Reference no: EM132717758

Summarize this paragraph main points. Formulate two questions to go with your answer.

Valuable Animals

A mother free-tail bat, a mammal like ourselves, can, using sonar, wend her way out of Bracken Cave, in Texas, in total darkness, catch 500-1000 insects each hour on the wing, and return to find and nurse her own young. That gives evidence of bat-valuing; she values the insects and the pup. Now, it seems absurd to say that there are no valuers until humans arrive. Animals do not make humans the measure of things at all. There is no better evidence of non-human values and valuers than spontaneous wildlife, born free and on its own. Animals hunt and howl, find shelter, seek out their habitats and mates, care for their young, flee from threats, grow hungry, thirsty, hot, tired, excited, sleepy. They suffer injury and lick their wounds. Here we are quite convinced that value is non-anthropogenic, to say nothing of anthropocentric. 15 Holmes Rolston III These wild animals defend their own lives because they have a good of their own. There is somebody there behind the fur or feathers. Our gaze is returned by an animal that itself has a concerned outlook. Here is value right before our eyes, right behind those eyes. Animals are value-able, able to value things in their world. But we may still want to say that value exists only where a subject has an object of interest. David Prall writes: 'The being liked or disliked of the object is its value . . . . Some sort of a subject is always requisite to there being value at all (Prall, 1921, p. 227). So at least the higher animals can value too, because they are experiencing subjects and can take an interest in things. Do animals value anything intrinsically? We may not think that animals have the capacity, earlier claimed for humans, of conferring intrinsic value on anything else. Mostly they seek their own basic needs, food and shelter, and care for their young. But then why not say that an animal values its own life for what it is in itself, intrinsically, without further contributory reference? Else we have an animal world replete with instrumental values and devoid of intrinsic values, everything valuing the resources it needs, nothing valuing itself. That is implausible. Animals maintain a valued self-identity as they cope through the world. Valuing is intrinsic to animal life.

Rolston, Holmes, III. 1994. "Value in Nature and the Nature of Value" in Robin Attfield and Andrew Belsey, eds, Philosophy and the Natural Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13-30.