Does Iowa Praire Have Intrinsic Value?

and the research administration office is the sponsor of the bioethics program at Iowa State I wanted to say just a little bit about the bioethics program so you can see how this activity tonight fits into it in the late 1980s the Iowa Legislature provided an additional funding in fact quite a substantial amount of extra funding for Iowa State University to work in the area of biotechnology and a part of that was to finance a building that my molecular biology building on campus and there were lots and lots of dollars put into the program here a bunch of it originally coming out of the lottery funds and as they did that as they moved into this biotechnology realm the legislature at least sufficient number of them felt it was important to discuss or have a concern for the ethics of what was being done in biotechnology and so the university agreed to set aside a certain amount of the money for biotechnology into a bioethics program in the first years of the bioethics program here the focus was on essentially assembling data information from all kinds of sources all across the country and around the world and then in the fall of 1989 the vice provost for research Patricia Swann decided to turn the focus inward for a while to see what we could do on the campus itself professor Gary Comstock of the philosophy department at Iowa State was put in charge of the program and he really is the one who has managed this program for the last four years the on campus program then has taken the form of a fall colloquium so this will be the fourth annual colloquium on bioethics and a early summer or late spring depending on how you at an institute in which approximately 25 faculty members from the biological sciences and other related areas get together for a full week and discuss ethics issues in both the colloquium and in the Summer Institute a major aspect of the process is to have debates about ethical issues where we take experts who take polar positions on a particular issue to illustrate the great breadth of ethical issues that do arise when we talk about biological topics in general biotechnology in specific terms so tonight we will have our fourth fall colloquium in a debate format and we hope it will be a friendly debate these people will take positions rather an odd and odds with each other and go at it so that's the purpose the on campus program we feel has been very successful this year instead of having a fourth Summer Institute we are spending our time and energy evaluating the Institute's the previous three years and then we hope to work off that next year in perhaps a new direction or perhaps strengthening and continuing in the areas that we feel they're very successful so I'm happy to be hosting the fourth annual colloquium on bioethics and I now want to turn the podium over to Professor Richard Van Dyne at philosophy department who will introduce the topic and the debaters thanks Tom I'm dick tonight and I'm pleased to see you all here tonight Gary Comstock gives me a nice opportunity every then to be associated with this program and I really enjoy that I should say at the outset that Gary Comstock came into this program in a context which involved changing of leadership people leaving the University and a circumstance of drift could have occurred but Gary came in and took over the program and the result has been very gratifying outcome to this point in time and we're confident beyond this evenings meeting if it were looked at from the standpoint of undergraduate pedagogy it has to do with the idea that contrary to popular opinion and general views about these matters there is a connection between the way people act and the way people think that essentially is what philosophy is all about from my perspective and you'll see as you listen to the participants in this debate that what underlies the perspectives they take is not some esoteric theoretical dispute but essentially an ultimately a debate that has to do with what difference does the discussion concerning the possible instrumental value of prairies have to do with the way in which we might conduct ourselves as enlightened and decent minded citizens I'm pleased to introduce in the reverse order in which they will appear first I'd like to introduce dr. Lili Marleen who stole or so was an associate professor of philosophy at Purdue University lili marleen was so receive her PhD from Princeton and her main research interests are in the areas of ethics and animals philosophy of mind and environmental ethics she's done a lot of writing and is well known and her colleague Eric Alacoque is equally accomplished he's a professor of philosophy and the coordinator of Letters and science of the letters and Sciences program at the in the environmental studies program at the universe at Wisconsin at Stevens Point and he's on the editorial board of a publication is well known in the country the environmental ethics publication he's one of the people who perhaps the best the person who knows best Aldo Leopold done a great deal of research with regard to Leopold and he's the author of a well known book in defense of the land ethic each will take a different view with regard to the question does the Iowa prairie have an intrinsic value and I should point out to you that you could put in the area of prairie virtually anything you wanted to do that has to do with the environment around us it could be animals it put the mountains it could be rivers it could be prairies last before we start the program is designed to go about an hour and a half each speaker will take approximately twenty five minutes at the end of the two 25-minute presentations there will be a repartee between