1 Daisy Dixon
Part II is the heart, and longest part, of Elliot’s paper. You will read it in four chunks. Before you do that, listen below to Daisy Dixon – a researcher in philosophy at The University of Cambridge. Daisy considers two answers to the question put to her. You will then answer some questions in the following activity.
Download this video clip.Video player: Daisy Dixon on restoring nature
Transcript: Daisy Dixon on restoring nature
DEREK MATRAVERS
Imagine you had some relatively untouched piece of nature. And then, a mining company discovered there were valuable minerals there. And they wanted to extract the minerals. And they were going to make a complete mess of the landscape. But it was OK because they said that they would restore the landscape to exactly how it looked before. Now do you think that would make everything all right? Or do you think there would be some kind of loss of value?
DAISY DIXON
I suppose it depends on what kind of value we're talking about. Because there might be a loss of value on a more sort of perhaps scientific level with some of the habitats might have been disturbed in some way. And they're unable to sort of rebuild after this disturbance. And if we just assume that everything is exactly the same as it was, I'd say, obviously, weighing up the values, if the value of getting these minerals was just as important, say, as the beauty of the piece of nature, then I think it would be OK to do that in some cases.
If this replica sounds the same, looks the same, even tastes the same or smells the same. Then you might think that the aesthetic value of that piece of nature hasn't changed. Because we've just got the very same formal elements that we had originally.
But on the other hand, if you think that beauty, especially with this piece of nature, part of what made it beautiful was the fact that it was untouched. You might think that knowing that it's artificial, and that it is a copy, more or less, that might kind of affect our experience of those sensorial features. So whilst we're getting all the same kind of inputs, like it sounds the same and looks the same, we can take all those on board. But we know that it's a bit artificial and that might affect our kind of aesthetic experience.
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Activity 1
Timing: Spend around 10 minutes on this activity.
Answer the following questions about the video in the text boxes below, and compare your notes with the feedback provided.
- Why does Daisy Dixon think there might be no loss of value?
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Answer
- She speculates that ‘the aesthetic value of that piece of nature hasn’t changed because we’ve just got the very same formal elements that we had originally’.
- Why does she think there might be a loss of value?
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Answer
- She speculates that ‘part of what made it beautiful was the fact that that it was untouched’. Obviously, this will not be true of the restoration.