Contents
Introduction
People tend to use the term ethics in two different ways.
Ethics help us decide how we ought to live. In their most
general form, we might say that
ethics are the standards we employ (among other factors) to
determine our actions. They are
prescriptive in that they tell us what we should or ought to
do and which values we should or
ought to hold. They also help us evaluate whether something
is good or bad, right or wrong.
Leopold’s example:
“A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from
conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it...it implies
respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as
such.”Ethics explain why things are important to us. Ethics are also concerned
with how and why we value certain things and what actions properly reflect
those values. In this sense, ethics appear more descriptive. Just as it is
possible for taste to be a neutral and descriptive term – appreciation for a
work of art can be a matter of taste – ethics can operate the same way.
Leopold’s example:
“Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew
hung on every
lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands...do
economists know about lupines?”
“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the
community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the
land.”- Aldo Leopold
Published in 1949 as the finale to A Sand country Almanac,
Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ defined a new relationship between people and
nature and set the stage for the modern conservation movement.
Leopold understood that ethics direct individuals to
cooperate with each other for the mutual benefit of all. One of his
philosophical achievements was the idea that this ‘community’ should be
enlarged to include non-human elements such as soils, waters, plants, and
animals, “or collectively the land
“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology,
but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”
This recognition, according to Leopold, implies individuals
play an important role in protecting and preserving the health of this expanded
definition of a community.
“A land ethic, then, reflects the
existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction
of individual responsibility for the health of land.”
Central to Leopold’s philosophy is
the assertion to “quit thinking about decent land use as solely an economic
problem.” While recognizing the influence economics have on decisions,
Leopold understood that ultimately, our economic well being could not be
separated from the well being of our environment. Therefore, he believed it was
critical that people have a close personal connection to the land.
“We can be ethical only in relation to
something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”
(leopold, 1949)
Ethical Sequence Aldo Leopold's land ethic
Extension
of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological
evolution. Its sequence may be described in ecological as well as in
philosophic terns. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom action in
the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically is a differentiation of
social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The
thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to
evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls fees symbioses. Politics and
economics are advanced syrnbioses in which the original free-for-all
competition has been re placed, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an
ethical content.
The
complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increase with population density, and
with the efficiency of tools. It was simpler, for example, to define the
anti-social uses sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of bullet
and billboards in the age of motors.
The
first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals; the Mosaic Decalogue
is an example. Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual
and society. The Golden Rule tries to integrate the individual to society,
democracy to integrate social organization to the individual.
(leopold, Land ethics, 1948)
Land ethic based on different concepts
Economics based land ethic
This is a land ethic based wholly upon economic
self-interest. Leopold sees two flaws in this type of ethic. First, he argues
that most members of an ecosystem have no economic worth. For this reason, such
an ethic can ignore or even eliminate these members when they are actually
necessary for the health of the biotic community of the land. And second, it
tends to relegate conservation necessary for healthy ecosystems to the
Government and these tasks are too large and dispersed to be adequately
addressed by such an institution. This ties directly into the context within
which Leopold wrote Sand County Almanac.
For example, when the US Forest Service was founded
by Gifford Pinchot, the prevailing ethos was economic and utilitarian. Leopold
argued for an ecological approach, becoming one of the first to popularize this
term created by Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago during his
early 1900s research at the Indiana Dunes. Conservation became the preferred
term for the more anthropocentric model of resource management, while the
writing of Leopold and his inspiration, John Muir, led to the development of environmentalism
Such
a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the lures and distortions
of personal experience and personal bias. But wherever the truth may lie, this
much is crystal-clear; our bigger-and-better society is now like a
hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity
to remain healthy…Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little
healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
One
basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is
that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wild-flowers
and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to
Wisconsin, it is doubtful weather more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten,
or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic
community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they
are entitled to continuance.
