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Joshua Duclos, "Wilderness, Morality, and Value" (Lexington Books, 2022)
01:07:29
An interview with Joshua Duclos
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Kyle Johansen
Hi everyone, and welcome back to the New Book Network's Animal Studies Channel. My name is Kyle Johansen, and I recently became a host on this channel. Today, I'm very happy to be interviewing Dr. Joshua Duclo. Josh is an instructor of humanities and philosophy at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. And we're going to be discussing his book, Wilderness Morality and Values, which was published earlier this year by Roman and Littlefield. Welcome to the podcast, Josh.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.
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Kyle Johansen
Yeah, it's great to have you. So could you please tell us a little bit about yourself, such as where you're from, what topics you work on, or anything else you think the listeners might want to know about you?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Sure. I actually grew up in New Hampshire, where I'm now living and working. I went to school for college down in Connecticut, then did some graduate school in Chicago, and then ultimately did my PhD at Boston University and over the years lived in a variety of places. I lived in India, France, the Czech Republic, but New England and specifically New Hampshire are home.
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Kyle Johansen
Okay, yeah, I guess you're pretty well traveled. In fact, one thing that is neat about you, that maybe people would like to know is that you were recently in the Ukraine doing some volunteer teaching. How was that?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
It was a valuable experience. It was a more disturbing experience than I had anticipated, but I'm glad I went. I was able to connect with a school in Lviv, Ukraine, and made an arrangement that if they could organize students who weren't able to meet their tuition and set up some classes, I'd be happy to come over and do primarily language instruction with them. But they also had asked if I would organize a series of philosophy seminars for their advanced students. So it was a special opportunity, and I was grateful to be able to help out a bit.
- [03:28]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, it's wonderful that you did that. And I'm also happy that you were able to get a bit of financial support, because going to Ukraine and spending some time there and doing all this is expensive. And I know you got a bit of help from friends and family and whatnot, so that's good.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
But primarily from friends and other philosophers. I put out a request for anyone who was able to make any sort of donation. $20, $15, anything. And a whole of philosophers, whether they were teachers or fellow graduate students or people I've met at conferences, were extremely generous in making donations and helping me get over there.
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Kyle Johansen
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Okay. So another thing that I think is neat about you, or in my opinion, it's neat. Before inviting you for this interview, I'd never bothered to learn anything about St. Paul's School. And when I scheduled an interview with you, I thought I'd look into the place that you work. And St. Paul school sounds like a pretty unique place to work. So it's a boarding school and also a prep school, but I think tuition there for students is like $62,000 a year. So it's a very expensive prep school. What's it like working at a place like this? It's probably pretty different working there than working at lots of. Lots of educational institutions.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah. So I've taught high school for a number of years, and I taught at the university level as well. And in some ways it's similar. In some ways it's very different. And when I've applied for these various jobs, I always honestly say the same thing in interviews, which is I don't particularly care if the students are 16 or 19. It doesn't make much difference to me. In some ways, teaching is teaching. But, yeah, these schools are a unique environment. Saint Saint Paul's is one of the old American prestigious boarding schools. It's a beautiful campus on over 2000 acres of new England woodlands. I get to teach some very, very talented, motivated students and I get to do other things as well, like be the head coach of a JV soccer team. So I balance out teaching philosophy with teaching people how to take corner kicks, which I actually quite enjoy.
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Kyle Johansen
Right, okay. It sounds like it's a pretty work intensive. I think I looked up that you are working. Is it six days a week? Basically, like full time, six days a week kind of thing?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, six days a week. At a minimum. The teaching schedule is six days a week. We have classes Monday, Monday through Saturday. So coming to this situation from teaching college, even if you're teaching a 4, 4 or 5, 5, the workload here is fairly intense. It's of a different kind. You know, there are no research demands on me here. There's no requirements to publish, so anything like that, you just do it because you want to or because you're particularly so. It's a different set of work demands. Having been in both worlds, I would never say one is more rigorous than the other. It's just a different set of demands.
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Kyle Johansen
Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, well, as interesting as your life is, we're here to talk about your book and not really about your life. So let's get into the book. First thing is just why did you decide to write this book in the first place?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
I think I've been thinking through philosophical questions about nature and the environment since I was a kid. I grew up in New Hampshire in fairly rural New Hampshire. Spent a lot of time in the woods and in the mountains. And then during graduate school, I ended up with a part time job working as an outdoor guide, a sort of mountain guide for a company that did outdoor adventure. So I would lead these outdoor adventure trips in the mountains with various clients, mostly in the United States, but sometimes in the Alps, sometimes in the Himalayas, you know, doing that sort of part time work as a, as an outdoor guide or a wilderness guide, and then also working on a PhD in philosophy, the two worlds were always colliding in my head and I was always sort of thinking philosophically about human nature relations and the meaning of wilderness, the function of wilderness, the status of plants and animals. And, you know, when, when, when you're a philosopher and something's not quite clear in your own head, you tend to think more about it and then you dip into the literature and I mean, there's fantastic literature on this stuff. I got very interested in writers like Dale Jamison and Holmes Ralston. Mark Sagoff, Baird Calicott, Katie McShane, Claire Palmer. You know, I could go on and on and learned an enormous amount, but I found a lot of the literature on wilderness somewhat unsatisfying, that whatever I was seeing there wasn't quite resolving the confusions I had or getting at the questions that I felt were particularly important. So at that point, you have the beginning of a project.
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Kyle Johansen
Okay. Yeah. And, I mean, we'll get into this later, I guess. But it's interesting that you look at wilderness the way you do, and so we'll talk about wild animal welfare later on. But it's interesting that philosophically, you're very interested in wild animal welfare and yet you are yourself a wilderness lover. Right. You have spent so much time in the wilderness yourself. It's a big part of, I guess, who you are and what you do and has been for a long time. I thought that was just an interesting fact about you. I've not, like, I've surveyed the people who work on wild animal welfare and found out how likely they are to be people who climb mountains and go on long hiking trips and things like that. But.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I've had that comment from a few people, and I agree. A number of people have said that they're very surprised that this book came out of me, whether they particularly like the book or not, or whether I happen to be right or wrong about any individual claim. And, you know, parts of the book make me a bit uncomfortable, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about some of the conclusions that I've reached.
