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

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/een/summary/v017/17.1.mcshane.html

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Some ChALLenGes For NArrAtive AccoUnts oF VALUe

KAtie McShAne

Recently in environmental ethics some theorists have advocated narrative 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 merely valued and that the project of constructing such a standard faces significant 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 showing that the value of environmental goods (places, species, ecosystemic relationships, and so on) is often misunderstood. For this reason, some of the most well-known debates in environmental ethics have been debates 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, independent of whatever contribution it might make to human interests), though

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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 example 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, arguing that without providing some sort of evaluative standard for narratives, 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.).1 Rather than engage with these debates, I am going to set them aside. By narrative here, I will just mean story.2 So 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 [Poetics 1450b26]). Stories arrange events chronologically and show how they are related (usually causally related) to one another. And they are told in such a way that the events at the beginning 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 (Velleman 2003; Preston 2001; Murray 1986; Cronon 1992). For the purposes of this paper, I will discuss only nonfictional narratives, since narrative accounts of value typically refer to these rather than to fictional narratives.

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So what is a narrative account of value? By this I just mean an account on which a things value is ultimately given by the role that that the thing plays in our narratives. (I say ultimately because narrative accounts of value can make claims about instrumental value as wellthings can 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.3 In telling us this, narratives dont separate out descriptive and normative elements neatly at all. They tend, rather, to describe situations in terms that blend these two elements two together.4 Consider, for example, Aldo Leopolds famous description of killing a wolf:
We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled 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 a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyessomething known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view (Leopold 1970, 13839).

