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MORAL PLURALISM, NONSENTIENT NATURE,
AND SUSTAINABLE WAYS OF LIFE

By
Bruce Keith Omundson

. A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Philosophy

1992

(“47“(6’27

ABSTRACT
MORAL PLURALISM, NONSENTIENT NATURE,
AND SUSTAINABLE WAYS OF LIFE
By
Bruce Keith Omundson

Ecologist Aldo Leopold called for a land ethic in which the entire ”biotic
community" has direct moral consideration. A major philosophic barrier to a land ethic
is the interest principle, the notion that only sentient beings have interests whose loss
could be a moral harm to them. Although strict adherents cannot be argued out the
interest principle, a morally pluralistic position based on sustainable ways of life is a
viable way to counter and transcend it.

Recent major approaches to a land ethic are examined. Monistic positions include

I. Baird Callioott’s evolutionary altruism and inherent value of nature, Holmes Rolston

III’s natural value of projective (evolutionary) nature, and Paul W. Taylor’s respect for

nature. Pluralistic approaches include Christopher D. Stone’s mapping of moral planes,
Eugene C. Hargrove’s natural aesthetics, and Jim Cheney’s postmodern bioregionalism.
Arne Naess’s deep ecology is treated as a borderline case.

I claim that Stuart Hampshire’s notion of a way of life, the holistic and
interdependent complex of personal commitments and practices which deﬁne and make
meaningful an individual’s existence, provides a grounding for moral intuitions that
nonsentient nature is itself morally considerable. If one values a way of life, one will
want it to be sustainable for future generations; this requires a recognition of one’s
dependence on nature and how nature both limits and gives positive deﬁnition to one’s
way of life. The position is exempliﬁed by the works of Wendell Berry and his analogy
between marriage and the farmer’s relationship to the land.

Giving moral primacy to sustainable ways of life would allow Stone to counter
criticisms that his pluralism (1) merely assumes nonsentient entities are morally
signiﬁcant, and (2) provides no way for deciding cases of moral conﬂict. The variety of
gestalts valued in a sustainable way of life meets the ﬁrst criticism. Stone’s suggestions
of lexically ordering and overlapping moral planes can be supplemented by Martin

Benjamin’s notion of integrity preserving compromise to meet the second.

Copyright by
BRUCE KEITH OMUNDSON
1992

For Floyd and Marty whom I love as parents

and respect as human beings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many without whose support and encouragement this dissertation would
never have been written. A few require special mention.

I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee who have been
generous with their time, helpful in their suggestions, and from whom I have learned
much about the craft of philosophy: Professors Martin Benjamin, Frederick H. Gifford,
Bruce L. Miller, and Winston A. Wilkinson. Special thanks are due Professor Benjamin
for chairing the committee, for suggesting the core idea around which the dissertation
crystallized, and for constantly providing enthusiasm for the project. Many and long
discussions with Professor Wilkinson have always been illuminating, amusing, and ftm.

Professors Holmes Rolston III and Bernard E. Rollin of the Philosophy
Department at Colorado State University introduced me to environmental and animal
ethics respectively during my sabbatical leave of 1985. They showed me how
philosophers can raise social awareness and make a practical difference in the affairs of
the world. They were a primary motivation for pursuing a Ph.D. Along with Professor
J. Baird Callicott of the Philosophy Department at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens
POint, they have provided help and inspiration in developing my ideas.

Professor Wm. Blake Tyrrell of the Romance and Classical Languages Department
at Michigan State University and Mr. Larry Joe Bennett not only kept me intellectually
alive during a long exile from philosophy, but also changed my outlook on pluralism
With their work on textual interpretation in Greek mythology. Mr. Bennett’s wizardry

With the occult powers of computers has rescued me from folly whenever I played

Somerer’s apprentice.

Ms. Kathleen F. Duke, Executive Editor, has granted me permission to use parts of
my article, 'lealism and Prospects for a Land Ethic," which appeared in the Michigan
Academician, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1991), pp. 191-200, in Chapter 4 of the dissertation.

Dr. John R. Watson’s knowledge of wildlife, his observations on values, and his
deadly aim in debate have been of incalculable beneﬁt. Field studies with Dr. Watson
have taught me much about animal behavior. Ms. Ann Watson has supplied a keen
feminist perspective with extraordinary tolerance and good humor.

As cohorts in the role of graduate student Dr. Harold F. Gamble, Ms. Betina Henig,
and Mr. Michael J ankoviak have been especially supportive morally and intellectually
with their many hours of philosophical and environmental discussion. Mr. Jankoviak’s
own work in environmental ethics has widened my awareness and deepened my
appreciation for the ways in which the issues can be understood and addressed.

Two mentors from my undergraduate days at Luther College, Professors Earl J.
Leland and Harland Nelson, have supplied material on Wendell Berry and sustainable
agriculture. More importantly, they have modeled for me and many other students the
kind of values and inter-generational work which Berry celebrates.

Mr. Jeffrey S. Gustafson represents a new generation whose love of nature and
environmental concern serve as a reminder of Berry’s insight that meaningful work
cannot serve petty ends.

Ms. Lois R. Baumer has given me the personal focus and support to pursue this
long project. She has improved the text with her questions and her stylistic and
proofreading skills. Her willingness to share the joys and frustrations of this odyssey

are the generosity of a true friend.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SEARCI-IFORALANDETHIC .............................. p. 1
Environmental Philosophy .......................................................... . p. 1
The Land Ethic..- - ........ -- ......... p. 4
Monism, Pluralism, and Sustainable
Ways of Life ......................................................................... p. 5
CHAPTER 1: MONISTIC APPROACHES TO A LAND ETHIC ........... . p. 11
INTRODUCTION ...... p. 11
Monistic Ethical systems---.-- -- . ..... . p. 11
CALLICO’I'I"S LAND ETHIC - __ .............. p. 14
Ethics and Community ___________________ . p. 14
Ethical Subjectivism and Evolutionary
Altruism ...... ..................... p. 15
Difﬁculties for Callicott--- ........... . p. 19
ROLSTON AND NATURAL VALUE ............. p. 23
Natural Value ...................... - . p. 23
Method and S le.. ............................... . p. 25
Nature and Cu ture ............... p. 29
Difﬁculties for Rolston ....... p. 31
TAYLOR AND RESPECT FOR NATURE . 35
Goods and Inherent Worth..- p. 35
Respect for Nature ...... . 38
Integrating RFN and Human Ethics p. 39
Difﬁculties for Taylor ..... p. 40
CONCLUSION - ..... p, 47
Burdens of a Land Ethic ..... p. 47
CHAPTER 2. PLURALIS'TIC APPROACHES TO A LAND ETHIC. ..... p. 49
INTRODUCTION ...... . p. 49
Pluralistic Ethical Systems ...... p. 49
STONE AND MORAL PLANES ....... p. 52
From Monism to Pluralism ............... p. 52
Maps and Moral Planes p. 53
Textural Variables p. 57
Decision Making and Conﬂict Resolution p. 59
Difﬁculties for Stone ............... u p. 62
HARGROVE AND POSITIVE AESTHETICSM p. 68
Anthropocenuic Intrinsic Value _ p. 68
Positive Aesthetics - ..... p. 69
Plurali_sm - ...... p. 72
Difﬁculties for Hargrove p. 73
CHENEY AND POSTMODERN BIOREGIONALISM- p. 76
Postmodernism and Privileged Discourse p. 76

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

language and World -- ........ - - .......... . p. 77
Bioregions and Mythic Narratives .............................................. ..p 80
Difﬁculties for Cheney ................................................................ ..p 82
CONCLUSION - - - - -- -- . p. 87
Alienation and Integration...............................- ...... . p. 87
CHAPTER 3: DEEP ECOLOGY ................................................................ p. 88
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... . p. 88
Ecology and Moral Philosophy ................................................... . p. 88

NAESS AND ECOSOPHY -- - ........... p. 91

The Primacy of Ontology -- - ........ . p. 91

The Deep Ecology Platform ........................................................ . p. 95
Difﬁculties for Naess .................................................................. . p. 99
CONCLUSION -- - - p.101
Deep Ecology and Ways of Life ................................................. . p.101
CHAPTER 4: SUSTAINABLE WAYS OF LIFE PLURALISM ............. . p.104
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... . p.104
Grounding a land Ethic .............................................................. . p.104

WAYS OF LIFE. .................................................................................. p.107
Identity, Liminality, and Ways of Life ......................................... p.107

Marriage and LanCL... -- -- - - -- - p. 115

Work -- - ...... - -- . p. 118
SUSTAINABILITY ............................................................................ . p. 126

A Moral Argument. ..................................................................... . p.126
Biological and Cultural Carrying Capacity ................................. . p. 131

Further Constraints. .................................................. ~. .................. . p.138
CONCLUSION - - - ..... - - p.143

The Problem of "Seeing". -- - .................. p. 143
CHAPTERS: MORALPRIMACYANDALANDETHIC .................... . p.146
INTRODUCTION-" -- - - - ----------------- - -- p. 146
Problems with Planes ........................ p. 146
PLANES AND MORAL STANDING p.148
Moral Intuitions and Perspicuitym ----- p. 148
RESOLVING PLANAR CONFLICT- p.151

The Hierarchy Method- ---------------- p.151

The Map Overlap Method .154

Integrity Preserving Compromise .156
CONCLUSION-- ..................... .164
The Primacy of Sustainable ways of Life p.164
EPILOGUE--- .................... p.166
NOTES - ______ p.168
BIBLIOGRAPHY -- -- - -- -- p.177

INTRODUCTION:
ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE SEARCH FOR A LAND ETHIC

Environmental Philosophy

As an academic discipline environmental philosophy is scarcely two decades old.
It grew out of the widespread concerns of the 1960s about pollution, exhaustion of
nonrenewable resources, overpopulation, increasing rates of species extinctions, and
threats of irreversible damage to the earth’s life support capacity. The term
’environmental philosophy’ is quite broad, ranging from studies in philosophy of
biology to any ethical considerations dealing with the environment. I will use the term
loosely and interchangeably with ’environmental ethics’ which does not directly include
philosophy of biology. In speaking generally, I will freely substitute ’moral’ for
’ethical’ and vice versa. On occasions when I use ’moral’ with connotations of duties
owed or owing, while reserving ’ethical’ to refer to character development and style of
life, the context will, I hope, make the usageclear.

Philosophers who have taken up environmental issues have sorted themselves into
three main groups. The traditional humanists or anthropocentrists insist that only
human beings count morally, have direct moral standing, or are ethically considerable.
They see environmental ethics largely as an applied ﬁeld where traditional concepts and
distinctions are used to sift through new problems in which we have duties regarding
the nonhuman world to other human beings, but no duties directly to nonhumans.
According to this position, it would not be morally wrong to dump raw sewage into a
river because it kills the ﬁsh or degrades a natural watercourse. Rather, it would be
wrong because it ruins the sporting pleasures of the ﬁsherman, creates aesthetically

offensive conditions, or endangers the health of people downstream who drink the

water. Nature, including other animals, has no intrinsic value, but only instrumental

2

value as a resource for human use. The most that disciplines like evolutionary biology,
ecology, and sociobiology can contribute to traditional humanist ethics is to make us
more factually sophisticated about how our decisions will affect other human beings.
The second group consists of the humane moralists (following Callicott 1980)
sentientists or animal extensionists who extend the concepts used by the traditional
humanists in order to give moral consideration to nonhuman animals (hereafter:
animals) that share certain key ethical traits with humans.l Rather than claiming the
moral concepts of the traditional humanists are ﬂawed, the animal extensionists see the
problem as one of application. They attack the anthropocentrism of the humanists for
being arbitrary, inconsistent, and speciesist (on analogy with racist) in its refusal to
apply the principles evenhandedly by extending them equally to all sentient creatures
who possess the relevant ethical traits. The animal extensionists include both
utilitarians and deontologists.2 The utilitarians, who judge the tightness or wrongness
of an act on the net goodness of its consequences, argue for animals’ moral standing on
the basis of their ability to feel some degree of pleasure and pain (or satisfaction and
frustration); thus animal preferences must be included in calculations as to which action
will produce the best consequences, i.e., the greatest overall preference satisfaction,
happiness, or feeling of well-being. The deontologists argue that we have moral duties
to animals apart from any utilitarian consequences. Usually this is discussed in terms of
moral or natural rights which restrict what can be done to someone no matter how
much utility might be increased. The most common method employed by deontologists
is to argue from cases of marginal human beings and to insist that fairness or parity of
reasoning requires the same treatment and protection for animals. For example, if it is
not morally permissible to do away, however painlessly, with severely retarded humans
because they have a right to life, then nonrational animals (many of whom demonstrate
greater mental competence than severely retarded humans) must also have a right to life.

3

Whether for ease of parlance or from conceptual confusion, the utilitarian and
deontological extensionists are sometimes lumped together as ”animal rights”
philosophers. Generally, animal extensionists will regard new scientiﬁc information in
the same way as the traditional humanists.3 Duties regarding the environment are
extended to nonhumans, but nonsentient nature has no nonderivative moral standing. A
prime example of how nonsentient nature might be treated is Joel Feinberg’s suggestion
that wildlife preserves be protected from human development as the rightful property of
the animals who live there (Feinberg 1980, p. 198).

The third group of philosophers insist that nonsentient nature is, at least in some
forms, ethically considerable in its own right; I will refer to them generically as land
ethic philosophers.4 Subgroups include biocentric individualists who assert individual
plants, but not species, are loci of value; and biocentric or ecocentric holists who would
insist that species or ecosystems are not reducible to individuals or component parts,
and who would accept species or ecosystems themselves as loci of value. ..In this
position, humans not only owe moral duties to each other, and to (some) animals, but
they also owe moral duties directly to some form of nonsentient nature, whether
individual trees, or species, or ecosystems, or inclusively ”the land. "5 Most land ethic
philosophers have an holistic bent; in their view the moral concepts of traditional
humanism are fundamentally ﬂawed or severely limited because they rely on an
atomistic and reductionistic view of nature which ecology has shown to be false and
practice has shown to be disastrous. They instead look to evolutionary biology and
allied sciences (and sometimes even to subatomic physics) to critique traditional ethical
concepts and to supply us with new conceptual models. They see as arbitrary traditional
philosophical dichotomies of fact and value, is and ought, conceptual problems and
empirical problems.

The Land Ethic

The term ’land ethic’ was coined by forester and ecologist Aldo Leopold who
spent his early days with the U.S. Forest Service exterminating predators to increase
deer herds for sport hunting. The eventual result was habitat destruction and mass
starvation as the herd increased beyond the carrying capacity of the land. Leopold’s
reﬂections are found in A Sand County Almanac where he espouses an holistic ethic
based on the ecological web of life:

The ’key-log’ which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an
ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use solely as an economic
problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically
right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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 (Leopold 1970, p. 262).

Leopold’s holistic concern for the biotic community is at once understandable and

disturbing, for it sometimes requires sacriﬁcing the welfare or lives of sentient
individuals (like the deer) for the well being of nonsentient nature. _

The idea that nonsentient nature in certain cases should take moral precedence over
sentient individuals often has led to bitter disputes between land ethic philosophers and
animal extensionists.‘ The conceptual basis of these disputes is what Joel Feinberg calls
the interest principle. Of the minimal qualiﬁcations to be a holder of rights Feinberg
says:

A mere thing, however valuable to others, has no good of its own. The
explanation of that fact, I suspect, consists in the fact that more things have no
conative life: no conscious wishes, desires, and hopes; or urges and impulses; or
unconscious drives, aims, and goals; or latent tendencies, direction of growth
and natural fulﬁllments. Interests must be compounded somehow out of
conations; hence mere things have no interests. A fortiori, they have no interests
to be protected by legal or moral rules. Without interests a creature can have no
"good” of its own, the achievement of which can be its due. Mere things are not
loci of value in their own right, but rather their value consists entirely in their
being objects of other beings’ interests (Feinberg 1980, pp. 165-166).

Interests serve as the moral common denominator for both utilitarian and deontological

defenses of animals. They also serve both traditional humanists and animal

5

extensionists as the boundary of moral conceptual coherence beyond which one is
talking nonsense. In the case of Leopold’s deer problem, both groups might advocate
culling the herd, but it would be to save the habitat for human uses, or to minimize
animal suffering with a relatively quick death by hunting (whether humans or
reintroduced predators do the hunting) rather than a slow and agonizing death by
starvation. To these philosophers, saving the nonsentient habitat for its own sake is
nonsense because, having no interests, the habitat has no "sake of its own." land ethic
philosophers retort that conceptual terms like ’good’ and ’sake’ are deﬁned arbitrarily
and are narrowly legalistic in scope; one must consider actual situations, they claim,
rather than excluding nonsentient nature from moral standing by a verbal game of
stipulative deﬁnitions.

Monism. Pluralism. and Sustainable Ways of Life

The ﬁrst order of business for a land ethic is to ﬁnd a way to argue beyond the
psychocentrism of the interest principle. In the last decade, major positions have been
sketched for defending the moral signiﬁcance of nonsentient nature, and a split has
occurred between ethical monists and pluralists. The monists seek a single principle
under which to subsume and integrate all ethics whether dealing with rational beings,
sentient life, or nonsentient nature. The pluralists argue that no single principle can
handle the task, especially since the concepts of traditional ethics were developed to
relegate nonsentient nature to the status of instrumental value for rational or sentient
individuals. J. Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston, III, and Paul W. Taylor are pioneering
ﬁgures who defend monistic positions. Representative advocates of a plmalistic view
are Christopher D. Stone, Eugene C. Hargrove, and Jim Cheney? Ame Naess occupies
a middle ground in which his principle ’Self-realisation! ’ (the exclamation point being

Naess’s way of indicating an imperative) functions more like a Kantian regulative

6

concept guiding the individual toward-~but not dictating-a coherent system of ethical
decision making.
I begin by examining the comparative merits of the monistic positions on four key

points:

1. The method of arguing for the moral signiﬁcance of nonsentient nature.

2. The manner and degree to which the methodology depends conceptually on

the sciences.

