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Some Challenges for Narrative Accounts of Value

Katie McShane

Ethics & the Environment, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp.

45-69 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

DOI: 10.1353/een.2012.0002

For additional information about this article

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ETHICS&THE ENVIRONMENT, 17(1) 2012 ISSN: 1085-6633

Indiana University Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.Direct all correspondence to: Journals Manager, Indiana University Press, 601 N. Morton St.,Bloomington, IN 47404 USA [email protected]

SOME CHALLENGES FORNARRATIVE ACCOUNTS OF

VALUE

KATIE McSHANE

Recently in environmental ethics some theorists have advocated narra-

tive accounts of value, according to which the value of environmental

goods is given by the role that they play in our narratives. I first sketch

the basic theoretical features of a narrative accounts of value and then

go on to raise some problems for such views. I claim that they require an

evaluative standard in order to distinguish the valuable from the merelyvalued and that the project of constructing such a standard faces signifi-

cant problems. I conclude by questioning whether narrative accounts of

value really offer advantages over other pluralistic and context-sensitive

accounts of value.

Environmental ethics has long had an interest in questions about

value, perhaps because environmentalism has been interested in show-ing that the value of environmental goods (places, species, ecosystemic

relationships, and so on) is often misunderstood. For this reason, someof the most well-known debates in environmental ethics have been de-

bates about value: what it is, which things have it, whether it comes in

different kinds or just different amounts, and so on. Some of the earliest

environmental ethicists were keen to show that nonhuman nature has

nonanthropocentric intrinsic value (i.e., value in its own right, independ-

ent of whatever contribution it might make to human interests), though

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ETHICS&THE ENVIRONMENT,17(1) 201246

they clearly had different ideas about what this meant and why it was

true. (See, e.g., Rolston 1988; Callicott 1984; Regan 1981; and Routley

and Routley 1979.) More recently, the trend has been away from claims

about nonanthropocentric intrinsic value and toward more pluralistic,context-dependent, and anthropocentric accounts of value. (See for ex-

ample Norton 2005 and Light and Katz 1996.) The most recent iteration

of this trend has been the view that the value of environmental goods is

ultimately given by the role that these goods play in our narratives. I will

refer to views that make this claim as narrative accounts of value.

In this paper I will first describe these accounts and explain why I

think environmental ethics has become so interested in them at the present

time. Next, Ill consider some challenges that face such accounts, argu-

ing that without providing some sort of evaluative standard for narra-tives, narrative accounts of value wont be able to distinguish between the

valued and the valuable. After considering and rejecting some standards

offered by other fields, I will say a bit about why the formulation of such

standards is likely to be a very difficult project. Finally, I will conclude by

raising questions about whether narrative accounts of value really offer

advantages over other pluralistic and context-sensitive accounts of value.

WHAT IS A NARRATIVE ACCOUNT OF VALUE?To begin, it is worth noting that there are plenty of debates out there

about what counts as a narrative and about how narratives differ from

other literary forms (annals, chronicles, etc.).1Rather than engage with

these debates, I am going to set them aside. By narrative here, I will just

mean story.2So by constructing a narrative, I just mean coming up with

a story. Stories, as they are typically understood, have certain features.

They have, as Aristotle so helpfully noted, a beginning, a middle, and

an end (Aristotle 1984, 2321 [Poetics1450b26]). Stories arrange eventschronologically and show how they are related (usually causallyrelated)to one another. And they are told in such a way that the events at the be-

ginning and middle of the story lead to the events at the end of the story.

Hence it is the storys ending that provides the unity and structure that

organize the presentation of events in the beginning and the middle (Velle-

man 2003; Preston 2001; Murray 1986; Cronon 1992). For the purposes

of this paper, I will discuss only nonfictional narratives, since narrative ac-

counts of value typically refer to these rather than to fictional narratives.

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KATIE McSHANECHALLENGES FOR NARRATIVE ACCOUNTS OF VALUE 47

So what is a narrative account of value? By this I just mean an ac-

count on which a things value is ultimately given by the role that that

the thing plays in our narratives. (I say ultimately because narrative ac-

counts of value can make claims about instrumental value as wellthingscan be valuable because they contribute to something thats good in our

narratives, even if the instrumental goods themselves play no role in those

narratives.) On a narrative account of value, our narratives tell us what

things mean to us, and positive value just amounts to meaning something

good rather than something bad. But more importantly, narratives tell us

how things matter to us, what they represent to us, what our caring about

them looks like and how it relates to our caring about other things.3In

telling us this, narratives dont separate out descriptive and normative

elements neatly at all. They tend, rather, to describe situations in termsthat blend these two elements two together.4Consider, for example, Aldo

Leopolds famous description of killing a wolf:

We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of whicha turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was adoe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When sheclimbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized ourerror: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprangfrom the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails

and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed andtumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill awolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with moreexcitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is alwaysconfusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and apup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dyingin her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that therewas something new to me in those eyessomething known only toher and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; Ithought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolveswould mean hunters paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, Isensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such aview (Leopold 1970, 13839).

Notice that every claim in this passage is technically what philoso-

phers would classify as a descriptive claim rather than a normative claim.