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Kyle Johansen
Yeah. Okay. Well, and we'll talk about those conclusions during this interview. Okay. So perhaps the most important concept in your book is the concept of wilderness, or the most important concept to your book and specifically what you have in mind is what you call wilderness as wilderness. Can you explain what you mean by wilderness as wilderness? And can you also explain its relationship with the concept of nature?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Sure. This was one of the things that I felt. The stuff I was seeing in the literature just wasn't quite satisfying me. So a lot of debates about the function or the value of wilderness to me seem to really miss the mark. They often aren't really debates about wilderness itself, or as I put it, wilderness as wilderness. They tend to be debates about the importance of preserving natural resources that you might find in wilderness, like timber or water, or maybe debates about the ability of nature to provide enriching esthetic experiences. But in a lot of these conversations, it's just Often not noticed that these experiences or these goods in principle, really could come from another source. And that wilderness, whatever wilderness turns out to be, however you finally want to. Want to analyze it in these conversations, is really seen as a means to an end, as, you know, just a vehicle for the delivery of some other good. And I completely agree. Wilderness has abundant instrumental value. I don't know anyone who would try to maintain the opposite. But in political philosophy, people who are interested in democracy, I think it's pretty common to say, look, democracy has various instrumental values, but a number of theorists say it also has certain intrinsic values. And even if democracy isn't as good as some other system in getting us this or that instrumental good, there's still some just inherent value to democracy itself. And that's kind of what I wanted to try to get at with wilderness. What exactly is it? And can we say that wilderness as wilderness, possesses some distinct value?
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Kyle Johansen
Okay, right. Yeah. So you're interested in the. In the intrinsic value of wilderness.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah. And to get at that, you. The first step is you've got to be able to say what wilderness is. You have to have some working understanding of this thing if we're going to try and understand whether it has a distinct value.
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Kyle Johansen
Okay, and you think that. Yeah. You think wilderness has a pretty close relationship with the concept of nature.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah. So on the one hand, I have. I have no problem if people want to stipulate that they're going to use the terms wilderness and nature interchangeably. So Bill McKibben in the end of Nature, his famous book, I think he's essentially talking about what I'm talking about when I say wilderness. So I don't have too much of a problem with that. But nature and natural are really loaded terms in philosophy. And I found it almost impossible to use these terms in the context of philosophy without getting immediate interruptions or causing confusion and then just leading to these unhelpful disagreements. So for. For the book I was writing, there was a kind of philosophical efficiency to talking about wilderness. But also I was engaging with, at a minimum, sort of 30 years of philosophical literature, specifically also talking about wilderness, using the term wilderness. As for the distinction, I think it makes a lot of sense to say that the house plant you have in your living room is part of nature. I don't think it makes much sense to say that it's part of the wilderness. So in the book, I try and say, look, this is a vague concept we can understand. It's a vague concept that's going to get fuzzy at the edges. But there is still a philosophically important distinction that can be made. And if we don't make it, it actually gets very hard to have some important moral conversations.
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Kyle Johansen
Okay, thanks. Well, I guess the next question will give you a chance to say a bit more about how you understand the concept of wilderness. In particular, I'm wondering what you mean when you. When you say that we might go about either preserving or reducing wilderness. Because you talk about both those things in the book preservation of wilderness and also the possibility of reducing wilderness. At first glance, reducing wilderness seems synonymous with habitat destruction. It kind of just sounds like that's what that would have to mean. But that's not what you're talking about in your book. You don't have habitat destruction in mind?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
No, I'm certainly not advocating habitat destruction. I mean, it may. The reduction of wilderness might. Might be done in a way that. That results in habitat destruction, but it. But it need not be. And that's one of the things I was trying to bring out. So the way. The way I understand wilderness, first, I try to sort of revive or defend just the. The Wilderness act definition. And I won't read the whole thing there, but that's the definition that's sort of been under attack for. For 30 years with all these various objections. But when I say wilderness, I mean something like a condition of the natural world distinguished by a relative absence of human activity, past or present, intentional or unintentional, conspicuous or inconspicuous. And that, to me, that's just sort of a quick way to explain what is laid out in the U.S. wilderness act definition. Untrammeled land. Land where human beings are visitors who do not remain. That you preserve the world as human beings initially found it. So that's what I'm talking about. So when it gets to preserving or reducing, we're really talking about a cond of the natural world. So preserving wilderness would be preserving the natural world or conditions of the natural world distinguished by a relative absence of human activity. So to give maybe some examples of that, if there's no further human habitation or activity or influence in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, then I think we could say wilderness will be preserved there. But if five new resorts go up, then wilderness is going to be diminished or reduced, but it wouldn't be eliminated necessarily. And then if we said that all human habitation and all human activity and influence is going to cease in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, then in some sense wilderness will have been enhanced. When you just mean something like a condition of the natural World distinguished by relative absence of human activity. And it's important for me to point out that I'm not making any kind of evaluative statements here at all. I take these just to be be statements of fact. So whether preservation reduction or elimination is good or bad, and why is going to be a completely different question.
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Kyle Johansen
Right. Okay, thanks. Yeah, so I mean, I guess given the way you understand wilderness, human activity will tend to reduce the amount of wilderness that there is. So if you go into something that we would call wilderness, you know, a relatively uninfluenced ecosystem, and human beings start doing things, anything really in that ecosystem that affects that ecosystem's environment, that will tend to reduce wilderness. I wonder if human behavior can sometimes increase wilderness. Is that conceptually impossible, do you think? Or would some human behavior plausibly be thought to increase wilderness?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
That's a great question. And I felt like I had bitten off enough in the book that I didn't get into that. But it's a really good question. It's a really important question. It gets into the questions about rewilding, whether this conceptual makes any sense, and then whether we think it's a good idea to engage in rewilding or not. But yeah, the way I've understood it, no human activity is going to diminish wilderness. And most people just take that as an evaluative claim, like, oh, so human activity is bad, human activity is hurting nature. But that's not what I'm saying at all. So to get back to your point about habitats, it's completely possible that that human activity, while diminishing the wilderness conditions of a certain natural area, might actually result in habitat restoration that tends to beneficial for the welfare of non human animals living there. So human activity might improve habitats. We're just so used to thinking of human activity or human interference in the natural world as being disastrous or self interested or short sighted. And it usually has been. But there's nothing in principle that says that needs to be the case.