3. The degree of holism and the kinds of entities encompassed.

4. The way in which each is integrated with mainstream or conventional ethics.
The analysis reveals serious shortcomings of the monistic positions because of: (1)
their speculative nature, (2) their attempts at a monolithic hierarchy for decision making
(which seems to be a fantasy even within the limits of traditional humanistic ethics), and
(3) their dependence on a gestalt switch or conceptual shift in which one comes to view
nature in a new and morally signiﬁcant way. I will refer to this last problem as the
problem of seeing, and claim it is endemic to any land ethic because such an ethic
requires crossing the barrier of the interest principle.

I turn then to pluralistic ways of arguing for the moral status of nonsentient nature.

The chief objection to moral pluralism is that it provides no means to settle disputes
between conﬂicting moral principles or values. Beyond that, each of the three versions
of pluralism suffers from its own speciﬁc limitations. Stone suggests that we treat
ethical principles as different kinds of moral maps depending on our purposes. Just as
we use topographical maps for some situations and road maps for others, so we might
invoke, for instance, utility to deal with animals but not to save rare plant species.
Where there are disagreements about which maps to use, an overlay of maps will often
reveal a common goal arrived at by different moral routes. Traditional humanists,
animal extensionists, and land ethic philosophers frequently agree as to what should be
done, though they justify it in radically different ways (as in the Leopold deer case cited

7

above). A major limitation of Stone’s position is the pseudo-pragmatic ease with which
differences can be papered over. A fundamental requirement for being a moral person
is acting from the right motives which in turn requires each moral agent to know
himself. Hargrove simply offers one reason for moral duties to nonsentient nature based
on an argument from positive aesthetics. In addition to the difﬁculties associated with
positive aesthetics, this provides little guidance in making hard choices between
aesthetic preservation and critical human or animal interests. Cheney argues for
'bioregional narrative" based on the "contextual languages" of whatever group is
establishing some kind of moral relationship with nature. Here, mythmaking may
preclude science and create two major problems: (1) the group’s concerns may contort
the moral and ontological status of nature, and (2) many environmental problems which
have collective and cumulative effects--for instance, global warming--may remain
invisible because they can only be perceived and understood with a combination of high
level scientiﬁc theory, sophisticated models, and statistical analysis.

Arne Naess’s view of deep ecology can be seen either as monistic in its attempt to
create a pyramid of norms or pluralistic in the need for each individual work out such a
pyramid based on his own experience. Naess’s primary ontology of simultaneously
. cognitive and affective gestalts bridges the gap between facts and values; his relational
view of self to milieux bridges the gap between the individual as ego-center and the
world as something foreign. Both gestalts and the relational view of self will become
important in understanding how a way of life may include nonsentient nature and give it
direct moral standing. Naess’s ultimate norm ’Self-realisation! ’ as an expression of the
total unity of Self and Nature, however, is destructive of the delicate balance which
must be maintained to avoid one extreme of total annihilation by absorption into the
other and the opposite extreme of total alienation from the other.

I conclude that the goals of these various forms of pluralism can be better achieved

by adding a sustainability factor to Stuart Hampshire’s notion of a way of life, the

8

holistic and interdependent complex of personal commitments and practices that give
deﬁnition and meaning to an individual’s existence. Internally, a way of life is
regulated by the requirement that an individual achieve as much overall coherence as
possible in his commitments. He must have an integrated life that is ”of a piece" rather
than a fragmented existence. Externally, Hampshire safeguards a way of life from
becoming degenerately ethnocentric through his side constraint of a thin concept of
justice augmented by considerations of utility.

If one is committed to a way of life, I argue, then one will want it to continue. To
have it continue requires that it be sustainable-and, observing Hampshire’s notion of
justice-without undue infringement on other ways of life. Sustainability requires
knowledge of environmental limits, but the commitment to a way of life also suggests
an appreciation for and dedication to the natural environment for the manner in which it
makes one’s particular way of life possible. The resultant position I call sustainable
ways of life pluralism. It is explicated and ﬂeshed in through the paradigm ‘of the
relationship of the farmer to his land and the mutually reinforcing relationships of
people, land, and community which are found in the novels and essays of Wendell
Berry.

I maintain that the chief objection against pluralism, namely that it cannot settle
moral disputes between different ethieal principles, may also be raised against monistic
systems which employ tacit appeals to shared world views or a partisan vocabulary
masquerading as an objective conceptual framework. If such charges can be made to
stick against well established positions like utilitarianism, they can be made more easily
against a land ethic with its wider and more diverse concerns. Though I share Rolston
and Callicott’s hopes that evolutionary biology can ground some universal moral claims
(and would argue for my particular way of life on that basis), there is no conceptual
Archimedean lever by which a land ethic philosopher can move the earth of a traditional

9

humanist or animal extensionist (Williams, 1985). Nonetheless, the case for a land
ethic--or different land ethics--under sustainable ways of life pluralism is not as
dismally fractious as it may ﬁrst seem. There are many noncontroversial basic needs
which humans (and animals) share: clean air and water, nontoxic places to live, global
airsheds in the form of forests, a protective ozone umbrella. Here the disputes between
traditional anthropocentrists and land ethic philosophers are less about what should be
done than why. Concerted action for diverse reasons can be handled by Stone’s
pluralistic method of overlapping moral maps or planes. Personal integrity, however,
still requires one to be clear about his reasons or motives for action. Where there is
serious disagreement about what should be done, Martin Benjamin’s notion of integrity
preserving compromise can be employed (Benjamin, 1990). In cases in which
individuals cannot compromise without losing their integrity, there is no solution, but
that is as problematic for ethical monism as for pluralism. The only response is that we
live imperfect livesin animperfect world. '

Sustainable ways of life pluralism has several advantages. It forces the individual
to come to a ground level understanding of abstract and theoretieal ethical principles by
a living test of their implications. It builds character and mature judgment by requiring
that each individual stand for something and live it. It provides the positive motivation
of upholding a valued way of life in one’s ethical regard for nonsentient nature rather
than merely threatening what will happen if we don’t restrain our actions. It emphasizes
the continuity of the individual by linking him through his way of life to past and future
generations and to a wider community in the present. This is a stabilizing factor against
the vicissitudes of life as well as an antidote to nihilism and alienation. Because its
holism deals with nonsentient nature in terms of experienced gestalts, its primary
ontology is less speculative and its commitments are less sweeping than ethics which

lap to high level complexes like ecosystems. It requires an individual to know himself

10

and thus prepares him to compromise with others by clarifying what is and is not crucial
to his own way of life and self respect. It frees one to live an ethic of the real world in
which each of us can choose to be only a few things to ourselves and others rather than
impersonally being all things, or the same thing, to all people. And, for those who value
a tradition of democratic liberalism, its egalitarian recognition of the primafacie right
of each individual to pursue his own way of life maintains a respect for the autonomy of

the individual in what Leopold called the biotic community.

CHAPTER 1:
MONISTIC APPROACHES TO A LAND ETHIC

INTRODUCTION

Monisitic Ethical Systems

Moral monists seek to bring all ethical decisions under the governance of one
master moral principle or a single methodology which yields the best answer for every
problem. A monist may idealize moral theory in such a way that its principles are
understood as a set of axioms from which lower level principles can be deduced until
from these principles, in combination with accurate deﬁnitions and empirical
information, one can arrive, theoretically, at the proper solution to any moral problem.
In practice moral monists readily admit that not all problems have a single clear
solution. A However, they claim, this is net due to the fault of ethical systems (notably
their own) but to human frailty and limitations of knowledge. Monist R.M. Hare asks
us to consider a thought experiment in which there is an "archangel” with ”superhuman
powers of thought, superhuman knowledge, and no human weaknesses.” Of such a
moral agent Hare claims:

He will need to use onl critical thinking. When presented with a novel
situation, he will be ab e at once to scan all its properties, including the
consequences of alternative actions, and frame a universal principle [i.e.,
binding on all moral agents] (pahaps a highly speciﬁc one) which he can accept
for action in that situation, no matter what role he himself were to occupy in it
(1981, p. 44).
The grand ambitions of moral monism are seldom overtly articulated with Hare’s
clarity, but they nonetheless remain as unstated goals and standards by which monists
judge the adequacy of any ethical system. Christopher Stone (a recent convert to
pluralism), commenting on competing ethical theories, says:

...[U]nderneath all the rivalry, there is a striking if ordinarily only implicit
agreement on two tenets that together endow moral philosophy with what might

11

12

be called its prevailing sense of mission. Each school is monistic, and as a sort
of corollary, each is determinate. By monistic I mean that the enterprise is
conceived as aiming to produce, and to defend against all rivals, a single
coherent and complete set of principles capable of governing all moral
quandaries. By determinate I mean that the ambition of that one framework is to

ield for each quandary one right answer. I suspect that anyone who wavers
between doctrines, or who shows second thoughts about the most ambitious
powers of his selected orthodoxy to solve all problems, would arouse suspicion
of "not taking morals seriously” (1987, p. 116).

Stone’s acerbic comments are a warning about the potential for hubris in those who
assume monistic moral positions. Generally speaking, land ethic monists are
safeguarded from such insolence by their awareness that they are philosophic underdogs
who must justify their opposition to the entrenched view that only beings with interests
have direct moral considerability. Being on the defensive, land ethic philosophers are
usually more hamstrung than presumptuous in their monism.

In this chapter, the positions of three monistic advocates of a land ethic are
examined with special attention to their (1) method of arguing for direct moral standing
of nonsentient nature, (2) conceptual dependence on the sciences, (3) degree of
ontological holism, and (4) ways of integrating typical anthropocentric concerns of
conventional ethics. Though each position is that of a particular author, it can be
viewed more broadly as a type of response or way of arguing beyond the interest
principle.

J. Baird Callicott argues that we are evolutionarily programmed for altruistic
sentiments which allow us to value others for what they are in themselves, whether the
other is a human individual or an holistic and nonsentient entity like an ecosystem.
Value is subjective because it requires a sentient valuer, but what is valued needs
neither itself to possess sentience nor to serve the instrumental purposes of a sentient
being.

Holmes Rolston, III, claims that value is objective in that nature has the ability to
eXcite nonarbitrary valuational responses in sentient beings, notably humans. Evolution
has so ﬁtted us to our natural environment, that, just as light striking the eye of an

l3

attentive normal observer will cause a relatively standard response, so the unintentional,
but nonetheless creative, projects of evolutionary nature will cause a relatively standard
response in the attentive normal valuer.

Paul W. Taylor asserts that respect for nature is a fundamental attitudinal stance
(like respect for persons) which occurs when our biological sophistication forces us to
recognize that each living thing has a good of its own. Minimally, a good is a complex
of needs which must be fulﬁlled for the organism to survive and ﬂourish in its normal
life cycle. Having a good, nonsentient living individuals like plants have direct moral
standing, but holistic and/or nonliving entities do not.

A fourth way of arguing, the extension of the concept of self to include nonsentient
nature, is deferred to Chapter 3 because its representative spokesperson, Arne Naess,
straddles the boundary between monism and pluralism, and because Naess claims to be
interested in ontology rather than ethics.

14

CALLICOTT'S LAND ETHIC

Ethics and Community

J. Baird Callicott has been the most devoted philosophic disciple of Aldo
Leopold’s seminal insight that ecology provides a new basis for expanding ethics to
include all of terrestrial nature which Leopold alternately calls ”the land" and ”the biotic
community.” The disastrous results of his early attempts at predator extermination
(discussed in the Introduction) convinced Leopold that symbiosis was the key to
understanding the ﬂourishing of animal and plant life. He found a counterpart to

symbiosis in human ethics:

An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation of freedom of 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 these symbioses. Politics and economics are
advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been
replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content (perhaps
in order that there may be a place to compete for).

All ethics so far evolved rest on a single premise: that the individual is a
member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to
compete for his place in the community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include
soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land (1970, pp. 238-239).

Three basic convictions are discernible in Leopold’s deﬁnition of an ethic. The concept
of community based on cooperation is fundamental to biologieal symbiosis and cultural
ethics, and it bridges the supposed gap between them. An ethic is the product of an
historically evolving conception of what constitutes the moral community. The intricate
symbioses discovered by ecologists force the latest (and last?) widening of the moral
community for those who have attained enlightenment.

Were Leopold of more volatile nature than his affable style and common sense
comments indicate, one might describe his ecological conversion as a Eureka!

experience: The awareness of our interdependencies in the ecological web of life

15

suddenly made sense of everything! In seeing that the predator was not the enemy of
the hunter--or even, on balance, the enemy of the deer--Leopold was freed from
unnecessary and unproﬁtable management struggles against nature. Simultaneously he
was freed from the moral hostilities engendered by deﬁning himself as a combatant.
This amounted to a large scale paradigm shift in which (nonhuman) predation, once
envisioned as inimical to the community (of hunters, ironically), becomes understood as
vital and beneﬁcial to the community. As vital to the community, the predator must be
included at least minimally in the community. For Leopold, the predator becomes
synechdochic for the rest of nature. The biological roles have expanded so that they can
no longer be understood in polar absolutes of good (inside and for the community)
versus bad (outside and against the community). The roles are assimilated on analogy
with the limited competition which is a necessity-and, despite some dangers, in the
long run of overall beneﬁtuwithin a human community. Like Newtonian physics which
opened up new images and ideas for Enlightenment intellectuals, ecology held promise
for a new synthesis of humanity and nature. Leopold was among the earliest and most
eloquent prophets of that new synthesis. Turning Leopold’s views into a defensible
philosophic ethic is the task assumed by Callicott.

Ethical Subjectivism and Evolutionary Altruism

Callicott points out two standard philosophic objections to enlarging the
boundaries of the moral community in Leopoldian fashion. The ﬁrst is that Leopold
provides us only with prudential reasons, not moral ones. The hunter who accepts
animal predators into his community does so, according to Leopold’s critics, not
because he values the predator for what it is in itself, but because the predator serves the
hunter’s purposes of maintaining overall a maximally healthy herd to hunt.

The second objection is that Leopold conﬂates facts and values and commits the

naturalistic fallacy. David Hume complained of arguments in which philosophers

16

suddenly deduced an ought or moral imperative from premisses that only described
what is the case. Unless ’is’ and ’ought’ mean the same thing (which is tantamount to
asserting that there have never been any immoral acts), to conclude logically that
something ought to be requires at least one ought-premiss among the factual premisses
of an argument. G.E. Moore observed that whenever presented with some natural
property such as intelligence or pleasure as a candidate for goodness, one could always
sensibly ask whether intelligence or pleasure is (really) good? Goodness, thought
Moore, must be some property other than the natural entity which was judged good.
Moore concluded that goodness was a nonnatural quality which we intuited. To label
anything other than goodness as ’ good’ is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. If Hume’s
and Moore’s objections hold, then the most we can gain from sciences like ecology is
greater sophistication in understanding how we are affected by the networks of
relationships in nature. We might be provided with prudential reasons for
instrumentally valuing nature, but no moral reasons .er intrinsically valuing nature.

. Callicott’s defense of Leopold from the objections of Hume and Moore is based on
a distinction between intrinsic and inherent value. Something possesses intrinsic value
”if its value is objective and independent of all valuing consciousness.” Something
possesses inherent value if it "is not independent of all valuing consciousness [but] is
valued for itself and not only and merely because it serves as a means to satisfy the
desires, further the interests, or occasion the preferred experiences of the valuers"
(Callicott 1989, p. 161). Callicott thinks that the intrinsic value position must be
rejected, but the inherent value position can be defended rationally through an appeal to
evolutionary altruism.

Anyone who asserts that value is objectively in nature apart from a sentient valuer,

says Callicott, quickly runs into the naturalistic fallacy.

A sincere skeptic is always entitled to ask why reason, pleasure, order, or

whatever is good and/or why rational, sentient, organized, etc., beings should
therefore be intrinsically valuable. In the end, all a naturalistic advocate can do

17

is to commend a property to our evaluative faculty of judgment or evaluative
sensibilities (1989, p. 158).

The result of such disputes over intrinsic value is a standoff in which each side can only
assert its position and claim the other side is blind. Unfortunately for disciples of
Moore, intuitionist claims that intrinsic value is due to ”primitive or irreducible"
nonnatural properties likewise come to grief whenever moral intuitions are not widely
shared. There is no way to settle disputes over intuitions. Callicott thinks that the
problems raised by intrinsic value positions can be avoided by turning to a subj ectivist
account of value based on Hume’s theory of moral sentiments.

According to Callicott, the pattern of argumentation in conventional ethics has
blocked a moral appreciation of nonsentient nature because it begins with a form of
egoism. I claim moral status for myself based on a ”psychological capacity” such as
“rationality or sentiency" which is ”arguably valuable in itself and which thus qualiﬁes
me for moral standing." But because I base my moral status on psychological
characteristics not unique to me, I must ”grudgingly" grant the same moral standing to
others who share these traits. Having no such psychological capacities, nonsentient
nature is excluded from the moral community at the outset. Callicott ﬁnds this
methodology (typical of animal ethics) objectionable both in its exclusiveness and in its
tacit assumption that human nature is basically selﬁsh. The assumption has forced
moral philosophers into accepting a false dichotomy: Either limit the scope of the
moral community to some level of sentience which each of us values in himself, or be
stuck with a shouting match whenever value disputes arise. Fortunately we need not be
saddled with this dilemma.

Hume provided the beginnings of a solution in his theory of moral sentiments by
rejecting the notion that humans were by nature selﬁsh. Augmenting Hume’s position
with the idea that evolution has bred us for altruism, Callicott develops his argument for

18

the inherent value of nature:

Hume, [Adam] Smith, and Darwin diverged from the prevailing
theoretical model by recognizing that altruism is as fundamental and
autochthonous in human nature as is egoism. According to their analysis, moral
value is not identiﬁed with a natural quality objectively present in morally
considerable beings-as reason and/or sentiency is objectively present in people
and/or animals--it is, as it were, projected by human subjects.

Hume and Darwin, furthermore, recognize inborn moral sentiments which
have society as their natural object (1989, pp. 84-85).

