Liberal Debutante

In 1992 countries met at the Earth Summit
to crack a strategy for dealing with the environment. There was one issue that
was the ‘key’ issue which was not on the agenda at all… population growth. It
was left off because the Vatican and various Muslim countries didn’t want it on the agenda.

There is controversy to what extent growing
population is the cause of environmental degradation. Economic growth is
arguably more of a threat than population growth in itself.

Nevertheless it is true that population
growth has boomed. 2000 years ago, 200 million people lived here. 200 years
ago, it was at 1 billion. By 1950 it was at 2.5 billion. By 1990 it doubled.
1990’s another 1 billion net increased occurred. It’s predicted that by 2020
there will be about 8.5 billion, by 2050 there will be about 10 billion people
on the planet and should level off between 11 and 14 billion around 2100.

Why will it level off? Part of the reasons
is that there are limited resources which could bring about a crash or
something like that, but the rate of replacement will decrease by this time. As
people become more educated and as there are more social services, and with
women’s rights and birth control increase there will be dramatic decreases of
the birth rate.

Even in developing countries the birth rate
is already decreasing, but even so there are still billions of people that are
under reproduction age, and they won’t start reproducing for a few years, so even
with the decrease of the population birth rate, there will still be a shoot up
before the number levels off.

The controversy is progressively becoming
less controversial as we can see that carbon levels have dramatically increased
as the population dramatically increases. Also, logic says the more people
there are – the more resources we’re going to use.

What are our obligations to the environment
then? Animals share certain characteristics with human beings in particular
they are conscious. They have desires and such therefore we ought to apply some
level of moral standards that we apply to humans. But what then of all those
elements that are not sentient? The rational dividing line was always the
ability to suffer. If you can’t suffer then you have no interests to take into
account. But there have been various environmental ethicise that say we need to
expand our obligation to the non-sentient world.

Rachel Carson opened us up to the
scientific side with Silent Spring, where Aldo Leopold looked at the philosophical
side. His book Sand County Almanac came out in 1949, around the time he died
and in it Leopold argues that we have to expand the circle of moral considered
to the biosphere or ‘the land’ as he refers to it. An ethic ecologically is an
ethic as it pertains to consciously putting limits on our behaviour. We ought
not to kill each other; we limit that behaviour within ourselves. He suggests
that we need to extend these ethics to include the ecosystems as these also
struggle for life. This extension of ethics is an evolutionary possibility and
an ecological necessity.

It is also something that advances our own
possibilities of survival. Leopold sees the extension of moral obligations to
the ecosystems is in line with our moral obligation to evolution. It is also an
ecological necessity because of the impact we’re having on the natural
environment. The land ethic enlarges our community to include soils, waters,
plant, animals and particularly communities of creatures. He says that the land
ethic requires a psychological shift from the idea that we are conquerors of
the land to the fact that we are just citizens of the biotic community. We are
parts of the evolutionary ecosystems, therefore just as the way to treat other
human beings to respect them, we must respect other aspects of the natural
world. The economic system, as presented by Max Baxter, is invested in self
interest and is thus lopsided, it tends to ignore and thus eliminate anything
that lacks commercial value. It assumes falsely that economic parts will
function the same as the non-economic parts, it is all necessary for the
functioning of a whole.

It is not good enough to leave this up to
governments, Leopold argues. It is something that we all have to take on as a
personal responsibility. We have to internalize this ethic, and understand the
capacities of ecosystems. Therefore his key line is “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”.

Now, this in a moment’s reflection will
show that this is a holistic environmental ethics. It is not focused on the
intrinsic values of individuals, it is not a Kantian ethic in that sense, and
it focuses on the health of eco-systems. It is in some sense, akin to
utilitarianism, as it promotes the health of the whole; however that health has
nothing to do with experiencing happiness. Basically Leopold asks us to simply
stop thinking of the environment in purely economic terms. This anthropocentric
approach, however, is more realistic because this is how people think.

So is the land ethic realistic? Or
hopelessly idealistic?

Ones own self interest is to have clean
water, not to have clean water for the bees and the pine trees. People will
rarely do the right thing, unless they see a direct benefit in it for
themselves. In some sense there no real big difference between Baxter and
Leopold. The basic line comes down to conservation for the benefits. If you use
Baxter’s argument, you’ll be more likely to fulfill Leopold’s bottom line.

Leopold’s bottom line does raise some
challenging and perplexing questions…

Doesn’t nature evolve with constant change?
Why is it good to preserve stability? And what is beauty? Is a desert as
beautiful as a horse? In regards to animals such as the Pere David deer, do we
have an obligation to reintroduce these species back into the environment? What
if humans hunted zebra for their pretty stripes, would it then be wrong if we
can genetically engineer them to have no stripes to stop the hunting? We’re not
preserving the beauty, but we’re still preserving the animal.