(Leopold, 1948)
Utilitarian based land ethic
Utilitarianism
was first put forth by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Though there are
many varieties of utilitarianism, generally it is the view that a morally right
action is an action that produces the maximum good for people. Utilitarianism
has often been used when deciding how to use land and it is closely connected
with an economic based ethic. For example, it forms the foundation for
industrial farming; as an increase in yield, which would increase the number of
people able to receive goods from farmed land, is judged from this view to be a
good action or approach. In fact, a common argument in favor of industrial
agriculture is this it is a good practice because it increases the benefits for
humans; benefits such as food abundance and a drop in food prices. However, a
utilitarian based land ethic is different from a purely economic one as it
could be used to justify the limiting of a person's rights to make profit. For
example, in the case of the farmer planting crops on a slope, if the runoff of
soil into the community creek led to the damage of several neighbor's
properties, then the good of the individual farmer would be overridden by the
damage caused to his neighbors. Thus, while a utilitarian based land ethic can
be used to support economic activity, it can also be used to challenge this activity.
Actions
which result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people Promote efficiency
by comparing actions of Our judgments are universalizations (Van DeVeer, 1998).
An example is the laws passed that “try to please everyone…” which result in
confusion. The first doctrine evaluates options based on whether their
consequences produce happiness or unhappiness. That is, we judge what actions
give us the most happiness with the least pain -- the utilitarian calculus. We
sum the goods, positives and then the bads, negatives. Then subtract the
negatives from the positives. This result must have a net good for the action
to be considered right, however, this is not without weaknesses. A principal
weakness is that by concentrating on consequences in the interest of broad
human welfare, individual human rights can be trampled. Another weak point to
this theory is, that in order to properly maximize happiness, we need to have a
way to quantify the amount of happiness produced by an act and a way to compare
those results with the happiness produced by other possible acts (Griffin,
1998). "How do we measure pleasure?” We connect enjoyment with preference
fulfillment and associate this with the capacity to purchase those preferences
in the marketplace. Measuring the fulfillment by the dollar amount used
obtaining the preferences. In addition, the defining of happiness may be
impossible.
(Griffin, 1998)
Libertarian based land ethic
Marshall’s Libertarian extension
echoes a civil liberty approach (i.e. a commitment to extend equal rights to
all members of a community). In environmentalism, though, the community is
generally thought to consist of non-humans as well as humans.
Andrew Brennan was an advocate of
ecologic humanism (eco-humanism), the argument that all
Ontological entities, animate and
in-animate, can be given ethical worth purely on the basis that they exist. The
work of Arne Naess and his collaborator Sessions also falls under the
libertarian extension, although they preferred the term "deep
ecology." Deep ecology is the argument for the intrinsic value or inherent
worth of the environment the view that it is valuable in itself. Their
argument, incidentally, falls under both the libertarian extension and the
ecologic extension.
Peter Singer's work can be
categorized under Marshall's 'libertarian extension'. He reasoned that
the" expanding circle of moral worth" should be redrawn to include
the rights of non-human animals, and to not do so would be guilty of
specialism. Singer found it difficult to accept the argument from intrinsic
worth of a-biotic or "non-sentient" (non-conscious) entities, and
concluded in his first edition of "Practical Ethics" that they should
not be included in the expanding circle of moral worth.
This approach is essentially then,
bio-centric. However, in a later edition of "Practical Ethics" after
the work of Naess and Sessions, Singer admits that, although unconvinced by
deep ecology, the argument from intrinsic value of non-sentient entities is plausible,
but at best problematic.
(http://www.drze.de/BELIT?la=en-)
Egalitarian based land ethic
Egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy.
An egalitarian favors equality of some sort: People should get the same, or be
treated the same, or be treated as equals, in some respect. An alternative view
expands on this last-mentioned option: People should be treated as equals,
should treat one another as equals, should relate as equals, or enjoy an
equality of social status of some sort. Egalitarian doctrines tend to rest on a
background idea that all human persons are equal in fundamental worth or moral
status. So far as the Western European and Anglo-American philosophical
tradition is concerned, one significant source of this thought is the Christian
notion that God loves all human souls equally. Egalitarianism is a protean
doctrine, because there are several different types of equality, or ways in
which people might be treated the same, or might relate as equals, that might
be thought desirable. In modern democratic societies, the term “egalitarian” is
often used to refer to a position that favors, for any of a wide array of
reasons, a greater degree of equality of income and wealth across persons than
currently exists.
