Nature and Ethics

In “Wilderness, Morality, and Value” Humanities Teacher Josh Duclos explores the inherent meaning and value of wild places.

Josh Duclos joined the faculty of St. Paul’s School, where he teaches Humanities, including philosophy electives, in 2019. Duclos earned degrees in philosophy from Connecticut College (B.A.), the University of Chicago (A.M.) and Boston University (Ph.D.). He also was a Fulbright scholar to the Czech Republic.

A Concord native, Duclos first became acquainted with SPS as a student at the Advanced Studies Program in the summer of 1999. He returned to the ASP five years later as a teaching fellow and became a teacher for the bio-medical ethics class in 2017. An expert in moral philosophy and its relationship to environmental and political philosophy, Duclos published “Wilderness, Morality, and Value” with Lexington Books in 2022.

What’s been the focus of your research?
At the University of Chicago, I studied virtue ethics. In contemporary moral philosophy, there are generally three major approaches to normative ethics. One is that you just work out the consequences of an action and try to produce the most happiness for the most people. Another is about trying to establish some fundamental rules of right and wrong, not worrying too much about the consequences. [And then] there’s a much older tradition that’s known as virtue ethics that begins with the question, “What sort of person should I be?” The project for a virtue ethicist is to sort out what it means to be a truly good or an excellent human being.

How have your interests as a philosopher evolved?
I shifted projects when I went to do my Ph.D. I got interested in thinking philosophically about the environment. I was working part-time guiding trips in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, but also trips to Nepal, the American West and the Alps. As someone who was studying formal philosophy, I found myself dissatisfied with a lot of the philosophical thinking about wilderness. I realized I was uncomfortable with some of what other people were saying, but I didn’t have much to say myself, so I got into the literature and realized that philosophers had not always done a great job thinking carefully about the concept of wilderness, what it means, how it’s been used, if it has moral ramifications. The question I fixated on, that became the focus of the book, is “What is the value of wilderness itself?”

What arguments do you explore in your book?
My interest was in the meaning and value of wilderness, but to investigate this I draw attention to an often-ignored tension that exists between animal welfare activists and wilderness preservation activists. This tension motivates an investigation of the value of wilderness itself. Is the value of wilderness instrumental, or intrinsic? Is it anthropocentric, or non-anthropocentric? Is there a value to wilderness that is unique, not attainable from some other source? There are many arguments about these questions. This is what I explore. The later chapters deal with bioethics, long-term planetary thinking and wilderness as a religious value. I published this book while I was working at SPS. The School supported me in a number of ways. I am very grateful for that.

How do you define wilderness?
It’s hard to argue about the ethics of wilderness preservation if we don’t have a shared understanding of the term. Wilderness is a condition rather than an entity. It’s something like a condition of the natural world distinguished by a relative absence of human activity — past or present, intentional or unintentional, conspicuous or inconspicuous. The worst thing we can do is spend all our time arguing about the definition rather than thinking about what to do with the wild places we still have and what moral trade-offs are made when we protect or preserve wilderness. Part of what I argue is that wilderness really is a spectrum. It may be that there’s no patch of land on Earth that has not been affected by human beings. In a sense, Walden Pond is more of a wilderness than the Boston Common, and the Alaska Wildlife Refuge is more of a wilderness than Walden Pond. If people get fixated on identifying an absolute wilderness, they’re going to be disappointed.

Is there somewhere you’ve been where you feel like you’ve experienced true wilderness?
If you’re in New England and you’ve never been deep into the Pemigewasset Wilderness, go there and spend a couple days alone. Go a mile out into the woods behind St. Paul’s. You’re not in the deep wilderness, but you’re in a place that’s more or less controlled by nature. Spend 24 hours out there alone and you’ll begin to get some sense of the distinct experiential value that comes with wilderness. Thoreau was relatively comfortable at Walden Pond, but he took some journeys into Northern Maine where he encountered something much closer to wilderness, and he admitted it was terrifying. There is peace and beauty in the woods; there is also fear and trembling.