Since moral sentiments attach to holistic and nonsentient entities (society) as well as

individuals, the groundwork is laid for extending the sentiments to ecologically holistic

and nonsentient nature.1

Callicott goes through a four step process of arguing in defense of Leopold’s land
ethic. The ﬁrst step is the presupposition that Hume’s theory of moral sentiments is
basically correct. The remaining three steps (here identiﬁed by brackets for reference)

are outlined as follows:

...Hume suggests that the values you project onto objects are not arbitrary, but
arise spontaneously in you because of the ”constitution of your nature." [Step
two] The affective constitution of human nature, Darwin plausibly argued, is
standardized by natural selection. Homo sapiens is an intensely social species
and so certain sentiments were naturally selected in a social environment which
permitted and facilitated growth in the size and complexity of society. [Step
three] The social sentiments, however, though ﬁxed by natural selection are
open-ended. There is more than just a little room for the cultural determination
of their objects. Thus, just what is of value, either instrumentally or inherently is

1y determined by what Hume‘ called ”reason," but what might better be
called ”cultural representation.” [Step four] Aldo Leopold masterfully played
upon our open social and moral sentiments by representing plants and animals,
soils and waters as ”fellow members” of our maximally expanded ”biotic
community." [Conclusion] Hence, to those who are ecologically well-informed,
nonhuman natural entities are inherently valuable—as putative members of one
extended farnil or society. And nature as a whole is inherently valuable—as the
one great f ' y or society to which we belong as members or citizens (1989,
pp. 162-163).

As Callicott notes, ethicists who ﬁrst encounter Leopold are likely to be horriﬁed
at the prospect of subordinating the interests of sentient individuals to the well-being of
the biotic community, a position Tom Regan refers to as ”evironmental fascism” (1983,
p. 362). Callicott claims the problem is defused, however, by paying careful attention
to Leopold. Critics, especially those in the animal welfare camp, can only envision

19

horriﬁc scenarios because they impute to Leopold their methodology of taking a single
criterion (e.g., "rationality or sentiency”) and imposing it across the board to provide a
base line equality of moral standing. (Consider Singer’s phrase "all animals are equal. ”)
The Leopold-Callicott methodology has a built-in safeguard.

From the biosocial evolutionary analysis of ethics upon which Leopold builds
the land ethic, it (the land ethic) neither replaces nor overrides previous
accretions. Prior moral sensibilities and obligations attendant upon and
correlative to prior strata of social involvement remain operative and

preemptive.
Callicott likens this to rings on a tree with those at the core taking precedence over

those farther out.

Family obligations in general come before nationalistic duties and humanitarian
obligations in general come before environmental duties. The land ethic,
therefore, is not draconian or fascist. It does not cancel human morality. The
land ethic may, however, with any new accretion, demand choices which affect,
in turn, the demands of the more interior social-ethical circles. Taxes and the
military draft may conﬂict with family-level obligations. While the land ethic,
certainly, does not cancel human morality, neither does it leave it unaffected
(1989, pp. 93-94).

Difﬁculties for Callicott

The HumeanlDarwinian altruism with which Callicott begins his argument
(identiﬁed above as step one) is relatively uncontroversial as is the claim that natural
selection has standardized the "sentiments" in us (step two).

Step three raises a cluster of questions about the ”open-ended" nature of our
sentiments: How much is genetic, how much due to early social imprinting, how much
is under the governance of reason? If, as commonly accepted, what we ought to do
ethically presupposes what we can do, then Callicott is right to regard sociobiology and
allied sciences as a ”tremendous resource" for ethics. His position is bold, speculative,
and promissory with a willingness to risk yet-to-be-given scientiﬁc answers to some

basic questions which could prove disastrous for his land ethic.

20

How widely do our "social” sentiments extend? It is true that people are capable of
intense passion over anything, but are they so in Hume’s "cool hour” of reﬂection?
Holistic entities like ecosystems and the biosphere are, as wholes, far removed from the
strong parent-child bonding and genetic kinship which serve as Callicott’s model and
reference point. Further, if, as sociobiologists suggest, we are genetically selected for
”altruism" towards kin, are we concomitantly programmed for hostility towards
outsiders, whether of the same or of other species? If so, the land ethic is undone by its
very appeal to our biological sentiments.

Philip Kitcher (1985) has noted the difﬁculties of separating our genetic from our
cultural heritage, difﬁculties which are inherent in any sociobiological account of

human behavior.

Our evolutionary heritage surely equips us with something. Perhaps
humans have genes that predispose us, given the environments in which we
typically live, to ﬁnd certain situations desirable and to avoid others. Yet we
also have extraordinary cognitive abilities which we use to represent to
ourselves many subtle features of the world around us. Furthermore, each of us
is reared in a culture that provides us with a mass of information and
misinformation, that shapes our appreciation of what is desirable and what is
not. So, in our maturity, we make decisions. Those decisions are the products
of many factors: our basic edispositions, our representations and reasonings,
our interactions with the socrety in which we live (p. 268).

Kitcher’s comments are aimed at the laxity of sociobiological explanations of social
phenomena as part of biological inclusive ﬁtness, but there is a similar laxity in using
sociobiology to support an ethic.

Callicott’s substitution of ’cultural representation’ for Hume’s term ’reason’
creates additional difﬁculties. Hume clearly meant reason to be selective and
regulatory. ’Cultural representation’-if I understand it rightly-can refer to anything a
group might value collectively, and it opens the door to socialization through
propaganda as well as thoughtful reﬂection. Without qualiﬁcation or side constraints,
the bigot would have as much scientiﬁc ground to stand on as someone of Leopold’s
moral caliba.

21

Moving away from the biological basics, humans vary considerably in world views
and practices. If we must rely on ”cultural representation” it is likely that the land ethic
will fragment into cultural relativism at the very abstract point (step four) where
Callicott needs his strongest argument for adopting--cognitively and affectively--a
common ecological perspective. I think Callicott’s answer would be a typically
Western, liberal, and secular common sense one: In this day and age no rational person
can deny that the physical and social sciences are our best form of knowledge, and they
demonstrate that we are all members of a common biotic community. This may be the
most adequate answer one can give, but it is not nearly as foundationally secure as
Callicott assumes in his espousal of ethical monism. Even granting (a presently
lacking) universal cognitive assent to the sciences, human affective ties remain diverse
and often in conﬂict with accepted scientiﬁc theoriesz

The concept of community in step four is problematic. What does the biotic
community of the ecologist have in common with the moral community of the
philosopher, other than the name ’community’? Callicott claims the former becomes
the latter when (1) one is ecologically well informed, and (2) one’s open-ended
sentiments are attached to both individuals and holistic entities (including the whole of
nature). There is a fundamental problem with each part of Callicott’s assertion.

First, why pick the family model rather than, say, the energy flow model of
ecology? Is the family model better on any scientiﬁc grounds or can it be better
defended with arguments from philosophy of biology? Obviously, the family model has
great metaphoric power in constructing analogies: it not only ﬁts biological accounts of
strong kinship attachments, it also appeals to our dearest moral intuitions about family
and friends. But can Leopold’s masterful play "upon our open social and moral

sentiments” be defended in a more foundationally absolute and exclusive way than as

poetic insight? Poetic insight might provide good reasons for a pluralist to commit

22

herself morally to the biotic community. It might, for instance, make her life more
meaningful and her value commitments more cohesive. As a pluralist, however, she
might not claim that everyone else should employ the poetic insight in exactly the same
way. If Callicott is going to hew to ethical monism, he needs to eliminate the
conceptual competition in a way that a pluralist need not.

Second, how strong is the analogy between our ties and obligations to the human
community and those of the biotic community? The tree ring image of ethical
expansion suggests severely attenuated obligations and duties to the biotic community.
As long as ”moral sensibilities and obligations" to inner rings ("strata of social
involvement”) are ”preemptive,” duties to outer rings are likely to diminish
progressively. In that case the duties to the biotic community based on inherent value
may be so weak as to be ineffectual (though one may still argue for strong duties
regarding the biotic community based on instrumental value).3 Recently, Callicott
(1990a, p. 123) has endorsed the notion of a "mixed community” in which the innermost
tree rings already include interrelationships among humans, animals, plants, and the
land.4 This goes a long way toward resolving the problem of the disparity between
moral duties to the human and to the biotic communities. For the bulk of humanity, the
human community was never as exclusively human as the idealistic ﬁctions of
philosophers and the legalistic ﬁctions of the courts would have it. But, the holistic
understanding of the mixed community at the personal level also permits a range of
moral choices and commitments which Callicott as a monist would probably regard as

promiscuous.

23

ROLSTON AND NATURAL VALUE

Natural Value

Holmes Rolston, III, argues that the conventional wisdom that values are felt
subjective preferences is an inadequate account of valuation. Though some values may
be subjective preferences, that is not the whole story. The conventional account rests on
an epistemology which draws a Lockean distinction between primary (objective, i.e., in
the object itself) and secondary qualities (subjectively in the mind, but the same in all
normal observers) with values being relegated to a tertiary status (subjective and
relative, differing from individual to individual). This epistemology was used as a
foundational basis for building up knowledge of the world from sensation; facts were
ultimately reducible to sensory data. But modern science, especially since Einstein and
Heisenberg, can no longer be epistemologically undergirded so simplistically. The
micro-world of the physicist looks quite different from the middle-level world of daily
experience, if it can be said to ”look” at all. (What color is an electron?) The
understanding of the sciences as paradigms of knowledge must include high levels of
theory which are mind-dependent and cause us to interpret our observations differently,
perhaps even to have different observations or see differently. Rolston says:

World building does go on in the mind of the beholder, as we shape up theories
over experience. But world building also takes place out there. We ﬁnd the
information or energy ﬂow only by attending with deliberate focus of mind. But
the mind does not contribute these features because it must model them by
careful attention and decision. To the contrary, we discover richer qualities in
name (Rolston 1982, p. 131).

Rolston claims we go through this same process in valuation. The knower and valuer

both play a role in the process, but the subject depends on what is already there in the
world.

The ownership feature in value judgments is important, but we need to think of
value judgments as genuine, involved, if limited, claims about the world....
They do not attach to bare primary and secondary [quality] levels, but to high
level constructions of matter wrth which we are in exchange-initially in

24
common experience and afterwards in the sciences of natural history. Just as we
are getting incoming commands from ”out there” about length, color, hawks,
and trees, so too we are getting some commands about value. We start with
these as native range judgments, not as absolute ones.... This much makes them
locally objective, although it leaves unresolved how deep they run (1982, p.
130).

Rolston proposes testing the theory that value is in part objective by using the
hypothetical deductive method just as it might be used to test a scientiﬁc theory.

...[Vlalue is not the sort of thing one would expect to know without excitement.
If there is objective value in nature...then one would predict it to stir up
experience... But sometimes too that experience fails..., and we must presume a
faulty registration and/or valueless parts of nature (1982, p. 144).

One may suspect the usefulness here of the hypothetical deductive model of reasoning.
A positive consequent (i.e., the excitement) does not guarantee the truth of the
antecedent (i.e., the theory predicting objective value); to claim otherwise is to commit
the fallacy of afﬁrming the consequent. Nor does a negative consequent automatically
disconﬁrm the antecedent, since it is virtually impossible to specify all and only the
jointly necessary and sufﬁcient conditions in the antecedent. Still, given the
indispensable need for induction to make claims about the world, one may allow
Rolston some credibility from successful applications of the test.

The cards are not nearly stacked so much against Rolston as one steeped in value
subjectivism might ﬁrst assume. Rolston emphasizes the fact that valuing subjects are

themselves objectively in nature and the products of a long evolutionary process.

Some natural values are of the common-sense kind and nearly universal to
cultures, as with the taste of an apple, the pleasant warmth of the spring sun, the
striking colors of the fall. Even though these experiences come culturally
bound, some natural impact here is shared by Iroquois and Nobel prize winner.
Experience is required, but something is there which one is ﬁtted for and ﬁtting
ilngg); some good is transmitted and is productive of the experience (1982, p.

Thus the "tertiary quality” characterization of value as subjective and relative appears to
have counter examples at least as far as relativity goes. What can Rolston do in the case
of one who does not so react, who, for instance, feels melancholia instead of pleasure in

the spring sun? He can seek a reason just as one would for anomalies in conventional

25

accounts of sensation. If a reason can be founduperhaps the death of a loved one in a
previous spring—one can fairly say that but for this event the person would be enjoying
the pleasant warmth. A cultural overlay obscures the natural value.

One cannot as easily appeal to evolution to explain higher level value experiences,
and disputes over these kinds of value are more difﬁcult to adjudicate. Here Rolston
would claim that the anomalous reaction is due to the valuer being uninformed or ill-
informed. For instance, one gazing at a road cut through a hill may see only a rock
embankment. But a little geological knowledge, i.e., awareness of what really happened
according to our best estimates, might arouse valuational excitement at the sequence of
events—seas and sediments and tectonic thrusts and struggles for life-that took place
there. Rolston often presents his reader with the rich panoply which scientists have
discovered in nature, and—on a simplistic reading—waits for him to be overwhelmed by
the wonder of it all. The philosopher looking for a series of clean arguments and
applications of conventional distinctions will be driven to distraction by Rolston’s
lyrical descriptions of the way nature functions and his multifarious uses of ’value’. But
there is a method in Rolston’s style.

Method and Style

As an empiricist claiming that there is objective natural value, Rolston is ultimately
forced to presenting a picture of nature and then awaiting the reader’s verdict. He
points out the connections to things conventionally valued and how they are part of a
larger processes in a way that only a naturalist intimately acquainted with his subject
can.5 Out of the many examples which permeate his writings, consider his generic case
for projective nature. ’Projective nature’ is Rolston’s term for the organized way matter
and life have evolved and continue to evolve in the universe. He chooses it deliberately

for its etymological sense of ”throwing forward,“ and it undergirds his many

26

discussions of natural value. In the extinction of species, for instance, Rolston sees a
vast difference between natural extinction, which is part of the forward thrust of
evolution, and human-caused extinction, which shuts down the generative process.‘5 To
fail to feel valuational excitement at the whole process is, for Rolston, either a failure of
knowledge or a failure of moral character. As an empiricist testing his theory using the
hypothetical deductive method, Rolston must ﬁrst show us verbally what we cannot see
literally by our stepping outside. He gives us a summary-with-commentary of scientiﬁc
discoveries. Moving from the mundane to the less familiar, he quotes E.O. Wilson on
the ”richness of structure" in an ordinary clump of earth and gives a capsule

characterization of stages of evolution of life on earth, concluding:

The whole storied natural history is little short of a series of "miracles,"
wondrous, fortuitous events, unfolding of potential; and when Earth’s most
complex product, Homo sapiens, becomes intelligent enough to reﬂect over this
cosmic wonderland, we are left stuttering about the mixtures of accident and
necessity out of which we have come (1988, pp. 194-195).

He then cites astronomers and physicists on the fortuitous coincidences among physical
constants which not only allowed, but seemingly guaranteed, the formation of life, the
'anthropic principle." He qualiﬁes this by setting it into an environmental context.
For mivironmental ethics, "anthropic principle” is an unfortunately chosen term,
one that no ecologist would have selected. We wish to avord associating
anthropocentrism with the process, especially any suggestion that everything in
the umverse is arranged to produce and serve humans. But what the anthropic
principle points to is important--a rich, fertile nature that is energetic and
creative, so much so that at length nature evolves life and mind. That may
involve some accident, but it cannot be all accident, it is in some sense a
prognperty, a potential of systemic nature that it projects natural history (1988 p.
One key point is that nature and its processes are not completely and chaotically
accidental with no rhyme or reason on a micro, mid-level, or macro scale; it can thus be
appreciated for what it is. Another key point is that our sciences have opened up the
possibilities of appreciation far beyond the direct range of our senses over our short

lives (even when our living experiences are pooled with those of the rest of the human

27

race). Modern natural science is critical for Rolston (as it is for Callicott) to get us to
see nature in the proper way. The order of discussion is a technique for moving the
reader from a narrow focus to a wider vision by going from the known (the clod of
earth) to the less familiar (evolution of life) to the most theoretical and encompassing

(the whole of projective nature).

From a short-range, subjective perspective we can say that the value of
nature lies in its generation and support of human life, and is therefore onl
instrumental. but from a longer-range, objective perspective systemic nature is
valuable intrinsically as a projective system, with humans only one sort of its
projects, though perhaps the highest. The system is of value for its capacity to
throw forward (pro-j ect) all the storied natural history. On that scale humans
come late and it seems shortsighted and arrogant for such latecomers to say that
the system is only of instrumental value for humans, who alone possess intrinsic
value, or who ”proj ect" intrinsic value back to nature [e.g., Callicott and inherent
value]. Both of these are inappropriate responses. The only fully responsible
behavior is to seek an appreciative relationship to the parental environment,
which is projecting all this display of value...

Nature is not inert and passive until acted upon resourcefully by life and
mind. Neither sentience nor consciousness are necessary for inventive processes
to occur. The inventiveness of systemic nature is the root of all value, and all
nature’s created products have value so far as they are inventive achievements...‘.

A ”mere thing” can...be something to be respected, the project of
projective nature. Crystals, volcanoes, geysers, headlands, rivers, springs,
moons, cirques, patemoster lakes, buttes, mesas, canyons-these are also among
natural kinds. They do not have organic integrity or individuality; they are
constantly being built, altered, their identity in ﬂux. But they are recognizably
different from their background and surroundings. They may have striking
particularity, symmetry, harmony, grace, story, spatiotemporal unity and
continuity, even though they are also diffuse, partial, broken. They do not have
wills or interests, but rather headings, trajectories, traits, successions,
beginnings, endings, cycles, which give them a tectonic integrity. They can be
projects (products) of quality. The question now is not ”Can they suffer?” or "Is
it alive?” but "What deserves apprecration?" (1988, pp. 198-199.)