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Kyle Johansen
Okay, well, look, so before we get into your critique of wilderness preservation, because that's a big part of your book, it's worth discussing your defense of the claim that wilderness exists. Can you explain why some scholars have challenged the existence of wilderness and why you think that they're wrong?
- [18:19]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, absolutely. And you'll have to. I could go on about this for quite a while. So you'll have to let me know if we've said enough and if it's time to move on. In kind of surveying the literature, I identified five distinct challenges and Then there certainly could be more. But I came up with 5, 5 challenges just to the idea of wilderness. I call them the empirical, the cultural or the ethnic or the racial, the philosophical, the social constructivist, and the environmental or political. And I really just don't find any of them convincing. Which is not to say I think they're all entirely wrong. I think a lot of them make cogent, in some cases self evident points. I just don't think they're in any way they impede on the idea of wilderness. So the, the empirical objection, this is someone like, like McKibben who thinks nature no longer exists. There's nothing left that could be called wilderness because humans have touched, spoiled, put our fingerprints on, on everything. There's just nothing left that could fall into this category. You know, I think Dale Jamison's pretty good on this one, saying that this is just trivially false in certain ways. We can find many areas of the earth and then certainly the cosmos where human fingerprints are not present. So the influence of human activity is not yet present. But it also just ignores the vagueness of the term. It might be true that an absolute wilderness is very hard to come by these days, but gates of the Arctic national park, for example, or wilderness area, it's definitely wilderness to a higher degree than Yellowstone, which is going to be wilderness to a higher degree than Central park, which is actually going to be wilderness to a higher degree than LaGuardia Airport. So I just don't see much force in that. That's saying empirically there's nothing that could ever fit the referent of wilderness as I described it. For the, for the cultural, ethnic or racial objection, the objection here isn't so much that wilderness doesn't exist. It's that a number of people have found the term offensive and demeaning. And this, this, I need to be careful with this one because it's a really important point that has something valuable in it. Historically, it often has been the case that certain groups of people have identified certain areas as wildernesses either to impugn the people who are already living there, to say, look at these people, they couldn't develop civilization, they couldn't, they, they couldn't advance. And, and you know, this was quite common with, with Europeans arriving in North America and Central America and South America. But there's a big genetic fallacy that seems to happen here. A lot of people point out that this term wilderness seems to have been invented by white Europeans or white Americans, and therefore it only applies to them or it couldn't possibly apply anywhere else. And that just doesn't quite follow. It's also possible to just point out that certain areas do seem to be wilderness to a greater degree without then making a value judgment about the people applying the term or the people living in the areas that another group considers wilderness. I mean, it should be plain to everyone today that North America was not some absolute pristine, untouched wilderness prior to the arrival of Columbus. That's a silly fiction, but it should also be true. And Holmes, Ralston, among others have pointed this out, that North America was certainly wilderness to a far higher degree and greater extent than Europe in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries. So I don't think pointing out the sometimes nefarious and racist way that the term has been applied by some groups is a good reason to reject the idea of wilderness as itself intrinsically racist or culturally offensive. Adam, please tell me if I'm going on too long about any of this. I'll make these other ones quick. The philosophical objection kind of says that there's this untenable human nature divide, that there's this silly metaphysics going on that it's not possible to separate humanity from nature. We couldn't ever explain why one state of affairs is called natural and the other is artificial. I don't think there's any complex metaphysics involved in this. I think it's very easy to tell why the Chamonix Valley is natural and why the computer that I'm using to speak with you right now is called artificial. And I guess I'd want to know if someone thinks that's not a distinction that's tenable. I'd love to know what distinction short of absolute, strict logical necessity, you know, P and not P is going to be tenable. Like, there's just. It's going to be hard to talk about anything like, can we not make distinctions between cats and dogs at that point? So I don't think there's any complex metaphysics in talking about the. The natural world or wilderness and, and the human world or artifacts and nature. Social constructivism, you know, is a view that. That thinks wilderness itself is socially constructed, that this is. This is an idea and it comes out of a certain way of thinking, and that no wilderness existed until human beings formed the concept of wilderness and then applied it to certain areas of the world. I think there's an uncontroversial point here that perhaps no one would have talked about wilderness until the idea arose. And perhaps you need certain historical and social conditions for people to be even interested in identifying areas of the world like that. But to think that the concept is responsible for the creation of the entity makes a fairly large mistake, I think. And then the last one is this environmental political objection. And this one doesn't really say that wilderness doesn't exist. This is where environmental activism tends to maybe tread on environmental philosophy a little bit in ways that are not always helpful that a number of writers will point out. Look, all this environmental philosophy, people like me, and, I don't know, perhaps people like you sitting around talking about this stuff, we're wasting our time. Nothing we're saying right now is actually getting out there and helping save wilderness or doing our bit for the polar bears or preserving endangered species. That this is kind of a waste of time. Now, I'll just concede that that's true if people want. I don't think it is true, but we could concede that it is. It just fails to make a distinction between environmental philosophy and environmental activism. You know, someone can do brilliant political philosophy, and it may not solve the most pressing problem of the electoral college, but it doesn't mean they're not doing something distinct and that what they're doing doesn't have a distinct kind of value. So those were the five objections that I tried to push past in order to just have the conversations I wanted to have.
