An Eco-Deconstructive Account of the Emergence of Normativity in “Nature”

This chapter elaborates an eco-deconstructive account of the emergence of “value in nature” with the differential constitution of living beings in their habitats. Prevailing accounts suggest that value emerges first and foremost with self-valuing individuals, with suffering, or with holistic entities. In response, the chapter argues that Derrida’s concept of “double affirmation” helps us to see that these three elements give rise to “value” in nature in a tangled interrelation. A living being must affirm both itself and its others as a result of each living entity being constitutively and differentially related to other entities in its life context. Self-affirmation or self-valuing is thus viewed as a response to both the fundamental vulnerability of living things and the dependence on a life-sustaining context that always threatens with death and reabsorption into a larger “whole.” This account of the emergence of value in a vulnerable self-affirmation, the chapter concludes, suggests new and productive avenues for thinking environmental ethics beyond the stand-off between accounts that begin with self-valuing and those that make suffering central, as well as beyond the clash between individualism and holism.