the speakers and then following that they're eager to get into discussion with you and there I know from being with them their preference is to have discussion and in that respect the debate atmosphere is something they will move away from I'm guessing because they were interested in learning just as you are too will stop about 9:30 it's my pleasure to introduce to you dr. beard thank you very much dick I'd like to tell all of you to be invited here to Iowa State University this is my second formal visit to Iowa State atmosphere in 1987 at a an event that was lasted several days in a number of rooms centennial celebrating the hundredth anniversary of all the Leopold's birth Aldo Leopold is I'm sure all of you know being here for an environmental ethics event was the author of sand County Almanac which is sometimes referred to as the Bible with contemporary conservation movement and Leopold is a native son he was raised and so that's why this event here is organized by tomten so I'm glad to see so many of you come out this evening Saturday night for an ethics event that's the night as we can but within limits but I'm sure that we're going to have a lively debate I've been asked to address the question does the Iowa prairie have intrinsic value since the time of the ancient Greeks the Philosopher's usually try to address specific questions by a circuitous route first we transform the specific question into a more general one then only - we address the general question do we return to the original question which we treat as a special case to take an example that every sophomore is familiar with suppose someone asks a philosopher is Socrates and since the original Socrates is of course demonstrable immortal I'll make this a personal Socrates when we not yet dead and so we don't really know for sure in this case is Socrates Thermopolis who let us hypothesize is a contemporary Greek American who owns a restaurant in names moral the philosopher asks first are all men immortal and addressing that question with inductive logic so far they all are therefore all the rest must be as well she draws the universal conclusion that indeed all men are mortal then observing that Socrates is a man our philosopher returns to the original question and confidently concludes that yes Socrates is so does the Iowa Prairie have intrinsic value proceeding according to the pattern first it was just Illustrated let's ask more generally do prairies have intrinsic value whether they are ill annoyed Iowa Wisconsin and Kansas Nebraska or wherever but even that question is not gentle enough for for philosophers to want to try to address queries are excellent examples indeed the first generation of ecologists regarded them as paradigm cases of biotic communities moving up another rung on the generalization ladder we might ask do biotic communities intrinsic value but biotic communities or ecosystems as they were later called are themselves only one sort of distinctly holistic biological entity species or another thus the actual question that has recently been debated mooted in environmental philosophy is not new prairies have intrinsic value or even due biotic communities have intrinsic value but do some biological poles as well as some biological individuals have intrinsic value now the next thing that philosophers are want to do after generalizing question 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 refers you know notoriously gender biased way to human beings irrespective of gender and leaving open another question the question of life after death mortal refers to somatic not psychic death similarly in respect to the present question I need to indicate what the term biological holds refers to and what intrinsic value means species are fairly clear and straightforward cases of biological wholes justice specimens are fairly clear and straightforward cases of biological individuals the sperm whale is a is a biological whole moby-dick is a biological individual just what a species feasible precisely is not on controversial our species abstract classes this was the traditional view the more recent population biologists tend to regard them as sets of populations more reductively still as gene pools or some far out biologists regard them as super individual sort of protracted in space and time however species however species may be technically defined in theoretical biology and the philosophy of biology we have a clear enough idea of what a species is to regard the current episode of abrupt mass anthropogenic species extinction has it caused for alarm just what a biotic community may be more precisely as if anything a matter of more controversy in theoretical biology and philosophy of biology than want a species maybe but again we have a clear enough idea of what a biotic community is to recognize the difference between a prairie and a cornfield and to regard the wholesale replacement of the former by the latter is a cause for alarm what about intrinsic value intrinsic value may be defined in contre distinction to instrumental value the instrumental value of the thing is its usefulness to something or to someone else tools our 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 his or her own total value exceeds his or her instrumental value that is 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 value addition to his or her instrumental value that's the first approximation of what intrinsic value means it's business intrinsic value is divided you 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 this question have been proposed in the past if some things have been created in the image of God and others have not that a good case might be made that those creating