Foundations of Environmental Ethics Page: 78
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78 AESTHETIC AND SCIENTIFIC ATTITUDES
our descendants will still delight in what now delights only some of us and
did not delight our predecessors."'
In this chapter I argue that modern environmental attitudes are the
product of several centuries of changing attitudes toward nature and are
most closely associated with nineteenth-century developments in the natu-
ral history sciences of botany, biology, and geology and in the arts, par-
ticularly poetry and American landscape painting. Unlike Passmore, I
claim that the perception of the world of modern ecologists and environ-
mentalists is little different from and is directly traceable to the aesthetic
perceptions of early botanists, biologists, and geologists and is therefore, in
this sense, compatible with at least one important component of science
and with Western civilization and man.
In large measure, my views are in agreement with many of White-
head's major themes in Science and the Modern World, especially those that
deal with a romantic reaction to science.2 One major difference, however,
is that by separating the natural history sciences from the physical sci-
ences-a distinction that Whitehead does not seem tQ make-I am able to
claim that even though the romantic reaction was most certainly opposed to
some aspects of physical science, it was nonetheless in tune with the natural
history sciences, which were strongly value-oriented from the very begin,
ning. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries particularly, the physical
and natural history sciences could be distinguished from each other in
terms of their reliance on primary and secondary properties. While early
physicists dealt exclusively with primary properties (measurable and quan-
tifiable properties like extension, figure, motion, and number), natural
history scientists were forced by the nature of their subject matter to clas-
sify the objects they studied in terms of secondary properties (nonquan-
tifiable properties like color, smell, taste, and sound). It was this focus on
secondary properties that not only sharply separated natural history sci-
ence from physics but also provided it with important links with poetry,
painting, and gardening, aesthetic disciplines also grounded in secondary
properties.
In addition, my analysis has some bearing on the is/ought controversy.
Holmes Rolston, III, for example, has pointed out that environmentalists
often present their arguments for preserving nature in such a way that the
"sharp is/ought dichotomy" seems to disappear. He writes:
What is ethically puzzling, and exciting, in the marriage and mutual transfor-
mation of ecological description and evaluation is that here an "ought" is not
so much derived from an "is" as discovered simultaneously with it.
Rolston is puzzled because he has a feeling that ecology, which he rightly
recognizes as a science, ought, like more traditional branches of science, to
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Hargrove, Eugene C., 1944-. Foundations of Environmental Ethics, book, 1989; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc52172/m1/90/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Center For Environmental Philosophy.