THE VALUE OF NATURE

In the Lectures on Ethics which he gave at the outset of the period of his mature work in the 1780s, Kant reported to his students a traditional conception of the philosophical basis for our duties to nonhuman nature:

Aside from the passing reference to beauty, the assumptions expressed in this remark were characteristic of a widespread attitude toward nature. The foundation of any duty to conserve nonhuman nature which we might acknowledge is our duty of consideration toward the needs of our fellow humans, and the indirect duty regarding nature to which this underlying duty can give rise is a duty to ensure that natural objects, whether animate or inanimate, are available for legitimate use by other persons as well as by ourselves.

A similar attitude, although founded upon explicitly theological reasoning absent from Kant's brief discussion, was also expressed in Locke's famous proviso restricting our appropriation and accumulation of the useful fruits and beasts “produced by the spontaneous hand of nature.”