the image of God have intrinsic value and those not so created don't have but the image of God is a property the possession of which cannot be ascertained by empirical means historically restaurant philosophers have sought a more secure and universally persuasive justification for their own claims and those of their fellow man as they once referred to the rest of us to possess intrinsic back but at the same time they wish self-serving ly to rule out claims made on behalf of non-human beings preferring to follow that 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 not worth as 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 they exist and somatically living human beings all have intrinsic value because all are putative lis rational everything else has conveniently for human beings at best only instrumental unfortunately not quite all human beings are in fact rational human infants severely retarded profoundly demented and abject ly senile people or 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 that is painful medical experiments on babies hunt the retarded and demented and make dog food out of the Sina 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 true narrower basis for intrinsic value in order to include all human beings the marginal cases in the class of beings that have intrinsic value recently some philosophers Peter Singer most notably have suggested that the capacity to suffer is a more inclusive intrinsic value conferring property more inclusive indeed not because of 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 Peter Singer the animal had it mine sailors powerful ploy set others philosopher other philosophers with even wider concerns to thinking why draw the intrinsic value line between beings that are sentient and those that are not non sentient animals and plants after all have interests have Goods of their own which they tried to put them it makes sense in other words to say that that paving a parking lot around a tree is not in the trees interest it's not good and their interests can be frustrated whether they consciously suffer therefrom or not they to plants as well as animals are striving potentially thriving beings no less than our we shouldn't we therefore admit that they too have intrinsic value no less than do be environmental philosopher Paul W Taylor on the basis of such reasoning as this concluded that all living things all living beings have intrinsic worth which is only another annuity called 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 beings on this account biological holds such as species and biotic communities lack intrinsic value other philosophers have tried to extend Taylor's account of intrinsic value to species and ecosystems on the decidedly shaky supposition that species are spatially and temporally protracted super individuals and that ecosystems have interests in the same way that organisms do but the weight of opinion in evolutionary biology and theoretical ecology does not support such eccentric characterizations of species and ecosystems so returning to the our original question does the Iowa prairie have intrinsic value this line of argument leaves us not only with a negative conclusion but with an implausible and implausible alternative conclusion in general all individual living things have intrinsic value but no biological holes have it therefore the prairie community has no intrinsic value neither has excelled species such as big bluestem Indian grass compass plant round-headed Bush clover Lupin and butterfly we need to mention a few but its individual components habit this stock will blue stem this stalk of Indian grass this compass plant this bush around headed clover this sprig of Lupin and this particular butterfly weed that doesn't sound right 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 are biotic communities holes 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 goods of their own perhaps we are looking for intrinsic value in the wrong place in the value ease instead of in the valuers now a cornerstone of modern science and philosophy is the proposition that objective nature is value neutral value-free if we imagine that all subjectivity all consciousness were obliterated single stroke then all value would disappear with it and only impassive phenomena would remain the 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 valuable when he/she R it is valued because he she or it is useful to someone else someone or something is intrinsically valuable 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 whatever that means it is crystal clear what it means to say that we value ourselves and trinsic ly that is to say for our own sakes more problematic is whether we value anyone or anything else intrinsically I think we do who is prepared to be so cynical as to say that the only way that one human being values others is merely instrumentally that is values others only to the extent that they are useful to him or herself the most unambiguous case is the way most parents drive you their child for its own sake further we believe that the hallmark of true friendship is that friend value one another intrinsically if one quote-unquote friend values another only instrumentally he or she is no true friend is anyone prepared to say them that true friendship is totally non-existent but if we can value our children and friends intrinsically then we can principle value anything under the Sun intrinsically genuine humanitarians value all human beings intrinsically some fervent anti-abortionists seemed genuinely to value each and every human embryo and fetus intrinsically though some any an abortionist all cooking 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 