Appreciating pigeons: Aesthetic experience, emotion, and the intrinsic value of nature

How to justify ascribing intrinsic value to nature ? This task emerged in the 1990s as “the central theoretical quest of environmental philosophy†, especially as concerns non-sentient living nature and superorganismic entities such as species. Since then, many theories have been offered to answer the ontological question of how nature's intrinsic value is to be understood, ranging from Moorean non-naturalist, objectivist theories to Elliot's subjectivist “indexical theory†. The question I shall focus on in this paper is related but different: How can we have evidence for the existence of such a value (however, nature's intrinsic value is to be understood, and whatever properties it is based on)? In other words, my focus is on the question of the epistemology of the (putative) intrinsic value of nature. My proposal is that there is a hitherto underappreciated epistemological resource lurking in aesthetic experiences of nature. Serious aesthetic experiences of nature can awaken emotions such as wonder and awe that, in light of recent perceptual theories of emotion, can be recognized as disclosing the intrinsic value of nature . In summary, I shall argue for what I see as a key epistemic role that aesthetic experience (of a certain sort) can have in grounding ascriptions of intrinsic value to nature.