That is to say, Leopold never explicitly judges anything to be good or

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bad, right or wrong. However, one cannot read this story without coming

away with a very clear sense of what his evaluation was of the events that

transpired that day. This is typical of narrative; by describing events one

way rather than another way, value judgments of all kinds are indirectlycommunicated.5

On a narrative account of value, value claims might or might not be

generalizableif our narrative is about this oak tree, then its value wont

generalize to other oak trees; but if our narrative is about oak trees in

general, then this oak tree and that oak tree will share in the same role. So

a narrative account of value is a kind of context-dependence about value

(where the narrative is what forms the context), but it isnt (or in any case,

neednt be) a kind of particularism. But it is a kind of constructivismit

is narrative that makes things in the world meaningful to us, and it is invirtue of this meaning that they are valuable. On a narrative account of

value, then, ethical questions turn out to be questions of how to continue

the narrative (ONeill et al. 2008, 15556).6John ONeill, Alan Holland,

and Andrew Light, after offering readers some narratives about particular

places, say this: the problem can be conceived as how best to continue

the narrative of the places through which we walked. From this perspec-

tive, the value in these situations that we should be seeking to uphold lies

in the way that the constituent items and the places which they occupyare intertwined with and embody the history of the community of which

they form a part (ONeill et al. 2008, 155). And this, they claim, raises

the ethical question, What would make the most appropriate trajectory

from what has gone before? (ONeill et al. 2008, 156).7

Narrative accounts of value have made their way into environmental

ethics from a number of different sources. The work of Alasdair MacIn-

tyre has been one source, as his work has had a significant influence on

some versions of environmental virtue ethics (MacIntyre 1981; Gare 1998;

Preston 2001). The work of Paul Ricoeur has been another source, as ithas influenced environmental ethicists working withinor those simply

open tocontinental approaches to environmental ethics (Ricoeur 1995).

Aesthetics, especially landscape aesthetics and later environmental aes-

thetics more generally, has accorded an important place to narrative, and

as the relationship between environmental aesthetics and environmental

ethics has grown closer, environmental ethicists have taken a keen interest

in claims about the importance of narrative within aesthetics. And finally,

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within mainstream analytic ethical theory, people have argued that the

narrative structure of ones life is an important component of well-being.

Because views about the importance of narrative for understanding value

come from such different sources, there are still considerable differencesamong the narrative accounts of value that are starting to emerge in envi-

ronmental ethics. My analysis here will have to generalize, then, in ways

that will ignore some of the finer details of each viewthough I dont

believe that any of the details left out here are relevant to the analysis of

the problem I will discuss below.

WHY NARRATIVE?

So why the interest in narratives? And perhaps more importantly, why

the interest in narratives from environmental ethicists, who tend to bemore interested in talking about things like birds, coral reefs, carbon emis-

sions, and petrochemicals? While discussion of the importance of narra-

tive in environmental ethics isnt entirely newecofeminists have long

emphasized the importance of narrative forms of understandingthe idea

recently seems to have garnered much broader appeal.8Part of the rea-

son has to do with whats been going on in other fields. In the last few

decades, mainly in fields other than environmental ethics, scholars have

slowly been building the case for the importance of narrative to humanbeings. Psychologists have argued that narrative forms the basis of our

identities, both personal and social. We understand our individual selves

as selves through narrative: our stories tell us who we are and how we

got to be this way (Crites 1986; Novitz 1997; Gergen 2001; Hardcastle

2003; Nelson 2003).9Our stories also tell others who we are, which is an

important social function; it lets other people know what to expect from

us (Gergen and Gergen 1997). Some go so far as to argue that not only

do our stories give us and others insight into who we are and what we are

like, but our stories actually makeus who and what we are.10The unity ofthe self, on this view, comes from the coherence of our personal narratives.

We make ourselves into selves capable of (among other things) agency and

autonomy by simultaneously narrating our lives to ourselves and living in

a way that conforms to the narratives we tell (Velleman 2003). Sociolo-

gists make an analogous claim at the communal levelour communities

become and remain communities through the stories that their members

share in (Fisher 1997, Witten 1993; Carr 1986).11

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In ethical theory, narrative has also been described as playing a crucial

role in the way that we evaluate the choiceworthiness of human lives. If

we are given the choice between lives containing equal amounts of happi-

ness, one a rags-to-riches story and the other a riches-to-rags story, we willtypically have a preference for the former even though the total amount

of happiness in it is the same as in the latter. The reason we prefer the

former life has to do with its narrative structure. We want our lives to end

triumphantly rather than tragically (ONeill 1993; Slote 1983; Velleman

2003).

Finally, first in landscape aesthetics and later in environmental aes-

thetics more broadly, narrative has been described as playing an impor-

tant role in shaping our aesthetic responses to the world.12The claim is

that the way in which we respond to objects aesthetically depends in parton the meaning that they have for us, and the meaning that they have

for us comes from the role that they play in the narratives that form our

understanding of the world. So, for example, a picture of farmland with

corn planted as far as they eye can see might well mean different things

to an environmentalist and a corn farmer. The environmentalist might see

degradationa monoculture, the production of which is an environmen-

tal tragedy, whereas the corn farmer might see flourishinga well-main-

tained farm, with a good crop to show for it. And so the environmentalistmight find the picture ugly, sad, or even revolting, while the farmer might

find the picture soothing, beautiful, or even impressive.