but that's it that's enough just to just to see if we were waiting here animal rights advocates animal rights advocates value animals intrinsically and some environmentalists value biological holes species and ecosystems intrinsically we can 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 why do we value a child a friend an aimless starving Somali though I think we're sort of running out of intrinsic value for them and according to the newspapers a pet intrinsically but not but not a lamp or a brick what sorts of things stimulate the intrinsic value center in our central nervous systems in a second magnum opus the descent of man Charles Darwin suggested that what stimulates what he called more quaintly our altruistic Moral Sentiments was the recognition of fellowship and community the Moral Sentiments evolved the argued in conjunction with human social evolution no try darwin points out could hold together if murder robbery treachery and so forth were common consequently such crimes within the limits of the same tribe or bat are branded with everlasting infamy but excite no such limits no such sentiments beyond these limits the bond the glue holding total human tribes together Darwin suggested for 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 today and with that process of social active evolution step per step human-beings recognized more and more fellow members and larger and larger communities as man advances in civilization Darwin concludes and small tribes are united into larger communities the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation personally unknown to him this point being once reached there was only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races unquote 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 intrinsically to value all our fellow human beings irrespective as we say of race creed and nationality humanity we value humanity and such and we value human civilization not only did Darwin foresee the time when universal human rights would be widely acknowledged he foresaw the emergence of animal rights quote simply beyond the confines of man that is humanity to the lower animals he notes seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions this virtue one of the noblest with which man is endowed seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and widely diffused until they are extended they are extended all sentient beings and now i've beg to differ here with darwin and only one small particular sympathy for animals is not in my opinion and it's a dental school vard Moral Sentiments it arises rather because we recognize the kind of fellowship and community with animals the sense of fellowship that comes from our realization that we and many other animals are members of the community of sentient beings but how does all of this help us to address the general question with which we began now we formulated in light of a more scientific understanding of intrinsic value are some biological poles as well as some biological individuals intrinsically valuable human beings and sentient animals of 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 valuable but what about species per se and ecosystems as such or particularly what about such species as big bluestem and super and what about ecosystems like the iowa prairie well first of all it's important to recognize that Darwin noticed that the proper objects are targets of some of our altruistic Moral Sentiments are in fact social poles indeed according to Darwin our most basic and primitive Moral Sentiments were community oriented quote we have now seen he notes that actions are regarded by savages and we're probably so regarded by primeval man as good or bad solely as they 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 loyalty to the communities that we recognize our selves to be members of indeed one such community-oriented moral sentiment and a very powerful one at death has a special name of its own we call it patriotism patriotism our love of country is quite evidently not reducible to love with fellow citizens individually since the most ardent Patriots at least at this time in this country often hate the majority of their fellow citizens especially those who are members of other races religions or sexual orientations as we know from our debates about gays in the military all the léopold building upon the foundations laid down by darling simply pointed out that he called you today recognizes that we are members not only of the hierarchy of human communities we are also members of a hierarchy of biotic communities acknowledgments of our membership in the hierarchy of biotic communities Leopold believed would lead us to develop a land ethic and a land ethic according to Leopold quote changes the role of Homo sapiens from Conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen heaven it implies respect for his fellow members and also respect for the community as such respect as a moral attitude that we hold only for entities that are ends of themselves we do not respect automobiles or other things which though highly valued are valued only as means on the instrumentally that is we respect only intrinsically valuable entities as Leopold wrote quote it is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to and can exist without love respect admiration for land and a high regard for its value by value I of course mean something far broader than be our economic value I mean value in the philosophical sense unquote and by value in the philosophical sense her poem could only mean what we philosophers called intrinsic value so once again does the Iowa prairie have intrinsic value it doesn't have intrinsic value in the