Neosentimentalism provides environmental ethics with a theory of value that might be particularly useful for solving many of the problems that have plagued the field since its early days. In particular, a neosentimentalist understanding of value offers us hope for making sense of (1) what intrinsic value might be and how we could know whether parts of the natural world have it; (2) the extent to which value is an essentially anthropocentric concept; and (3) how our understanding of value could be compatible with both a respectable naturalism and a robust normativity.

A social scientific survey on visions of human/nature relationships in western Europe shows that the public clearly distinguishes not only between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, but also between two nonanthropocentric types of thought, which may be called “partnership with nature” and “participation in nature.” In addition, the respondents distinguish a form of human/nature relationship that is allied to traditional stewardship but has a more ecocentric content, labeled here as “guardianship of nature.” Further analysis shows that the general public does not subscribe to an ethic of “mastery over nature.” Instead, practically all respondents embrace the image of guardianship, while the more radical relationships of partnership and participation also received significant levels of adherence. The results imply that ethicists should no longer assume that the ethics of the public are merely anthropocentric. Finally, they call into question the idea of a single form of ecocentrism and favor a hermeneutic virtue ethics approach to the study of the interface between ethics and action.

At the end of the 1960s, two philosophers who did not know each other, and who came from different traditions and wrote in different languages, published two texts at almost the same time that called for the reinstatement of a philosophical discipline that had been largely abandoned by academia: the aesthetics of nature. One of the philosophers was Ronald Hepburn. His text, entitled “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” appeared in 1966. The other was Theodor W. Adorno, who included a chapter entitled “Natural Beauty” in his book Aesthetic Theory, published in 1970. A comparison of these two foundational texts shows that, despite clear differences between them, there are also major affinities and shared ideas that would make a dialogue between the two proposals possible and therefore also a dialogue between analytic and continental aesthetics of nature.

The trajectory from Rousseau through romanticism to twentieth-century efforts to preserve natural settings for their aesthetic values is a familiar one. What may be less familiar and more fruitful to explore at the present time is Rousseau’s stoic recognition of the need for limitation and balance in the ways that human beings interact with their surroundings. Rousseau’s discussion of the dynamics of natural need, artificial desires, and human powers or faculties appears in its most elaborated form in Emile, within the context of the pedagogue’s role in fostering authentic happiness. Given our present preoccupation with competition, consumerism, and growth, Rousseau’s ethic of self-limitation and retrenchment is unlikely to be embraced by policy makers any time soon, but his alternative vision nevertheless merits contemporary recognition.

The moral obligation to support space exploration follows from our obligations to protect the environment and to survive as a species. It can be justified through three related arguments: one supporting space exploration as necessary for acquiring resources, and two illustrating the need for space technology in order to combat extraterrestrial threats such as meteorite impacts. Three sorts of objections have been raised against this obligation. The first are objections alleging that supporting space exploration is impractical. The second is the widely held notion that space exploration and environmentalism are at odds with one another. Finally, there are two objections to using space resources that Robert Sparrow has raised on the topic of terraforming. The obligation to support space exploration can be defended in at least three ways: (1) the “argument from resources,” that space exploration is useful for amplifying our available resources; (2) the “argument from asteroids,” that space exploration is necessary for protecting the environment and its inhabitants from extraterrestrial threats such as meteorite impacts; and (3) the “argument from solar burnout,” that we are obligated to pursue interstellar colonization in order to ensure long-term human survival.