The Enlightenment communication between, on the one hand, natural philosophy preoccupied with causal explanations and empirical adequacy about nature and, on the other hand, aesthetic claims about beauty, has recently gained new attention. The third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), who has been introduced as an intermediary in this context, is frequently claimed to integrate scientific methods, idioms, and problems in aesthetics and ethics. This chapter follows a different tack. I will argue against the current trend and demonstrate why we might benefit from maintaining and improving a focus on Shaftesbury’s disavowal of natural philosophy, rather than erasing differences. I will proceed in three parts. First, I will clarify how Shaftesbury’s science of the self relates to conceptual variations of the terms interest and disinterestedness. Second, I will explain how he unites the moral (human) self with the beauty of physical nature as a self by arguing for a shared fraternity with plants and animals. Third, I will show how Shaftesbury’s science of the self and his critique of natural philosophy are most fully developed in aesthetic claims about disinterestedness and natural beauty in The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody (1709). Though rarely recognised in contemporary environmental ethics and aesthetics, Shaftesbury’s radical claim for an “equal brotherhood” with plants and animals continues to speak to us in the age of global climate change.