same way than it has a deep root system as I understand it value is not an independently existing objective property the Yellen excuse me 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 that we are members of hierarchically organized human communities most of us intrinsically vadik valued the latter we value intrinsically our families home towns cities countries if we're patriotic 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 ought intrinsically value the former forests prairies lakes and streams marine communities and the biosphere in which we live move and have our being further we intrinsically value the component species of intrinsic valuable biotic communities according to Leopold they should continue to exist as a manner of biotic right regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us well that's my understanding of how the Iowa prairie is intrinsically well I do want to thank you for inviting me here and I'd like to thank professor callicut for doing a really admirable job with explaining and then illustrating how philosophers approach questions such as does the Iowa prairie have intrinsic value just to sort of summarize where we are so far the conclusion he reaches might be summarized this way he wants to say yes the iowa prairie duck is a biological hole which kept which we can and should value for its own sake not just for the usefulness that it might have to something or someone else now what I want to try to convince you of is that there are two major claims two major problems with the claim that the Iowa Prairie has intrinsic value and that these problems are serious enough that we really can't yet accept professor kalloch ops conclusion in short I think that the Prairie does not have intrinsic value now before going any further let me sort of at least fictitiously or imaginatively brandish my Nature Conservancy card and tell you that I'm a great fan of prairies I support them I'm not saying that they're not important or valuable in any sense whatsoever my concern is really just with the philosophical underpinnings of that sort of claim the claim that the Prairie constitutes a biological whole and that its value is of a very special kind namely intrinsic value I'm going to focus specifically on the question of prairies rather than ecosystems in general so some of my arguments will apply only to prairies but I think that it's important to look at the philosophical underpinnings not just the goals like-minded people can all agree on goals but that's not good enough we need to figure out what the best possible reasons are that we can give in supporting that view and perhaps persuading those who might not yet have seen the light so let's start with the basic concept of intrinsic value first of all I'm going to fully with Professor callicut some of Professor Calafat general views on value namely that we have to start asking questions about value by looking back to the valuer we're not going to find it out there in the world independently of those who value it we can't just look for some elusive property and moreover I think is very specific strategy for identifying when we hit intrinsic value as opposed to other kinds is a very good one he wants to tell us to look for what's left over once we have once we subtract all the instrumental values and see if there's something else of value that's still left but I think we have to go at least one step further now to claim that something has value of whatever sort whether we're talking about intrinsic or instrumental in this context is not just to claim that some value were somewhere in the world for whatever reason attaches importance to that thing indeed that may not even be a necessary condition professor callicut and I and I hope everyone who addresses this as an ethical question speaks of not just any object that happens to be an object of moral sentiment but the proper object of moral sentiment and insist that not only our Prairies things that some of us value but it's something that we should value now but if we want to make claims like this about the proper object of value and what we should value we better give reasons to support those claims going back to one of Cala cops examples Peter Singer gives reasons to show why he thinks we should recognize all sentient beings as intrinsically valuable and professor Calcott talked a bit about what his reasons were now the same point about needing to give reasons it's going to apply to any kind of value instrumental as well as intrinsic if I want to just claim that this is a good lectern I should be able to give some reasons for what makes it a better left turn than others that might be around so when we turn to this case of prairies then we've got to be prepared to support our subscriptions of value we've got to be prepared to explain why we think they should be valued now the need for good reasons is especially clear in dealing with someone who fails to recognize the value of the Prairie the developer who sees a prairie is a fine place for housing development a shopping mall or a well manicured golf course for example however this special need of persuading our political opponents or those who disagree with us shouldn't obscure the fact that even among people who agree about goals who agree the prairies are good things we need to give reasons to support descriptions of value and I think that Professor calico hasn't really told us the whole story about his reasons for thinking that the Iowa Prairie has intrinsic value he's told us something he's told us why he thinks we can value them because he says it's a community in which we live it's a special kind of a community a biotic community but I'm sure that he doesn't think that