The ﬁnal sentence is a parody of Bentham’s summation of his argument for the moral
standing of animals: "[T]he question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but,
Can they suffer?” The quote is often cited by moral philosophers in defense of
animals, and the parody is Rolston’s way of chiding them for the narrow scope of their
moral concerns. Rolston’s conclusion may strike one as a breathtaking insight, or as a
frustrating consequence of a confusing rhetorical appeal to emotion rather than an
informative account of valuational excitement. The issue of Rolston’s prose will be

examined later.

28

One cannot argue the value subj ectivist out of his position, Rolston admits, but one
can supply several criticisms of what he is doing. First, one can accuse the value
subj ectivist of argument by stipulative deﬁnition: Values cannot be objective because
values are felt subjective preferences. The alleged argument is simply a tautology.

A second criticism is that the value subjectivist’s understanding of nature is naive,
simplistic, shortsighted, and/or factually wrong. He suspects no intricacy and has no
wonder because he isn’t looking and is focused on other things, for instance, the use of
nature to alleviate the suffering of humans or animals. Urban life with its dependency
on others to take care of nearly all our survival needs can lead one to think of nature
simplistically in the most vague and anthropocentric of ways, economically as a
resource. Natural science can cut through the cultural overlay (often relativistic) and
show us nature as it really is (or a good approximation thereof).

A third criticism comes in an observation by Thomas E. Hill discussing human

excellence:

A person who [intellectually] understands his place in nature but still
views nonsentient nature merely as a resource takes the attitude that nothing is
important but human beings and animals. Despite ﬁrst appearances, he is not so
much like the pre-copernican astronomers who made the intellectual error of
treating the Earth as the "center of the universe" when they made their
calculations. He is more like the racist who, though well aware of other races,
treats all races but his own as insigniﬁcant (1983 p. 219).

Both Hill and Rolston would claim that a factually well informed person who is
functioning on the level of someone considering the signiﬁcance of what he knows—as
opposed, say to someone loaded down by a bunch of facts--will have some kind of
valuational response. An attitude of ”So What?! " from the racist or natural resource
ideologue indicates a lack of sympathy or ability to appreciate, something undeveloped
ordeadatthecoreoftheperson.

29

Nature and Culture

Integrating environmental ethics with conventional ethics is, for Rolston, largely a
matter of constraining action so that ecosystems are not severely impaired or shut down.
Much of ethics will be traditional duties humans have to each other, sometimes
modiﬁed to accommodate the new moral insight the natural sciences have given us.
Many of the values "carried by nature”-an ambiguous phrase deliberately chosen to
cover the whole range of degrees of value subjectivity/obj ectivityuare highly subjective
with some applying only to rational creatures (e.g., the American eagle as an example of
'cultural-symbolization value"). In practice, a biologically well-informed ethical
anthropocentrist might countenance pretty much the same decisions as Rolston, though
justifying them on the basis of prudence and duties to other humans.

Animals fare worse in Rolston’s scheme of things. They are pressed ﬁom both
sides. Lacking the range and degree of human awareness, they do not value as fully as
we do. Lacking rational self-control they threaten ecosystems when predation, (animal
or human) is disallowed. Rolston appeals to a strict nature/culture distinction and to a
characterization of domestic animals as artifacts to justify his position.

Domestic animals are breeds no longer natural kinds. They are ”living
artifacts,” kept in culture for so long that it is often not known precisely what
their natural progenitors were. They ﬁt no environmental niche; the breeding of
them .for traits that hlgnans desire has removed them from forces of natural
selecnon ( 1988, p. 78 .
Against the vegetarian’s Benthamite appeal to pain as an egalitarian moral criterion,
Rolston says:

[S]uch argument fails to distinguish between nature and culture, between
environmental ethics and human ethics. We simply see ourselves in fur. But
there are morally relevant differences that distinguish person in culture from
food animals in agriculture, where quasi-ecosystemic processes remain.
Whether or not there are differences in pain thresholds between sheep and
humans, the value destruction when a sheep is eaten is far less, especially since
the sheep have been bred for this purpose and would not otherwise exist.
Because animals cannot enter culture, they do not suffer the aﬂliction (a
heightened, cognitively based pain, distinct from physical pain) that humans
would if bred to be eaten...

30

[Elating is omnipresent in spontaneous nature; humans eat because they are in
nature, not because they are in culture. Eating animals is not an event between
persons but a human-to-animal event, and the rules for it come from the
ecos stems in which humans evolved and which they have no duty to remake
(1988, pp. 80-81 .

Rolston would allow the killing both of domestic animals in agriculture and wild ones
in hunting, though he would agree that animals should be spared unnecessary pain.
Beyond that, being artifacts domestic animals play no role in projective nature and we
are not obligated to them. Rolston speaks almost as if domestic animals, had they the
awareness, should be grateful that we bring them into the world at all, even if our
purpose is to slaughter them. The attitude verges on contempt. In contrast, he often
speaks admiringly of wild animals which have adapted and survived on their own. As
part of a functioning ecosystem, they should not be hunted to extinction.

Species endangered as a result of human interference (rather than natural
processes) deserve more protection than plentiful species regardless of sentience.
Rolston would have no moral qualms about shooting deer to save the rare Furbish

lousewort.

Subjects count, but the do not count so much that they can degrade or shut
down the system, thoug the count enough to have the right to ﬂourish within
the system. Subjective sel -satisfactions are, and ought to be, sufﬁciently
contained within the objectively satisfactory system. The system creates life,
selects for adaptive ﬁt, constructs increasingly ncha life in quantity and quality,
su ports myriads of species, escalates individuality, autonomy, and even
3

jectivity within the limits of decentralized community. If such land is not an
admirable, satisfactory biotic community, why not (1988, p.190)?

Rolston’s position may be rejected as panglossian because it ignores the amoral
lack of intention and awareness in nature and the vast amount of pain and death which
drive evolution. Rolston’s answer would be that the pain is not gratuitous and that it
takes a mature person to accept it. There is a gently worded dare implicit in Rolston’s
rhetorical question: Given that sentience, rationality, and autonomy are all products of
evolution, could you accept the consequences if thae was no pain for sentient creatures

(or "affliction“ for humans)? Considering what we know of possible worlds given the

31

constraints of biological evolution, is this pain-ﬁlled world a better one than a world on
which no sentient life has evolved? Logically possible worlds and biologically possible
worlds are vay different. A moral theory not ﬁtted to the latter is built on metaphysical

fancy rather than solid ground. It is not he, Rolston may claim, but his critic, who is

panglossian.

Difﬁculties for Rolston

The most fundamental problem for Rolston is whether he can make the case for
objective intrinsic value. Can value stand on its own as something which a sentient
valuer merely discovers? Rolston rejects a purely conceptual analysis of ’value’
because it boils down to stipulative deﬁnitions worked out by scientiﬁcally myopic
anthropocentrists. His case rests on an empirical test: Does the scientiﬁcally informed
person feel "excitement" in the presence of the alleged value? How and how well one is
informed scientiﬁcally are crucial. Consider Rolston’s lengthy case for the objectivity
of projective nature, the long natural history and evolutionary process in which
nonsentient nature "throws forward” diverse and complex projects. Buried in the
seemingly neutral descriptivist language is a strong subjective component. Why does
nature throw forward? The projects develop in nature, or are caused by nature, or are
thrown off by previous stages of complexity. But where does the directional language
come from? It seems to come from a subject or mind supplying Cartesian valuational
coordinates for what is happening in natural history. There is a tendency to see more
complex projects of evolution as better or richer or more interesting, and it may be
pafectly natural for us to do so.m But while these projects are complex, to consider
them better is the subjective valuation of the mind interacting with the complexity it
meets. Rolston speaks freely of situations like a predator devouring its prey as an

example of values being captured and recycled in the ecosystem. A simple answer is

32

that such cases can be handled by descriptive language: nutrients are captured and
recycled. To speak of nutritional values (apart from a sentient valuer) is to mistake
properties for values; the term ’values’ does no useful work and adds nothing but
linguistic confusion to the situation.11

Weaknesses in the hypothetical deductive method of reasoning as a value litmus
test have already been mentioned above. The case for it would be strengthened if thae
were near universal value agreement. In the absence of such consensus, however, it
allows us to account for any number of anomalies, and nothing like any moderately
strong case of confirmation or disconfirmation can be made (above immediate
physiological reactions such as enjoying the pleasant warmth of the spring sun).
Anthropocentrist critics can charge Rolston with confusion; Rolston can charge them
with failing to see. Thae is no way to settle the issue between them.

Rolston’s heavy reliance on the biological sciences is both conceptual and
empirical But the sciences are not objective in the sense of being free of the interests
and values of scientiste themselves. He claims above that sentient beings ”do not count
so much that they can degrade or shut down the system...." What counts as an
ecosystem, and how would we know it was shut down? What counts as an ecosystem
will depend on the focus of intaest of the person making the judgement. Whether one
speaks of the entire biosphere as an ecosystem, or the Great lakes Basin, or Lake
Superior, or a stretch of shoreline will be determined by the problem(s) at hand,
problems selected as important or signiﬁcant by a sentient-to say nothing of a rational-
observa. Rolston admits that hard boundaries are difﬁcult to draw, but genaally takes
(naturally adapted) species diversity and species complexity as a sign of ecological
health. Is thae any way to make this judgment without a presupposition that diversity
and complexity are better? If not, then he must tacitly rely on a subject/evaluator to talk
about the health of ecosystems.

33

The absolute nature/culture distinction with which Rolston draws an almost
Kantian boundary bemeen homo sapiens and other animals is yet another problem.
This is an attempt to justify the saving of species (whether sentient or not) at the
expense of individual sentient animals. To avoid sacriﬁcing individual humans, Rolston
uses the nature/culture distinction to set off our special moral duties to, and only to,
other human beings. Given our evolutionary kinship with other animals, the many
interdependencies we have with them, the fact that although we have altered species in
domestication we have not rendaed all of them helpless without us, and the fact that
they are subjects-of-a-life, Rolston’s distinction seems more than a little severe and
simplistic. Bernard Rollin (1989), for instance, argues that (some) animals are capable
of thought and points out that the value of certain animals, notably primates, in
psychological research is because they are so much like us psychologically. Mary
Midgley (1983) comments on the importance of animal play as a learning device and
the resultant cross species emotional bonding. Rolston’s nature/culture distinction is
not as fully grounded empirically as our many similarities and relationships with
animals suggest.

There is a more deep-seated issue here characteristic of ethical monism. Where
Rolston as an environmentalist may be faulted in this is not in his acceptance of the
whole consequences of evolution with its omnipresent pain and death. Nor is it in his
wanting to ascribe some intrinsic value to projective nature as opposed to relegating it
to instrumental value status as a necessary evil. Rather, it is his acceptance of what
Stuart Hampshire calls "the doctrine of moral harmony,” the position that ”a morally
competent and clear-headed person has in principle the means to resolve all moral
problems as they present themselves, and that he need not encounter irresoluble
problems..."(1983, p. 144). The resolution of all problems eliminates a moral tension
which is essential to prevent philosophical systems from degenerating into doctrinaire

34

justiﬁcations. All things considaed, one may accept the pain of sentient creatures (and
the affliction or suffering of humans) as an unavoidable consequence of one’s ethical
position, but the biological necessity of pain does not make pain something laudable or
ethically irrelevant. In an imperfect world with limited knowledge and power, one is
forced to be a meliorist and to try to balance conﬂicting claims, whether in theory or
practice. Not to acknowledge this, along with awful doubts about one’s own choices, is

to 001m callousness and risk dogmatism.

35

TAYLOR AND RESPECT FOR NATURE

Goods and Inherent Worth

Paul W. Taylor claims that his ethics of Respect for Nature (hereafta RFN) is the
only ethical system that (1) meets the formal requirements for an ethic, and (2) is
consistent with a biocentric outlook on nature. Taylor is at pains to make clear that
RFN is respectable as an ethic because it is parallel to, but more widely informed than,
traditional anthropocentric ethical systems. The ﬁrst aspect of this parallelism is in the
formal criteria any ethic must meet. Taylor lists ﬁve: It must be general in form,
universally applicable to all moral agents, applied disinterestedly, have normative
principles for all to adopt, and override all nonmoral norms (1986, p. 27). The
impartiality required by the formal criteria means that there must be a common factor
which gives all things which are morally considerable this special standing. , .

A‘Fsecond point of parallelism between RFN andtraditional ethics is Taylor’s
acceptance of the fact/value distinction. The common factor which makes anything
morally considaable thus must have both a factual and an valuational component. For
Taylor, the former is found in the concept of a good of a thing while the latter is
characterized by inherent north.

The commonly assumed baseline criterion for moral standing of a thing’s having
interests is too narrow to ﬁt a biocentric outlook on life for it excludes life forms which

do not have (so far as we know) any subjective experiences such as plants.

There are some entities that have a good of their own but cannot, strictly
speaking, be described as having interests. The have a good of their own
because it makes sense to speak of their being bene tted or harmed. Things that
happen to them can be judged, from their standpoint, to be favorable or
unfavorable to them. Yet they are not beings that consciously aim at ends or
take means to achieve such ends. They do not have intaests because they are
not intaested in, do not care about, what happens to them ( 1986, p. 63).

Here some may want to draw the line in terms of moral vocabulary and claim that, by
deﬁnition, things which do not have interests cannot be harmed (Cf. Feinberg 1974).

36

Taylor’s phrase about judging beneﬁts and harms to nonsentient things ”from their
standpoint“ is unfortunate because ’standpoint’ implies conscious perspective. That is
not what he means, howeva, nor is it necessary to so phrase it. Unless one wishes to
make the problem purely one of deﬁnition, it seems clear that some non-subj ects-of-a-
life can be harmed and beneﬁtted with regard to their biological functioning. Why else
would one fertilize a lawn or refrain from pouring salt on it? Even one who thought the
grass had only instrumental value for its human owner has to recognize that the grass
can be beneﬁtted and harmed in order to get instrumental value hour it. For Taylor the
notion of "entity-having-a-good—of-its-own" is purely an objective, factual matter.

This means that unless is-statements about objective goods with objective beneﬁts
and harms are coupled to ought-statements about promoting or protecting those goods,
no moral conclusions follow. Taylor’s notion of inherent worth supplies the ought: If

anything X has inhaent worth, then:

A state of affairs in which the good of X is realized is better than an otherwise
similar state of affairs in which it is not realized (or not realized to the same
degree), (a) independently of X’s being valued, either intrinsically or
instrumentally, by some human valuer, and (b) independently of X’s being in
fact useful in furthering the realization of some otha being’ 3 good, human or
non human, conscious or nonconscious.

This generates prima facie duties for all moral agents to "promote or preserve the
entity’s good as an end in itself and for the sake of the entity whose good it is" (1986, p.
75).

Taylor contrasts inhaent worth with intrinsic value and inherent value. Intrinsic
value is the value conscious beings place on ”an event or condition in their lives which
they directly experience to be enjoyable in and of itself, and when they value the
experience (consider it to be good) because of its enjoyableness..." Intrinsic value thus
requires a conscious valua who appreciates not the good of the object (whetha sentient

or not) of experience, but his own experience. Inherent value is

the value we place on an object or a place (such as a work of art, a historical
building, a battleﬁeld, a ”wonder of nature," or an archaeological site) that we

37
believe should be preserved, not because of its usefulness or its commercial
value, but simply because of its beauty, or historical importance, or cultural
signiﬁcance (1986, p. 73).
The inherent valua is not focused on his own subjective pleasure as the intrinsic valua
is, but rather on some property of the object valued. Like the intrinsic valuer, howeva,
the inhaent valua fails to appreciate the good of the object valued.

These distinctions mark some great differences between Taylor and ethicists like
Rolston and Callicott. First, by focusing on an animal or plant’s good as objectively
understood in the biocentric outlook, Taylor denies inherent worth and thus-~in his
systemumoral standing to nonliving nature. One may intrinsically value the thrill of
watching Yosemite Falls, or inherently value the beauty or power of Yosemite Falls, but
Yosemite Falls itself (having no good of its own) is not a proper moral patient/recipient.
It is either a means to a purely subjective experience or an entity which has aesthetic,
ratha than moral, standing.

Second, only individuals can have goods and hence inherent worth and hence
moral standing. Rolston and Callicott (with qualiﬁcation) consider the proper moral
focus in the case of wild animals and plants to be on the species rather than the
individual. Instead of the term ’species’, which Taylor sees as a classiﬁcatory

abstraction, he uses the term ’species-populations’ to denote groups of similar
individuals.

Just as it makes sense to speak of the good of a whole species-population, so it
makes sense to talk about the good of a whole biotic community. It should be
emphasized that there is no individual physical entity referred to by the term " a
whole biotic community." There is only a set of organisms, each a physical
reality, related to one another and to their nonliving environment in various
ways. The good of a biotic community can only be realized in the good lives of
its individual members. When they fare well, so does the community.
Nevertheless, what promotes or protects the good of an individual organism may
not promote or protect the good of the community as a whole, and what harms
an individual may not harm but actually beneﬁt the community. Consider, for
example, the predator-prey relationship in a well-functioning ecosystem. The
fact that individual members of the prey species are killed and consumed by
individual predators is consistent with the good of the whole life community in
the given ecosystem (1986, p. 70).

38

The familiar litany of uncontrolled prey species destroying habitat not only irnpails the
existence and well being of the prey species-populations, but that of other animals and
plants, each of which has a good of its own which is to be respected morally.

Respect for Nature

What can cause us to have Respect For Nature? For Taylor it is a fundamental
stance (analogous to respect for humans in traditional anthropocentric ethics) which is
informed by a more sophisticated biocentric outlook that has replaced the naive
anthropocentric outlook. Thae is no higha level (set of) moral principle(s) from which
RFN can be derived. RFN is a fundamental attitude.