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Kyle Johansen
Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and those objections are sufficiently heterogeneous that, like, summarizing what you just said is a little tricky. But I think at least some of your response could be summarized as being something like, look, wilderness is a scalar concept instead of a binary concept. We can talk about things as being more or less wild, and that's perfectly sensible. And then also, although a lot of people treat wilderness as a morally loaded evaluative concept, we don't need to. We don't. And that you need a separate argument for why you ought to treat it that way. And once we sort of don't treat it as a morally loaded evaluative concept, some of the difficulties with it seem to go away.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
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Kyle Johansen
Yeah. Okay, so your critique of wilderness preservation, which, when I'll get into it's, largely based on considerations of wild animal welfare or alternatively, wild animal suffering, as you note in your book. This critique, or what you call the objection from welfare, is interesting in part because environmentalists normally invoke wild animal welfare in support of wilderness preservation. Can you explain the importance of wild animal welfare for proponents of wilderness preservation for people who are unfavorable wilderness preservation, as well as why you think considerations of wild animal welfare are actually in tension with wilderness preservation?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
I think I really started thinking about this more specifically when I got a fundraising letter from the. It might have been the Nature Conservancy, and they were appealing for funds, and there was a picture of a sad, skinny polar bear. And the essence of the letter was, look, if you care about animals and you care about their welfare, and if you want to help this polar bear and other polar bears like it and other animals in the same situation, we've got to preserve wilderness. And now I will completely agree that a base condition for faring well is existing. It's continuing to live. So to the extent that preserving wilderness preserves the conditions necessary for the continued existence and, and even the flourishing of wild animals, then you can say that the preservation of. Of. Of wilderness is directly linked to the welfare of. Of animals. And if you're thinking that the destruction of wilderness, if you're, if you're imagining bulldozers going in and just raising forests or strip mining or. Or toxic sludge, you know, dripping into the rainforest or something like that, it seems pretty clear that destroying or eliminating the wilderness in that way is going to have a negative impact on the welfare of animals. But there's a real tension here, and the tension is that animals rarely fare well in the wilderness. So if we're understanding wilderness as a kind of state of nature, then the overwhelming majority of wild animals are going to lead lives that are more nasty, brutish and short than anything Hobbes ever could have envisioned. For humans, it's starvation, it's disease, it's predation, it's exposure, it's parasitism. And for the very, very, very small percentage of wild animals that make it past their existence is a relentless and pitiless attempt to avoid some kind of gruesome death. And this is not. I mean, again, I take this just to be a factual claim. There's not yet any value judgment involved in any of this. And every good biologist from Darwin through Dawkins is crystal clear on this fact. So animals don't tend to do well in the wilderness. But I think we have this false dichotomy set up where the only interference. If we imagine that the only interference humans are making in wilderness is to cut down forests or strip mine or make the natural world so unlivable that wild animals can't even exist, then, yeah, it would make sense to say that we're making things worse for them. But it's very different to say that simply preserving wilderness as it is Creating. Creating the conditions where animals are going to fare particularly well, if that makes some sense.
- [29:16]
Kyle Johansen
Oh, yeah, no, it definitely does. I'm very interested in this topic myself, too. Wild Animal Welfare. I'm out of curiosity, how bad do you think the situation is for wild animals? Because, I mean, throughout the book you talk about various sources of suffering in the wilderness and you indicate that you think wild animals are in a pretty bad situation. I don't know if you ever say anything specific about how bad you think it is. So, I mean, some people who are working on this topic, they think that the situation in the wilderness is so bad that the lives of wild animals are net negative. And I think that's partly supposed to be a matter of most individual wild animals having net negative lives, understood as lives where the amount of negative experience exceeds the amount of positive experience. And it's also, I think a lot of people who say this think that if you take all of those animals who are living net negative lives and you aggregate that ill fare and try to come up with an overall assessment of average welfare or aggregate welfare in nature, it's going to turn out that those animals who are living bad lives are outweighing the good lives of whichever animals happen to live good lives, which are presumably a small minority. But. Yeah, so these sorts of assessments are. Are really quite bleak. I'm wondering if you think that's right, if you have an equally bleak assessment.
- [30:43]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
I think what you've just said is entirely plausible, and I do cite some specific things. I don't do that kind of careful analysis in the book, but relying on data from scientists, and this really is an empirical question, I mean, then philosophers can do various analyses with it. But if you want to figure out how much any individual animal or a group of animals or a species is suffering, we need to be careful not to just do armchair speculation and actually figure it out. I mean, there's interesting studies just with stress hormones, which is one of the good indicators of happiness. And it turns out wild animals have far higher concentrations of these. And there's very good reason for that, that if you were kind of a relaxed, very calm guinea pig out in the wild, you're not going to last very long. But it's also equally true that living a life where your stress hormones are constantly five times higher than your domestic counterpart doesn't seem like a particularly pleasant sort of life. So what you've just said, I think is entirely plausible. And yeah, I think it's correct that it may well be the case that the issue of Wild animal suffering, far from being an unimportant moral problem, could actually be the most overwhelming significant moral problem of which we're aware.
- [32:03]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah. Which I'm sure strikes some people as being terribly counterintuitive. But. But I myself find it hard to resist that conclusion. And we could keep talking about that long for a longer period of time, I think.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Let me just revise that. I just want to revise that quickly. I guess I maybe went a bit too far. Whether you think it's the most pressing moral problem becomes a very different issue. But the scale of wild animal suffering, it seems almost inescapable to me that it dwarfs anything else.
