By Lester Embree
It was mentioned in the Introduction to the present work that the 100-year history of phenomenology includes, thus far, four broad, overlapping, and rich tendencies. In the order of their emergence, these are Realistic Phenomenology, Constitutive Phenomenology, Existential Phenomenology, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology. All of these can be seen as stemming historically from what can be called, somewhat redundantly, Descriptive Phenomenology. Descriptive Phenomenology emerged at the turn of the century in the work of Edmund Husserl and the present book has attempted to introduce it through practice and then reflection on that practice.
The aims of phenomenology in its more developed versions might be obvious to specialists in philosophy and other cultural disciplines. The present chapter is concerned, however, with reason or justification, which is the ultimate concern of phenomenology. The phenomenology of reason will be sketched or, since "reason" tends exclusively to denote logic and knowledge too often today, "justification" and associated expressions are to be preferred. Simply put, we have attitudes towards various objects and situations and, should need arise, we can justify or, in other words, give reasons for them. Often the word "opinion" is used in this way, but "attitude" is better because there is more to an attitude that might be justified than merely believing, although the justification of believing is fundamental. The tendency to use "attitude" merely to refer to belief or opinion can be resisted.
Another word that might have been used in this connection, if it had not been ruined, is "rationalization." Since Sigmund Freud, however, that refers to positions taken up due to unconscious motives and then "rationalized" with whatever "reasons" can be thought up afterwards. Any attempt at justification is open to the challenge that it is merely a rationalization and that the true reason is not being given for the position taken. This implies, however, that there is a true reason that can be known in order to denounce the false reason. While rationalizations occur in individual life, ideologies analogously occur in collective life and with the same implication. What in general is then needed is a way to be sure of true as opposed to false reasons. More specifically, can the justification of attitudes can be done phenomenologically, i.e., through reflective observation?
Section I.--CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND ATTITUDES.
What may or may not prove to be or to be able to be justified are best called "attitudes." When we reflect, we find that our conscious lives include an enormous number of attitudes. Some are attitudes toward the future, some are towards the past, some are towards objects and situations in the now, some are cognitive, some evaluational, and some are volitional, some are towards ourselves and some are towards others, some are towards groups we belong to and some are toward other groups, some are serious and some are fictive, etc. Upon analysis we find that attitudes in general are patterns of what it has been urged we call "encounterings," which are encounterings of objects, other persons included, in situations.
We live fundamentally within cultural worlds with others and hence this must be the ultimate starting point for inquiry. We humans tend to focus on others who are also human and it appears that dogs, for example, tend to focus on other dogs and the same may hold in many other species. Nevertheless, the others encountered are not merely of the same species for humans or for dogs and at least some other species. In our various species, we are sometimes individuals and sometimes we are groups in one way or another. That we are individually and collectively others for each other makes it a social world. It is also a cultural world because individuals and groups and also the objects around them, such as clothes, tools, and toys, have values and uses of various sorts in relation to or "for" individuals and groups of almost all sorts (naturalistic scientists when in their disciplinary attitudes are one exception). Chimpanzees and other non-humans appear to live in rudimentary cultural worlds, but humans will be concentrated upon in this chapter.
Within the cultural world we have what are often called "identities," although "cultural identities" appears a more adequate expression. The question, What are we?, can be asked and answered in many ways. To take a relatively simple but not insignificant dimension of identity, it can be asked if an individual is left handed or right handed. Perhaps 90% of humans are right handed, handedness appears to come in degrees, but perfectly ambidextrous people are rare. Lefties and righties, as they might be called for short, are groups at least in the signification of categories into which individuals can be sorted. Especially lefties seem quick to notice each other, but there do not seem to be any clubs based on being left handed such as there are for short or bald people.
There has been a considerable history of nasty attitudes of righties towards lefties (the word "sinister" originally signified left handed), but handedness at least in wealthy countries today is at most a very subtle basis for selecting a mate or political candidate; probably hair color is more important in these respects, blondes having, allegedly, more fun. In part for technological reasons, less effort is now made to teach lefties to write with their right hands (left handed writing is less messy with ballpoint pens and quick-drying ink). Nevertheless, much equipment, e.g., bolt-action rifles, is designed to the disadvantage of lefties, who are quick to recognize it.
