Everyday Aesthetic Loss in Environmental Ethics — Epoche C1
The loss in question, and the account of loss against which it is tested When open-cut coal mining reshaped the ridgelines, the air and the night noise of the Upper Hunter Valley in New South Wales, residents who had moved nowhere reported a distress peculiar to staying put: the place they still lived in no longer looked, sounded or smelled like the place they lived in. Glenn Albrecht and colleagues, working from interviews with residents of the affected valley, named this condition solastalgia in 2007 — the loss of the solace a person draws from a home environment, suffered while remaining in that environment. Losses of this shape are the subject of this essay: not the destruction of a celebrated wilderness, but the erosion of the ordinary aesthetic texture of places people actually inhabit. The question is what philosophical description such a loss deserves, and whether the description usually offered — that it is one negative item among the many that make a life go worse — is adequate. The standard apparatus for assessing losses of this kind was built for a different purpose, and the transfer is worth setting out rather than assuming. In the philosophy of death, the problem is Epicurean: if being dead involves no experience, it is hard to say for whom, and when, death is supposed to be bad. The dominant modern answer is the deprivation account , whose canonical statement is Thomas Nagel's paper 'Death' of 1970. On this account death is not bad in itself — there is nothing it is like, and so nothing intrinsically unpleasant about it. It is bad comparatively : bad because of the goods the person would have had, had they lived. Shelley Kagan's Death (2012), which developed out of his Yale lecture course, gives the fullest recent working-out of the position and of the difficulties that attend it. Made precise, the account says that the badness for a subject of an event $e$ is the difference between the well-being that subject would have enjoyed without $e$ and the well-being they enjoy with it: $$B(e) \;=\; W(\neg e) \;-\; W(e).$$ Two properties of this formula do the work in what follows, and neither is innocent. The account is comparative : it locates badness in a difference between two lives rather than in any feature of the event itself. And it is aggregative : $W$ is a single magnitude, into which the various goods of a life are supposed to enter as contributions, $$W \;=\; w_{\text{health}} + w_{\text{friendship}} + w_{\text{achievement}} + w_{\text{aesthetic}} + \cdots$$ so that the aesthetic goods of a life appear as one summand among others. Applied to a river that has been polluted or a skyline that has been built over, the account returns a determinate verdict: the loss is real, it consists in the reduction of $w_{\text{aesthetic}}$, and it is bad in exactly the way and to exactly the degree that this reduction lowers $W$. The claim to be examined here is that this verdict, though not false, misdescribes what has happened — that aesthetic deprivation is sui generis , a loss of its own kind rather than a subtraction from a total. Why everyday aesthetic experience is an awkward case for an aggregative account Before the objection can be assessed, the phenomenon needs a sharper description than 'enjoying pretty things', and this is what the field called everyday aesthetics supplies. Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (2007) argues that philosophical aesthetics, having modelled itself on the museum and the concert hall, has left unexamined the far larger part of aesthetic life: the appearance of a swept floor, the weight and balance of a familiar tool, the sound of rain on a particular roof. Her further contention is that these responses are consequential rather than idle — that what people find tidy, ugly, cheerful or forbidding shapes what they build, plant, keep and destroy. Three structural features of everyday aesthetic experience, drawn from that literature, make it fit badly into the summand $w_{\text{aesthetic}}$. The first is continuity. A concert is an episode with a beginning and an end; the aesthetic character of the room one is sitting in is not. Ordinary aesthetic experience is ambient — it is going on whenever one is awake and somewhere — so it is not naturally counted in units the way pleasures of a discrete sort are. The second is the absence of a frame. Ronald Hepburn's essay 'Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty' (1966) made the point that has organised environmental aesthetics ever since: a painting has edges and a viewer stands outside it, whereas an environment has no edges and the appreciator is inside it, moving, and is therefore part of what is appreciated. One does not confront a valley; one is in it, and the valley includes one's own vantage, gait and breathing. The third is dependence on knowledge. Allen Carlson's Aesthetics and the Environment (2000) defends what he calls the natural environmental model: appreciating nature appropriately requires knowing something of natural history and science, in the way that appreciating a painting appropriately requires knowing what kind of painting it is. A saltmarsh looks like waste ground to someone who cannot see it as a saltmarsh. None of these features by itself defeats the aggregative account. Continuous goods can be integrated over time; unframed goods can be counted; knowledge-dependent goods can be assigned values conditional on the knowledge. What they establish jointly is weaker but still important: that aesthetic experience of environments is not a series of pleasant episodes that happen to occur outdoors, and that any accounting which treats it as such is measuring the wrong thing before it starts adding. The blindness case, and the distinction it actually establishes The usual argument for a distinct aesthetic deprivation runs through a case of sensory loss, and it is worth following carefully, because it proves something slightly different from what it is normally taken to prove.