- [32:30]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially once you start. So wild animal suffering is associated with the effect of altruism movement. In addition to being a topic in applied ethics, it's also a cause area within the effective altruism movement. And people working in effective altruism are increasingly interested in a view called long termism, which holds that we should be giving quite a lot of weight to the interests, if not just far more weight to the interests of people who don't yet exist because they, they are far, far more numerous than the people who do exist. Like people in the past, presumably they don't have any moral significance because they don't have interests. They're dead. People who currently exist have interests for sure, but people who will exist in the future also have an interest in living a good life. And the people who will exist in the future, there's going to be many orders of magnitude more of them than of us. They're going to outnumber us by quite a bit, just assuming that the future is long and that we don't kill ourselves with nuclear war or what have you. But it seems like, yeah, especially once you start thinking about that with respect to animals, there's gonna be lots of wild animals in the future, like huge numbers. Huge, huge numbers of them. And so, yeah, if we look at existing wild animals, there's huge. They're very, very populous. I think I've seen estimates that suggest that there's about something somewhere along the lines of a trillion wild terrestrial vertebrates in existence. But then especially when we start thinking about all the future animals that there'll be, it's just we're looking at numbers that are unlike anything anyone has ever thought about, really.
- [34:03]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
And this concern, or at least interest in the ceaseless transgenerational suffering of animals in the natural world has certainly not escaped previous generations of philosophers. There's a vivid passage from Schopenhauer where he's reporting something that he must have heard about someone coming upon a beach in Indonesia. And it's just these dead turtles and skeletons and then there's the tigers that relentlessly come and eat the turtles and then the tigers themselves are, you know, eaten. And Schopenhauer says it's just ceaseless and generation after generation. And his response to this was, my God, the universe is bleak and it's just endless suffering. So, yeah, I do tend to agree with you that there's a factual element to this that really does seem undeniable. Now, what analysis and then what course of action we ought to take in response becomes a very complicated, different sort of question.
- [35:00]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, yeah. Although I think maybe one thing I notice, I'm not sure how much past thinkers, and by past I mean classical thinkers and people who are writing Prior to the 20th century, I, I think they probably didn't have as much appreciation for the implications of population dynamics for wild animal welfare. That's something that's a little more recent where people started thinking about reproduction and the implications of particularly our strategist reproduction for wild animal welfare.
- [35:33]
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. I was just thinking about. I don't think people have been unaware of, of the scope and scale of suffering. They've just either tended to ignore it or downplay it or excuse it in various ways. But no, you're completely right about the new discussions about population dynamics.
- [37:17]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah. Okay, great. Well, let's keep going. So I was hoping you could explain some of your thoughts about ecocentrism and biocentrism. You critique these views in your book, but in addition to critiquing them, you also indicate that if they turned out to be true, they would actually support the objection from welfare. And it initially seems like maybe they would actually be. Maybe could be used to critique the objection from welfare. But you think they support the objection from welfare. I was hoping you could explain that and maybe also say what those views are, what ecocentrism and biocentrism are.
- [37:59]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, I do think they would actually have that. So I end up, for a variety of reasons, and I won't recapitulate the arguments here, but defending a version of sentientism. And so one quick response. If you're looking to respond or reject what I'm saying, you might say, well, you're just wrong. You got to take a biocentrist ethic, or you got to take an egocentrist ethic. So if biocentrism, and I gotta be careful here, there's a whole variety of different biocentrists, but generally speaking, this is a claim that perhaps only are all and maybe only living organisms are morally considerable ought to be brought into the moral community. So if biocentrism is correct, then not only the welfare of deer and bear and snakes must be taken into our moral deliberations, but we'd also need to think about the welfare of plants and non sentient animal life. Now, the reason I don't think this is even if you and I think that view is completely untenable, but even if it is, even if biocentrism turns out to be correct, and I am completely wrong about sentientism, the welfare of non sentient organisms don't fare any better in the wilderness than sentient organisms. Their lives are no less perilous or short and frequently wretched than the lives of wild animals that your houseplant in your living room very likely is. If you even think it makes sense to talk about that plant faring well or living a good life is very likely living a better life because it's a houseplant in your living room than if it was out in the wild, where the struggle for existence is just as real for non sentient life as it is for sentient life. So to the extent that the OFW is onto anything, the objection from welfare, then biocentrism would just exponentially increase the number of or the amount of morally repugnant suffering that's actually furthered by wilderness. And I think you can make the same point about ecocentrism. If you take ecosystems to be the locus moral value and you think ecosystems are morally considerable, then we ought to have some moral concern for ecosystems and we can just play the same thing out again. So again, I don't think either of those two positions are tenerable. But even if they are, you still have to do something with the objection from welfare. You still have to think about this preponderance of relentless citrus and as you point out, perhaps increasing suffering that exists in wilderness.
- [40:31]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, I think what you say about these views is plausible. And it strikes me that probably the reason why anyone would have thought otherwise, why anyone might think that egocentrism and biocentrism support a non interventionist sort of view, would be because people were building in implicitly some sort of naturocentrism within them. Where the thought is that, well, when we say that ecosystems are the locus of moral value, what we mean is naturally occurring ecosystems or wild ecosystems. And when we say that living individuals in general, including non sentient living individuals, are morally considerable, we mean something like living individuals that came about or were born naturally or something like that. And so when you add that stipulation, then yeah, I could see why non interventionism would would follow from that. Because we're reducing the amount of naturalness that ecosystems have and the naturalness of maybe, I guess, living individuals. But you really need to build in that natural centrism in order for these views to turn into non interventionist views.
- [41:37]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
I think, Kyle, that's right on the mark. That's exactly what it is. And there's this often implicit stoic idea of nature is good. Naturum sequi just follow nature to the extent that something is natural, then something is good. And if you're going to insert that or stipulate it, that whatever ecosystem is so long as it's natural, then it is good and it ought to be preserved. That's fine, but that just strikes me as rather dogmatic.
- [42:05]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, right. And it also suggests that that's what we should be talking about. We should be talking about the value of naturalness or the value of wilderness, which is what your book is about. So it's good. That's what you're doing.
- [42:14]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Exactly. Yeah. So that's why I don't see a move to biocentrism or egocentrism, even if they turn out to be far more plausible than I allow. I don't think it gets us away from this central question of the meaning and value of wilderness and then what to do with the undeniable suffering that exists therein.
- [42:32]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, okay, thanks. Okay, so in the third chapter of your book, in chapter three, you claim that wilderness as wilderness plausibly possesses a particular kind of anthropocentric, but also intrinsic value. Can you explain this type of value to us as well as why you think it's implausible to claim that wilderness as wilderness possesses other types of value?
