly supports sentimentalism with respect to environmental
values. So Clipsham’s objections do not detract from my account.
VI. CONCLUSION
I have argued that environmental values are largely based in emotions. Naturalized accounts of sentimentalism have provided reasons to think that emotions are
psychologically central to our moral concepts. My survey of the relevant evidence
suggests that this is true for moral concepts applied to the environment as well.
Aside from providing general support for sentimentalism, the naturalized account
I have presented here benefits ethical theorizing specifically about the environment
in two ways. First, my account resolves perceived concerns over the compatibility of sentimentalism and the intrinsic value of nature. As argued in section two,
environmental ethicists have been reluctant to accept sentimentalism because it
depends on the existence of human perceivers. However, sentimentalism is not only
consistent with intrinsic value but is important for explaining why people attribute
intrinsic value to various nonhuman entities.
Second, much of the research I have discussed could be used to improve normative prescriptions with respect to the environment. Though they endorse different
strains of sentimentalism, Prinz77 and McShane78 both argue that sentimentalism
can help diagnose common obstacles for improving moral behavior. This has not
been the focus of my discussion here, of course, but the basic idea in application
to environmental behaviors is simple: improved diagnosis of the emotional basis
for proenvironmental behaviors (e.g., feeling guilt about one’s littering or failing
to reduce one’s carbon emissions) will lead to improved suggestions for producing
action. Further development of a sentimentalist ethic for the environment would
thus be greatly assisted by further exploration of the normative implications of
empirical research from moral psychology.
76 Patrick Clipsham, “Does Empirical Moral Psychology Rest on a Mistake?” Philosophical Studies
170 (2014): 216.
77 Prinz, Emotional Construction of Morals.
78 McShane, “Neosentimentalism and Environmental Ethics.”