Meditations on Values and Priorities

At the moment, I’m working on a paper that constitutes my last course requirement for my doctorate, an application of John Dewey’s thought to environmental ethics. Then again, perhaps I should better call it a demonstration that Dewey’s thought can be applied to environmental ethics. The concept of the intrinsic value of nature and an enmity to anthropocentrism seems pretty alien to a pragmatist viewpoint, and most environmental ethicists agree that pragmatism can’t help them.

Of course, my essay takes a completely left-field attack on this point of view. My reasoning isn’t so much that environmental ethics actually can work by understanding value as inevitably reflecting human priorities. That’s an obvious frontal attack on environmentalist hostility to pragmatism that just won’t work. Instead, I’m looking at Dewey’s metaphysical principles - ideas about the world as being contingent; understanding that a species only survives when it is able to adapt mindfully of its surroundings, making environmental mindfulness a key factor in any evolutionary success. Immediate practical values of staying alive are integrated with understanding how you’re interdependent with a huge multiplicity of things that are not you.

Of course, this brief summary doesn’t do the idea any justice in its details, and is only meant to be an overview of what I’m currently working on. And any commentary should reflect the provisional and summary nature of what I’ve said in the last two paragraphs, not flippantly attempt a total refutation based on a few ambiguities in the account (I’m talking about you, Benny Wald). This is a method that’s been fairly common for me, and quite successful: ignoring the obvious set of philosophical debates (in this case, all Dewey’s ethical projects) and seeing how the central concepts can be informed by other elements of philosophy.

Quite a Paradoxical Steel Town

So I went to a suburban mall this afternoon to buy a new watch, and ended up missing the bus back downtown. Suburban Hamilton is an area called The Mountain, a name which my office-mate Jessica from the interior of British Columbia considers laughable. But the suburbs are cleanly divided from the city’s interior by an escarpment that goes up several hundred metres.

Sick of waiting for another bus in the heat of August, I started walking in the general direction of my home with no idea if any of the roads back down the escarpment even had sidewalks. As it turned out, they didn’t, but I had no need to wait for another bus. Crossing the road before the highway-style street began, I walked through a small park with a modest stone pavilion, a series of bright grey arches covered in ivy along one side. Looking out the pavilion, I could see the road, as well as a sidewalk that ran along a thick grove of trees, protected from the road by a waist-high cement barrier.

I crossed the road at one of the gaps in the barrier, and after walking along the protected sidewalk for a few minutes, discovered a metal staircase that led all the way down the escarpment. It was deeply shaded by a canopy of trees and lit by old fashioned black streetlamps that needed to be on to light the way even in the middle of a sunny afternoon. It was a swath of dense forest in the middle of a busy road system, and a pedestrian was so deeply hidden that I couldn’t even hear the traffic until I left the woods and got back out onto James street.

Think of that when anyone calls Hamilton a dirty city again.
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In other news, the latest Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice, has been released this week, though it'll be a while before I get around to reading it. It'll take me about a month to finish In Search of Lost Time, and then I have my courses starting again, that I'm taking and helping to teach.

Inherent Vice is a detective novel, basically, except that it's written by Thomas Pynchon. It takes place in 1970 in Los Angeles, with a stoner private detective Doc Sportello as the protagonist. This teaser trailer from Penguin Press (which might even be narrated by Pynchon himself) lays out the whole book for you, or at least as much as can be sanely summarized without actually reading it.