Finally, there would seem neurological causes for handedness, for these traits appear early and seem impossible to change through training. But attitudes toward lefties and righties are learned, whether we notice them or not, and, correlatively, people--ourselves included--are valued and willed by us in different ways according to whether they are left handed or right handed. Thus they have "handedness identities." Because fundamentally constituted in habitual or traditional believing, valuing, and willing, such identities are cultural. The handedness one has is one thing, how it is routinely believed in, valued, and willed by oneself an others is another thing, i.e., a matter of attitudes.
Our handedness is by no means all of what we are, but it is one of the identities that we all have. There are other identities or, better, dimensions of identity than handedness. These include social class (e.g., lower middle), sexual orientation (e.g., ambisexuality), region of origin (e.g., the South), life-stage (e.g., adolescence), disability status (e.g., deaf), and generation (e.g., "Baby Boomers" born between World War II and the Vietnam War).
Then again, there is political or, better, civic identity, which also deserves a few remarks. "Civic" is better than "political" insofar as the latter connotes parties and partisanship (e.g., Conservative and Progressive), while "civic" can connote what holds for all members of a body politic such as a nation, e.g., voting, laws, taxes, and other obligations such as jury duty. There are more specific provincial and local civic identities and also broader ones including Asian, European, and "human being." Toward national civic identities, e.g., American, Brazilian, Chinese, Egyptian, German, Indian, and Japanese, we can find that we have attitudes composed of habitual and traditional believings, valuings, and willings. This not to contend that our civic attitudes are often very clear, distinct, or justified, but only to suggest that they exist and can be examined.
Gender, ethnicity, and environment will be focused on below, but attitudes toward the other cultural identities just mentioned can be examined similarly. Since environmental identity might not immediately seem plausible, it may be said now that there is encountering of animals, humans included, plants, fungi, etc., that there is a variety of attitudes toward pollution, over-population, preservation of species, and conservation of natural resources, and that we can all be said to have identities by virtue of our attitudes toward the environment, even if they may be subtle and unrecognized, not to speak of unjustified, perhaps like our attitudes toward handedness.
Besides being often unrecognized, our attitudes are often so deeply established that do not ask where they came from. A mark of intellectual maturity is, however, the recognition that we have many attitudes the vast majority of which not only came from others, rather than being established by us, but are also not easy to justify. Three stages seem to occur: First, an attitude somehow becomes an issue. There are many ways in which this happens and it does not seem easy to reduce them to a few types, although encountering other persons and groups with different attitudes toward the same objects appears the most prominent one. Secondly, we can reflectively observe the attitude in order to ascertain its source as well as its components.
Finally, we can consider how, if at all, a given attitude can be justified. The traditional philosophical name for this step is "critique," but this word and the inelegant verbal form recently made from it, i.e., "critiquing," have acquired chiefly negative connotations, while it is possible get positive results. "Examination" appears a better expression, the verbal form is not a problem, and "examined" and "unexamined" are at least fresh alternatives to "critical" and its opposite, which is "naive." And, as students know, examinations can be passed and indeed passed in various degrees, as well as failed. ("Evaluation" is often used to express the same signification, but has been reserved in Chapter ??? above strictly to signify valuing and values.)
Attitudes can be examined with respect to how they might be justified. When some alleged justifications do not hold up under examination, they may be rejected as rationalizations, ideologies, or simply errors and then other justifications can be considered. And when justifications cannot be found for an attitude, new and justified attitudes can be sought. The attitudes of others just as much as one's own attitudes can be examined and indeed there appears a somewhat unreflective tendency to examine those of others more than and before one's own, but it might be wiser to learn to examine one's own attitudes first. Of course we can concoct spurious rationalizations for any attitude, but genuine justification in phenomenology must be ascertained through reflective evidencing, i.e., through "seeing" that which justifies the justified, i.e., the true reason.
As mentioned, what are here called "attitudes" are sometimes called "opinions." This is presumably when the believing component predominates within the attitude. Another advantage of speaking of attitudes is that beliefs or opinions can be more strictly called "cognitive attitudes" and we can then speak analogously "evaluational" and "volitional" attitudes according to whether the valuing component or willing component rather than the believing component predominates in the pattern of encountering that is the attitude. If one can evade the tendency to think of spatial place in using it, "position" can be a useful synonym for "attitude"; it emphasizes the positings over the awareness component within the concrete encountering of an object, which does not seem harmful, although it is nevertheless awareness in a certain form that ultimately justifies.
