ABSTRACT
Recently I argued in this journal that it may well be self-defeating to seek intrinsic values in nature upon which to "ground" an environmental ethic.1 The preoccupation with "grounding" in any case misses what environmental ethics really needs (so I claimed) and has perhaps been struggling towards: a much more sensitive inquiry into our actual environmental values and their possibilities and synergies, in short an understanding of values themselves as dynamically interdependent systems such that we could almost speak of an "ecology" of values. Eric Katz, responding to my article,2 grants the critique, and by speaking of the "mapping" function of the concept of intrinsic value he seems to point in somewhat the same alternative direction, but he rejects pragmatism as unacceptably anthropocentric, and argues that the concept of intrinsic value is not at all as central in non-anthropocentric environmental ethics as I claimed. Is he right?
