How ethics shape the policy preferences of environmental scientists: What we can learn from Lomborg and his critics

Some environmental ethicists have proposed that different environmental values lead in principle to different environmental policy preferences. The controversy provoked by Bjørn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001), has provided an opportunity to test this hypothesis in practice for scientists and other technical experts. In analyzing the language of the argument between Lomborg and his critics, I find that environmental scientists participating prominently in the debate fall into one of two camps according to whether their valuations of nature tend to be anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric. I find further that for these scientists moral philosophies correlate both with policy preferences and with interpretations of data. I conclude that unexplored differences in environmental values make important and underappreciated contributions to the politicization of science and to polarization among scientists and other technical experts involved in environmental disputes.