ABSTRACT
To the title of this book – Is Nature Ever Evil? – my spontaneous reaction was no. When I reflected on the reason why I thought that the answer should be no, the reason which seemed to me most convincing was that in nature there is no mind, and that where there is no mind there can’t be value (moral or aesthetic) either. I asked myself whether – for example – in a world in which survived the music of Bach’s Goldberg variations but in which there was no longer a mind to listen to it, this beautiful music would have a value. It seemed to me that this couldn’t be the case. Could – to take another example – a flower be beautiful if there are no longer eyes to look, nor noses to smell? Could in a world without a conscious mind there be something like a beautiful object or something having an aesthetic value? My spontaneous reaction told me that this ‘obviously’ couldn’t be the case. The next step in my reflection was that the realm of nature is free of mind. Of course this thesis is problematic but I will try to give a rather trivial interpretation of it later. But now, if (1) the realm of nature is free of mind, and if (2) the possibility of value presupposes mind, then (3) in nature (as far as it is viewed not in connection with externally imposed values) there can’t be value. The result of this preliminary reflection seems to be an anthropocentric view on values. Without something like a human (or human-like) mind there can’t be value. But isn’t relating everything to our human interests and values not just one of the reasons that nature is endangered? Don’t we need a concept of value which is free from human interests and human points of view in order to have, for example, a true environmental ethics?