What all this adds up to is a very robust role for narrative in human

life. Humans, the claim goes, are story-telling animals. It is through sto-

ries that things in the world come to have meaning for us. Our stories tell

us which things are important, how they matter, and what is to be done

about them. If this is right, then one can see how narrative would matter

to our understanding of the value of environmental goods, since narrative

matters to our understanding of everything.For this reason, the way tounderstand the shape of our valuings is to look at our stories.

So one reason environmental ethics has taken an interest in narrative

is that conversations that have been taking place in other fields about

the importance of narrative have finally made their way to us. But there

have also been trends within environmental ethics that have made it espe-

cially open to seeing an important role for narrative at this time. As noted

above, environmental ethics has been moving toward more pluralistic,

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context-dependent, and anthropocentric theories of value in the last 20

years or so. The reason for this is that earlier theories that didnt have

these features havent gone so well, particularly when applied to actual

environmental policy problems.ONeill, Holland, and Light argue that narrative accounts of value

can help us avoid the pitfalls of both utilitarianism and intrinsic value the-

ories, in particular, as theyve appeared within environmental ethics. They

argue that these two approaches, which only talk about value in abstract

terms, often fail to capture the particular ways that things in the world

matter to us, and for this reason they lead to bad environmental policy.

The utilitarian approach to value, as it is commonly applied in environ-

mental policy-making, consists in the attempt to itemize and aggregate

the values of the various items that feature in the situationand pursuea policy of maximizing value (ONeill et al. 2008, 155). A solution that

satisfies twelve of a communitys fifteen preferences, a piece of land that

fulfills seven of the nine desiderata for open space preservation, a visual

feature that rates 76 out of 100 in attractivenessthese are what envi-

ronmentalists must hope for under such rubrics. Well-intentioned though

they might be, such quantifications are inevitably absurd and lead to bad

reasoning about environmental policy. A narrative account of value helps

us to understand where the absurdity comes from. Satisfying twelve pref-erences might or might not be a good dealit depends on what the pref-

erences are, why we have them, and how they relate to one another. The

desiderata for open space preservation may or may not capture what peo-

ple feel is so special about a particular place and why it is worth preserv-

ing. Rating 76 out of 100 in attractiveness might or might not be a good

thingwe value some things precisely because theyre ugly, shocking, or

peculiar. This approach, in trying to quantify how much things matter to

us, fails to pay due attention to the way in which they matter to us. And

to do right by the world we live in, we need to know not just how much athing matters to us, but the way in which it matters to us.

The narrative approach can also capture the importance of environ-

mental goods without needing to appeal to the intrinsic value, rights, or

the moral considerability of those goods. On a narrative account of value,

we dont need to worry about whether plants or even whole ecosystems

have rights and how those rights should be balanced against human and

nonhuman animal rights. Our narratives will tell us what importance such

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things have for us, and that might be quite a lot of importance, or impor-

tance in some contexts but not others, and so on. Within our narratives,

environmental goods can be valuable for their own sakesome might be

sacred, others might be special in a way that doesnt allow trade-offs withother goods, and so on. But to say this is just to say something about the

way in which such things are special to us, it is not to make a metaphysical

or metaethical claim about the value of such things existing independently

of their role in our narratives. So, the hope is, such an approach can get

all the normative force that intrinsic value theorists are looking for (or at

least all the normative force that they have any right to be looking for)

without any of the metaphysical weirdness that seemed to come with it.

Finally, a narrative account of value offers us an explanation of how

environmental goods come to matter to us in such specific ways, and whythose ways differ so greatly across times, cultures, and particular people.

This can help us to see why moral disagreement about the value of envi-

ronmental goods occurs and why it can be so intractable. This is a particu-

larly serious problem in environmental ethics, where we see fairly radical

disagreement about the importance of different environmental goods even

among people who all consider themselves to be environmentalists. Take,

for example, debates about the value of wilderness preservation. People in

the United States, Canada, and Australia tend to be much keener on thisidea than people from the British Isles and Europe are, and there has been

a running dispute for decades within environmental ethics about which

of these positions is misguided. Part of the reason for the disagreement is

that wilderness plays a very different role in the narratives of these dif-

ferent nations. In the United States, for example, much of the history of

the early settlement of the country is told as a history of people struggling

to survive and eke out a living in a new, harsh, and unforgiving natural

environment. Many US children, for example, especially those living in

Western states, will grow up hearing the story of the Donner Party. Thiswas a group of 87 pioneers trying to make their way across the Sierra