The only way [to justify RFN] is to set forth the belief system that underlies and

supports the attitude and show that it is acceptable to all who are rational,

gacmtually informed, and have a developed capacity of reality-awareness (1986, p.
By reality-awareness Taylor means "a moral agent’s capacity for heightened awareness
of the reality of individual organisms’ lives" (1986, p. 164). A reality-aware person
would not only be vaguely aware that animals and plants are alive, but that each (kind
of) animal or plant has its own biological-teleological program with its own good
(which deﬁnes its needs, beneﬁts, and harms). The reality-unaware pason presumably
would see, for example, mosquitoes as pests and quackgrass as weeds, and use his
biological knowledge to exterminate them. The more sophisticated the reality-unaware
pason’s biological knowledge, the more effective the extermination. The reality-aware
person would be acutely cognizant of destroying these teleological centers of life (a
factual awareness), and, not being able to gloss the destruction, is then faced with
claiming that the destruction is morally insigniﬁcant or adopting something like RFN.
Just as Kant’s whole ethical system depends on an individual’s willingness to respect
persons because they are autonomous rational agents who can act out of duty ratha than

inclination, so Taylor’s system depends on a willingness to respect centers of life.

39
integrating RFN and Human Ethics

Although Taylor does not think it conceptually incoherent to claim that animals
and plants have moral rights, he thinks that everything such rights can do can be
accomplished by RFN. He draws a conventional distinction between moral and legal
rights.

Generally speaking, to have a right is to have a legitimate claim or entitlement

to sometlung, the recogmtion of the legitimacy of that claim or entitlement being
(morally or legally) required of others. For a moral right, the requirement of
recognition is imposed by valid moral principles on all moral agents. For a legal
right, it is imposed by a given system 0 law on all members of the legal
community in question (1986, p. 219).
Though plants and animals can-and in Taylor’s view should--have legal rights, he
prefers a conservative interpretation of moral rights which restricts the moral rights-
holder to rational moral agency, a capacity for self-respect, ability to choose to exercise
the right, and ”second-order entitlements” like the ability to seek redress (1986, p. 246).
The ”equality among rights-holders...does not imply any [moral] inequality between
rights-holders and other living things,” for moral equality is based on the common
concept of having a good (1986, p. 261).

The integration of the human rights-based ethic with RFN is accomplished by ﬁve
principles for settling claims: self-defense, proportionality, minimum wrong,
distributive justice, and restitutive justice. Since only humans are moral agents, the
principles are binding only on humans. Self-defense is handled pretty much as it is in

conventional law with stipulations authorizing only minimum necessary use of force

after reasonable precautions to avoid conﬂict have been taken.

The principles of proportionality and minimum wrong apply to cases in which
there is a conﬂict between the basic interests of animals or plants and the
nonbasic interests of humans. The principle of distributive justice...covers
conﬂicts where the interests of all parties involved are basic. Finally, the
principle of restitutive justice applies only whae, in the past, either the principle
of minimum wrong or that of distributive justice has been used. Each of those
principles creates situations where some form of compensation or reparation
musﬁcl; 1made to nonhuman organisms, and thus the idea of restitution becomes
app e.

4o

...[T]he term ”intaests" [refas] to whateva objects or events serve to preserve
(223013“ to some degree or other the good of a living thing (1986, pp. 270-
Taylor goes to some length discussing the practical implications of these principles. He
acknowledges that they will not settle all disputes and they ”do not function as
premisses in a deductive argument.” That does not make them deﬁcient as ethical
principles, howeva, for the principles of any exclusively anthropocentric ethic can do

no better.

Difﬁculties for Taylor

A basic problem arises from Taylor’s claim that a fundamental attitude of respect
for nature rests on showing that it is acceptable to anyone with reality-awareness, a
”heightened awareness of the reality of individual organisms’ lives.” Why should this
help produce an attitude of respect given Taylor’s maintenance of the fact/value
distinction? Rolston claims that being factually informedwill also give rise to values,
and the many examples in his prose are not intended as mere descriptions of natural
phenomena but as prods to a valuational excitement. Often, he does not so much argue
as bombard the reader with nature’s intricacies in hope of triggering a valuational
response. But this method is closed to Taylor. So long as he maintains the fact/value
distinction, his reality-awareness will simply remain detailed factual knowledge. The
alternative is to admit a valuational component, but then his distinction between
inhaent value and inherent worth collapses while his argument becomes trivial: reality-
awareness includes valuing/respecting nature, and therefore once one has reality
awareness one will have respect for nature.

Taylor’s bottom line critaia for moral standing, his concepts of goods and needs,
are also problematic. Critics have pointed out that cars also have ”goods" and ”needs.“

To prevent respect for nature from degenerating into respect for everything, Taylor

41

draws a distinction between ’goods’ and ’needs’ of organisms as opposed to artifacts:
All organisms, whether conscious or not, are teleological centers of life in the
sense that each is a uniﬁed, cohaently ordered system of goal-oriented activities
that has a constant tendency to protect and maintain the organism’s existence...
The goal-oriented operations of machines are not inherent to them as the
goal-oriented behavior of organisms is to them. To put it another way, the goals
of a machine are derivative, whereas the goals of a living thing are original....
. Although they manifest goal-oriented activities, the machines do not, as
independent entities, have a good of their own. Their "good” is ”furthered" only
insofar as they are treated in such a way as to be an effective means to human
ends (1986, pp. 122, 124).

Partisans of the interest criterion will detect subjective language creeping into the
distinction with a tacit appeal to the interest principle: How can an entity be
”independent”-in any sense other than "separate”m-without having at least a will of its
own? How can it have ”goal-oriented activities" in any sense other than ”genetically
programmed processes,” and how can they be ”original” in any sense otha than ”not
assigned" by humans? The problem is exacerbated when Taylor talks about judging
from the "standpoint" of a nonsentient entity, all the while denying that consciousness is
necessary for moral consideration. If one grants Taylor latitude to speak
metaphorically, thae’s trouble from the other side. In the case of nonconscious life
forms, Taylor’s claims about "teleological centers of life" with ”goal-oriented activities"
are an updated version Aristotelian telos genetically explicated. Rolston has noted how
easily genetic sets become normative, but this way of making sense of Taylor’s
terminology is blocked by his adherence to the fact/value distinction. If we allow
”originality" and "independence" some valuational force, why then exclude the law-
governed processes of Rolston’s "proj ective nature" which function without human
instruction or intervention? The answer for Taylor presumably is that they are not
living individuals with goods of their own, but the criteria to which he makes appeal do
not require individuality. The criteria might require life if there is something special
about having genes or about having what Aristotle called nutritive soul. One answer

Taylor could give would be that nature is not "teleological” in the same way as an

42

individual plant. Biological evolution and natural history shaped by geological
processes have no goals, they just change. But the same can be said of an individual
plant. We can discover its biological blueprint from its genetic code and thereby
characterize it intellectually. We can, in principle, do the same kind of thing by
discovering the ”natural laws" that govern geological change. Taylor might claim that
in this sense we understand the telos of individual organisms because we can grasp the
whole of their life cycles, but we are largely ignorant of the telos of nature on a wider
scale (despite much speculation on the route from "big bang” to a universal entropic
”heat death”). This is not his claim, however, and if it were it would undermine his
position. The only remaining criterion to which Taylor can appeal is that of entities
having goods of their own. Granted that nonsentient entities can be harmed in the sense
of interfering with them or diminishing them or destroying them, how do these criteria
fail to ﬁt, say, a river which has been dammed or whose waters have been siphoned off
for irrigation to the point of reducing the ﬂow entirely?

A conceptual problem of the relationship of telos to an entity’s good comes to the
fore in the integration of RFN into human ethics. Aristotle, reasonably enough,
identiﬁed the telos of biological organisms with an idealized version of the appropriate
adult form for each type of organism. But what would Taylor do in severely marginal
cases like that of an anencephalic infant or an individual in a persistent vegetative state
(PVS)? Not having anything approaching a functioning human brain, would the infant
or PVS victim still have a good based on a degenerative form of human telos? Would it
have a good despite lack of a telos? Would it have neither a good nor a telos? What
sort of respect—if any—should we have for it? Are we bound out of respect for what the
infant should have become, or what the PVS victim was, to maintainuor, for that
matter, to terminate-the (non)person’s remaining life processes?12 The questions are
not idle or mischievous, because in Taylor’s system the notion of a good must bear the

entire moral weight of RFN.

43

The underlying problem—and not just for Taylor—is not that moral distinctions
cannot be drawn, but that Taylor’s hard-line interpretation of ’ goods’ is metaphysically
and morally dogmatic. Environmental philosophers can gain more ground by taking a
Wittgensteinian tack of pointing out "family resemblances” between entities
traditionally granted moral standing and those traditionally excluded, and by showing
the arbitrary nature of the criteria employed. A bottom-line single criterionuwhetha
ability to reason, sentience, or having a good-is convenient for legal decision making
and preventing courts from being overwhelmed by case loads. No responsible moral
philosopher would identify what is moral with what is legal, yet many are willing to
adopt the legalistic methodology. Single criteria work well only in closed conceptual
systems where there is little change and where the group under consideration is
arbitrarily limited either by consent or by ﬁat. The weakness of the methodology is
exempliﬁed in Peta Singa’s Animal Liberation (1975) where we are informed that ”all
animals are equal" (in having intaests) only to have furtha distinctions (the fact that all
animals do not have the same interests) so erode the ”equality“ as to render some
animals usable for virtually any human whim. It is one thing to use a conventional
moral criterion to demonstrate the arbitrariness of its application in order to awaken
morally those grown soporiﬁcally comfortable with it. It is something quite diffaent to
adopt the criterion oneself or to be bewitched into thinking the problems are solved by
substituting a diffaent one.

Taylor’s exclusive individualism is a problem for his ethic being environmental in
the sense that he wants it to be. There are both ontological and moral reasons for
Taylor’s individualism. Ontologically, he claims that species are really collections of
individuals and better labelled ’species-populations’. The issue of ontological holism,
whether (in this case) species are more than or diffaent from the sum of the individuals
who make them up, is a complex one on which biologists disagree. It cannot be settled

44

here. Howeva, it is possible to sketch some factors which demonstrate the simplicity of
Taylor’s view.

It should be noted that calling species ’species-populations’ is something with
which environmental holists could agree since no one is peddling a Platonic position
that there are species without individuals that make them up. What is at issue is
whether the individuals can stand alone, in what ways, and to what degree. Biologist
Ernst Mayr draws a distinction between species as taxa and species as categories. The
species category is an abstraction or class or set.

A taxon is a concrete zoological or botanical object. Groups of individuals like
wolves, bluebirds, or houseﬂies are species taxa...

Are the animals that belong to a species members of a class or are they
not? Ghiselin...has come out quite emphatically in favor of the interpretation...to
consider all the products of the gene pool of a species as parts of the species (not
as members of a class!) and to consida the species as a whole as an individual,
ontologically speaking... Species taxa are individuals in the sense that each
species has spatiotemporal unity and historical continuity.... Each species has
reasonably discrete boundaries, internal coherence at any one time, and, with
limits, continuity through time. Any aggregate of po ulations that satisﬁes the
deﬁnition of the species category is a species taxon (1 82, p. 253).

An appeal to Mayr as a legitimate authority does not, in the absence of furtha technical
argument, settle the issue. Other legitimate authorities disagree. However, the ease
with which Mayr applies common criteria of individual identity to species taxa
demonstrates the superﬁciality of dismissing species as sets of morphologically similar
individuals. There are many complicating factors such as asexual reproduction,
polymorphic and sibling species--both of which are intabreeding populations—and the
fact that commonality of traits within species is subservient to their relative status with
other species and how these traits relate to reproductive isolation from such species.
The safest thing to say is that some species seem to be more like individuals
ontologically than others.

Taylor’s moral individualism stems from the fact that only individuals have goods

to be respected. If Taylor is to remain true to his system of RFN, he must treat the

45

maximizing of goods via protection of their basic intaests (in his unconventional sense)
as Bentham does the maximizing of interests with each individual counting for one and
only one. Taylor ﬁnds predation in nature morally acceptable because individual deaths
are "consistent with the good of the whole life community" (in a lapse into collectivist
language) and because animals (and plants) are not moral agents. But nature is far more
destructive of individual goods and basic interests than Taylor seems to acknowledge.
In a rebuff to Peta Singer who argues that caring for individual animals is the way to
presave wild species, Mark Sagoff says:

The ways in which creatures in nature die are typically violent: predation,

starvation, disease, parasitism, cold. The dying anima in the wild does not

understand the vast ocean of misay into which it and billions of otha animals

are born only to drown. If the wild animal undastood the conditions into which

it is born, what would it think? It might reasonably prefa to be raised on a farm,

where the chances of survival for a year or more would be good, and to escape
from the wild where they are negligible (Sagoff 1984, p. 303).

If one considas the goods and basic intaests of plants in addition to those of animals,
the destruction is staggering. How many teloi come to naught at germination? Does
predation destroy more goods than it serves? Consider the simple problem of an
ungulate grazing on grasses with each individual plant having a good of its own. Is
there any reliable indication that the existence of "higher level" organisms like
mammals, consumptive as they are, reduces the total number of goods destroyed in an
ecosystem? Or, more likely—even if all mammals were herbivores and consuming at
the lowest possible trophic level—do individual mammalian goods require destruction of
other goods many orders of magnitude greater than the mammalian population? To
what extent and how are we as moral agents to act on this?

Taylor seemingly wants to distinguish between wild and domestic situations, and
he frequently mentions wild nature, but his ethical system is not set up to handle it.
Rolston draws conceptual distinctions between wild nature (ﬂourishing on its own in

situ) and domestic animals and plants (artifacts); he also claims a moral distinction

46

between individuals (which in nature are expendable) and species (which we have
duties to preserve). Such biologically based distinctions are precluded in RFN because
of Taylor’s egalitarianism of goods. Having dedicated his book "To the Earth’s Wild
Living Things,” it is ironic that Taylor’s insistence on impartiality threatens to

undamine what he so clearly respects and wants to protect.

47

CONCLUSION

Burdens of a Land Ethic

None of the ethical systems we have examined is powerful enough to force
someone into giving up a strongly held belief that having interests is the sine qua non
for direct moral standing. This is because the holda of the interest principle can always
isolate his ethical position from new scientiﬁc information by drawing the fact/value
distinction. Taylor’s upholding of the fact/value distinction causes his whole system to
founder because he depends on an attitudinal change in ”reality-awareness” which the
fact/value distinction prohibits. What Callicott and Rolston accomplish in different
ways is to cast doubt on the fact/value distinction as anything more than a pragmatic
tool. Epistemologically, facts are not, like Hume’s impressions, the absolute foundation
stones on which we build a house of knowledge. The modan paradigms of knowledge,
our sciences, are neither conceptually absolute nor value free. Evolutionary biology
provides overwhelming evidence that we are creatures who by our very nature make
strong emotional and valuational attachments, in Rolston’s words, "ﬁtted for and ﬁtting
into“ our environment.

Where Callicott and Rolston are most venturesome, and argumentatively weakest,
is in moving from our emotional and valuational attachments to our immediate
surroundings (which do include nonsentient entities) to high-level ontological
complexes like ecosystems. Callicott goes furtha than Rolston by putting great moral
stock in future developments in biological science and related ﬁelds, suggesting, in
promissory and hyperbolic fashion, ”the rigorous derivation of an environmental ethic
from contemporary sociobiology and ecology" (Callicott 1989, p. 11). A major factor
which impedes the acceptance of a land ethic is not so much a rigid clinging to an

outdated notion of fact/value, but fears that a land ethic is too ambitious, that it goes too

48

far too fast and will cost us morally too much. Some environmental philosophers who
share this reservation have scaled down their claims for a land ethic by turning from
moral monism to moral pluralism. In Chapter 2 we will consider how some major

pluralists argue for a land ethic.

CHAPTER 2:
PLURALISTIC APPROACHES TO A LAND ETHIC

INTRODUCTION

Pluralistic Ethical Systems

Succinctly deﬁned by Gary E. Varner, 'a pluralist ethical theory [is] one which
acknowledges distinct, theoretically incommensurable bases for direct moral
consideration.” Vamer’s deﬁnition is of theoretical pluralism as opposed to pragmatic
pluralism which is a ”strategy for theory construction in ethics rather than a
characteristic of completed ethical theories" (Varner 1991, p. 177). Unlike the
theoretical pluralist, the pragmatic pluralist might hope ultimately to ﬁnd some single
base for direct moral consideration, but, given practical difﬁculties, s/he prefers to start
out with several seemingly incommensurate bases and/or sort out different types of
moral quandaries using different criteria for considerability. The most basic monistic
criticism of theoretical pluralists is that they have no theory at all, and hence no rational
way of reaching moral decisions when a conﬂict arises among two or more different
bases for moral considerability. Whether one accords pluralism the appellation
’theory’-and whether withholding the term is of serious consequence—depends on how
logically tight a notion of theory one has, and on whether one thinks that theories can be
applied—if at all—with equal rigor to all areas of human endeavor.

The criticism that pluralism cannot resolve all moral quandaries rests on a furtha
distinction between theories that are determinate and those that are indeterminate. A
determinate theory can, in principle, provide a best answer for any problem. Generally,
monists are assumed to have theories which are determinate (see comments of monist R.

M. Hare and pluralist Christopher Stone in the introduction to Chapter 1) while

49

50

pluralists are committed to indetaminate theories. Howeva, indeterminism is catainly
possible in monistic ethics. A hedonistic utilitarian, for instance, might try a computer
calculation of all the pleasures and pains of all the sentient creatures affected by the
logging of old growth forests. It is conceivable, whether the forests are logged and the
spotted owl is lost, or the owl and forest are saved and the loggers’ jobs are lost, that the
computer spews out exactly the same number of pleasure units for both scenarios (and
any compromise scenarios in between). Pluralism, however, by its vay nature must be
indeterminate. Were there some theoretical way of resolving all conﬂicts among
diffaent bases of direct moral consideration, pluralism would collapse into monism.