Notice that every claim in this passage is technically what philosophers 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 indirectly communicated.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 in virtue 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).6 John 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 perspective, 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 occupy are 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 MacIntyre 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 it has influenced environmental ethicists working withinor those simply open tocontinental approaches to environmental ethics (Ricoeur 1995). Aesthetics, especially landscape aesthetics and later environmental aesthetics 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 differences among the narrative accounts of value that are starting to emerge in environmental 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 be more interested in talking about things like birds, coral reefs, carbon emissions, and petrochemicals? While discussion of the importance of narrative 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.8 Part of the reason 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 human beings. 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).9 Our 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 make us who and what we are.10 The unity of the 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). Sociologists 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 happiness, one a rags-to-riches story and the other a riches-to-rags story, we will typically 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 aesthetics more broadly, narrative has been described as playing an important role in shaping our aesthetic responses to the world.12 The claim is that the way in which we respond to objects aesthetically depends in part on 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 environmental tragedy, whereas the corn farmer might see flourishinga well-maintained farm, with a good crop to show for it. And so the environmentalist might 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 stories 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 to understand 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 especially 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 theories, 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 environmental policy-making, consists in the attempt to itemize and aggregate the values of the various items that feature in the situationand pursue a 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 environmentalists 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 preferences might or might not be a good dealit depends on what the preferences are, why we have them, and how they relate to one another. The desiderata for open space preservation may or may not capture what people feel is so special about a particular place and why it is worth preserving. 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 a thing matters to us, but the way in which it matters to us. The narrative approach can also capture the importance of environmental 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 importance 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 with other 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 why those ways differ so greatly across times, cultures, and particular people. This can help us to see why moral disagreement about the value of environmental goods occurs and why it can be so intractable. This is a particularly 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 this idea 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 different 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. This was a group of 87 pioneers trying to make their way across the Sierra Nevada Mountains to western California. They got trapped by an especially 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 to ones 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 subdued 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 remaining 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 account of value. For example: Is it only through narrative that humans value 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 tell stories only get represented insofar as they play a role in our narratives. Might there be sources of value that dont come from human valuings at all? 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 narrative 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 psychologists call framesthey are stories that we use to organize our experiences. 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 Southern plains 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 people, people with ability and talent, people with resourcefulness, fortitude, and courage.... The people of the dust bowl were not defeated, poverty-ridden people without hope. They were builders for tomorrow. During those hard years they continued to build their churches, their businesses, their schools, their colleges, their communities. They grew closer to God and fonder of the land. Hard years were common in their past, but the future belonged to those who were ready to seize the moment. Because they stayed during those hard years and worked the land and tapped her natural resources, millions of people have eaten better, worked in healthier places, and enjoyed warmer homes. Because those determined people did not flee the stricken area during 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 life of the southern plains. The name suggests a placea region whose borders are as inexact and shifting as a sand dune. But it was also an event of national, even planetary significance. A widely respected authority on world food problems, George Borgstrom, has ranked the creation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history. It cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation or 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 the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself [the] task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth. (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 farming 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, or those 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 descriptions of different aspects of a phenomenon; in any case, they reflect the fact that people often find different meanings (and thus different values) 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 usefulit can help people to understand conflicting points of view, and even, by facilitating mutual understanding, help us to resolve conflicts.14 But 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 in ethics. 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 a distinction 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-satisfaction versions of utilitarianism that rely on actual preferences or actual desires to ones that rely on rational preferences or informed desires (Griffin 1986, 1011). Our actual preferences and desires can beto put it bluntlyquite stupid, and satisfying the stupid ones is neither good for us nor a good in the world in general. Only those that meet some evaluative 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 really any 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 those narratives 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 standard. I worry about the adequacy of this solution, however.15 On 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 between the 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 perniciousness 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 couldnt pick 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 more than youve gotten. Why havent you gotten what you deserved? Because those people over there who arent upstanding 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 agendas, 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 might also 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 they cheated 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 journals 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 narratives. 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 universally 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 McCarthy era 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 stories they told portrayed wolves as clever, ruthless, and committed to massacring 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 confrontation 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 persecution 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 noting 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 theorists have used for preferences and desires wont quite get us what we need here. Narratives are by necessity selectivecertain facts, people, and events 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 structures 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 addition 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 for quite 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 contravene 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 be lucid, engaging, and enjoyable to read (Cronon 1992, 137173). The psychologist Robert Steele, in describing features that should make a psychotherapist 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 social 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 example, by not omitting or concealing important facts, by not being biased, etc.) and two of the three also insist that a narrative be aesthetically successful (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 the non-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 examples 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 concentration camps or mass killings of innocent people. The worry about this 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 European 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 understanding 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 even be 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 evaluative standard. But now weve got a problem. On this view, values will have to be both constituted by our narratives and that by which we judge the adequacy of our narratives. Why is this a problem? Take the values that make up our evaluative standard. Those values will have to be locatable in narratives. 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 allaccept all narratives as equally indicative of whats valuable, (2) to accept an evaluative standard that only criticizes narratives for their factual representations, (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 I think 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 both that the way to determine the value of environmental goods is to look at their role in our narratives and that human flourishing is objectively good and facts about what contributes to human flourishing are objectively true. Putting these together, we might say that the evaluative 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 lives to 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 answer 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 narratives and that we employ values to evaluate our narratives. So articulating evaluative standards for narratives is going to be, at the very least, complicated. 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-glorifying 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-dependence? 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.16 But 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 the world, or just one of the many ways. Metaphor, analogy, imagerynone of these is a narrative, and yet they all seem to have powerful framing effects too. Furthermore, if what I argued earlier is right, then even a narrative 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 Applied 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 conversations about some of the ideas presented here.
NOTES 1 See White (1980), who distinguishes narratives from annals, chronicles, discourse, and the like. Cf. Lothe (2000, 68). 2 Cf. Appleton (1998, 257): a series of events related chronologically or in some other meaningful way, in short, a story. 3 See Barry Lopezs (1989, 71) claim that the truth reveals itself most fully not in dogma but in the paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguish compelling 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 narrative constitutes the natural transition between description and prescription. Hayden White (1980, 18) has claimed further that moral assessment is part of narrative. He says, narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling and probably in fictional storytelling as well, is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the 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 somewhere and that ethics is about figuring out how to make them go the right places is, in broad terms, the position that Alasdair MacIntyre argues for in After Virtue. (Preston 2001, 248) 7 For an excellent discussion of the ways that this question can be raised and answered in the context of ecological restoration, see Hourdequin and Havlick

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 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

(2011). It is worth noting that not everyone who deems narrative important to environmental ethics adopts what I am calling here a narrative account of value. King (1999), for example, sees narrative as important for making values 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; see discussion on p. 20 and endnote 34 below] and perhaps Preston (2001). For early discussions of the importance of narrative by ecofeminists, see, for example, Cheney (1989) and Warren (1990). For a description of the growing importance of narrative within psychology, see McAdams (2001). See, for example, Anderson (1993), Singer (2004), Velleman (2003), and the articles collected in Fireman et al. (2003). For an overview of the literature on narrative and power relations within sociology, see Clegg (1993). These claims by sociologists are echoed in the environmental literature in discussions of the nature and importance of sense of place. See, e.g., Appleton (1998), Foster (1998), and descriptions of approaches in landscape aesthetics in Porteous (1982) and Zube et al. (1982). 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). I thank an anomymous reviewer for emphasizing this very important point to me. 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 convinced of the adequacy of the solution that I describe above. The other two solutions he offers are (1)taking the Aristotelian view (aspects of which have been taken up by later virtue ethicists, such as Ronald Sandler and Rosalind Hursthouse) that facts about human nature can serve as an evaluative standard; 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. Cf. Dancys (1993, 112, 125) discussion of the relationship between narrative what he calls shape, which is the total picture of salience-relations in a given view of a situation. Explaining context-dependence through the selectivity involved in narrative seems to me to be more helpful than describing situations as having shape, especially since situations can apparently have more than one shape at the same time.

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