Nevada Mountains to western California. They got trapped by an espe-

cially early and snowy winter. Half died of starvation and many of those

remaining resorted to cannibalism to survive. The moral of the story is,

Dont underestimate nature, it can kill you or turn you into a cannibal in

the blink of an eye. Much of the history of the state of Colorado, where

I now live, is told as a history of fur-trappers and later miners battling to

survive and make a living in terribly harsh conditions. That many people

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live in Colorado at all today is attributed to the ingenuity and success of

these early settlers in figuring out how to do this. What these narratives

have in common with each other and with the many others like them is

a view of the natural world as posing a very live and constant threat toones ability to survive. Why are people in the US attracted to the idea of

preserving wilderness, then? Our national narratives, as Wallace Stegner

points out, are ones in which the wilderness was the challenge against

which our character as a people was formed (Stegner 1980, 148). While

early settlers were battling the wilderness for their very survival, Stegner

claims, the wilderness was working on uswe were in subtle ways sub-

dued by what we conquered (Stegner 1980, 147). Because of its role in

shaping our sense of what it is to be an American, Stegner believes that

something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remain-ing wilderness be destroyed (Stegner 1980, 147). Note that the national

narratives of England and France, for example, have wilderness playing

no such role. Part of the reason for the dispute, then, is that wilderness

has a very different meaning for the disputants, and our narratives can

explain why.

CHALLENGES FOR NARRATIVE ACCOUNTS OF VALUE

There are lots of worries that one might have about a narrative ac-count of value. For example: Is it only through narrative that humansvalue things in the world? If so, what explains why narrative serves this

function but nonarrative forms of understanding and discourse do not?

If not, how are the values that come from our narratives related to values

that come from other sources? How is the constructivism supposed to

work herewouldnt something have to have value prior to appearing

in a story in order for the storyteller to be motivated to tell the story in

a way that attributes value to it? And how do we feel about the kind of

anthropocentrism involved herethe interests of creatures that cant tellstories only get represented insofar as they play a role in our narratives.

Might there be sources of value that dont come from human valuings atall? These are important questions to be answered on such an account, to

be sure, and I think that some of them pose very serious problems for nar-

rative accounts of value. But here I want to focus on a worry that I think

has been most under-discussed in the literature on narrative and that I

think is most relevant to ethics, the question of an evaluative standard for

narrative.13

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What I think is most promising about narrative accounts of value

is that they offer a very good description of the way that people often

understand and value environmental goods. Narratives serve as what psy-

chologists call framesthey are stories that we use to organize our expe-riences. Familiar types of narrative stick with us, and we use them to make

sense of new experiences (le Cheminant and Parrish 2010). Psychologists

point out that when different people use different frames for making sense

of the same phenomenon, the result is often very different understandings

of that phenomenon. This is clearly the case with narratives. In his essay,

A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, the environmental

historian William Cronon compares two different historical accounts of

the Dust Bowl. (The Dust Bowl was an extended drought in the 1930s

in the United States that rendered much of the farmland in the Southernplains unusable and produced terrible dust storms.) Here is an excerpt

from the first narrative:

In the final analysis, the story of the dust bowl was the story of peo-ple, people with ability and talent, people with resourcefulness, forti-tude, and courage.... The people of the dust bowl were not defeated,poverty-ridden people without hope. They were builders for tomor-row. During those hard years they continued to build their churches,their businesses, their schools, their colleges, their communities. Theygrew closer to God and fonder of the land. Hard years were commonin their past, but the future belonged to those who were ready toseize the moment. Because they stayed during those hard years andworked the land and tapped her natural resources, millions of peoplehave eaten better, worked in healthier places, and enjoyed warmerhomes. Because those determined people did not flee the stricken areaduring a crisis, the nation today enjoys a better standard of living(Cronon 1992, 1348, quoting Bonnifield 1979, 202).

And here is an excerpt from the second narrative:

The Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century lifeof the southern plains. The name suggests a placea region whoseborders are as inexact and shifting as a sand dune. But it was alsoan event of national, even planetary significance. A widely respectedauthority on world food problems, George Borgstrom, has ranked thecreation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blun-ders in history. It cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulationor social disorder. It came about because the culture was operating

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in precisely the way it was supposed to. The Dust Bowlwas theinevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, setitself [the] task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it wasworth. (Cronon 1992, 1348, quoting Worster 1979, 4)

In the first narrative, the protagonists are the farmers, the story is one

of triumph, and their triumph is due to their insistence on continuing to

farm in the face of an environmental disaster. In the second narrative, the

protagonist is the culture as a whole, the story is a tragic one, and the

tragedy is due to their insistence on continuing to farm in the face of an

environmental disaster. In the first story, the decision to carry on farm-

ing is a brave and courageous choice; in the second, it is an ignorant and

short-sighted one. Both are familiar kinds of stories: those brave people

who soldier on in the face of great difficulty and ultimately succeed, orthose rigid people who stick to the way theyve always done things even

when there is lots of evidence that they ought to change their ways. What

we have here are conflicting narratives. They pick out different events

and aspects of events as important, and they invite different patterns of

endorsement and condemnation from readers. That we have conflicting

narratives isnt necessarily a problem. They might both be accurate de-

scriptions of different aspects of a phenomenon; in any case, they reflect

the fact that people often find different meanings (and thus different val-ues) in the same situation.

In part because of this, narrative accounts of value do a great job of

capturing the rich and complex meaningsand valuesthat we attach

to things in our environment. That is to say, they offer us a good account

of what our valuing looks like. Such an account can be very usefulitcan help people to understand conflicting points of view, and even, by

facilitating mutual understanding, help us to resolve conflicts.14But is that

enough to get us a good theory of value for the purposes of ethics? Here

it is worth taking some time to think about what role value-talk plays inethics.