A related point is whether pluralists may be charged fairly with moral relativism.
Certainly the charge is not legitimate given the contrast Stone draws between his
position and that of a "rank relativist.” The rank relativist asserts that there are no
objective standards for right or wrong, good or bad, that there is at most a majority
opinion, relative to the society in question, which differs from majority opinions in
other societies. On the contrary, the pluralist claims that thae are nonarbitrary
standards or criteria, but that there is more than one of them, and, in principle, they
cannot always be reconciled with each otha or placed in a hierarchy to settle disputes
deﬁnitively. Whetha one then equates pluralism with relativism will depend eitha the
form of pluralism used andlor how successful it is at supplying answers even if it is
indetaminate.l

Chapter I examined some monistic attempts at a land ethic and the difﬁculties that
arose. In this chapter, three pluralistic approaches to a land ethic are examined with
regard to (1) their arguments for the direct moral standing of nonsentient nature, (2)
conceptual dependence on the sciences, (3) degree of ontological holism, and (4) ways
of ameliorating conﬂict. The fourth point of comparison differs from that in Chapter 1
(ways of integrating a land ethic with the typical concerns of anthropocentric ethics),

51

because pluralists accept indeterminism and the resulting moral conﬂict as inherent in
ethics. The conﬂict, howeva, need not be vicious or debilitating.

Christopher D. Stone claims that we have many different types of ontological
commitments (e.g., persons, animals, corporate bodies) each of which has its own
special morally signiﬁcant features which call for different kinds of moral relationships
with us. Mapping these features for each separate domain or moral plane gives us a
truer picture of the moral texture of our relationships. When more than one plane is
involved in a moral decision, we can usually arrive a good moral decisionuor at least
avoid the worst decisions—by ovalapping the moral maps.

Eugene C. Hargrove utilizes a thought experiment by GE Moore to argue that we
have a moral duty to promote beauty in the univase, whether the beauty is paceivable
or not. He then turns to positive aesthetics to make the case that pristine nature is
(almost) always beautiful, and we therefore have a primafacie moral obligation to
presave nature apart from any instrumental enjoyment of the aesthetic experience.
Hargrove’s pluralism is due partly to his view that moral rules are analogous to the
nonconstitutive or strategy rules in chess. One learns them as ”rules of thumb," but the
chess master (or moral sophisticate) also lmows when they should be ovaridden.

Jim Cheney accepts postmodernist criticism of philosophical searches for a
"privileged discourse" that would give us the true picture of reality, but ﬁnds Rorty’s
insistence that all we have is language is an assertion that embodies the same illusion.
A case can be made for the moral signiﬁcance of nonsentient nature by using a
Heideggerian understanding of language to ground discourse and Being in the context
of place. Cheney’s pluralism takes the form of ”contextual languages" within different

bioregions.

52
STONE AND MORAL PLANES

From Monism to Pluralism

Christopher D. Stone adopted moral pluralism after rethinking his earlier work
Should Trees Have Standing ? In Trees Stone used a legal extensionist methodology
parallel to the moral argumentation of the animal extensionists (see Introduction). Both
accept traditional standards and criteria for direct consideration in human ethics, and
then use marginal cases to establish a "ﬂoor" which supports the moral or legal standing
of disenﬁanchised entities. The courts, claimed Stone, have recognized three criteria
for being a holder of legal rights and therefore having direct legal standing rather than
being tr'eated indirectly by law as, say, a right holder’s property.

They are, ﬁrst, that the thing can institute legal actions at its behest; second, that

in determining the granting of legal relief, the court must take injury to it into
account; and, third, that relief must run to the beneﬁt of it (Stone 1974, p. 11).

Despite the paradigm of the right holder being a sentient individual, namely an adult
human being, Stone argued there were no insuperable legal barriers to extending legal
rights to nonsentient and/or collective entities such as wilderness areas; there were
ample precedents of well established marginal cases in British and American law.
Corporations, which are neither sentient nor individuals per se, and severely retarded
humans (sentient individuals, but rationally incapable of meeting the ﬁrst requirement
for a right holder) have long been accorded direct legal standing in the courts through
appropriately designated spokespersons or guardians. On analogy, a wilderness area
could be accorded legal rights with an environmental organization like the Sierra Club
appointed as its legal guardian to exercise these rights.2

Stone’s legal colleagues were disturbed by the practical matter of environmental
suits clogging the courts and immensely complicating the already tangled web of law.
Both legal and moral objectors pointed out that Stone’s legal precedents ignored
signiﬁcant differences. Corporations are under the control of rational individuals who

53
have ofﬁcial duties for which they ean be held legally and morally accountable. Who

would take responsibility for an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, or other ”acts of
God"?3 For ethical humanists and animal extensionists hewing to the interest principle,
that was the end of the matter. The disanalogies between corporations and "natural
objects” were regarded as too great to include nonsentient nature in the moral or legal
communities.

There was, however, another faction which admitted the disanalogies but drew a
different conclusion: The very methodology of the extensionists was morally and
ontologically corrupt because it tried to force the entire nonhuman world into a human
mold. In a combined review of Stone’s Trees and Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation
John Rodman attacked the extensionists for their smugness in assuming that all entities
must be judged morally by the same criteria and in seeking a moral bottom line in

marginal cases of severely defective human beings:

Is this, then, the new enlightenment-40 see nonhuman animals as imbeciles,
wilderness as a human vegetable? As a general characterization of nonhuman
nature it seems patronizing and perverse. It is not so much that natural entities
are degraded by being represented in human legal actions, or by not having us
attribute to them moral obligations. They are degraded rather by our failure to
respect them for having their own existence, their own character and
potentialities, their own forms of excellence, their own integrity, their own
grandeur--and by our tendency to relate to them by ’ giving them’ rights by
assimilating them to the status of inferior human beings. It is perhaps analogous
to regard women as defective men who lack penises, or humans as defective sea
mammals who lack sonar capability and have to be rescued by dolphins

(Rodman 1977, p. 94).
Though Rodman is not cited in Earth and Other Ethics, Stone spends the ﬁrst halfof

the book criticizing the methodological assumptions which so incensed him. In Earth
Stone abandons the legal extensionism of Trees while retaining his moral concern for

nonsentient nature. The result is an elaborate structure for moral pluralism.

Maps and Moral Planes
The opening section of Earth and Other Ethics contains a synopsis of the

controversy over oil exploration in the Beaufort Sea which serves as a paradigm case for

54

the kind moral decision making that the growth of technology and environmental

awareness increasingly demands.

The lands over which the U.S. government has dominion include the
submerged bed of the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. The Department of Interior has
proposed to lease the acreage to oil corporations for purposes of exploiting oil
and gas that may underlie the region. To carry out exploratory drilling...drilling
platforms will have to be constructed in the path that the bowhead whale, an
endangered species, uses to reach its sole known spawning ground. Oil spills
could have disastrous effects on their survival. Also, early-stage oil exploration
often involves dynamiting (the explosions’ echoes are used to map geoph sical
structures), and there is evidence that the procedures could destroy the w es’
hearing, and thus their ability to navigate and survive. To make the matter more
complex, if the whales successfully avoid these hazards by adjusting to a course
that takes them somewhat to the north of their present route, they will be out of
the range of a native tribe, the Inupiat Indians, who have long hunted the
bowhead, a custom they claim to be integral to the maintenance of their culture
(Stone 1987, pp. 36-37).

The kind of moral analysis that merely sums utilitarian preferences, or extends rights as
Stone did in Trees, obscures the vast and multifaceted range of ethical concerns. The
insensitivity estranges ”moral thought ﬁ'om considered moral intuitions" and the gross
simpliﬁcation results in rules which carry no conviction. Stone thinks these problems
are endemic to moral monism.

Stone’s pluralistic solution is to divide ethics into different moral planes or
domains, each with its own ontological commitment and governance (set of rules).
Mapping offers an analogy by which to understand the planes and their uses. Different
maps emphasize different features and are chosen according to the concerns and needs
of the user whether it be to ﬁnd out information on topology, political boundaries,
roads, weather patterns, or whatever.

Thereisnoonemapthatisrightforallthethings wewanttodowith maps, nor
is one map, the topology map, more valid than another, the demographic.
Indeed we do not regard them, because of their variances, as inconsistent. We
may in fact choose to overlay maps, that is, combine salient featln'es (p. 137).

The analogy for moral pluralism is that most signiﬁeant decisions are not single factor
ones, and an ”overlay" of moral planes may be necessary to arrive at an appropriate

decision reﬂecting the moral richness of the situation.

55

Unlike an axiomatic model of ethics in which moral rules are deduced from
general principles, maps (and moral planes) make ethical complexity perspicuous
showing ”relations and degrees" rather than dictating a binary right/wrong, standing/no
standing conclusion. As Stone says, ”morally salient qualities of the world, including
rationality, sentience, and autonomy, are not qualities that humans, dolphins, or pigs
either possess or do not possess" (p. 140). The provisional nature of maps or planes
encourages an openmindedness to revisions in a way that ethical principles conceived as
axioms do not. Planar maps, especially when overlaid, also can change the basic
objective because one sees simultaneously many features. One might, for example,
restrict methods of oil exploration after information that dynamiting destroys the
bowhead’s ability to navigate, or, one may decide that, given bowhead pain and the
potential loss of species, oil exploration in the Beaufort Sea should be forbidden
altogether.

The sorts of maps Stone sees as relevant to making a well informed and morally
sensitive decision in the Beaufort Sea drilling case ean be presented in outline form:

I. Empirieal Maps
A. Natural Features (e.g., whale migration routes)
B. Action-Influence (e.g., drilling alternatives)

' 1]. Utility Plane Maps

A. Person Preferences
B. Extended Utilitarianism (all sentient beings)
C. Temporally and Spatially Remote (whose preferences are not easily known
and who cannot reciprocate actions)

III. Nonutility Plane Maps
A. Persons (appropriate holders of rights)
B. Persons Remote in Time and Space (to whom we have duties even though they
have no binding right claims)

56

C. Nonhuman Animals

D. Preferenceless and Nonsentient Entities

E. Membership Entities (e.g., species, corporations, cultures)

F. Qualiﬁes
Not all moral decisions would require every map, and the list is open-ended. Other
maps would be a reﬁnement of the system.

The order of listing follows Stone’s order of discussion and is not supposed to
suggest a preordained hierarchy of moral importance. It nonetheless reﬂects Stone’s
preference for those entities about which we know most and for which we already have
extensive moral and legal conceptual machinery. Consider his distinction between

Persons and everything else conveniently lumped under the term ’Nonpersons’:

By deﬁnition, I have reserved the term Persons for normal adult homo sapiens
living in a common community. Persons therefore not only have, along with
sentience and intelligence and life plans, a good grasp of one another’s tastes
and preferences. They have the capacig to understand what is happening to
them, to consent, to raise, waive, and tra e entitlements; they have some shared
ideas of the Good. The fabric of inter-Person relationships is a product of these
many ﬁne threads: of expectations of reciprocity, of rights that can be waived,
of claims that can be forfeited, or risks that can be accepted, of obligations that
can be earned and discharged. When we move beyond the domain of Persons,
some of these threads simply are not available. If there is to be some moral
fabric between us and them, it has to be woven of another cloth. Any claims we
give animals, future persons, and natural objects will have to be of a sort that
they cannot waive or trade with us. If these are ”rights,” they are not identical
with most human rights, which are waivable. Nor can Nonpersons earn
obligations or reciprocate our good acts. They cannot consent to our risky
maneuvers, as we are sometimes wont to do among ourselves...(pp. 143-147).

 

The imagery of fewer and fewer threads from which to weave moral relationships as we
move away from humans phylogenetically (and beyond) suggests that the strongest
fabric of moral relationships is among Persons. Aside from examples involving animals
and a commentary on Inupiat society, Stone provides few illustrations ,of what these
particular threads might be, and almost nothing in the way of how they are to be woven.

For the vast majority of Nonpersons our moral relations will simply be "woven of

another cloth.”

57

Textural Variables

Stone is a little more helpful at higher meta-ethical levels. The fabric woven for
each moral plane will have a different ”texture" dependent on prescriptive variables and
variables of character and other attributes.

Prescriptive variables, so called because they determine the moral prescriptions
which tell us what we ought to do, are divided into grain and mood. The grain is the
descriptive level of ontological focus, for instance, whether we take into consideration
the welfare of individual animals, species, or ecosystems.

Each focus brings along an allied stock of concepts. Focusing upon the
individual animal, one scans for such properties as its capacity to feel pain, its
intelligence, its understanding of the situation, and its suffering....the ecosystem
version brings out stability, resilience, uniqueness, and energy ﬂow. An analysis
that emphasizes species favors concepts such as endangered and adaptive ﬁtness
(relative to a habitat), and requires portrayal of uniqueness, breeding boundaries,
population size, and genetic variability (p. 157).
Mood variables indicate the prescription’s degree of moral obligation. Stone suggests
the use of three logical operators to replace the binary do/don’t logic of traditional
ethics: ’1’ for what is morally mandatory, ’0’ for what one ought to do but would not
be harshly judged for not doing, and ’P’ for what is permitted.

Within the stated purview of any conventional ethic, one may question (in practice,
if not in theory) how binary moral decisions really are. Supererogation is a concept well
established in philosophical ethics. Stone is correct, however, to attribute much
unwillingness to extend direct moral considerability beyond humans-or beyond sentient
beings—to a binary sort of thinking: Either X shares salient human features or it has no
moral status of its own. This stance downplays a sharing of features in degree and
precludes moral status based on totally different features. Stone also notes that moral
decisions in practice are seldom taken to promote the best alternative, but rather to

avoid the worst ones. A failure to maximize the good might be seen as grounds for

criticism in situations which are thoroughly familiar to, and under the control of, the

58

moral agent. But, increasingly we are asked to make moral decisions where our
knowledge is scanty, our control is tenuous, and factors are numerous. This is
particularly true of any ethic which includes Nonpersons and considers long range
consequences of technological change for which we have neither adequate intuitive
models from past experience nor adequate theoretical models from which we can
specify a reliable probability.

Different variables come into play when assessing character (in the case of
Persons) and other attributes (of Nonpersons). Character may be treated as a
”dependent variable“ totally determined by whether the moral agent follows the
appropriate prescriptions by performing the right actions. Or, it may be treated as an
"independent variable” still centered on right action but in addition partly determined
"either generally desirable traits or special qualities of the particular actor." Stone’s
preference, however, is to treat character a third way, as an "intrinsic good.” To assess
character as an intrinsic good (one separable from action in a moral plane) requires
taln'ng into account (1) life plan information like "the agent’s history [and] ambitions,”
(2) the ”intent, motive, and attitude with which something is done," (3) considering
actions ”neither good nor bad in themselves" according to the ”way the conduct
’ disappointingly conﬂicts with or marvelously reinforces the life the person has chosen
for hhself within permissible boundaries,” and (4) ”tolerance, even appreciation for,
qualities that may be uniquely good about the particular person being evaluated” (pp.
191-192). An analysis of character as an intrinsic good serves as a model for moral
treatment of ”other attributes" as intrinsic goods. Once any attribute from a moral plane
has been established as intrinsically good, the case has been made for direct moral
consideration of the type of entity in that moral plane. Because a diverse moral
ontology and a modal logic require many ﬁne gradations of distinctions, Stone sees

aesthetics providing a model for ethics, "particularly in this area of grading, where our

59
ability to provide criteria wanes and trained intuition dominates" (p. 198). In the case of
nonsentient nature, Stone’s "trained intuition” serves the same function as Taylor’s

I'reality awareness” and Rolston’s ”value excitement."

What makes a person or a lake "good" or whatever else may be signiﬁcant?
Indeed, the analysis suggests that our final appeal may lie, unabashedly, in
apprehension, rather than in anything like formal deduction from general
principles. With the right training we apprehend that a person who cares about
nature is a better person, other things being equal, than one who does not. To so
hold is no more mysterious or doubtful than our apprehension that, other things
being equal, knowledge is better than ignorance, and that a simple explanation
of natural phenomena is to be preferred to one that is complex (p. 199).

One might ask if one is better person "who cares about nature, other things being equal,
than one who does not,” why the same conclusion doesn’t apply to persons who care
about music, books, etc. The best answer open to Stone is that he is focused primarily
on arguing nature’s case, and that other valued things/activities can be handled under
Person Preference maps. Nor does relegating such things to preferences skew the moral
ontology by treating them all equally since the rules/govemance of each moral plane
can establish criteria for hierarchies. Stone’s major concern in discussing types of
moral maps, however, is comprehensiveness and ontological sensitivity; he would
object to reductions but not necessarily to expansions or different kinds of divisions.
The required ontological sensitivity in the case of Rolston and Taylor is very closely
tied to an understanding of nature supplied by the natmal sciences. Stone’s emphasis on
aesthetics rather than evolutionary biology and ecology may be due to his presenting a
comprehensive pluralistic theory of ethics rather than one to be appended to human
ethics (e.g., Rolston and Taylor). But, it may also be that multi-plane judgments by

their very nature must be ”more aesthetic” and less guided by insight from biology or
natrual history.

Decision Making and Conﬂict Resolution
Moral decision making requires (1) a selection of planes and (2) resolving conﬂicts
among planes. There is no formal procedure for selecting planes; it requires consulting

60

both moral intuitions, which Stone calls "hard-to-trace emotions,” and imagination, and,
in turn, it also requires the reasoned examination of intuitions.
[T]he plane must have moral perspicacity; the elements of a situation to which it
turns our attention must "feel right.” It must carry our thought along lines that
feel right to a judgment that feels right—perhaps not so much right to each of us
as individuals but (so far as we can grasp it) right to the collective conscience of
mankind. I do not consider it paradoxical to suggest that the moral feelings
should themselves feel right: consistent, coherent, rational, correct, satisfying
(p. 244).
On a personal level one must strive for affective as well as cognitive coherence. The
potential for vicious forms of coherence-ethnocentric bigotry, religious zealotry,
ideological "purity"-is circumscribed by several factors. Stone’s position is morally
inclusive, not exclusive, and the number of planes one must take into consideration to
”feel right” provides a system of checks and balances. The ultimate appeal to feeling
right is to "the collective conscience of mankind,“ not to an individual or group with
partisan axes to grind. The system is open to continual reﬁnement through new
information and correction by others. And, one must understand that the very act of
moral judgment is not a laying down of absolutes, but an ongoing interplay of reason,
intuition and imagination.
Moral thinking (and perhaps all vital and creative thinking) seeks an image, even
to the point of conjuring the object of our imagination as a metaphor. Moral
planes can be conceived, like novels, as providing a sort of ”literature” for the
development and play of this image-conj uring imagination. Some such sort of
literature rs particularly valuable when we are considering our relations with
Nonpersons and Things (p. 245).
Like maps, moral planes show us what is involved in the actions we are contemplating.
Unlike algorithms which require only mechanical obedience, moral maps require
diligence, intelligence, and imagination on the part of the moral agent who reads them.4
The simplest cases of moral decision making involve no planar conﬂict, either

because only one plane is involved or because multiple planes indicate the same action/s
as morally appropriate.