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, and it might be helpful for me here just to repeat how I understand wilderness and how I use the term, which is really just in line with the Wilderness act definition. So it's something like a condition of the natural world distinguished by a relative absence of human activity, whether that's past or present, intentional or unintentional, conspicuous or inconspicuous. So anthropocentrism, or if something is anthropocentric, just focused on human beings and non anthropocentric, it could apply to others. So if you think about, if wilderness has some value, what would it even mean for wilderness to have a non anthropocentric value?
- [43:36]
Kyle Johansen
Well.
- [43:40]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
You could consider that some other type of organism might value the wilderness, and then you'd have to think about what that exactly means. I can't find any, any reason to even entertain the idea that wilderness, as I've just explained it, is something that is or even could be valued by any other entity that we know of other than human beings. Now, if it turns out that dolphins are far smarter than we think and they've been thinking about wilderness for quite a long time, and they actually value it as I've just described it, I would be happy to say, well, then I suppose it has a non anthropocentric basis, but. But there seems to be no evidence at the moment for anything like that. Non anthropocentrism. Has been kind of a touchstone of environmental ethics. The idea is that if nature, the environment, wilderness only has anthropocentric value, then it only needs to be preserved, protected, cared for, respected, regarded as long as and to the extent that human beings value it. And environmentalists have rightly realized this leaves nature or wilderness in a very dangerous position. But it just seems to be a self serving move that certain thinkers have been desperate to ascribe this non anthropocentric and later intrinsic value to nature. Because if you can show that it exists, it's going to be this really good safeguard for the environment. So that even if all humans, present and future, turn out not to value nature or wilderness, and then we don't even need it instrumentally, there would still be some reason to protect and respect these areas. So this search for intrinsic value has led people to propose various types. And I identify, I think there's at least four types of intrinsic value that have some purchase in the wilderness discussion. And the only one that I think could plausibly be ascribed to wilderness is intrinsic value as ultimate value. I don't think wilderness is morally considerable because I don't think it's sentient, and I take a sentientist line in the book. I don't think any kind of Mauryan non relational value can reasonably be ascribed to wilderness, Especially given that most of the values of wilderness are deeply relational. It's the rarity of a species or how wilderness stands in relation to human civilization. And then maybe the ultimate holy grail, which is value in the absence of valuers. This idea is argued for by certain environmental philosophers using isolation tests, kind of Mauryan isolation tests, and very famously the last man scenarios. But I don't think any of them actually get you anywhere near establishing the idea that something like wilderness could have value in the absence of valuers. I do think that wilderness has value. I think it obviously has instrumental value and I do think it has a kind of intrinsic value. I think it has intrinsic value in the sense of ultimate value that frequently human beings, myself included, value wilderness simply for its own sake. Not because I'm getting natural resources from it, not because it's a good place to hang out with my friends, not because I can hide there in the case of political tyranny. I actually just value the wilderness. But I find no reason to think that it goes beyond an anthropocentric basis or that it could be any other sort of intrinsic value.
- [47:14]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, I guess the kind of value you're talking about there intrinsic value as ultimate value. That's something we're pretty familiar with in lots of other contexts. So if I just am very interested in certain things because, I don't know, I identify with them or something like that. Like, if I'm a collector and I'm just collecting these cards that matter a lot to me because I think of myself as a card person or something like that, or comic books or what have you, these things often have that kind of value. Right? I think that's the kind of value you're talking about.
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Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, that's exactly right. So an example that I like to use, I have an old hunting knife that I inherited from my grandfather. And so if we ask the question, well, does this knife have value? Well, it certainly has instrumental value. I can use it to cut things, I can use it to whittle. I could use it for hunting. I suppose I could trade it and get some value for it that way. But that's not the value that the knife actually has for me. I don't. I don't use the knife for anything. It is not a means to getting anything else. But the knife has value for me. Just owning it, possessing it, and I could try to unpack that a bit more. It reminds me of my grandfather. It makes me feel part of some kind of a tradition. But it's not a means to anything else other than the value that I. That I derive from it. So this is a completely familiar concept. And I see no reason to think that wilderness doesn't possess that value. Again, I can say quite confidently it has that value for at least one person, and that's me. But I think it has that value for many, many people. The trouble is, that's an entirely. Well, the trouble for certain environmental philosophers is that's an entirely anthropocentric type of value. So to the extent that people don't value wilderness or stop valuing it or don't see the ultimate value in it, then it seems like there's one less moral safeguarding for the natural world.
- [49:13]
Kyle Johansen
Right. Okay. Yeah, thanks. Okay, well, shifting gears a little bit, in your last chapter, the final chapter of your book, chapter five, you draw an analogy between bioethics and environmental ethics. I was hoping you could explain to us this analogy you draw and what it has to do with wild animal suffering.
- [49:35]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Well, I think the debate about the value of wilderness is, in a really important sense, just a debate about the given over the created or the natural world that human beings were thrown into and have inherited. And the world that we might create through human agency. And to me, this, this is almost identical to a fundamental issue in bioethics. So in bioethics you might say, is there a given human nature, whether it's given by God or chance or evolution or whatever, and should that nature be preserved and should that nature be respected? And we might even say, are we obliged to understand and maintain this nature or are we permitted to augment it? Or you can go a step further. Someone like Julian Savulescu might say, actually we're obliged to augment it. It's not just that we're permitted to. If and when human agency can augment human nature such that it improves human welfare, then we really morally need to do that. So. So I found that this debate is a bit more developed in bioethics, but the essence of the question seems to be the same. And there's also something really odd that I don't mention in the book, but maybe it's worth mentioning now, just in my experience, anecdotally, I found that the same people who are very liberal about bioethics, so transhumanists, for example, tend to be real intense bio conservatives, that they're very bullish about tinkering with human nature and even moral obligations to do that, but almost have this immediate moral revulsion at the idea of human interference in non human nature. So it may be that there's an important distinction, but it may be that there's some inconsistency going on. So I end up using Michael Sandel, who wrote a really wonderful little book called the Case Against Perfection. And Michael Sandel was invited to be on the President's Commission on Bioethics. And Sandel gives what I think is a really eloquent and important plea for kind of restraint in bioengineering and restraint in trying to exert human domination over human nature. So to the extent that there was any kind of germane analogy between bioethics and debates about wilderness, I wanted to see how, well, a defense like Sandel's, which does a reasonable job arguing against this unrestrained meddling in human nature, I wanted to see how that might hold up with the argument that maybe we should exercise more restraint in meddling with non human nature, even if our meddling is actually meant and perhaps even will reduce the amount of suffering that exists in that world.