For the purposes of ethics, to be valued is (roughly) to be seen as

good; to be valuable is to actually be good. Goodness is normativethe

good is to be sought, promoted, endorsed, cherished, cared about, etc. In

order to be able to account for the phenomenon of mistaken valuations, a

theory of value within ethics needs to be able to distinguish between what

we value and what is in fact valuable. We need to be able to say things

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like, Yes, at one point I valued money very highly. But then I got a lot of

it and realized it isnt really as valuable as I thought it was. In order to

make sense of the idea that our actual valuings can get it wrong, that we

can value something even though it isnt really valuable, there must be adistinction between the valued and the valuable. Only those valuings that

get it rightonly those that meet some sort of evaluative standardwill

indicate what is actually valuable.

We have seen this issue arise for other theories of value in the past. It

is what explains the shift from preference-satisfaction or desire-satisfac-

tion versions of utilitarianism that rely on actual preferences or actual

desires to ones that rely on rational preferences or informed desires (Grif-

fin 1986, 1011). Our actual preferences and desires can beto put it

bluntlyquite stupid, and satisfying the stupid ones is neither good forus nor a good in the world in general. Only those that meet some evalua-

tive standardi.e., only those that arent quite stupidare constitutive

of value. So what we need for narrative accounts of value is an analogue

of a rational preference or an informed desirean evaluative standard

by which we can exclude the stupid ones from determining what is really

valuable.

So while narrative accounts of value give us a helpful account of the

valued, my question is whether they give us a helpful accountor reallyany account at allof the valuable. Narrative accounts of value claim

that the way that we actually value things comes from the role that those

things play in our narratives. But should they play that role? And further,

are the narratives in which they play that role really worth accepting and

using to organize our experiences? Might there be narratives that are so

awful that we dont want to count the things deemed valuable by thosenarratives as really valuable?

One might think that this is a misguided worry. Some proponents

of narrative accounts of value suggest that it is not a serious problem.Brian Treanor explains that by looking at the narratives that appear in

most human cultures or narratives that have broad cross-cultural appeal

we can find values that will be more or less universal (Treanor 2008,

372). These widely shared values, then, can provide an evaluative stand-

ard. I worry about the adequacy of this solution, however.15On this view,

the only standard by which we might criticize these widely shared values

would be one that we find in even more widely shared narratives. But

why think that that which is most widely shared gets it right? I worry

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that the most widely shared values might actually be sexist, xenophobic,

and homophobic ones, to mention a few widely shared aspects of human

cultures that we see over the course of history. What we get here is not a

distinction between the valued and the valuable, but a distinction betweenthe locally valued and the globally valued. However, I dont think theres

any reason think that the global is more likely to get it right than the

local.

ONeill, Holland and Light, on the other hand, suggest that this is a

problem that doesnt need a solution. They declare this to be a matter

for reasoned debate and reflective judgment on the part of those who are

involved in, or have studied, a given situation carefully and thought hard

about it and say no more about what the shape of this debate or content

of this reflection should be (ONeill et al. 2008, 157). I think, however,that if we are to have a theory of value that can make sense of not only the

valued, but also the valuable; that is to say, if narrative accounts of value

are to be useful to ethics and not just to psychology, then coming up with

evaluative standards for narratives is crucial. What we need are ways of

understanding how narratives can go wrong, and when we should want

to revise them or reject them altogether.

But even if this is a legitimate theoretical problem, one might wonder,

how serious of a problem is it in practice? A fairly serious one, I think.The world we live in is full of pernicious narratives that are very effective

in getting people to do very bad things. Furthermore, while the perni-

ciousness of these narratives in some cases might be due to an internal

inconsistency within the narrative, there are plenty of narratives that are

beautifully consistent and yet deeply misguided.

I live in the United States, which as I write this is in the early stages

of campaigns for the 2012 elections. It is an excellent time to not own

a television or subscribe to a newspaper. In fact, if one were thinking of

becoming a hermit and living in a cave for a year or so, one really couldntpick a better time. What political strategists know, what marketers know,

what propagandists have always known, and what Plato (among others)

tried to warn us about, is that public support for someone or something

often just requires one to have a good story. Here are some stories that

might sound familiar:

1. We are Xs. Xs are responsible for many good things in the

world; we are a people with a proud history. Were not

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Ys. In fact, Ys are trying to take over and undermine our

achievements. If we dont act now to stop them, they will

end up destroying our most cherished institutions.

2. You are a good upstanding person. You deserve much morethan youve gotten. Why havent you gotten what you de-

served? Because those people over there who arent upstand-

ing have found a way to get more than they deserve. This is

an injustice that needs to be corrected.

3. Lots of people want us all to believe P even though there are

plenty of reasons for thinking that P isnt true. These people

act as if those of us who dont believe P are crazy. But notice

how much they have to gain from getting us to believe P.

Unless we want to be stooges mindlessly serving their agen-das, we should stand up for ourselves refuse to believe P.

Election season is when these kinds of stories are trotted out and

repeated over and over again until they start to sink in and shape voters

opinions on particular issues. And this is done with utter disregard for

whether the stories actually help to make any sense of those issues. The

stories are, in short, an easy way to manipulate public opinion.