J. Baird Callicott of the University of North Texas takes on the task of defending the land ethic. What’s surprising is that UNT is a hotbed for environmental philosophy. The journal of environmental ethics is
published here and has attracted many environmental philosophers, to

Collicott has written extensively on
environmental ethics, particularly defending the land ethic. He points to the
fact that generally speaking the study of morality has been seen as uniquely
human. It has set us apart from the rest of nature. What gives us the capacity
to be moral creatures is reason. This is like Kant; who, as we know, argued
that our ability to be moral rational agents set us apart from the rest of
animals. The general idea is that humans are moral beings and this gives us a
special worth in the world. And our language is also something that sets us
apart; we can hold one another accountable and live by moral principles.
(Sorry, I have to say it… Raptors had the ability to reason and communicate and
were probably smarter than humans…)

Collicott later pulls on Darwin. One idea of morality is that it came
from god; god gave us the difference between right and wrong. However
supernatural explanations are literally nothing, the purple unicorn in the
corner can’t vouch for your theory. Collicott makes the point that reason seems
to depend on language, and that language would not have developed apart from
humans living in society. So if reason can not evolve without linguistics and
linguistics could not have happened without being social beings, in order to be
these social beings we must have had limitations on our actions, before being
these rational moral agents. Being social beings, we already have ethical
limitations on our behaviour. If reason depends on being social and being
social depends on having limitations it can’t be the case that reason gave rise
to morality. Hence we must have become ethical before we became rational.

This is where Darwin comes in. Darwin, like Hume and Smith (*shudders* I
detest Adam Smith, I have read waaaay too much of his stuff), argue that ethics
rest on feelings or sentiments. The basis of our systems and notions of reality
is sentiment, it is built within us. We have a natural disposition to apply the
golden rule and empathize with others in their suffering and their well being.
This sentiment with other people is the basis of morality. This is then
informed by reason. Darwin takes this and argues that morality is to be found in many animals that are
social by nature. Whether they be crows or lions, animals that live together in
families or groups develop a sense of well being for others – it is naturally
selected for.

We all sort of know Darwin’s basic idea of evolution but, I’ll
just do a quick reminder – any species, different individuals have different
characteristics, he noted that in any population there is an excess of those
born or produced than what survive. The question is then, which are likely to
survive? The ones that have a characteristic that gives them an advantage in
their particular environment. The individuals which are better adapted are more
likely to pass on those characteristics to the offspring which will ultimate produce
a ‘better fit’ population in the future.

For animals that live in groups, coming to
one anothers aid gives the individuals a better chance for survival, so that
mutual aid and sentimental attachment to one another is selected for by nature.
The origins of ethics is not with human reason, it starts before humans become
humans. It can be found today in crows or bunnies.

Darwin’s account begins with the affections between parent and children
common to perhaps all mammals. Darwin does not say that hyenas have the same level of morality of humans, but the difference between humans and non-humans is in a degree.

Collicott takes all this and says that
Leopold’s land ethic’s basis is a Copernican cosmology, in other words, we are
not at the centre at the universe. He tries to argue that the land ethic of
Leopold is in line with evolution, particularly in line with the evolution of
morality. We are one species on the earth, which is one planet, which is in one
solar system, which is in one universe…of many universes. The extension beyond
human concern is rooted in the natural history of ethics. The logic of the land
ethic is that natural selection has equipped us with an effective moral
response to identity. The land is a community, so a land ethic is not only
possible, but is also necessary because we have developed the ability to
destroy the integrity of it.

This then indicates that Singer and
Reagan’s previous arguments toward animal rights are inadequate. The boundaries
of the moral communities in cahoots with sentience do not take into account the
interaction with the non-sentient world. Ethics like those of Singer or Reagan
are based on extending the egotistical concern for ones self. The contemporary
animal liberation rights and ethics of the kind in Singer and Reagan extend the
classical paradigm of Kant and Bentham and extend it to non-human beings.

But
this standard is too traditional, and bases too much consideration on modern
capacities. This provides no moral consideration for holes, and ecosystems.
Species do have interests as species. Endangered species, the biosphere of its
totality, ecosystems and holes having no psychological experience, it doesn’t
suffer or reason so it has no mental capacity thus we can’t deal with our
obligations to the natural environment based on these ethics. Nature is not
amoral, intelligent moral behaviour is natural. 

We are not rational beings in spite of, but
in accordance with nature.

So is the land ethic deontological? Or
credential? It is both, self consistently both. It applies to someone who has
absorbed the ethical view of nature and will internalize this attitude. The
land ethic is a set of principles to follow because it is moral. From the
objective and analytic point of view, there is no other way for land to survive
with man acting irresponsibly, and no way for man to survive without the land.
It is a categorical imperative. It is a moral principle to be obeyed, and it is
in our best self interest to obey it.

I apologize if you read all that thinking I
would have some grand conclusion, but I don’t. That’s it. I do however, realize now that I’ve finished typing all that out, that it is longer than the essay I should have written instead