any community in which we live should automatically be valued so there's more work to be done it's easy to find examples of social communities that for example are so repressive or so chaotic or so deadly to human flourishing and they turn on the news just about every night and you'll find such things that its members the members of such social communities might be quite justified in refusing to value then we do often value our community but that's not a message it's not necessarily true that we should in all cases and in the case of biotic communities - the biotic the immediate biotic community in which I typically live consists mostly of soybeans and corn not bluestem grass or prairie species of any sort interspersed with patches of Kentucky bluegrass asphalt pavement and houses should we say that this isn't a community at all or we have some reasons for not assigning at the same kind of value that we assigned to other sorts of biotic communities that's the question I think we need to ask and that's where I think the problems arise now certainly we were to do a survey it would be fairly easy to generate lots of reasons for valuing the Iowa Prairie they're not hard to come by some of the reasons however once we start looking at them are straightforwardly instrumental and on professor Cal cop's own criteria so for example if we justifies protecting an ecosystem like a prairie because it provides the habitat in which species which we wish to preserve can survive that's an instrumental value it's good because it provides a home for something that we want to protect others for other reasons that people give to prairies are instrumental in a less transparent way we might say for example that prairies give us a proper sense of humility by reminding us how small we are they show us how big the sky is how complex a system of interconnected long-range life cycles nature can devise in short we describe a prairie almost as a combination of a laboratory and a museum for us to study some of these facts it teaches us for example to avoid superficial rigid and anthropocentric judgments like fire is bad it serves as a good intrinsic value but of course we might find yet other reasons on our list that seem to impute intrinsic value in a straightforward sense such as the claim that prairies are simply beautiful Oh inspiring are those good enough to justify the claim that they have intrinsic intrinsic value let's look a bit closer at that with the help of an imaginary dialogue suppose Jo says I've been working for six years to restore the Prairie on this piece of land and it's finally starting to come together isn't it beautiful jo seems to be talking about intrinsic value Mary says yes it's so much more diverse and interesting than a lawn but you know there aren't a lot of flowers and why don't we just spark it up with some let's say purple loosestrife after all it would grow really well here and it's such a pretty color Jo of course is outraged at this suggestion she says you don't understand the point here is to re-establish the original authentic Prairie class and to keep out exotics like purple loosestrife Mary what's the big deal about exotics now that we have access to more variety why not take advantage of it after all a painter doesn't have to limit herself to materials that she can gather around her own neighborhood she takes advantage of anything that will best fit her artistic vision why not do the same when you try to develop a beautiful landscape Jo one last desperate move says no authenticity is really important here besides purple loosestrife is so invasive that it would choke out many of the native species and let's defeat the whole purpose Mary says oh okay so your prairie is good because it provides a place where certain species can survive in a protected location protected from nasty things like purple loosestrife that of course is one of the instrumental values we have already identified but authenticity why is that important not because it makes the Prairie more beautiful but why now there's a sense in which Mary is saying I don't get it her suggestion about purple loosestrife reveals back much however she's right to be suspicious of any kind of glib assertion of intrinsic value they don't always fit with what ultimately said to be important about prayers to be in the prairies interest or to make the prairie better or worse why are authentic prairies better than prairies that have non-native species those values feed into the earlier sorts of reasons that led us to think that these reasons were ultimately instrumental they make us feel more connected with our historical roots they illustrate a particular ecosystem that was once widespread and so on now I've only been able to look at a very few of the candidates for reasons to value the iowa prairie and it would certainly be impossible to go through the all the list of all the reasons that anybody might do indeed it's probably going to be the case that our reasons for valuing prairies are very complex and involve a combination of reasons but I think at this point the burden of proof lies with those who defend the claim that the Iowa Prairie has intrinsic value produced please an explanation of this claim a reason for valuing the Prairie that will withstand the closer scrutiny that revealed the other reasons we did look at to turn out to be instrumental so so far my conclusion pending further replies from Professor calico or the audience is that the reason is typically given for valuing prairies perhaps all once we complete the job of that packing them rest on the instrumental value of a prairie they remind us of something important they teach us valuable lessons they illustrate something about