Lest we throw stones from the comfort of our glass houses, we mightalso note the personal narratives that we non-politicians just as happily

tell about ourselves. See if any of these sound familiar:

1. I came from a humble background, and I didnt have the

advantages that many other people had. But I worked hard

and was smart about the way that I pursued my goals, and

thats why Ive had the kind of success that Ive had.

2. I worked hard and followed the rules, and I should have

been successful. But others didnt play by the rules, and theycheated me out of what was rightfully mine. If the world

was fair, I would be as successful as they have been.

3. Im smart, Ive done good work on X, and my views about

X should have been much more influential than they have

been. The reason they havent been more influential is that

those people control [my department, my field, the jour-

nals in my field, etc.]. If they werent unfairly hindering my

success, I would have gotten the recognition I deserved.

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These are very common narratives, and they are very seductive nar-

ratives. But in many cases, buying into them causes one to ignore a more

complicated (and more accurate) reality. These narratives tend to invite all

kinds of moral vices: scapegoating, arrogance, paranoia, jealousy, racism,and sexism, just to name a few. They are self-serving narrativesthose who

accept them fit events into a story in which they come out morally superior.

Even stories of failure are turned into moral triumphs. (Recall the earlier

point: we want our lives to end triumphantly rather than tragically.) But it

would be too quick to say that these narratives are intrinsically or univer-

sally bad; in some cases they might be exactly the right story to tell. When

European immigrants moved into their territory, the Cherokee would be

right to describe this as outsiders posing a serious threat to the cherished

institutions of a proud and accomplished people. During the McCarthyera in the United States, theater and film industry workers who admitted

to being members of the Communist Party were blacklisted. They might

be right to attribute their lack of success on the stage or screen to a group

actively and unjustly discriminating against them.

We see troubling narratives about environmental goods as well (Palmer

2011). Consider the narratives about wolves that made Leopold not think

twice about killing as many as he could. Farmers and ranchers of his era

saw wolves as a threat to their lives and their livelihoods, and the storiesthey told portrayed wolves as clever, ruthless, and committed to massa-

cring as many innocent animals as possible. (Think too of the role of the

wolf in The Three Little Pigs or Little Red Riding Hood; these stories

probably didnt help the wolves case.) Or consider the national narrative

of US history that Stegner argued gives wilderness an especially valuable

role. This way of telling the storythat US history is the story of a con-

frontation by old peoples and cultures of a world as new as if it had just

risen from the sea (Stegner 1980, 148) is so much nicer than an alternative

story that one might tella story of people who fled poverty and persecu-tion in other places only to invade the new world (which wasnt new at all

to its inhabitants), enslave people from other lands, and march across this

new land killing its inhabitants in a centuries-long genocidal rampage.

So I think its clear that we do criticize narratives all the time and that

were absolutely right to do so. And we dont just criticize them by not-

ing internal inconsistencies, we sometimes criticize narratives as a whole

from a point of view external to that narrative. But can we say anything

meaningful about the standards by which we do so?

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EVALUATIVE STANDARDS FROM OTHER FIELDS

The first thing to point out is that the standards that ethical theo-

rists have used for preferences and desires wont quite get us what we

need here. Narratives are by necessity selectivecertain facts, people, andevents get included and others get left out. A good story provides enough

detail to paint a vivid picture and move the plot along toward the ending,

but it provides no more than that. The best storytellers know when to

simplify a complicated matter for their audience; they know what details

to leave out; they even know when to exaggerate a little to make a setting

or a character more vivid. And since the end of the story is what struc-

tures the beginning and the middle, which events get related and how they

are described depends on what ending this particular story has. So, if we

were to ask a good storyteller what story she would tell if she were fully

informed and rational, she would assume we were joking, or confused,

or both. Rationality just isnt a standard that governs story-telling very

wellfull-information is typically beside the point. Does William Stegner

know that early settlers in the US were battling Native Americans in ad-

dition to the forces of nature? Sure he does. That just isnt the story hes

telling right now. Should he be telling that story? Full information and

rationality wont get us an answer to that question.

Other fields have been grappling with questions about narrative forquite some time now, and some writers in these fields have proposed

evaluative standards for them. William Cronon, for example, offers the

following evaluative standard for historical narratives: they cannot con-

travene known facts about the past; they cannot exclude or obscure

natural (i.e., ecological) facts; they must be responsive to criticism from

other historians; they should be simple, they should incorporate many

different voices; they should be coherent; they should both reflect and

expand the historiographical tradition on the subject; they should offer

new perspectives and interpretations of their subject; and they should belucid, engaging, and enjoyable to read (Cronon 1992, 137173). The psy-

chologist Robert Steele, in describing features that should make a psy-

chotherapist critical of a narrative offered by a patient, lists five different

types of textual distortionsi.e., five different ways that narratives can

go wrong: inconsistencies, tailoring the details of a story to fit the point

that the narrator is trying to make, omitting important people, events or

ideas from the story, distorting facts in a way that simplifies the multi-

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plicity and ambiguity of experience, and being affected by cultural biases

(Steele 1986, 27172). Sociologists havent typically made their evaluative

standards for narrative explicit, but the standards by which they criticize

narratives typically involve being ineffective or concealing important so-cial facts (Witten 1993; van Dijk 1993).

