Ecological Restoration 155
others, or, as in the case of justifi cations for historical preservation, respect the creations
of those who have come before us. Note that I use the term virtue here rather than the
stronger language of obligation because I don’t think we have obligations to objects them-
selves in the same way we have moral obligations, for example, to people.
One way to explain the value of everyday things is to consider the case of the destruc-
tion of an object that stands for a relationship in some way. The unthinking destruction of
an object that bears the meaning of some relationship between individual humans refl ects
badly on the person who destroys that object. Consider the problem of replacing and rep-
licating objects that are special to us. I have a pair of antique glasses of which I am very
fond because they were the glasses that my maternal grandfather, Carmine Pellegrino,
wore for much of his adult life. The glasses are a combination of a set of lenses that were
no doubt reproduced at the time in large quantities and stems that he fabricated himself.
The stems are nothing fancy, just bits of steel wire that he bent and shaped—he was a coal
miner, not a jeweler—but it is important to me that he made them. If you were to come
to my apartment and drop Carmine’s glasses down the incinerator shoot and then replace
them with a pair of antique glasses from a shop nearby then I would justifi ably claim that
something has been lost that cannot be replaced. Further, paraphrasing one of Elliot’s
famous examples about ecological restoration, if you were to make an exact replica of the
glasses and fool me by passing them off as the original, then, while I might not feel the
loss, I would nonetheless have suffered a loss of some sort even though I would not know
that I suffered this loss. And if I were to fi nd out that you tricked me with the replicas
then I would justifi ably feel regret and then anger!
The moral harm that may be done to me in this case is parasitic on the value of having
been in a relationship with another person and not simply in some quality that is inherent
to the object itself. Still, the object does play an irreducible role in this thought experi-
ment—it is a unique entity that evinces my relationship with my grandfather that cannot
be replaced even though the relationship in this case is not only represented in this object.
Both the relationship and the object have some kind of intrinsic value. But surely not all
relationships have this kind of value and so neither do all objects connected to all kinds
of relationships. How then can we discern the value of different kinds of relationships?
One possible source is Samuel Scheffl er’s work on the value of relationships. Scheffl er
is concerned with the question of how people justifi ably ground special duties and obliga-
tions in interpersonal relationships without this being only a function of relations of
consent or promise keeping. Scheffl er’s account argues for a nonreductionist interpretation
of the value of relationships that fi nds value in the fact that we often cite our relationship
to people themselves—rather than any explicit interaction with them—as a source of
special responsibilities. So for Scheffl er:
... if I have a special, valued relationship with someone, and if the value I attach to the relationship
is not purely instrumental in character—if, in other words, I do not value it solely as a means to