Environmental Values and Fitting Attitudes

Dominic Lenzi

In our phenomenological experience of value, we think that our values are in some sense real features of the world, and not merely there for us. In environmental ethics, many unsuccessful attempts have been made to explain and justify environmental values along these lines. In this paper, I explore a promising recent proposal which argues that our environmental values (and our values generally) are features of the world that merit a fitting or appropriate response from us. Despite its advantages over earlier theories, I will argue that this proposal gives us an insufficient grasp of the notion of merit, and is prone to serious worries of cultural relativism. Instead, following work done by McDowell, Wiggins, and others, I explore a notion of merit grounded in the notion of the good life for humans. In my view, we can make sense of the notion of merit by looking at the use we put our value attributions to as part of our own attempts to answer the fundamental ethical question, ‘What sort of person should I be?’ And our answers here can be improved by thinking about the values that practically wise people recognise, and the role that these play in their living excellent lives"