Looking at these lists, we might notice that the standards here fall

into two categories: truth-related standards and aesthetic standards. All of

them insist that a narrative accurately represent its subject matter (for ex-

ample, by not omitting or concealing important facts, by not being biased,

etc.) and two of the three also insist that a narrative be aesthetically suc-

cessful (by not telling too simple a story, by not telling too complicated a

story, by being enjoyable, by being compelling). What is missing from this

list is a requirement that the narrative not grotesquely misrepresent thenon-aesthetic values (e.g., moral values) that are relevant to a good moral

understanding of the subject matter. And this does seem to be whats at

work in some of our evaluations of narratives. Even if a story gets the

facts right and is aesthetically pleasing to us, it might still be told in a way

that we take issue with because of the way that it represents the moral

values involved. Now perhaps responsibility to moral values is implicit in

Cronons and Steeles respective standards. Cronon insists that a narrative

history not contravene known facts about the past, but his two exam-ples of narratives that do this are examples of important facts that have

been omitted from a narrative (Cronon 1992, 1372). And Steele explicitly

criticizes narratives that omit important people, events, or ideas. As weve

seen, every narrative must make omissions. Yet we do think that some

omissions are criticizable. Which omissions we criticize, however, isnt just

a question of causal facts; its a value judgment as well.

For example, imagine the uproar if German schools started using

textbooks that told the history of World War II without mentioning con-

centration camps or mass killings of innocent people. The worry aboutthis omission would be a moral onewe would suspect them of trying to

whitewash their history. Thats also the criticism that I think people would

raise to Stegners description of US history as the conflict between Euro-

pean immigrants and wilderness or to the 1930s stories about wolves.

Its not that they say false things (typically they dont), or that they tell

only some of the facts (every narrative does this), or that they emphasize

certain features and deemphasize or ignore others (again, every narrative

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does this). Its that the way that they do it leaves us with a very flawed un-

derstanding of the relevant valueswe see US history as simply a proud

history involving European immigrants and the land they settled, we see

wolves as killing machines bent on destroying livestock. This might evenbe part of the truth, but the parts that are omitted make all the difference

morally.

So I think that one of the ways we rightly criticize narratives is by the

way they represent values. If thats right, then getting the values right (or

at least not getting them horribly wrong) needs to be part of our evalua-

tive standard. But now weve got a problem. On this view, values will have

to be both constituted by our narratives andthat by which we judge theadequacy of our narratives. Why is this a problem? Take the values that

make up our evaluative standard. Those values will have to be locatable innarratives. And how do we judge the adequacy of the narratives in which

theyre located? By our evaluative standard, of course. But if the values

that make up part of our evaluative standard are located in narratives

which we test by that very same evaluative standard, then we are using

these values to vindicate themselves.

Given this, I think a narrative account of values is left with four

choices: (1) not to have an evaluative standard for narratives at allac-

cept all narratives as equally indicative of whats valuable, (2) to acceptan evaluative standard that only criticizes narratives for their factual rep-

resentations, (3) to accept that we cant argue for the appropriateness of

the values in our evaluative standardthat is to say, to accept that they

must be in some sense self-vindicating; (4) to claim that not all values are

given by their role in our narratives, and that the evaluative standard in

particular can be judged to be acceptable by appeal to values outside of

our narratives.

Weve already seen the problems with (1) and (2), and I think the

problems with (3) are fairly clear. This leaves us with (4). Not only do Ithink this is our best choice, its one that I think some theorists have tried

to leave themselves open to. ONeill, Holland, and Light, for example,

claim boththat the way to determine the value of environmental goodsis to look at their role in our narratives and that human flourishing isobjectively good and facts about what contributes to human flourishing

are objectively true. Putting these together, we might say that the evalua-

tive standard for narratives is whether or not the narratives contribute to

human well-being. A nice, neat solution. But not so fast. Recall the claims

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earlier about the importance of narrative to human well-being. A life with

a better narrative, the claim goes, is a better one. But by what standard

is this narrativefor example, a rags-to-riches narrativea better one?

(This is a live question, I thinkperhaps the fact that we want our livesto end triumphantly is due to some kind of deep-seated narcissism.) If

we judge evaluative standards by their contribution to well-being, and

if well-being is in part constituted by involving better rather than worse

narratives, then we either end up with well-being and narrative being the

standard for one another, or well need some third kind of standard by

which to judge which well-being-related narratives are better ones. To

put the point another way, on this view if I were to ask, Why does that

life have greater welfare? the answer would be Because it has a better

narrative. And if I were to then ask Why is its narrative better? the an-swer would be Because it produces greater welfare. If we want to avoid

giving the last answer, well need a different standard by which we might

judge well-being-related narratives to be better or worse.