biotic communities and so on should I be worried about this should I think oh my gosh I'm opening the doors for the bulldozers I don't think so and we can see why if we look more closely at the contrast between instrumental and intrinsic value professor calop apps example of things within your mental values are things like tools automobiles lamps bricks and so on and those might give the impression that when we say that something has merely instrumental value we're saying that it's prosaic mundane purely economic and not very sensitive but I don't think that that's the right way of looking at things some things and libraries I think are a good example 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 it can be instrumental in supporting very important values and certainly non-economic values nor just labeling something is merely instrumentally value valuable means that it's somehow less important than things that are intrinsically valuable it's not the case that sort of intrinsically valuable things go up there and instrumental merely instrumentally valuable things always rank lower some things and here food is a good example have a great instrumental value have great instrumental value because they're absolutely necessary to sustain life in many cases in cases of food for example we may be quite right in sacrificing something of intrinsic value in order to obtain the food which is merely instrumentally valuable but which keeps us alive an artist might sell her paintings to feed her children for example and the same thing might be true with prairies now in light of this general reflection I've just been talking about some problems with the concepts of instrumental versus intrinsic value and on some of the reasons that are commonly given to justify the valuation of prairies I think we just have to conclude that the case hasn't been made yet that they have intrinsic value it may well be and I think it is instead the case that they have instrumental value of it particularly pressing kind however there's a second serious obstacle that also raises questions about the conclusion that prairies have intrinsic value I mentioned at the beginning that there were to my concerns about intrinsic value it's the first here comes my second in order to say of anything call it X that it has intrinsic value one must have some very solid idea of what X is or at least how to identify it as an X thus we must ask what is a prairie professor Calcott recognizes the importance of this question but tells us and this is a quote we have a clear enough idea of what a biotic community is to recognize the difference between a prairie and a cornfield and to regard the wholesale replacement of the former by the latter also as a cause for alarm sure we can tell the difference between prairies and cornfields most of us but I'm not sure that that's good in that we need to look more closely there are two facts about prairies as opposed to perhaps some other sorts of naturally existing objects that make this problem especially hard for prairies the first is that the prairies we have today in Iowa are often restored rather than original and more importantly they exist in very small isolated patches the second problem with prairies is that typically they require quite a bit of human intervention to flourish and survive at least in their present form in order to understand why these raise difficulties we need to look again at the general concept of what it is to be a biotic community or any community and why that's important for intrinsic value now if I've understood professor calatrava's position correctly and I'm doing a lot of reading behind between the lines here the notion of a community is sort of the glue that binds together a collection of individuals into unit or a whole this whole maybe a family a tribe a nation or an ecosystem that she speaks of prairies as biological poles of ecosystem as one sort of distinctly holistic biological entity we need something to weld these together into a unit he also cites Darwin when he introduces the notion of social wholes as appropriate objects of value the problem of course is that any community whether you look at social community mixed communities or biotic communities vary widely in the extend of what I may call their wholeness that is their own internally grounded integrity or identity this is easy to illustrate in social communities contrast for example a nuclear family which does have some sort of integrity or unity with the community that gets formed when I arbitrarily break the students in my logic class into groups of six for a group project the same will be true of collections of plants and animals a zoo or a safari park is a biotic community albian one whose scope boundaries members and functioning are for the most part determined by outside forces in that sense the Safari Park is more like my logic roots than like a family the choice is determining the shape of this sort of community might be arbitrary some will be better than others what will be lacking is the intrinsic or internal integrity the sense of wholeness that we need to sort of form the object or identify the object that we value now in the best of all possible worlds all ecosystems would be more like families than like zoos or logic classes indeed the notion of integrity that I've been using plays an important role in both Aldo Leopold's and Baird calicos ethical theories in order for professor cops argument at least the one he offers here today 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 to whether prairies are more like families were more like news do they have the right kind of wholeness sadly I think that at least as they exist today prairies in Iowa and