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Here the threads of the previous chapters are pulled together, and problems posed in the putative relationship between ontology and axiology are considered. A serious problem with ecocentric argument is its attempt to eliminate political contingency from arguments for nature preservation, such contingency cannot be overcome by appeals to the existence of natural values. The argument is made that the ‘strong irreplaceability’ of natural entities provides sound (but not incontrovertible) grounds for nature preservation, and does so irrespective of any position with respect to the ecocentric‐anthropocentric divide in axiology.

How should we characterize the quarry of practical thought? Some hold that practical thinking must ultimately find some non‐evaluative fact to be a reason for action. Some have affirmed a ‘buck‐passing’ view of the good, according to which talk of goodness or value can be reduced to talk of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts. In this book, it has been argued that practical thinking must sometimes apprehend the intrinsic goodness or value of an activity, where this cannot be reduced to the reason‐giving force of any non‐evaluative fact. The task of this chapter is to show that this latter, recognizably Ancient understanding of value‐talk remains implicit in a great deal of our talk about value, and that we cannot consistently renounce it without incurring a steep cost in the metric of articulacy about value. Nor can we sequester off a subset of the things we care about, under the heading of the moral, and reduce our talk of values to talk of reasons in this domain. Our actual sense of the moral value of human beings cannot plausibly be characterized in terms of the reason‐giving force of non‐evaluative facts about them.

A central thesis of Aristotelian virtue ethics is that practical wisdom cannot be captured in a tractable set of general principles. This raises the question how virtue might be learned and how we could ever fully articulate or assess our ethical convictions. The task of this chapter is to retrieve a recognizably Aristotelian view that is capable of clarifying these puzzles. On this view, we learn to be good by engaging in relationships sustained by continuously deepening approval by each participant of the other participant's evaluative outlook considered in itself. Healthy parent‐child relationships and good friendships are both relationships of this sort. The seeds of this view can be found in Aristotle's discussion of friendship (philia). This chapter develops a recognizably Aristotelian idea of philia and shows that it both fosters, and requires for its flourishing, an uncodifiable evaluative outlook whose verdicts are affirmable from all relevant social perspectives. This recognizably moral achievement emerges not as a limit on self‐interested pursuits but as a concomitant of a kind of human relationship that is essential to individual flourishing. The connection between virtue and philia lends support to Aristotle's otherwise counterintuitive claim that certain recognizably moral virtues are necessary conditions for happiness.

This chapter explores John McTaggart's thesis which mentions in part that love, “as we find it in present experience,” may be “because of qualities,” but it is “never in respect of qualities.” It points out that there is truth in the claim that “love justifies itself”: in the normal course of events, a lover does not have to justify love of another, to defend or support it, by pointing to qualities in the beloved for which one loves another. It further emphasizes that personal love attaches to the particular way in which a person instantiates the possibilities of being unique and irreplaceable. The chapter also conducts some thought-experiments on the issue of irreplaceability and explains further that each person loved is a unique, irreplaceable value because it is focused on a particular person with a particular style, and each person loved is irreplaceable because the love for that person is not displaced by the love for another.

This portion indicates the salient terms and conceptual frameworks required for the integration of eros, technics, and communitas. Technology, on the one hand, is not only defined as any set produced by technical means, but also described as the language (verbal or gestural) that binds “strangers;” while on the other, love can be expressed in the context of sexual desires, unconditional affection, and universal devotion to make communities prosper. Consequently, it is inferred that love is a technical tool of the community; likewise, technology is the result of one's love to his/her community. “Lover's discourse” seems to become universal across various periods of time considering the imperfections entailed in the discussion of love such as the “illusion of autonomy,” interchangeability, and irreplaceability.

“Mainstream” pornography constitutes the basic tension in “whateverbeing” such that lust is being equated to feelings of affection or, perhaps, that the completeness of the process of love is not according to the mutual relationship but based on the amount of satisfaction of sexual desires. This manifests structural interchangeability of the emotions and pleasure as well as the irreplaceability of the lustrous appetite with affectionate service. In this regard, “inessential commonality” is believed to take place. In spite of this realization, individuals are not bound to be reduced in such actions because of the genuineness of love, applicable to all sexual orientations, that emanates in the discourse of love. Proofs on the purport that a “saving power” radiates in the premises of pornography's “danger” zone are also itemized.