I am not arguing that this problem cannot be solved, though I cannot

see any adequate solution from here. My point is just that it turns out

to be a tricky business to both claim that values come out of our narra-

tives and that we employ values to evaluate our narratives. So articulating

evaluative standards for narratives is going to be, at the very least, com-plicated. That said, it might yet turn out to be a useful project. After all,

we do want to be able to say something about whats wrong with self-glo-

rifying narratives, or bigoted narratives, or (I would add) narratives that

portray environmental goods as nothing but resources for our own profit,

comfort, and enjoyment. Fields such as political psychology and rhetoric

have had quite a lot to say about which narratives can persuade people to

believe all kinds of crazy things. It might be useful for ethicists to come in

and say something about the moral acceptability of telling stories in such

a way that they have this effect.So what advantages does a narrative account of value have over other

accounts of value that accept both value pluralism and context-depend-

ence? In some ways, narrative accounts of value are ways of specifying

what the context is and where the pluralism comes from. And so in that

regard, theyre more helpful than hand-waving claims about plural values

that operate differently in different contexts.16But their specificity may

yet be a problem. On narrative accounts of value, narrative has to do an

awful lot of work, and Im not sure its up to the task. Its still unclear

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whether narrative is the fundamental way in which we understand theworld, or just one of the many ways. Metaphor, analogy, imagerynone

of these is a narrative, and yet they all seem to have powerful framing ef-

fects too. Furthermore, if what I argued earlier is right, then even a narra-tive account of value will need an evaluative standard, and that standard

will either have to be (ultimately) self-vindicating or (ultimately) justified

by appeal to some nonnarrative source of value. Sorting out what that

would be and what the resulting theory would look like is a formidable

challenge.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Society for Ap-

plied Philosophy Annual Conference. The author thanks Alan Holland,Marion Hourdequin, Hugh LaFollette, Connie Rosati, Brian Treanor, and

an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

She also thanks Hyejung Chang and Jeff Kasser for insightful conversa-

tions about some of the ideas presented here.

NOTES

1 See White (1980), who distinguishes narratives from annals, chronicles, dis-course, and the like. Cf. Lothe (2000, 68).

2 Cf. Appleton (1998, 257): a series of events related chronologically or insome other meaningful way, in short, a story.

3 See Barry Lopezs (1989, 71) claim that the truth reveals itself most fullynot in dogma but in the paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguishcompelling narrativesbeyond this there are only failures of imagination:reductionism in science, fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics.

4 Cf. Treanor (2008, 368), noting Paul Ricoeurs (1995, 170) view that narra-tive constitutes the natural transition between description and prescription.Hayden White (1980, 18) has claimed further that moral assessment is part ofnarrative. He says, narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably

in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, theimpulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that isthe source of any morality that we can imagine.

5 Cf. Slicer (2003) discussing Nussbaum (1990). 6 Cf. Christopher Prestons claim that [t]he fact that narratives must go some-

where and that ethics is about figuring out how to make them go the rightplaces is, in broad terms, the position that Alasdair MacIntyre argues for inAfter Virtue. (Preston 2001, 248)

7 For an excellent discussion of the ways that this question can be raised and an-swered in the context of ecological restoration, see Hourdequin and Havlick

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(2011). It is worth noting that not everyone who deems narrative importantto environmental ethics adopts what I am calling here a narrative account ofvalue. King (1999), for example, sees narrative as important for making val-ues intelligible. Oelschlager (1997, 88), on the other hand, claims that talk

(which includes but is not limited to narrative) is what carries our values.Those to whom I do attribute a narrative account of value include Treanor(2008); Liszka (2003); and ONeill et al. (2008) [with one qualification; seediscussion on p. 20 and endnote 34 below] and perhaps Preston (2001).

8 For early discussions of the importance of narrative by ecofeminists, see, forexample, Cheney (1989) and Warren (1990).

9 For a description of the growing importance of narrative within psychology,see McAdams (2001).

10 See, for example, Anderson (1993), Singer (2004), Velleman (2003), and thearticles collected in Fireman et al. (2003).

11 For an overview of the literature on narrative and power relations withinsociology, see Clegg (1993). These claims by sociologists are echoed in theenvironmental literature in discussions of the nature and importance of senseof place.

12 See, e.g., Appleton (1998), Foster (1998), and descriptions of approaches inlandscape aesthetics in Porteous (1982) and Zube et al. (1982).

13 For a discussion of nonnarrative ways that humans value things, see Foster(1998). For a discussion of nonhuman sources of value, see Appleton (1975)and Preston (2001).

14 I thank an anomymous reviewer for emphasizing this very important point tome.15 To be fair, Treanor (2008, 37273) presents this as one of three solutions in

his essay, and has said (in personal communication) that he is not convincedof the adequacy of the solution that I describe above. The other two solu-tions he offers are (1) taking the Aristotelian view (aspects of which havebeen taken up by later virtue ethicists, such as Ronald Sandler and RosalindHursthouse) that facts about human nature can serve as an evaluative stand-ard; and (2) locating the evaluative standard within the narratives themselves.Treanor explores these issues further in his forthcoming book on narrative

and environmental virtue ethics.16 Cf. Dancys (1993, 112, 125) discussion of the relationship between narra-

tive what he calls shape, which is the total picture of salience-relations in agiven view of a situation. Explaining context-dependence through the selec-tivity involved in narrative seems to me to be more helpful than describingsituations as having shape, especially since situations can apparently havemore than one shape at the same time.

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