- [52:17]
Kyle Johansen
Okay, right. Well, and this leads right into my next question. So regarding Sandel, you take an argument of his concerning what he calls the giftedness of life, and you apply it to this stuff about wilderness. Yes, I was Hoping you could talk about that. Why you think Sandel's argument provides. Because you're not entirely. You're somewhat critical of Sandel's argument, but not completely. You think it actually does provide some limited support for wilderness preservation. So I was hoping you could explain that.
- [52:49]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
I think it provides very limited. I think it does better with bioethics, and it's not entirely convincing with bioethics. And he has many critics, but I think it provides very limited support. So Sandel fundamentally needs to argue that even if human intervention and human ingenuity could do things that would improve the welfare of human beings, we'd live longer, we'd be healthier, we'd be taller and handsomer and things like that. That Sandel thinks there's really good reasons not to do this. And it boils down to the value of what he calls the giftedness of life. That simply taking something as a given, a world that does not come from us, wasn't created by us, isn't controlled by us, exists independent of us in every sense, that to have something like that exist is actually quite important and quite valuable. So if you try to apply this to the natural world, in one sense, I agree, because I go back to the idea that I am a lover of wilderness. I do not want wilderness in a certain sense to be eliminated. My own life, my personal life would be impoverished if there was no more wilderness. But stating that doesn't get me around the objection from welfare. So I do agree that there's a value in this giftedness of the world, but it doesn't evade the moral problem. And that's sort of what leads me into the last section of the book where I. I do my very best to think of what a good apologia for wilderness would be. And it has to be sort of a quasi religious, spiritual valuation. And I think that's what Sandel actually is doing in bioethics, though he says that he's not. He says he's giving a perfectly secular, non religious defense of human nature. But I think behind it all is this implicit spiritual valuation.
- [54:40]
Kyle Johansen
Okay, great. And that leads very nicely into one of my last questions here. So I was hoping you could explain this idea that wilderness is perhaps best understood as a religious or spiritual value. And also what you think the implications of understanding it as a religious or spiritual value would be because you think that you express some, not exactly reservations, but you indicate that there are costs associated with understanding it this way.
- [55:08]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, I have serious reservations with understanding of this way. And I'm to be Totally honest, still conflicted about this and still thinking it through. So, as I've said, I am a wilderness lover, and I didn't write this book to trash wilderness in any way. I wanted to better understand something that I love and because I'm genuinely morally disturbed by what I call the objection from welfare. So. So, getting to this religious or spiritual valuation of wilderness, I noticed two things. One, when I started looking back through a lot of prominent nature writers and nature philosophers, the way these people often write about and talk about wilderness, they're often explicitly religious and spiritual in the way they describe it and in the way they value it, you know, from John Muir on. And then when I looked at. I found some excellent scholarship going through the legislative process and actually passing the U.S. wilderness act, some of the strongest arguments to carry the day were these explicitly religious arguments that we needed to preserve wilderness because we were preserving God's land and because this became the Sabbath for the earth. And, I mean, it was really explicitly religious. So I wasn't finding a great way to get around the objection from welfare. But if there is this spiritual or religious dimension of wilderness, then it may be possible, and I just want to present it as a possibility that needs further thought to engage in some kind of Kierkegaardian teleological suspension of the ethical, where you don't say, look, ethics doesn't matter, suffering doesn't matter. I don't care about all the horrible ceaseless death that that's going on. But you say it just might be that. That there's another category that, you know, for Kierkegaard, it's the religious, above. Above the ethical. And there may be certain domains of valuation where if you try and cash it out in very cold, utilitarian, hedonistic terms, not only are you not going to understand you're not going to get the right valuation, but. But you'd almost be obligated to destroy that. That which you value. So it could be that someone could mount a defensive wilderness by saying you're simply using the wrong category, that you're thinking about this in terms of the ethical rather than in terms of the religious, in the same way that whatever the value of the Holy of Holies or the inner sanctum of a temple is, or any church, it's not just cashed out in the dollar value of the bricks and the mortar and the stained glass windows. The value somehow greatly exceed. Exceeds that. And it's not just the amount of hedonistic enjoyment that a church can provide its parishioners. It's something beyond that. The reason I think this is a particularly dangerous strategy is then you're in a situation of saying, once again, there's this anthropocentric kind of value that does seem to be predicated on unspeakable and appalling suffering. And then we might maintain that system because the sort of value we get from it, even if we want to call it religious, is just so important to us that we want to let it keep going even in the face of this suffering.
- [58:29]
Kyle Johansen
Okay, well, yeah, it seems reasonable to worry about understanding wilderness that way. I mean, I know in the book you talk about public reason a little bit, which is a concept from political philosophy, and you point out that if this is the kind of value that wilderness is, if it's a religious value, well, then. So first of all, it seems like that's not a public reason. That's something that maybe applies to wilderness. Wilderness. Well, lovers, or we could call them worshipers if they're religious, but it's not something that you can bring out in the public arena and say, well, look, here's a reason for other people, too, to care about the preservation of wilderness. It's only going to be something that's accessible to fellowship, fellow wilderness lovers.
- [59:14]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, and in a deliberative democracy, that also concerns me. I mean, I have great respect for religion and I want to make space for religion. But I think you do need to understand that, that if you slip into that world of the religious and the ineffable and the idea that these ideas are not translatable into public reason on some sort of Rawlsian principles, then it's not clear what debates about the future of wilderness look like. If you just claim, no, look, it's got a religious value. Leave it alone.