Egalitarianism is a contested concept in social and political
thought. One might care about human equality in many ways, for many reasons. As
currently used, the label “egalitarian” does not necessarily indicate that the
doctrine so called holds that it is desirable that people's condition be made
the same in any respect or that people ought to be treated the same in any
respect. An egalitarian might rather be one who maintains that people ought to
be treated as equals—as possessing equal fundamental worth and dignity and as
equally morally considerable. In this sense, a sample non-egalitarian would be
one who believes that people born into a higher social caste, or a favored race
or ethnicity, or with an above-average stock of traits deemed desirable, ought
somehow to count for more than others in calculations that determine what
morally ought to be done. (On the thought that the core egalitarian ideal is
treating people as equals, see Dworkin 2000.) Further norms of equality of
condition or treatment might be viewed as free-standing or derived from the
claim of equality of status. Controversy also swirls around attempts to specify
the class of beings to whom egalitarian norms apply. Some might count all and
only human beings as entitled to equality of status. Some would hold that all
and only persons have equal moral status, with the criteria of personhood
excluding some humans from qualifying (e.g., the unborn fetus or severely
demented adult human) and including some nonhumans (e.g., intelligent beings
inhabiting regions of outer space beyond Earth). Some would hold that sentient
beings such as nonhuman primates that do not satisfy criteria of personhood are
entitled to equal moral status along with persons..
(N.Zalta, Fri Aug 16, 2002;)
Ecologically based land ethic
In
addition to economic, utilitarian, libertarian, and egalitarian based land
ethics, there are also land ethics based upon the principle that the land (and
the organisms that live off the land) has intrinsic value. These ethics are,
roughly, coming out of an ecological or systems view. This position was first
put forth by Ayers Brinser in Our Use of the Land, published in 1939. Brinser
argued that white settlers brought with them "the seeds of a civilization
which has grown by consuming the land, that is, a civilization which has used
up the land in much the same way that a furnace burns coal.” Later, Aldo
Leopold's posthumously published Sand County Almanac popularized this idea. Two
other examples include James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis which postulates that
the Earth is an organism and the deep ecology view which argues that human
communities are built upon a foundation of the surrounding ecosystems or the
biotic communities. Similar to egalitarian based land ethics, the above land
ethics were also developed as alternatives to utilitarian and libertarian based
approaches. Leopold's ethic is currently one of the most popular ecological
approaches. Other writers and theorists who hold this view include Wendell
Berry (b. 1934), J. Baird Callicott, Paul B. Thompson, and Barbara Kingsolver.
Ecology
focused on two features of special significance to ecofeminist philosophy. The
first is deep ecology's criticism of canonical Western philosophy for its anthropocentric
(human-centered) thinking about human-nature relationships. The second is the
notion of the self that is described by deep ecology's basic “principle of
self-realization”. Both features are critiqued by Val Plum wood, one of the
pioneers of ecofeminist philosophy (Plumwood 1993). Her critique is summarized
here since it provides insight into some basic claims of ecofeminist
philosophy.
According
to deep ecology, canonical Western philosophy's unacceptable anthropocentrism
is rooted in several problematic value dualisms, including the “culture versus
nature” dualism. Plum wood argues that deep ecology's criticism of
anthropocentrism fails to see that canonical philosophy's anthropocentrism
has functioned historically as anthropocentrism (male-centered thinking).
She claims that its failure to see this leads deep ecologists to make two false
assumptions—that one can disentangle anthropocentrism and anthropocentrism as
distinct and separate ways of thinking, and that one can critique the “culture
versus nature” dualism without providing a gendered analysis of how this
dualism has functioned historically to “justify” the dominations of women and
nature.
(Warren, 1948)
References
Griffin. (1998). utalitarism.
http://www.drze.de/BELIT?la=en-.
leopold, A. (1948). Land
ethics.
Leopold, A. (1948). Land
ethics.
leopold, A. (1949). land
ethics.
N.Zalta, E. (Fri Aug
16, 2002;). egalitarinism.
Warren, K. J. (1948). deep
ecology.
