The purpose of this brief paper is to illustrate that the machinery and assumptions in moral foundations theory can further inform our understanding of environmental aesthetic experience and reactions. Moral foundation theorists employ emotions to explain moral intuitions and motivations. They do so by focusing on the types of things that elicit emotions and categorizing these into groups–what they call “foundations—rather than focusing on individual emotions themselves. They argue that the foundations emotions were originally developed to be set off by have been elaborated in different, sometimes highly symbolic ways, and that the intuitions to which they give rise can explain motivations for action. Similarly, I want to say that aesthetic evaluations about the environment are affectively driven, the emotions at the center of such evaluations have often been culturally elaborated in complex and symbolic ways, and this affective element explains our motivation to protect certain environments while avoiding others. In both cases, we will not always be aware of the foundation that gives rise to our reactions and judgments. The thoughts I offer in this paper are preliminary at best, but I hope to spark a serious interest in the viability of using frameworks like moral foundations theory in our theorizing about reactions to the environment (both aesthetic and sometimes moral—for as I shall illustrate, the two are sometimes difficult to parse out).