Researchers interested in remote locations have developed monitoring schemes, sometimes called “Watchful Eye” monitoring, that use a time series of remotely sensed images to assess changes over time to a protected area or habitat. For instance, the European Space Agency (ESA) and UNESCO have set up repeat analyses of satellite imagery for World Heritage sites. The first area for which they developed this technique was the habitat of the critically endangered mountain gorilla (Gorilla berengei berengei) in the Virunga Mountains in Central Africa, including the Bwindi and Mgahinga National Parks in Uganda, the Virunga and Kahuzi-Biega National Parks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the trans-boundary Volcanoes Conservation Area. The project developed detailed maps of these inaccessible zones so that protected area managers can monitor the gorilla habitat. Previously, available maps were old and inaccurate (at times handmade), did not completely cover the range of the gorillas, and did not cross national boundaries. Because there was no systematic information from the ground regarding changes over time, researchers also used remotely sensed data to complete change detection analyses over the past two decades. Using both optical (Landsat series) and radar (ENVISAT ASAR) satellite data, researchers were able to quantify rates of deforestation between 1990 and 2003 and relate these rates to human migration rates into the area resulting from regional political instability. Researchers constructed the first digital base maps of the areas, digital elevation models (DEMs), and updated vegetation and land use maps. They faced significant problems in both field and laboratory activities, including lack of existing ground data, dense vegetation cover, and fairly continuous cloud cover. They therefore used a combination of ESA ENVISAT ASAR as well as Landsat and ESA Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) optical data. The radar images allowed them to quantify elevation and distances between trees and homes. Landsat and MERIS data helped identify forest cover types, with Landsat providing finer-scale images at less frequent intervals and MERIS serving lower-resolution images more frequently.

This chapter gives consciousness a central role in value. It begins by showing how we can interpret and defend the idea that many common forms of consciousness are intrinsically beneficial to us—even if we don’t embrace subjectivism about well-being. It then shows how we can rationally accord these benefits such importance that we would find our own continued existence worthless without them. Neither objective list nor desire-satisfactionist views of well-being threaten this result. Moreover, regarding subjects’ desire-satisfaction: we can see that this bears on a non-instrumental concern for them only if they are capable of subjective experience: consciousness makes desires matter morally. Finally, the moral significance of consciousness is further deepened by seeing how our self-expressive experience entitles us to a respect that is due beings who make themselves accountable to norms—and how, since we are such beings, our lives have irreplaceable value.

It is widely affirmed that human beings have irreplaceable valuable, and that we owe it to them to treat them accordingly. Many theorists have been drawn to Kantianism because they think that it alone can capture this intuition. One aim of this paper is to show that this is a mistake, and that Kantianism cannot provide an independent rational vindication, nor even a fully illuminating articulation, of irreplaceability. A further aim is to outline a broadly Aristotelian view that provides a more fitting theoretical framework for this appealing conception of human value. The critique of Kantianism is extended to contemporary theorists with a broadly Kantian orientation. The paper closes with an outline of a virtue-theoretic ethical theory that follows Aquinas in taking love to be a master virtue—one that refines the other virtues so as to provide a continuous practical sensitivity to the irreplaceable value of fellow human beings.

This chapter illustrates the possibility of an epistemic answer to the “why be moral?” question, drawing on the views of Plato, William Wollaston, and Arthur Schopenhauer. The broad notion of an epistemic good is introduced and clarified, along with a special property of some goods: irreplaceability. Along the way, the idea of epistemic goods other than test-passing propositional knowledge is introduced. As a result, it is claimed that an epistemic answer to the “why be moral?” question would identify some epistemic good that only paradigmatically morally good people have, and for which paradigmatically amoral people have no replacement or comparable compensation. Finally, one relevant paradigm of moral goodness is introduced: that of a compassionate agent.