William James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism constitutes a philosophy that can reconcile the split between intrinsic value theorists, who stress the development and relevance of theoretical axiology, and pragmatists who have favored a more direct emphasis on environmental policy and application. By distinguishing James’s emphasis on direct personal experience from John Dewey’s more socialized approach, James’s distinctive emphasis on the transformative possibilities of pure experience and his links to romantic sensibility enable us to articulate and validate the noninstrumental aspects of (...) experienced environmental values that anti-pragmatists habitually regard pragmatism as unable to speak for. Using James’s framework to explicate and support Anthony Weston’s radically noninstrumental “immediate values” better expresses the felt noninstrumental worth of nature than intrinsic value theory can. Nonetheless, a rapprochement between the two sides is possible: although James’s pragmatic naturalism is the framework that can best capture nature’s experienced noninstrumental worth and link it to wider human values, intrinsic value theory has real practical application in the realm of law, and pragmatists can support it in that domain, thus upholding the primary emphasis on practicality and policy that is usually seen as pragmatism’s main strength. (shrink)

Standard defences of preservationism, and of the intrinsic value of nature more generally, are vulnerable to at least three objections. The first of these comes from social constructivism, the second from the claim that it is incoherent to argue that nature is both 'other' and something with which we can feel unity, whilst the third links defences of nature to authoritarian objectivism and dangerously misanthropic normative dichotomies which set pure nature against impure humanity. I argue that all these objections may (...) be answered by recasting the relationship between man and nature into a tripartite spectrum of ontological form between nature and artifact, with the key question being the extent to which nature has been humanised in accordance with certain modes of strongly instrumental rationality, these in turn being defined by reference to the split between abstract reason and natural feeling which was exacerbated by specific elements in the Enlightenment period. This new model may grant normative force by linking external nature to a broader conception of human psychological wellbeing than that offered by the quantitatively orientated models of human rationality and agency. (shrink)

Pragmatism views theory as embedded in our practices, and develops a normative methodology for evaluating our purposes. Neither theory nor practice are more fundamental: we evaluate practices for efficiently reaching ends, and we re-evaluate ends in light of the possible pursuits appropriate for flourishing human beings. Pragmatism's philosophical anthropology rejects the Humean prioritization of instrumentalist reason. Practical reason encompasses theoretical reasoning, without reducing truth to what is useful. While our warranted conclusions from inquiry are our only criterion for truth, the (...) objective success of our practices and inquiries depend on interacting with nature, not on thought alone. (shrink)

Reprinted in James The Will to Believe and Other Essays.

The reformist philosophy of the classical pragmatist tradition has gradually evolved into the now-fashionable revolutionary styles of pragmatism, some scientistic, some literary. This evolution is traced from Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, through Schiller, Lewis, Hook,and Quine, to Rorty’s literary-political neo-pragmatism. Rather than get hung up on the question of which variants qualify as authentic pragmatism, it is better — more fruitful, and appropriately forward looking— to ask what we can learn from the older tradition, and what we can salvage (...) from the new. (shrink)

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would (...) vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. -/- It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. (shrink)