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When planes do conflict, one might "construct a master rule” such as ”weighing
divergent judgments by reference to their respective ﬁrmness of mood." Or, one might
”work toward some sort of lexical ordering of planes in accordance with general moral
importance”

Under such a rule, actions indicated on plane B would be suspended until
actions indicated on plane A had been fulﬁlled up to some point. For example,
our mandatory obligations to Persons might claim priority up to the point where
all Persons had achieved a certain level of life-style, something above
subsistence. But when that level of comfort has been reached, considerations of
animals or of future generations, as per other planes, would be brought into play,
as required by the priority rule (251).
Many conﬂicts can be adjudicated successfully in ways which are not completely
arbitrary even if there is some arbitrariness in the rules by which we seek to order
planes.

In the insoluble cases of planar conﬂict, at least it is likely that some alternatives
will be eliminated. Given Stone’s view that ethics often is concerned with eliminating
the worst courses of action rather than selecting the best—a view which seems utterly
reasonable in an imperfect world—this is more of an ethieal achievement than it might
ﬁrst appear.

Under Stone’s form of pluralism an individual cannot always—though slhe can
sometimes—arrive at moral decision in a nonarbitrary way. Still less in all cases will
there be theoretical universal agreement. That does not reduce his pluralism to a ”rank
relativism” which claims that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by
the general approval or disapproval of the members of the society judging it. Clearly,
Stone thinks that there are, if not ethical universals, at least in some eases a convergence
of moral/aesthetic judgments which "feel right" to the ”collective conscience of

mankind.” If that is nebulous, it is so, Stone could insist, because precision in our

judgments is no virtue when it is accomplished at the price of moral insensitivity.

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Difﬁculties for Stone

Deferring criticisms of pluralism until later, the most basic charge that can be
levelled against Stone is similar to a difﬁculty encountered by Rolston: The direct
moral standing of nonsentient nature depends on a kind of “seeing” which carries no
argumentative weight with those who do not "see." One’s choice of moral planes is
determined by the ontology one takes to be morally signiﬁcant. Planes have to exhibit
"moral perspicacity" and to ”feel right” to “the collective conscience of mankind” As
with literature, we intuitively see or apprehend; the planar map makes the moral
standing manifest. Rolston assumes one will feel "value excitement" once natural
processes are properly, i.e., scientiﬁcally, understood. Stone considers the ”trained
intuition" of moral apprehension to be more like that in aesthetics where there is less
agreement than in science for mankind’s collective conscience to fall back on. Stone
depends on his criticism of moral extensionist methodology to convince the reader that
traditional ethics has been too narrowand rigid in its criteria for direct :moral
consideration. Stone’s criticism could, however, just as well reinforce the notion that
nonsentient nature is so vastly different ﬁom humans and animals that it is futile—and
invites moral chaos-to extend consideration beyond the interest principle.

Stone’s treatment of nontraditional entities often conﬂates argumentation for their
moral standing with the exposition of the meta-ethical structure of his system. The
foundational claim is not of itself objectionable: Many different types of entities ought
to have direct moral standing based on their own special properties rather than being
ethically assimilated as marginal cases (of defective humans). Stone then cites
significant differences between Persons and a generally accepted anomaly with
entrenched moral or legal standing. This ploy creates a dilemma: We can either (I)
retain traditional criteria for moral/legal standing and give up the direct consideration of
the anomalous case, or we can (2) quit 'marginalizing" the entity, appreciate it for what

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it is, and expand and diversify our criteria for direct standing to accommodate it. The
problem occurs when Stone concludes with some generalities about how other
Nonpersons might be so accommodated. The conclusion relies psychologically on a
earry-over of sympathy from the traditionally accepted marginal ease to cases which are
not at all marginal and which involve vastly different special properties. These are the
real points of contention and ought to be argued for. Since he eannot argue every ease,
Stone should at least provide an extended analysis of a few cases beyond the range of
marginal acceptance. He does not, and the result is a kind of philosophical shell game
played with moral standing. It takes several forms.

One form begins by dividing candidates for direct moral standing into Persons and
Nonpersons. Reasonably enough, Stone assumes we accept traditional characteristics of
Persons, such as rationality, as grounds for such standing. Next he cites signiﬁcant
differences between Persons and sample Nonpersons, for example, a bison. He counts
on our common sense beliefs that animals are sentient and that pain and pleasure are
criteria for direct moral consideration (or he trusts an acceptance of the literature which
argues the point). But even if we agree that criteria for direct moral standing should be
expanded to include the sample type of Nonperson on its own merits, that does not
justify the inclusion of other types of Nonpersons on theirs. ’Nonperson’ is simply a
label of convenience for sorting out types of planes, not the moral counterpart of a
natural kind where key features are shared across the board Yet Stone tends to treat the
set of Nonpersons as if there were something morally relevant and essenn'ally common
to all its members so that proving the case for one settled the matter for others.

The moral legerdemain takes a second form in Stone’s discussion of character as
an intrinsic good. Allowing that character is an intrinsic good, Stone’s claim that it
serves as a model for analyzing ”other attributes” as intrinsic goods is dubious. Stone’s

overt point is that "loosely logical” aspects of prescriptions are different ﬁom those of

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attributes (including character), but his use of character goes far beyond that. Because
character is commonly accepted as being morally important, it is easy to assume that the
"other attributes” are also reasonable candidates for intrinsic goods. Character,
however, is part of Person ethics involving issues of choice, responsibility, intent, and
so forth. These ”inner" aspects of Persons are thoroughly compatible with strong anti-
environmental positions such as Cartesian dualism, Descartes’ skepticism about the
physical world, and his pernicious belief that animals were merely machines. An
analysis of character used as a paradigm for handling intrinsic goods hardly makes the
case for "other attributes” as intrinsic goods, particularly attributes of nonsentient
nature.

A third form of the shell game involves a movement from what is legal to what is
moral. Noting that individual lawsuits to hunt endangered species have not been
successful, Stone suggests the Inupiat Indians’ claims to hunt the bowhead might gain
legal and moral legitimacy by showing how whale hunting is vital to the integrity of
their culture based on "attributeslof tribal existence such as tribal rituals, customs,
location,.and laws“ (p. 236). Indeed, the Inupiat might win their case as a tribe based on
treaties between membership entities, namely the Inupiat and the United States. The
legal status as tribe, however, says nothing per se about moral status. I happen to agree
with Stone that Inupiat society should be a candidate for moral standing, but I think that
requires more arguing than dejure recognition by the counts.

Problems of argumentation aside, there is a question of just how environmentally
sensitive Stone’s comprehensive pluralism can be. The shift towards aesthetics and
away from close adherence to the biologieal sciences could diminish the importance of
species, at least as functioning units within ecosystems. The problem arises because an
entity in its own right in one moral plane can become incidental in another plane.

Consider the difference between planar maps of things and qualities. Stone ﬁnds it

65

"more reasonable for considerateness to attach to the class of all objects that conserve or
carry forward the quality." If this is so, one would not need to preserve all mountains to
maintain the desired quality of grandeur or all species to maintain the desired quality of
variety. Stone himself voices concern over the ease with which on moral plane can be

assimilated by another.

One wonders, too, how strong an argument we ean wring out of the derivative
views, which do not value natural objects and so on as ends in themselves, but
only as instruments to human virtue or worthy lives. Conﬁned by that limited
rationale, the preservationist’s argument could not go beyond preserving enough
members of the class to assure that the favored virtue or form of ﬂourishing life
will be a viable prospect for humanity. One might conclude that there ought to
be enough Xs to go around, so that each person will have the opportunity to
develop the right tastes and activities; but that is not the same as to conclude that
each X has a right to endure, or even that the preservation of each X is morally
welcome (p. 239).

One can imagine other nonutility planes being reduced to quality planes and Stone’s
system diminishing to a reliance chieﬂy on anthropocentric considerations of humanly
perceived aesthetic qualities. Or, an emphasis on quality planes could result in a kind of
evisceration of the natural world by reducing it to a series of museum pieces which no
longer function on their own or retain signiﬁcant roles in ecosystems.s

The objections to Stone’s pluralism can be split into two groups: generic
objections to pluralism and system speciﬁc objections applying only to Stone. The
most important generic objection is that pluralists have no decision procedure to decide
conﬂicts between basic incommensurate principles. The simplest response is that
monistic theories of ethics provide only the illusion of a decision procedure. Stone
notes that any moral theory is hampered by lack of empirical knowledge, inability to
anticipate new situations, failure to foresee consequences of concepts and rules, and
physiological and psychological limitations which prevent us from knowing what
psychic states of other animals are like (pp. l42ff). Given the practical constraints,
there is no empirical way to substantiate the claim that a moral theory could in principle

decide every case. Those who make such claims do so on a dogmatic basis. Moral

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monists are increasingly willing to admit, in response to critics like Bernard Williams
(1985), that ethical theories sometimes underdetermine the proper response. That
leaves the monist to argue either (or any) side(s) of a case. The opportunity for what
Hare calls ”cooking,” tailoring an ethical decision to our beneﬁt or to ﬁt our prejudices,
is possible in monism as well as pluralism. There is a trade-off between the monist’s
claims to decidability and the pluralist’s claims to intuitive sensitivity. Moreover, it is a
reasonable claim that the appropriate focus of ethics should be on the actual and
probable, not on the possible or conceivable.6 Given these concessions, the theoretic
decidability claimed by monists does not seem to be much of an asset. The force of the
charge that pluralists cannot decide between incommensurate principles can be
maintained only by a straw man caricature of pluralism where there are no decision
procedures at all and pluralists are left to wring their hands at every conﬂict. Clearly,
Stone has decision procedures and he thinks there are some ethical universals. If the
burden of proof is on the challenger of traditional ethics, Stone’s claims for the greater
moral and ontological sensitivity of pluralism at least make a prima facie case for
reconsidering moral considerability.

There are, however, at least two major system speciﬁc objections to Stone’s
pluralism. The first is Gary Varner’s charge that Stone ”wavers between a robust
theoretieal pluralism and a pragmatic pluralism " (Varner 1991, p. 177). Recall from
the introduction to this chapter that the latter is a "strategy for theory construction"
which may mean only dividing up types of problems to cope with them more
successfully. The emphasis is on problem solving in applied philosophy. Whether or
not the different planes with their respective ontologieal comnritnrents and governances
can be knit into a super-theory is left open.7 What supposedly makes theoretical
pluralism “robust" is that it concentrates on meta-ethical structure stating and defending

the incommensurability of its basic principles. In the latter case there may or may not

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be much in the way of applied ethics. Ideally one would want a healthy interaction
where application tested and forced reﬁnement of the meta-ethical structure, and where
the meta-ethical structure provided the most coherent and comprehensive system
possible given the constraints of incommensurate principles or planes. Stone intends
that his pluralism should work in the ideal way described, but sometimes confuses the
two.

The second system speciﬁc criticism is that Stone does not make full use of his
own system. Stone acknowledges that an individual might have nonarbitrary grounds
based in his character that would make us judge him differently than another person
performing the same acts in the same situation. The way of life to which an individual
is committed might provide him with the ”lexical ordering“ requisite to deciding cases
of inter-planar conﬂict. In decisions involving more than one individual, a keen self
knowledge would make each moral agent aware of what slhe could compromise on, and
the manner and extent of the compromise. Stone rightly asserts that in many cases
planar conﬂicts will still allow one to eliminate the worst decisions. The claim is
impartial beeause it is based on an impersonal view of ethics. But the idiosyncracies of
character and ways of life also make ethics personal. What that might involve will be
taken up in Chapters 4 and 5.

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HARGROVE AND POSITIVE AESTHETICS

Anthropocentric Intrinsic Value

Eugene C. Hargrove argues for a form of moral pluralism in which nonsentient
nature has direct moral standing because of its intrinsic value as an object of beauty.
Hargrove deﬁnes ’intrinsically valuable’ as "valuable for its own sake or...without
regard to its use,” and locates intrinsic value

in both the experience and the object itself....[as] the [alternative] that best ﬁts
our basic aesthetic intuitions and practice. Anthropocentrically, it seems correct
to say that the value is in the object as long as we do not make a metaphysical
claim that the value exists as a property of the object itself. Such an attribution
of value to an object does not rule out the possibility that it may also possess
intrinsic value nonantlrropocentrically. It only means that humans aesthetically
consider the object to be valuable without regard to its use or instrumental
value... It is also possible for humans to consider the aesthetic contemplation of
an art object to be intrinsically valuable. There is nothing wrong with this
sition...unless it requires...that we conclude that the art object is merel
mstrumentally valuable as a trigger for the aesthetic experience (Hargrove 198 ,
pp. 124, 126).
The characterization of intrinsic value is very close to Callicott’s deﬁnition of inherent
value. But, unlike Callicott who denies that any object could possess value "as a
property" apart from a sentient valuer (the position Callicott calls ”intrinsic value“),
Hargrove remains agnostic on this point. To emphasize the distinction, Hargrove calls
his own position "anthropocentric intrinsic value."

If Hargrove is more willing than Callicott to entertain the possibility of objective
intrinsic value apart from a sentient valuer, he is less tolerant of the type of sentient
being his own system requires. To have an aesthetic experience of nature requires
judging the aesthetic object according to appropriate categories, which, so far as we
know, is an ability restricted to rational human agents. By way of contrast, Callicott
must include among valuers at least other mammals which are capable of altruistic
feelings. Rolston would claim that even plants have certain types of value relationships,

since plants "have,“ but do not "take,” an interest in nutritive value.

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Hargrove defends his claim that the preservation of (some) untrammeled nature is
a moral duty by coupling a thought experiment proposed by GE. Moore with positive
aesthetics which asserts that pristine nature is (nearly) always beautiful. Hargrove

outlines Moore’s thought experiment this way:

In responding to a claim by Sidgwick that it is not rational to aim at the creation
of beauty in external nature apart from any possible contemplation of it by
humans, Moore asks his readers to imagine two worlds, neither of which can be
visited by human beings: an exceedingly beautiful world and the ugliest world
that can possibly be conceived. He then argues that simply on the grounds that
beauty is in itself a greater good than ugliness, the beautiful world is preferable
to the ugly one and that in cases where our actions can affect the unperceived
and unperceivable beauty in such worlds, we have a duty to make such worlds
more beautiful insofar as we can. If we admit such a duty, Moore concludes, we
also admit that the existence of aesthetic value alone, independent of any
knowledge of its existence, contributes to the goodness of the whole in our own
world (pp. 171-172).

This position can be made into a moral argument for the preservation of nature if it can
be shown that nature is beautiful, for if beauty is intrinsically good, then we have a
moral duty to preserve natural beauty where we can. The proof for natural beauty
comes from Alan Carlson.

Positive Aesthetics
Allen Carlson is a major proponent of positive aesthetics which he characterizes as
the view that

...the natural environment, insofar as it is untouched by man, has mainly positive
aesthetic qualities; it is, for example, graceful, delicate, intense, umﬁed, and
orderly, rather than bland, dull, insipid, incoherent, and chaotic. All virgin
nature, in short, is essentially aesthetically good. The appropriate or correct
aesthetic appreciation of the natural world is basically positive and negative
aesthetic judgments have little or no place (Carlson 1984, p. 5).

Carlson thinks that positive aesthetics is defensible when judging nature whereas it
obviously is not so in cases of human produced art. His argument in brief is this. (1)
Aesthetic qualities depend on how objects (human created or natural) are perceived. (2)
To perceive appropriately depends on using the correct categories. (3) Categories of

70

man-made art are determined partly by art history, artist intent, etc. (4) Categories of
natural beauty are determined by the empirical sciences. (5) The empirical sciences
have built in aesthetic qualities like balance, harmony, etc. as part of the scientiﬁc
theories which make the world intelligible to us. (6) Therefore, in our scientiﬁc
ﬁndings we simultaneously discover order and beauty in the natural world.

To ﬂesh in the argument, Carlson invites us to consider how we use certain
categories to classify what sort of work we are aesthetically judging in cases of human
produced art.

Categories of art are established in light of certain facts about works of art and
their origins, such as their times and places of creation, their artists’ intentions,
and their societies’ traditions. The determinations of the correct categories for
particular works are also a function of such facts. However, the determinations
of the aesthetic qualities that particular works or kinds of works have, and thus
whether they are aesthetically good or bad, are in part a function of what
categories are correct for them. For example, since it is a post-impressionist
painting, The Starry Night rs aesthetically better than it would be were it an
expressionist work. Thus, in the case of art, determinations of cate cries and of
their correctness are in general prior to and independent of considerations of
aesthetic goodness (pp. 28-29). . ‘

Natural objects, on the other hand, are not created, but discovered. The categories
by which we perceive them come from the natural sciences such as botany, geology,
and ecology. There are indeed criteria which make natural beauty intelligible to us and
by which we can judge it.

