Preliminaries

Abstract

This chapter arms the reader with some requisite tools for following the many twists and turns of reasoning that this book follows – both in the work of others and later in the book's own (Chap. 8) proposal for why the natural world is so valuable. It first (in Sect. 2.1) provides an overview – aimed primarily at those less conversant with philosophy – of how philosophers think about value in the context of environmental ethics. Then, to give a sense of the state of the art in reasoning about biodiversity, Sect. 2.2 catalogs a variety of logical lacunae pervading arguments that try to find nature's value in biodiversity. Section 2.3 concludes the chapter with reflections on why it might be difficult to argue for the value of diversity in any domain – not just biological. It traverses a path from the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas and Gottfried Leibniz, through William Cowper's famous but almost always misinterpreted “Variety's the very spice of life”, on its way to a consideration of United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell's majority opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke about the value of diversity.