Relational values are a way of recognizing and valuing the complex and interconnected relationships between people and nature, such as caregiving, place attachment and spiritual meaning, as well as the social and cultural impacts of degradation and environmental and conservation efforts. However, the implications of these values for the management and conservation of protected areas are little known. We explored the role of relational values in shaping local communities’ connectedness to a protected area of Ecuador that had been used by the military in the past and the implications of the values for well-being. Four hundred individual face-to-face surveys in the surroundings of Arenillas Ecological Reserve (south-west Ecuador) indicated high levels of connectedness towards this natural reserve amongst local communities through multiple values of nature. However, relational values were identified as the most prominent value explaining the strength of connectedness to nature, followed by intrinsic and instrumental values. We also showed that combinations of different natural values (instrumental, intrinsic and relational) might explain the support for specific well-being components. Our findings offer understanding of human behaviour towards protected areas with a military past and represent a first step in Ecuador towards comprehending how relational values shape the connectedness of local communities to nature.

Why should ‘better than’ be transitive? The leading answer in ethics is that values do not change with context. But this cannot be the entire source of transitivity, I argue, since transitivity can fail even if values never change, so long as they are complex, with multiple dimensions combined non-additively. I conclude by exploring a new hypothesis: that all alleged cases of nontransitive betterness, such as Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, can and should be modelled as the result of complexity, not context-relativity.

Governments around the world have sought to promote school choice, not just in order to improve educational outcomes, but also because such choice is believed to be intrinsically valuable: parents are believed to want to choice and to feel empowered by it. This article empirically evaluates the intrinsic value of school choice, comparing the attitudes and experiences of parents in England (where expanding choice is an explicit policy goal) and Scotland (where policymakers tend to play down choice), combining an online survey with in-depth interviews. While the overwhelming majority of parents in both countries express a desire for some school choice, only a minority want choice primarily for intrinsic reasons. Rather, most believe it is necessary to avoid negative outcomes for their children. Moreover, while parents in England tend to say they have more choice than their Scottish counterparts, they are no more satisfied with the level of choice that they have. Indeed, they tend to be more cynical, fatalistic and disempowered. Based on the British experience, school choice policies have not been successful in promoting intrinsic value.

Traditional theism says that the goodness of everything comes from God. Moreover, the goodness of something intrinsically valuable can only come from what has it. Many conclude from these two claims that no creatures have intrinsic value if traditional theism is true. I argue that the exemplarist theory of the divine ideas gives the theist a way out. According to exemplarism, God creates everything according to ideas that are about himself, and so everything resembles God. Since God is wholly good in every way, and since ethical supervenience is true, it follows that creatures have intrinsic value.

Enlightenment era optimism that technological and educational developments offer a progressive path to plenty and liberation supports a hope that human toil may be progressively reduced. The Development Thesis defended by G. A. Cohen is a piece of that Enlightenment optimism. The Development Thesis holds that productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The tendency for such an increase in productive forces to occur is, according to Cohen’s argument, due to persistent facts about human nature. If Cohen is correct, there is a tendency toward progress of an important sort, and this progress is due in significant part to human nature. But the development of productive forces also destroys nonhuman natural value. In the era of the Anthropocene this is occurring on a planetary scale. The simultaneous development and destruction entails that claims of progress must rely on an all-things-considered judgment. But due to the plurality of the relevant values, which cannot be compared according to a common metric, rational disagreement about the existence of progress and our progressive nature can be expected to persist.

Theory suggests that values are important in determining an individual's behaviour and preferences related to environmental issues; however robust models that attempt to describe empirical relationships have proven elusive. This paper describes a model that clarified some relationships between values and preferences for the future management of natural areas. The key element in the model was the use of a new scale, the Natural Area Value Scale (NAVS) for measuring the relative strengths of individuals' intrinsic, non-use, use and recreation values for natural areas. Also of importance was a variable that grouped people according to their common values. The data were obtained from samples of the general public, environmentalists and farmers in Australia and were analysed in a structural equation model. The model indicated the relative importance of particular value components in determining nature conservation preferences, as well as individuals' willingness to make personal sacrifices to secure these preferences for protecting natural areas. The model fit differed for the three samples: it provided a good fit for the general public sample, for which it was designed, and weaker fit for environmentalists and farmers. The work contributes to understanding of the values that underlie conservation decisions and provides a basis for further research to develop the model's explanatory power.