It needs to be mentioned that there can may be cases in which no justification can be found. For example, there are nations in which driving is done on the right side of the road and where people also tend to walk on the right of sidewalks and staircases. One might think that this is related to right handedness, but then one should consider that there are countries such as Great Britain, India, and Japan in which people tend to walk as well as drive on the left. In this case, the "traveling side," appears arbitrary, conventional, and purely traditional, so that the best one can say is "We do it this way because we have always done it this way." There appears no deeper justification. That some positions cannot be justified does not imply that no attitude can be justified.
4. How is one disposed to will or act in this attitude?
3. What is valued in this attitude negatively as well as positively or comparatively?
2. In this attitude, what is the believing and what is believed in?
1. What types of awareness and objects as awared are characteristic of this attitude?
Section 2.--TOWARDS EXAMINING SOME ATTITUDES.
While this is not the occasion for a thorough examination of any attitude, perhaps a way in which to proceed can be shown. There are many different attitudes toward matters of gender, ethnicity, and environment, but most of them may be captured with pairs of contrasting types, one group concerned with supremacy and the other acknowledging differences but aiming at equality. Can this be clarified to some extent through reflective observation, analysis, and description?
Four general questions easily understood on the basis of the previous chapters can open the issues of what a given attitude is, after which more specific questions can be asked. Note that these questions can be listed such that the first is at the bottom of the list (See Figure 7.1).
These questions relate to the four kinds of component found within any concrete encountering and, correlatively, within all concrete objects and situations as encountered and, accordingly, all attitudes. Answers to them will be relevant for describing attitudes because attitudes are patterns of encountering. It also deserves mention at this point that what have been called "identities" above are correlative to attitudes toward objects and situations of the type called human. Furthermore, attitudes are traditional for communities and habitual for individual persons, which is another way of saying not only that they are learned and thus cultural but also that they can be changed if examination proves their justification wanting. To change attitudes and thus individual habits and collective traditions is seldom easy, but always in principle possible.
Another general point is pertinent. Our many attitudes are usually inactual. In other words, they are only actualized when we are seriously encountering the pertinent objects, that happens for one of them at a time, and not all situations in which an attitude arises are easily repeated seriously. We can, however, analyze attitudes reflectively through remembering and/or feigning, and this is also often easier. We have acquired many attitudes toward objects we have not yet seriously encountered. For example, what is one's attitude toward stray dogs? Probably one has an attitude even if one has never encountered such a dog.
Suppose one encounters a gaunt and dirty dog wandering about near one's house in a frantic way. The awareness here might be predominantly olfactory and evaluational because of the smell of such a dog, but one probably would not let a stray dog to get close enough to be smelled. The awareness involved in such an encounter is actually representational inasmuch as we focus on is the dog's psyche: What is this other of a different species doing? What might she do? Is she dangerous? Visual perceiving typically predominates for humans in the infrastratum of such a case of other-awareness, but audition might have played this role if we first perceived someone oddly whining behind us. Does one need actually to encounter a stray dog to become aware of one's attitude or would remembering or feigning such a case suffice to make the already established attitude available for reflective analysis?
When we reflect further on our attitude in such a case, we may find that we immediately believe that a dog looking and acting in such a way is dangerous. She might bite us. She might be rabid. Such beliefs might have come from our own experience but more likely they come from what others have communicated to us. Furthermore, effects such as bites and rabies that we believe the dog might have on us (or others) we certainly value negatively (and intrinsically) and hence we value the potential cause of them, i.e., the stray dog, negatively (and extrinsically). She is bad because bites are bad. Finally, and on this basis, we can find that we are inclined to avoid the dog by retreating into the house, chasing her away, contacting pertinent authorities to deal with her, etc., which are types of preventative if not destructive and thus negative willing.
But also suppose that, while we are cautiously retreating from the oddly behaving dog and about to call the police, a neighbor emerges from a nearby house joyously welcoming home the pet who was lost. Then our awareness focuses on the friendly interaction of neighbor and dog, the believing in danger is replaced with a believing in safety, the valuing component changes from negative to positive, i.e., now we delight in what we see, and we are no longer inclined to strive to establish a safer situation.
If the reader returns at this point to Figure 7.1, she will recognize that the questions there have just been applied to a particular case and answered. Beyond that, one can reflectively recognize at least motivational relations between what can best be called "components" discernable within an attitude, perhaps most clearly when the attitude changes into or is replaced by a different attitude. We were going to call the police because we disvalued the effects of dogs with rabies, which we believed the dog probably had because of seeing (and hearing) her behave and because of previous learning about canine behavior.