- [59:44]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, so I suppose we haven't actually talked about this yet, so maybe I should ask about it. Okay. So you think we have pretty strong reasons to intervene in the wilderness in order to increase wild animal welfare. What do you think? Do you have any opinion about what the best way to intervene is to increase wild animal welfare? Is there something you'd be willing to defend regarding that?
- [60:08]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Well, what I say is that I think we have a very, very strong pro tanto reason. And by that I just mean. Well, here's an example that I use in the book that I take from. From someone else. The if a joke is funny, that's a pro tanto reason to tell it. If the joke is also deeply offensive to someone you care about, that's a. That's A countervailing reason maybe not to tell the joke. So I did want to try and establish, I think there's a very strong pro tanto reason to intervene in wilderness if and to the extent that our intervention will reduce the suffering without having additional undesirable side effects. So as to how we would do that, this is something I don't have a great deal of insight on. I have some friends and colleagues who are strong proponents of population control through sterilization. Particularly I have someone who works on this with deer and thinks a lot about managing of wild and urban deer populations through that. I'm also pretty interested in germline, the people who have talked about the potential for germline genetic modification of transitioning predators, carnivores into herbivores. Now you mentioned that around any group of biologists or environmental activists or environmental scientists and they look at you like you're insane. But I do find that a fascinating line to take.
- [61:39]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I guess there are various tentative ideas that you think are promising, but you're not willing to really argue for any particular one of them. You just think whichever ones are most likely to be effective, we should maybe do research them or something.
- [61:56]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah. Yes, I think that's fair. So I don't have a strong activist stance that comes out of this book. And that's not because I'm trying to be apathetic or that I enjoy being a fence sitter. And part of it is because there's quite a bit more I think that I need to think through. I'm also, while presumably you don't publish a book if you're not fairly convinced by some of what you said, but I hopefully have enough humility that I would like to wait and see what some other people think of this. And there's always the chance that I am badly wrong about one or two things. So before I go off on some sort of half baked activist agenda, because I think I have sorted this all out, I think I need to hear what other folks have to tell me in response to what I've tried to articulate.
- [62:43]
Kyle Johansen
Right, okay. So maybe the thing you'd advocate for is just more philosophical research. I guess we need to think about this more.
- [62:52]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
What I would love is if there is a much better defense of wilderness or understanding of wilderness, I would love for someone to tell me why I'm wrong. I would really, really love that. Now if. If it turns out that this line of thought, there are many people who have proposed something like this does seem to be the best understanding we have given our current understanding of the world, then I do think it's time to move towards some sort of activist program and begin thinking about ways to lessen wild animal suffering. That's not my expertise, but how that would. How actually we would go about doing that. And that becomes a very different sort of question that perhaps philosophers aren't always the best people to ask. But what's interesting, though, is that the people who you might need to talk to, biologists and zoologists, are often deeply, deeply resistant to the conversation that you and I have just been having, or at least that's been my experience. I was a fellow at a center where I had a desk next to an environmental scientist and a biologist and a zoologist. And to even try and explain to them this of line of thinking, they were just horrified and didn't want to hear any of it.
- [64:06]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I guess it's hard to know how useful philosophical research can be for changing people's attitudes. It sort of requires that people be willing to read a lot of philosophy, but it's been useful in the past sometimes. I think it was perhaps because of philosophy, at least in part, that ideas like liberal democracy eventually became entrenched and the norm for how we understand legitimate political governance. I mean, there was a time when liberal democracy was a terribly controversial idea.
- [64:42]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think philosophical investigation and argument can be incredibly influential. I mean, I don't want to downplay that one bit. I mean, even if you want to look at what's happening on the level of environmental activism or climate justice, you just got to take a bit of a longer view and go back a couple generations, and you have somewhat radical philosophers making arguments in journals that struck most of the general public as utterly ridiculous, but they stick at it. And 30 years of really refining and hammering these arguments and challenging people to give a response. If you don't like these arguments, if this isn't the way to go, then give us a response. And when none is forthcoming, that's when I think political action starts to take hold. So I don't have any particular recommendation in terms of direct action right now, but that is. It's not at all. Because I don't think either some ought to be forthcoming or because I think philosophy is impotent in this, Quite the opposite. I think this is the first step.
- [65:42]
Kyle Johansen
Yeah, I agree. Okay. Well, thanks for talking to me, Josh. This has been a great conversation. I'd like to thank you again for joining us to talk about your book Wilderness Morality and Values, which I'll remind everyone, was published earlier this year by Roman and Littlefield. The only other question I have for you is whether you're currently working on any projects, and if you are, what are they?
- [66:07]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
I am. And let me say thank you so much for having me on. I am grateful to be here and I really enjoyed this. So I am working on a project. It's quite a different project. I'm trying to work through the norms of statue removal. So very quickly. There's been a lot of debate recently about whether certain statues should stay up or certain statues should come down. And most of the discussion about it seems to be heated and dogmatic and fairly uninformed. And I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if an analytic philosopher tried to carefully work through the norms associated with this. And my starting premise is just this. Some statues ought to come down and some ought to stay up. Up. So how do we figure out which ones? Why and when?
- [66:52]
Kyle Johansen
Okay. Have you any tentative conclusions concerning, like, what criteria we can use to distinguish between statues that should stay up and those which should stay down or not stay down? Be knocked down, rather?
- [67:05]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
I'm going to say it's too preliminary just yet. I have reached some conclusions, but I haven't worked out the arguments, and I'm always hesitant to give the thesis before I can give a good reason.
- [67:14]
Kyle Johansen
Okay. Okay, fair enough. Well, that's a good. That's a good project and a very topical one. Okay, great. Well, yeah, thanks again. Thanks again for participating in this interview, Josh. It's been great talking to you.
- [67:27]
Dr. Joshua Duclo
My pleasure. Thank you.