most other states are more like the zoos the conclusion is based on exactly those two facts that I mentioned earlier they're existing as restorations with very limited scope and the need for human management and the natural consequences of those two facts so the dilemma I want to pose for professor Calcott view is that either we admit that not all communities have wholeness in the right sort of sense in which case professor callicut argument for intrinsic value may not apply to them or we restrict the term community to only those holes which do have the internal integrity that's necessary to find these things together into a unit but if we take that second choice our two facts about prairies suggest that prairies won't count as communities in this more restricted sense and once again we don't have any reasons for thinking that they can have intrinsic value or that they do have intrinsic values now perhaps when Aldo Leopold looked at prairies some were still 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 that were specially adapted to fertilize or pollinate this sort of plan the grazers that prevented the overgrowth of larger plants and the Predators that limit the population of grazers and so on and so on now maybe when Ted Turner gets finished with Montana and the Buffalo and perhaps that he might bring in after that he'd turn his attention to the Iowa Prairie and it can be that way again but prairies as we have them and value them today fall far far short of that kind of completeness and unity the Iowa prairie may have a few dick sizzles but they also have their share of English sparrows the little pockets of prairies are inevitably surrounded by suburban or urban environments that disrupt the purity and integrity of the Prairie the problem is not just one of size although size and scale is an important factor restoration even on a grand scale raises questions about unity integrity and identity when an ecosystem involves gradually and naturally it in a sense defines its own identity the plants and animals in the system belong there there are legitimate members of the community they evolved as part of it by definition to the species that aren't represented in that system aren't really part of the system so in that sense the evolution defines the identity on the other hand when we set out to restore a prairie we have to decide what belongs in it and what doesn't we have to make that decision we in doing that we rely in part on historical records but those are often incomplete or inaccurate we also try to examine the few bits of original prairies that we can still find but that's a process like trying to understand gorillas by looking at a single gorilla in a barren cage in the Central Park Zoo and even that assumes that we've got a label on our cage that we can recognize an original Prairie when we find it that we can distinguish between the indigenous life and the exotics that have contaminated it what are the odds that we're getting this right I think that they're not that good finally and I have only time to raise the question and I'm not going to explore it although perhaps we can do so in the discussion period factor in human influence into the biotic community this is particularly a concern with prairies since prairies need to be burned periodically something that has required human intervention for a long time including burnings by Native Americans before European settlers got here most prairies also require some sort of weeding in some way to eradicate exotic species that inevitably contaminate it how much did these considerations affect and undermine the identity of prairies as biotic communities I think it makes their identity more dependent on us to sum up because many apparently intrinsic values turn out to be instrumental when we look at them more closely and also because it's not clear that prairies today at least have the sort of wholeness or integrity that makes them even potential objects of value in their own right I have to conclude that prairies do not have intrinsic value that doesn't mean we should not preserve and cherish them but it does mean that we need a different moral Foundation and justification for that preservation we've decided because of the time to go right into comments and questions and what we'll do is out sort of umpire I'll point at you and then you've got the floor and identify the person who's gonna be like stoplight when we when we find out that getting rid of purple loosestrife rather than adding it and prairie makes it better that gives the variety authenticity incremental value and there I think again the definition so what I was trying to do the just apply his test but show that seems like authenticity turn out to be values not for their own sake but because they get closer to our historical roots or illustrate an ecosystem that used to be a very important part of the ship next question or comment yes let me just follow up on an okay and push this between the two of you little further what would be the difference in the policies of the government of the state of Iowa were you or Lily but not both advising the legislature and the governor with regard to policy concerning prairies in the Oh better higher I don't think either does that take us does it take us from both of your perspectives in this case direction ultimately the answer to the question how do you identify what is straightforwardly or your senses intrinsically valuable has more to do with those who do the valuing and less to do with what is valued when it comes to the matter of explaining exactly what it is that makes anything in we have some and now it's the witching hour 9:30 we'd also like to thank you very much for coming good night