One may wonder, however, if the "becauses" just emphasized are merely motives or also introduce reasons that also successively justify the believing, valuing, and willing involved. What people have told us may be merely a motive for believing that the dog behaving in this odd fashion is probably rabid, but the seeing of it move and whine in an odd way is not merely a motivating factor off in the past but currently founds as well as motivates believing that the dog is dangerous. When an object presents itself in the way optimal for an object of its sort, the awareness of it is best called "evidencing" and when the evidencing component in a concrete encountering founds as well as motivates believing directly, and thus valuing and willing indirectly, justification can be spoken of.
The point of this brief analysis is that we can reflectively observe, analyze, and describe an inactualized attitude of encountering and, correlatively, the possibly actualized object and situation as encountered, i.e., an oddly behaving, probably dangerous, more than esthetically bad, and willed against dog near our house. When we are not actually encountering a dog in this way, we are still disposed or prepared to do so. This inactual but actualizable disposition is an attitude.
Concerning now the justification of attitudes in general, another example can be begun with. Suppose that when given the choice of chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla ice cream, one habitually picks chocolate. If asked, one can refer this choosing, which is volitional, to one's habitual preference of the taste of chocolate, which is evaluational and which refers to one's gustatory awareness, i.e., tasting, when ice cream of this flavor is in one's mouth. If asked about one's habitual believing, probably one would answer in part that ice cream, regardless of flavor, is edible, that if they are harmful at all, e.g., fattening, all flavors are so to the same degree. Beyond that, one just likes the taste of chocolate.
Suppose next, however, that the news comes through reliable sources that chocolate has been scientifically established as a minor but very definite cause of some type of cancer (This is hypothetical; the author has not yet heard any such thing about chocolate!). On this basis, which is reducible to the evidencing at the foundation of all scientific results even though it is different from our mere tasting, one's believing with respect to chocolate ice cream and, on that basis, our valuing and willing would probably change immediately--or at least we would begin the effort to change our attitude. If we trust the authority of medical science, we no longer believe chocolate ice cream at the worst slightly harmful like all ice cream, but instead believe it more harmful than other flavors. The naturalistic-scientific belief outweighs and replaces the common-sensical one.
Harmful objects have extrinsic negative values in relation to intrinsically valuable objects, such as health. We disvalue what we believe is conducive to illness. Believing chocolate causes cancer justifies disvaluing it and that justified disvaluing justifies choosing another flavor and even willing against the continued availability of chocolate. While believings, valuings, and willings in their actual or dispositional forms can be habits and traditions established through various influences, e.g., product advertising, influence or motivation is only part of justification. What is also essentially necessary to justification are reflective evidencings in which the components are evidenced to be founded in the order enumerated above in Figure 7.1.
If chocolate caused cancer, the unjustifiedness of the routine choosing of it begins not with the preference but with the believing, which was not as well justified as it could have been. When a positing is founded upon as well as motivated by either a justified positing of the correspondingly lower sort and thus by evidencing ultimately, it is justified. Then, when asked to justify a willing one can refer to the valuing, believing, and/or the evidencing that it is founded upon and motivated by. And if the stray dog on the street is welcomed by a neighbor as a lost dog who has found her way home and one witnesses this joyful reunion, that evidencing also alters one's attitude in various respects.
It is possible to change an attitude from a less justified to a more justified one deliberately. This may be accomplished through learning to focus on different aspects of objects, e.g., intelligence rather than brawn or beauty, through altering habitual beliefs, perhaps through finding stronger evidencing to found and motivate alternatives, and through changing values and purposes through changing their foundations and motives. If one reflects on what one would value if one believed this rather that, one might even watch the old habit weaken and the new one gain strength.
A final general remark: The arrangement of the interrelated components in every encountering offered in Figure 7.1 is rarely found in attitudes reflectively. Typically, only one or perhaps two components stand out or predominate and, in that case, we characterize our attitudes with merely what is important, e.g., "Stray dogs are dangerous." But analysis can find components of all four sorts and the relations of foundation and motivation can also be sought when we are concerned with justification.
Section 3.--THREE ATTITUDES AND IDENTITIES
Taste in ice cream, attitudes toward stray dogs, and handedness identities have been alluded to in order separately to illustrate various points above. Now three more cases can be preliminarily analyzed in a comparative although superficial and preliminary way.
