Value and Nature Part 2

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Value and NaturePart 2

• Extending Ethics to the Environment

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The Moral CommunityThe Anthropocentric View
Non-humans.
X
X
Humans
X
X
X
X
X
Humans are intrinsically valuable. Other beings
are extrinsically valuable or valuable because of
their value to humans.
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The Moral CommunityThe Sentientist View
Non-sentient beings.
X
X
Sentient beings
X
X
X
X
X
Beings that are sentient (those with a
devleoped psychological capacitites which enable
them to feel pleasure and pain and/or to
experience life as subjects) have intrinsic
value. They are morally considerable.
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The Moral CommunityThe Biocentric View
Non-living things.
X
X
All living things.
X
X
X
X
X
All living beings are teleological systems, and
can thus be benefited or harmed. All benefit or
harm must be taken into consideration in moral
deliberation.
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Key Questions and Pointsfor understanding the
debate

• What beings are valuable in themselves?
• Why?
• Important point our criterion for drawing the
  line between those inside and those outside must
  be relevant.
• Second point the criterion, many would argue,
  must be applied to individual beings, not to
  species as a whole.

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Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethicfrom A Sand County
Almanac, 1949.

• 1. The Ethical sequence. Ethics has evolved from
  a matter of relations between individuals, to a
  matter of the relation between individuals and
  society. It must now evolve to cover humankind's
  "relation to land and to the animals and plants
  which grow upon it." (Amstrong and Botzler, 3rd,
  374)

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Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethicfrom A Sand County
Almanac, 1949.

• 2. Life consists of 'biota' or 'biotic
  communities'. Ecology is showing us that we are
  not independent individuals, but members of a
  community.

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Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethicfrom A Sand County
Almanac, 1949.

• 3. The need is for an 'ecological conscience'.
  Leopold criticizes approaches which are based
  merely on economics, or government. He is
  calling for something more personal and
  fundamental than new government programs.
  Calling for a growth of love for the land.
• (See page 377, top left, first full paragraph,
  also 377-8.)

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Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethicfrom A Sand County
Almanac, 1949.

• 4. Land" is not merely soil, nor a commodity,
  but the whole "biotic pyramid which "is a tangle
  of chains so complex as to seem disorderly, yet
  the stability of the system proves it to be a
  highly organized structure. (379) It's
  functioning depends on the cooperation and
  competition of its diverse parts." (See 378-380,
  for example 379, top left, second and third
  paragraphs.)

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Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethicfrom A Sand County
Almanac, 1949.

• The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of
  the community to include soils, waters, plants,
  and animals, or collectively the land.
• (Amstrong and Botzler, 3rd, 375)

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The Land Ethic Principle

• Aldo Leopold A thing is right when it tends to
  preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of
  the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends
  otherwise. From The Land Ethic, in A Sand
  County Almanac.
• Challenge How do we evaluate integrity,
  stability and beauty?

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Callicotts Insight on the Land EthicAldo
Leopolds Concept of Ecosystem Health.

• Challenge How do we evaluate integrity,
  stability and beauty?
• J. Baird Callicot suggests we use the metaphor of
  land health.
• Health is an objective state and is also
  intrinsically valuable (valuable in itself).
• Health is not static but dynamic, growing,
  changing.
• Land health can be seen as a lands capacity for
  self-renewal or self-maintenance and
  self-regeneration (autopoiesis).

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Callicotts Insight on the Land EthicAldo
Leopolds Concept of Ecosystem Health.

• Land Health What it is not.
• It is not species diversity alone.
• It is not pristine wilderness. (Keeping nature
  the way it has always been. This does not
  recognize the changes nature and native peoples
  have always made through history.)
• Not the health of a single holistic land
  organism, but of a whole community of organisms.

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Callicotts Insight on the Land EthicAldo
Leopolds Concept of Ecosystem Health.

• We easily recognize symptoms of land sickness.
• Soil erosion, sudden death of species, soil
  infertility, qualitative deterioration of farm
  and forest products, outbreaks of pests, disease
  epidemics, boom and bust wildlife population
  cycles. (389)
• Ecology must still develop good positive
  indicators of land health.
• Not identical to keeping things they same, even
  nature changes ecosystems over time.
• Does not imply humans shouldnt change land, but
  we must learn how to change land in ways that
  maintains its health.
• Indeed, the practical raison detre for a
  science of land health is precisely to determine
  the ecologic parameters within which land may be
  humanly occupied without making it dysfunctional.
  . . J. (Baird Callicot, in Armstrong and
  Botzler, 3rd edition, page 388).

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Ecocentrism

• Aldo Leopold thing is right when it tends to
  preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of
  the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends
  otherwise. From The Land Ethic, in A Sand
  County Almanac.
• Extends ethics not just to living things, but to
  all members of the biotic community, including
  soil, rivers, etc.
• Shift from the intrinsic value of individual
  beings to the intrinsic value of entire
  ecosystems (biotic communities). (Shift from
  individualistic ethics to holistic ethics).
• Individual things are (instrumentally?) valuable
  according to the role they play in the entire
  ecosystem.

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A Holistic View of Environmental Value
The Biotic Community or Ecosystem as a whole
is valuable. Humans, plants, animals, soil,
rivers, etc. are all valuable as part of this
valuable whole.
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Some Unresolved Questions for the Land Ethic

• Do individuals have any value in themselves? If
  so, are they all equally valuable (humans, poison
  ivy plants, deer)? (In other words is holistic
  value the only factor in ethics or is holistic
  value added to individual value in the Land
  Ethic?)
• Do species have a biotic right to exist?
  (Leopold suggests they do on p. 377. What does
  this mean? Is this in addition to their value to
  the community?)
• What place do humans have? Do they have any
  unique or special value? Are they simply another
  part of the biotic community?
• How do we factor beauty into the Land Ethic?
  What part does this play in Leopolds theory?

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Approaches to Environmental Ethics

• Individualistic
• Anthropocentrism Humans are intrinsically
  valuable (members of the moral community). Other
  things in the environment are valuable because
  they are important to humans.
• Sentientism All beings that have the capacity to
  feel pleasure and pain (Singer)/the ability to
  experience life as a subject (Regan) are
  intrinsically valuable, and must be considered
  for their own good, not just human good. Thus
  higher animals have moral considerability/
  inherent worth.
• Biocentrism All living beings are instrisically
  valuable they are valuable in themselves, with
  their own benefits or harms, since they are
  systems with goals (teleological systems). The
  benefits and harms of all living things must be
  considered morally.
• Holistic
• Ecocentrism Value resides in ecological
  communities or systems. Individual things are
  valuable according to the value they have to the
  health, integrity and beauty of the system as a
  whole.