Ray asks:
> Can we come to some kind of agreement on approach?  Could we then agree to
> ask the moderators to moderate the discussion in the context of this
> definition?  Can we start with a personal statement of how we each,
> individually, think of the world view, the consequent values, ethical
> standards
> John said in part:
> > I think the various world views that influence desire (revealed personal
> > preferences) are the values, the intuition of some animals being bad or
> good
> > or both good and bad. So as long as the actors can agree on the logical
> form
>
> Ray here:
> It seems to me that how one views the world and the place of humans within
> it *determines* how one structures and orders one's values.  For me,
> "desire" is not a "value"; but "desire" follows from one's value set.

If I may use that term, the soul, I would add that the soul desires one
thing only, and that is the good. The good is unknowable, however, and the
closest the soul may draw near to the good, is through contemplation of
beauty in the intellectual realm. Actually I garnered this opinion from
reading numerous dialogues of Plato's. I quess I am a neoplatonist. Desire
is not appetition, but something else situated in the intellectual sphere,
the sensitive part of the soul versus the calculative part of the soul.
There is another interpretation which may be true in a more modern sense,
desire is a 'lack value' of consciousness for an object. Desire is credit in
this world.

In some way the 'lack value' of consciousness, as expressed in the
existentialist philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, means that what is lacking in
the consciousness has more value that what is present at hand in
consciousness. Human desires may be instilled for values which are
obtainable but once obtained they no longer attract the same desire. Many of
the commodities that are advertised in the media, through advertizing, have
this appeal.

I mentioned earlier that in the dialogue Protagoras, Socrates suggests that
the virtue is neither learned nor innately acquired, but rather suggests
that there is an intermediary called virtue-sense. Socrates thinks that a
sense of virtue can be cultivated through a combination of training and
experience. By extension then virtuous acts result from a sense of what it
is to be virtuous according to an actors appeal to common sense. C. S. Lewis
refers to the Cardinal Virtues such as prudence. Prudence is not a religious
virtue but more or less common sense. Exercising good common sense regarding
acts that may benefit the environment require both intuition and critical
thinking skills. In the later case, the critical thinking skills are
acquired through education, and training. In the former case intuition
requires sensitivity and experience. Intuition, if it is a true intuition,
thus will confer some sense of what it means to know the good, and this is
value. This value, felt as the good, is subjective or intersubjective;
therefore I would offer that there is a 'co-existentialist' content in
consciousness regarding a 'lack value' for the object in consciousness.

If virtues were innately acquired, or learned, then the problem is obvious.
Not all actors would possess the ability to be virtuous due to unfair
circumstances such as birth, or education. There would by necessity be
persons wholly lacking in virtue like Rusty the Tinman who lacked a heart.

I also think that there is no thing that solely possesses the good itself.
This is because all Nature taken on balance participates in the form of the
good. If some object in nature was solely good, then there would be many
objects which would not be solely good as agreed to by the testimony of many
men. For this last assertion to be true would be absurd. Not one object in
nature is said to be wholly lacking in any participation of the good itself.
Thus if any thing is said to be wholly good, then it must be the whole of
nature. However even nature cannot be said to be wholly good because that
would be absurd as well. Since nature is said to have a 'likeness' - and I
don't mean a similarity but much alike the good, men believe nature to be
beautiful, even if many of the objects in nature go unnoticed and unloved by
men.

"A weed is an unloved flower."

The environment values which are sensed as good by different persons
therefore must be derived from what is lacking in consciousness, ie., the
object in nature must be lacking or absent for the moment, or wholly, for
there to be any sensibility regarding the good in nature. Take air for
example, most persons do not value clean air. A person may only come to
value clean air after it becomes hazy, and after the air fills with smoke.
This 'lack value' then surfaces immediately when consciousness lacks the
object 'clean air' and the subject then desires clean air which was 'already
there'.

Aristotle defined health as the absence of disease. So if this is correct,
then a person who is never diseased also does not know what is health,
except through learning of the presence of disease in others.

Here where I live there is a lot of clean air. I do not value clean air here
because it is always present, and I do not desire this clean air except in
rare circumstances when there are forest fires in the summer. Then do I
desire clean air? Yes then I desire rain, and end to the smoke from
wildfires.

The only persons that I know that desire smoke filled air here are the
unemployed sometimes who are without work, and when the summer is hot and
dry, they are very happy to find some work fighting forest fires even if
they are paid to put them out. After a long period of forest fire fighting
these persons often lose their desire for fighting fires and begin to desire
the clean and cool air of the fall. Now they can relax and find easier work
or just go and file for unemployment insurance that will get them through
the winter months. Some of these persons also work at prescribed burns which
the helicopter pilots and companies like; they desire the smoke from the
prescribed burns on logged sites since this means there is going to be work
and wages if the snows do not arrive to early....

addios

john foster

> For me, animals (humans are of the animal kingdom but also including
plants,
> soil,...) are neither intrinsically "good" nor "bad".  (Note that a weed
is
> a "plant out of place", but only in the value that a particular person
> holds).  Those terms are human constructs, attributes assigned to the
> "other" in terms of the way humans, individually and collectively, think
> *they* have experienced those entities.  Which is to say that the
attributes
> (good/bad) that individual humans give to themselves, other humans and
> non-humans depend on how one views the world and the implications of
> "others" for oneself.  The individual world view  -> values becomes a
> community's world/value depending on the strength/dominance of one world
> view/value set over all others.  In a very homogeneous society there is
wide
> acceptance of a particular world view/value; in a heterogeneous society
> there is substantial conflict over world views/values.
>
> Presently, it seems to me that the Reagan/Thatcher "greed is good" world
> view and consequent value set is dominant in the "first world" and seems
to
> be gaining ground in the rest of the world.  From that world view ->value
> there has evolved a particular ethic regarding human-human and
> human-nonhuman relationships.  That does not mean it is the (absolutely)
> "right", "ethically right" world view/value/ethic set.  And there seems to
> be substantial opposition in all segments of the world community.  It
seems
> to me that this is a dynamic process, evolving as humans obtain a better
> grasp of the meaning of life, the world, the universe.
>
> It is in this context that I am most grateful to Paul, David, Jim for
> bringing that model of the world views into play here.
>
> I would hope that as we continue to look at different environmental issues
> that we would discuss the foundations of the conflicts in terms of their
> model - start with their model.  Then try to think about ramifications,
> modifications that seem pertinent to the ethics of environmental action.
It
> seems to me that it would be helpful if each of us, individually, would
make
> a little self-examination to try to understand why we ourselves take a
> particular position and how our individual world views determine our
values,
> our ethical positions, our positions on environmental issues.  Share our
> perceptions among us and see if we can come to some different kind of
> approach to evaluating environmental issues.
>
> Can we come to some kind of agreement on approach?  Could we then agree to
> ask the moderators to moderate the discussion in the context of this
> definition?  Can we start with a personal statement of how we each,
> individually, think of the world view, the consequent values, ethical
> standards.
>
> Or am I totally out of touch?
>
> Again, thanks John for pushing me toward this expression of my views.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Ray