A. GENDER.
There are societies that have three and even four genders, but most have only two. Bi-gendered socio-cultural worlds will be our concern here. This is not a question of sexual orientation; interestingly, however, there are masculine and feminine homosexuals as well as heterosexuals. In addition, gender can be distinguished from sex, the latter being something anatomical and physiological and the former being something cultural. Thus feminine males and masculine females occur. Whether or not these cultural terms of "feminine" and "masculine" apply to non-humans with culture, e.g., chimpanzees, seems likely, but is not known to the author; the present theme is thus also confined to human gender. Complicating the case, gender appears to vary with social class, ethnic group, regional identity, life-stage, generation, society, historical period, etc., but can still be distinguishable.
Nevertheless, most people in a bi-gendered society find it significant to speak of "men" and "women" as well as "boys" and "girls" and of "the feminine" and "femininity," "the masculine" and "masculinity," etc. These are cultural and not biological terms. Sometimes such terms are used descriptively and sometimes they refer to ideals in terms of which people and other objects are judged. And gender is inculcated, manifested, and reinforced by hair styles, clothing types, ways of speaking, posture, and movement, and also and above all by the attitudes of those towards whom we have attitudes.
Once differences between the masculine and the feminine are recognized even somewhat vaguely (the reader will notice that no definitions are ventured here), one can ask about attitudes toward the gender identities that humans have, oneself included. There are many such attitudes, but present purposes will be served sufficiently if two broad types are compared and contrasted. One type of gender attitude involves supremacy. Some hold that women are or ought to be superior to men, but far more common is the attitude in which men are encountered as typically an properly dominant over women. Furthermore, many allege that men are superior for biological reasons such as upper body strength and surges of testosterone.
Sometimes this type of gender attitude is called "male supremacy," but if the distinction between gender as cultural and sex as biological is made, and despite the emphasis on biological factors, it is actually a cultural attitude and thus better called "masculine supremacy." Strength and physical aggressiveness are valued over the opposites, which opposites may then be considered feminine and, furthermore, the somatic or bodily is valued over the psychic. Against this attitude, it might be contended that upper body strength, testosterone, etc. play an ever declining role in advanced societies where even war is increasingly conducted through equipment, i.e., by watching pictures on screens and pushing buttons. It might also be contended that psychic skills such as conciliation that tend to be considered feminine are of greater influence in most spheres of life, but to do that would go beyond the needs of this exposition.
In contrast with masculine supremacy, there is a type of attitude toward matters of gender, i.e., toward gendered persons, groups, objects, and situations and thus gender identities, that denies past practices no more than it does recent changes and acknowledges somatic and perhaps even psychic differences between the genders, but nevertheless seeks a world in which men and women do not have different rights, responsibilities, and opportunities, especially under the law. And to begin to analyze this gender egalitarian attitude, one can first ask about awareness. Perhaps this attitude includes focusing on psychic more than somatic traits, peace-time situations, and social relationships other than status hierarchy. Is a successful career better than a well-raised child?
Then one can ask what one is disposed to believe in if one is a gender egalitarian rather than a gender supremacist, what matters thus believed in are valued not only higher and lower, but also equally in the two types of attitude. Finally, one can ask about how one is disposed to will for and against people, oneself included, etc. with different gender identities. Has the reader encountered attitudes that can be classified as gender supremacist and gender egalitarian? Can they be analyzed in terms of how objects are awared in the awareness stratum, in terms of what is believed in, what is valued, and what is willed habitually and traditionally either in actual events or in dispositions that are accessible to reflective analysis assisted by recollection and feigning?
B. ETHNICITY.
Ethnicity is also a complex matter of culture. Fully to understand a person's ethnicity, one must interview her about her family and its past as well as present and also study relevant history. But without doing this, we can recognize that we nevertheless regularly encounter many people, ourselves perhaps as well as others, as belonging more or less clearly to this or that ethnic group. We make mistakes, but can also correct them.
Many ethnic groups are identified and differentiated by language and/or religion, but at least in the United States currently, where there may then be as many of 1,000 ethnic groups, what is called race appears the most frequent major basis and broad categories of Black, Brown, Red, White, and Yellow people sometimes recognized. But what is race? There can be no doubt that eye shape, hair texture, and skin color are biologically inherited. Some hold that psychic traits are also thus inherited, but this is difficult to prove.
One type of attitude toward ethnic matters that one might find in oneself or in others can be called "racial supremacy." Such an attitude may consider itself a biological position, but it is clear that there is, again, valuing of one set of traits over others, helping and hindering, i.e., willing, of individuals and groups on that basis, etc. Furthermore, it is typically not the inherited somatic traits that are approved or disapproved of, etc. Rather, a group and members of it may be recognized by racial traits, but it is preferred, fostered, etc. because of who is believed be cleaner, more honest, industrious, law abiding, thrifty, truthful, self-controlled, etc.
Race is then a matter of culture not only in how behaviors are habitual and traditional but also in how they are objects of habitual awareness, believing, valuing, and willing and for the person with the attitude as well as for other persons encountered, again habitually and traditionally. People have identities in correlation with our ethnic attitudes, including those of the type that can be called ethnic supremacy. Matters can be complex here because just as there can be a superiority attitude, there can be a sort of inferiority attitude in which those whom the superior look down upon accept aspects of the superior attitude, there is self-disapproval as well as approval based on positions in a hierarchial relationship, etc. These patterns occur in gender relations as well as in ethnic relations, e.g., in the latter respect, among religiously and linguistically, as well as racially determined ethnic groups.
If one were to seek an attitude of a contrasting type, one in which a plurality of different ethnic cultures and identities were recognized but valued and treated equally, which would be analogous to gender egalitarianism, ethnic egalitarianism might be spoken of. Here again, the foundation for the believing, valuing, and willing is in awareness. Supremacist beliefs can be challenged on the basis of the sort of awareness called evidencing and the egalitarian believing, etc. supported with other evidencing of comparable performances in all spheres of life, educational and similar advantages and disadvantages allowed for. Identities can be at once different yet equal in value and use. Crucial for all questions of cultural identity is then the recognition that identities can be different, but individual persons and also groups, e.g., religions, are to be treated in the same way in law and ethics.
These are not simple issues, a great deal of reflective analysis is required to sort matters out, but the place to begin is with the attitudes that one finds one already has. After finding that one has an attitude, one can attempt to examine it, i.e., to see whether it is justified, and if it is, then one is prepared to defend it if necessary. In some cases, one cannot find justification for an attitude and will need to change it, the goal being an attitude in which willing and dispositions to will can be justified with reference to justified valuing and tendencies to value, valuing can be justified by justified believing, and justified believing is justified by awareness of the type called evidencing of the pertinent objects.
Evidencing is the awareness in which the object awared presents itself in the most clear, distinct, and original way for an object of its kind. Ultimately, it is this "seeing" that is the goal of efforts to justify an attitude. The means to this end are reflective observation, analysis, and the explanatory as well as descriptive accounts that can be developed, confirmed, corrected, and extended through phenomenological evidencing, which is central to Chapters 1-6 of the present book.
C. ENVIRONMENT.
There certainly is ecology, i.e., of a biological sort, involved in considerations of the environment, but the environment is also an essentially cultural matter, i.e., a matter of how organisms and ecosystems are encountered and have correlative values and purposes and, more precisely, of human attitudes as patterns of encountering correlative to the environment as encountered. Are there supremacy and egalitarianism in this connection as well? (See Fig. 7.2)
(Figure 7.2) gender | ethnicity | environment | --------------------------------------------------------------- Supremacy | | | --------------------------------------------------------------- Egalitarianism | | | ---------------------------------------------------------------
Rather than individuals and groups of humans with gender and ethnicity, when concerned with environmental matters, which include habitats and ecosystems, one speaks here of species and specimens (now non-human as well as human). A widespread attitude in this connection can be called human supremacy. In this attitude, humans are encountered as superior in various ways to non-humans. The alternative attitude of environmental egalitarianism does not deny differences among species but holds that all species are equally valuable and is volitionally disposed against species going extinct due to human activity, destruction of ecosystems not essential for humans, etc. Human supremacy has a long history, especially in the West, and is of course connected with religion, but there are environmentally egalitarian tendencies in Asian religions and even in the views of some Western environmental philosophers and scientists. This is, again, not the place to more than initially examine attitudes of these types, but human supremacists can be required to justify their attitudes toward nature. Do humans have greater moral right to exist than tigers and chimpanzees?
* * *
Perhaps this short discussion will suffice to make the contention that Descriptive Phenomenology can be employed in the examination of attitudes plausible. Reaching a final position that is unshakably justified on these and other matters can be more than a lifetime's task, but to move in that direction is preferable to not doing so and thus has higher value than to living a life that is not only full of attitudes that are not only not of one's own choosing but also that one is unaware of and can only rationalize, not justify. But this again may raise more issues than it settles: Is the examination of attitudes better for self and others, for one's own groups and the groups of others, or should attitudes be left unexamined?