Perhaps this relationship is somewhat like the following: a more correct
categorization in science is one that over time makes the natural world seem
more intelligible, more comprehensible to those whose science it is. Our science
appeals to certain kinds of qualities to accomplish this. These qualiﬁes are ones
such as order, regularity, harmony, balance, tension, conﬂict, resolution, and so
forth. If our science did not discover, uncover, or create such qualities 1n the
natural world and explain that world in terms of them, it would not accomplish
its task of making it seem more intelligible to us; rather it would leave the world
incomprehensible... Moreover, these qualities which make the world seem
grlrgnprehensible to us are also those which we ﬁnd aesthetically good (pp. 30-

Although he does not claim an exact correspondence between scientiﬁc discovery and
aesthetic discovery, Carlson thinks that their common guiding qualities will allow the

71

claims of positive aesthetics to be unpacked in a way which does not result in begging
the question. If Carlson is basically right, then positive aesthetics can supply the
argument that pristine nature is beautiful. Carlson’s argument appended to Moore’s
argument gives Hargrove his ontological argument for duties to preserve untrammeled
nature.

Hargrove notes that there are additional considerations strengthening the case for
preservation of natural aesthetic objects. Unlike man-made art, natural objects cannot
be as easily copied, repaired, or replaced. Once the beauty is lost, it is lost (totally, or in
signiﬁcant degree) forever. As an illustration and test case of his position Hargrove
asks us to imagine an alligator in a swamp, one on an alligator farm, and a plastic

alligator at Walt Disney World.

The alligator in the swamp has both a contemporary and historical reality. It is,
ﬁrst of all, a part of wild nature as it exists today; it is a representative of a
species and an element of a natural ecosystem. Second, it is a direct and
recognizable descendant of a creature that was both a contemporary and perhaps
even a predecessor of the dinosaurs. A glimpse of that period of natural history
is stored in that alligator. As a reference to that period, it and other such animals
provide a depth, temporal unity, and an enlarged sense of reality to nature,
aesthetically and ontologically, just as reference to past events in human history
provides, depth, temporal unity, and a sense of reality in a work of literature.
The alligator on the alligator farm is physically identical to the wild alligator and
to this extent is still a ”real" alligator. It retains some of the natural history of its
wild counterpart. Robbed of its natural surroundings and deprived of the
opportunity to learn and carry out much of its natural behavior, however, it is a
creature rn transition, waiting for its transformation into a consumer
product...and ultimately into a biologically restructured human artifact, like the
domestic cow, that can more efﬁciently and inexpensively yield up its
instrumental value to humankind. With the plastic alligator, the connection with
nature and natural history is completely severed, and no trace of the ”real"
alligator remains, even aesthetically. When one sees the alligator open its mouth
as the safari boat turns a comer on the ride, no images of contemporary wild
nature or of the dinosaurs of natural histo come to mind. These have been
replaced by another history, evolutionary... ut not natural, beginning with the
ﬁrst experimental Mickey Mouse cartoons.... Like the medieval Christian
looking at a picture of a ﬁsh and thinking about the Bible, the amusement park
visitor has dropped the ”real” alligator out of his or her aesthetic experience
(1989, pp. 197-198).

Is it aesthetieally wrong, then, to indulge in what Rolston calls "cultural-symbolization
value” in his example of the "bald eagle [which] symbolizes American self-images and

72

aspirations (freedom, strength, beauty...” (Rolston 1988, p. 15)? Only when we confuse
the eagle (or alligator) as a cultural artifact with the eagle in nature. The two must be
judged by different categories, the former by categories of human produced art, the
latter by categories of biological science. For both Rolston and Hargrove the eagle’s (or
alligator’s) cultural-symbolization value is parasitic on the bird’s (or reptile’s) telos in

its natural environment.

Pluralism

His minimal focus for the direct moral consideration of nature, its intrinsic beauty,
not only differentiates Hargrove from the monists, but also from pluralists like Stone
who claims there are many different kinds of entities deserving direct moral standing,
and for which Stone tries to map different moral planes. Stone’s comprehensiveness as
opposed to Hargrove’s parsimony in moral ontology is also reﬂective of differing
attitudes towards moral conﬂict.

Hargrove’s pluralism is grounded on his analogy between moral rules and the
nonconstitutive rules of chess. Constitutive rules are rules that deﬁne the game of
chess; they govern the way in which pieces can be moved, what checlanate is, and so
forth. Nonconstitutive rules are strategies learned for effective play such as the best

way to counter an opponent’s move. According to Hargrove, the

most important implications of the chess analogy...concem the nature, status,
and value of ethical rules in decision making. Chess theorists over the last 130
years have put together a rather large body of strategic and tactical rules which
seem to improve chess play when studied and which function well in
explanations and justiﬁcations of particular moves. This body of rules,
nevertheless, has no ultimate unifying principle, and the principles themselves
are not logically related to one another (the omission of one or the addition of
another in no way effects the group as a whole), they are not organized in any
meaningful hierarchy, they are probably too general to be useful without the
kind of study beginners engage in, and there are innumerable cases which can be
brought forward with regard to each of them in which following the proper rule
leads to disaster in a board situation (1985, p. 22).

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David Wiggins makes a similar point in emphasizing the range of interests and the ﬁnite
knowledge which any moral agent brings to a situation:

No theory, if it is to recapitulate or reconstruct practical reasoning even as well
as mathematical logic recapitulates or reconstructs the actual experience of
conducting or exploring a deductive argument, can treat the concerns which an
agent brings to any situation as forming a closed, complete, consistent system.
For it is of the essence of these concerns to make competing an inconsistent
claims. (This is a mark not of irrationality but of rationality in the face of the
plurality of ends and the plurality of human goods.) The weight of the claims
represented by these concerns is not necessarily ﬁxed in advance. Nor need the
concerns be hierarchically ordered. Indeed, a man’s reflection on a new
situation that confronts him may disrupt such order and ﬁxity as had previously
existed and bring a change in his evolving conceptions of the point, or the
several many points of living and acting (Wiggins 1980, p. 233 .

Whereas Stone allows the possibility of resolving all moral conﬂict within a single
moral plane, and offers strategies for coping with inter-planar conﬂicts, Hargrove sees
only hemistic guidelines ”not logically related to one another” and in no "meaningful
hierarchy” which the chess master, and presumably his moral counterpart, frequently
abandons or ignores. As Callicott wryly says, "Hargrove...is simply willing to live with
moreofa messthanStone" (1990a, p. 112). i i I i i

Difﬁculties for Hargrove

So long as it does not commit one to buying into G.E. Moore’s notion that
goodness is a non-natural intuited property, there is nothing objectionable in Hargrove’s
use of Moore’s thought experiment. Those of positivistic bent may object that beauty is
merely the inner aesthetic experience of the beholder and that ”unperceived and
unperceivable” beauty is a contradiction in terms. In the example, the beauty is
”unperceivable" because of the technological impossibility of travel to the distant
planets; neither Moore nor Hargrove is talking about a logically impossible perception
of beauty. With that qualiﬁcation, the positivistic objection becomes another case of
truth by stipulation (as in the discussion of the deﬁnition of ’interest’ in Chapter 1).

74

More serious objections can be raised against positive aesthetics. Carlson’s claim
that the empirical sciences supply the proper categories for the aesthetic judgment of
nature involves many assumptions about the sciences. Do all empirical sciences have
built in aesthetic qualities like ”regularity, harmony, balance,” or only some, and how
are we justiﬁed in picking one science over another? Carlson seems to have in mind a
paradigmatic view of the sciences as axiomatic systems in which simplicity and logical
elegance play an important role. He ignores the immense difﬁculties posed by
anomalies and the heated arguments among philosophers of science over how they are
to be handled in theory construction (Newton-Smith 1981). Or, perhaps his assertion is
that aesthetic considerations allow us to simplify in theory construction by trading off
empirical accuracy for ease of generalization and intellectual intelligibility. If so, then
positive aesthetics is more about an idealized model of nature than it is about nature.

Aldo Leopold’s ecological claims about the “integrity, stability, and beauty" of
biotic communities do invoke concepts like harmony, balance, and order. But, given
the ubiquity of predation in nature and its importance in driving evolution, one could
just as well characterize the ecological equilibrium as a kind of homeostatic war. The
aesthetic harmony and balance are perceived because of what Stone would call the grain
of focus, the ecosystem rather than the individuals. Callicott, Rolston, and Stone would
agree that different levels of focus are appropriate in different situations. Rolston and
Callicott try to work out decision procedures for which grain is appropriate and when.
Stone does not think that a thorough systematization of procedures is possible, but he
offers strategies for ameliorating conﬂict between different planes (which have different
grains of focus). Hargrove has no system at all. His pluralism provides no guidance for
which level of focus will produce the experience of beauty, and the result is deadly for
positive aesthetics.

Biologically, the concept of telos raises special problems as it did for Taylor’s
system of RFN, but for Hargrove and Carlson the immediate question is one of beauty.

75

If there are any biological norms for beauty, one of the most promising candidates
would be on the species level using something like Bernard Rollin’s deﬁnition of telos
as ”the unique, evolutionarily determined, genetically encoded, environmentally shaped
set of needs and interests which characterize the [type of] animal in question" (Rollin
1989, p. 146). What does positive aesthetics have to say about a parasite infested
animal? Pristine nature is full of starvation, disease, malformation, violence, and death,
things we normally consider productive of ugliness, not beauty. Is there perhaps not
only a telos for healthy animals (and plants), but also a telos for scrofulous ones,
mangled ones, dead ones?9 To save pristine nature from clmrges of ugliness, the natural
sciences will have to supply much more in the way of categories of aesthetic judgment
than either Carlson or Hargrove offer. The proponent of positive aesthetics must either
deny the obvious or justify it by reference to some larger, more harmonious and
beautiful whole. To do the latter still requires an admission of ugliness in our concrete
experience of the world. Perhaps, like viewing a painting, a certain amount of aesthetic
distance is required to appreciate the beauty. If so, however, one must disregard much
of empirical science (to the degree that it is empirical), and in so doing, give up the very
categories that supposedly make the world concomitantly intelligible and beautiful in

positive aesthetics.

76

CHENEY AND POSTMODERN BIOREGIONALISM

Postmodernism and Privileged Discourse

Jim Cheney endorses a form of pluralism in which bioregional narratives
incorporate the direct moral consideration of nature. Relying on postmodernist
criticisms of foundational epistemology, Cheney argues that claims to a "privileged
discourse,” one which assumes there is a single correct viewpoint from which all other
standpoints can be judged, must give way to many ”voices" each of which is an
articulation of unique and historical circumstances embedded in a particular landscape.
Bioregional narratives integrate self, community, and place so that one can function and
grow in a healthy and satisfying manner.

Cheney accepts Richard Rorty’s (1979) case against foundationalist epistemology
in which the "glassy essence" mind mirrors nature, and on which metaphysical
commitments the correspondence theory of truth depends. Rorty goes wrong, according
to Cheney, in sharing with other postrnodernists the belief that language is only "a set of
toOls created for various human purposes or...the free creation of conscious persons or
communities," that we "should practice ontological abstinence in our beliefs about the
relation of language and the world," and that ”’truth’ is simply the result of social
negotiation, agreement achieved by participants in a particular conversation” (Cheney
1989, p. 118). Cheney agrees with Rorty in (l) rejecting the notion that there can be a
foundationalist epistemology which provides criteria for judging the legitimacy of all
other cultural activities, (2) emphasizing the desirability and need for many points of
view, and (3) wanting to keep Rorty’s ”continuing conversation of mankind" going.
Cheney differs from Rorty in (l) asserting a limited form of objectivity, and in rejecting
both (2) Rorty’s severance of language from the world and (3) his view of knowledge as
propositional“

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Following feminist Sandra Harding, Cheney argues that although there is no
foundational and objective privileged discourse, there is a limited form of objectivity

deﬁned negatively in relation to those views which oppositional consciousness
deconstructs. A voice is privileged to the extent that it is constructed ﬁ'om a
position that enables it to spot distortions, mystiﬁcations, and colonizing and
totalizing tendencies within other discourses (p. 118).

Whenever a concept or theory is abstracted from its paradigm setting, there is a danger

of colonizing.

[A]bstractions can achieve a life of their own; they can be articulated in
accordance with canons of coherence and made into apparently self-contained
wholes ready for export and application to a variety of situations.... The danger
is that the theory when applied to a situation specrﬁed by the theory will serve
not to articulate that new situation, that is, bring it to experiential and moral
coherence, but rather will serve as a mechanism of defacto repression of at least
some of the experiential dimensions of the situation and lead to confusion and
bafﬂement at the level of action and conscious attempts to understand one’s
situation and what one is about (p. 120).

A "voice” of ”oppositional consciousness" has limited privilege and objectivity to the
extent that it can discern when concepts or theories do not ﬁt a situation. In Rorty’s
view partisans of one discourse can only negotiate with partisans of a different
discourse. For Cheney, contextually rooted voices have a kind of veto power over those
exporting abstractions to other situations. This is justiﬁable because, contra Rorty,
language is rooted in the world even though there is no absolute and single foundation

of "facts" which the mind rrrirrors.

Language and World

According to Cheney, Rorty’s fundamental error is that he has deconstructed
foundationalist. epistemology only to retain its "transcendental subject" Rorty dodges a
mind-body dualism by linguistic talk. Gone is the glassy essence mind; gone also is the
world. The net result is "conversations sustained only by the criteria of self-coherence
and adequacy to the purposes for which they were constructed" by human beings
severed from any world but their own talk.

78

Rorty dismantles the correspondence theory of truth, with its hope of ﬁnding a
way for the transcendental subject to touch the world with its words, only to
leave the transcendental subject in place, freely creating world upon world of
wordsuﬁnally not taking responsibility for its words, but merely pouring them
forth in conversation after conversation.

Transcendental subjects talk, but their talk is only words because they cannot talk
”about” an externalized world of foundational epistemology to which they are
transcendent. Rorty ignores the possibility that a nontranscendent speaker can speak
"of" an encompassing world in which slhe directly participates.

When this transcendental subject is also deconstructed, we are left with the
world and words in it, emergent from it. Heidegger...opts for a new relation to
language altogether, one which results from a ”meditative openness“ to the
world. The world speaks through us when we let go of the metaphysical
voice.... The difference in the languages Heidegger describes is said to be a
difference between ”primordial" language, as a way in which the world discloses
itself by our being rooted in the world, and ”fallen” language, which constructs
itself as a mirror of nature and uproots itself from the world by employing the
criteria of adequacy to human purposes and internal coherence...at the expense
of faithfulness to experiential embedment in the world...(pp. 118-119).

Cheney credits John D. Caputo for the distinction between Heideggerian and
Rortyan views of language. Because the Heideggerian view is crucial to Cheney’s
position, it is worth turning to Caputo’s own discussion of Heidegger:

[F]or Heidegger thought belongs essentially to Bein ...we belong to language
and...our belonging to language is essentially a way 0 being bound to Being and
world. These are one and the same for Heidegger, not because Being reduces to
language, but because the event of Being occurs in and through language,
because the world in which we already have our pre-ontological bearings is
always and already linguistic. language is the house of Being for Heidegger not
in the sense that we are conﬁned to words-he does not have in mind Rorty’s
linguistic house-arrest--but in the sense that language houses, shelters, and
protects Being. More straightforwardly, language is the way the world is
experienced, disclosed, encountered (Caputo 1983, p. 672).

Caputo admits the ”mystifying effect” of Heidegger’s use of the word ’Being’,
preferring his use of "physis, aletheia, event (Ereignis), or world.” Nonetheless, Caputo
insists, Heidegger is not really mystical: ‘

Being for him means the world in which mortals...dwell. World is the place of

birth and death, growth and decline, joy and pain, the movement of the seasons,
of the mysterious rhythm of human time.

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What Heidegger and other 'edifying philosophers" are saying

is a call, or better a recall, back to the human setting ofom' lives, back to a sense

of ﬁnitude and mortality, to the joy and the tragedy of the human condition, to

2n8413nderstanding of ourselves in which we can recognize ourselves (pp. 683-
If one considers Caputo’s interpretation of Heidegger in light of objections by
Maclntyre (1981), Williams (1985), Hampshire (1983, 1989), and other ”anti-theorists"
to the impersonal and ahistorical theorizing of traditional ethics, there seems to be a
considerable convergence—however differently stated-between continental and Anglo
voices.

At the risk of using "fallen” language, the problem might be described in terms of
epistemological distinctions between propositional knowledge, knowledge how, and
knowledge by acquaintance. Propositional knowledge is ”about” something, distancing
the knower from knowledge, and knowledge from the known; knowledge itself is
linguistic. Knowledge how is a skill or ability which is "part” of the knower. While one
can use language to expand knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge by acquaintance is
an immediate and pre-linguistic recognition. The latter two kinds of knowledge depend
on a participation or living through of experience; this is where the fact/value distinction
is most artiﬁcial. The positivistic heritage of British and American philosophers has
channeled their thinking along the lines of reducing knowledge how and knowledge by
acquaintance to propositional knowledge which then becomes separated from its
generative context and takes on its own signiﬁcance.11 Continental philosophers have
objected that this reductive epistemology makes of the knower a bystander who is
alienated from the process of living. As Caputo says, "For Heidegger epistemology is a
kind of hubris according to which human subjectivity presumes to hold court over
Being itself" (p. 664).

The Anglo-American antipathy toward continental philosophy is in large part due

to the primacy it assigns to knowledge by acquaintance. Knowledge which does not

8O

reduce to propositions seems uncomfortably mystical and intuitive, it cannot be checked
by an objective and external correspondence to data nor by its coherence with other
propositions. It might, however, be checked by agreement or disagreement—especially
within a communitynover how one ”feels about” an issue or ”sees” a situation. This
kind of checking by putting oneself into another’s shoes is basic to maintaining any
community and for civilized relationships among different communities. It has been
denigrated in modern philosophy because it is too protean too handle the admired
epistemological paradigm of theoretical physics, and it has too much primitive raw feel
about it for those intent on exorcising the ghost of mind. Anglo-American empiricism
has striven for clarity by keeping language separated from the world (and thereby, in
Heideggerian terms, reducing Dasein to das Man).

Bioregions and Mythic Narrative

The Heideggerian point which Cheney and Caputo elaborate is that each person
lives a unique life which slhe is constantly transforming. Descriptions in natural and
social science-to say nothing of other cultural institutions--tend to be generic,
universalistic, and static in the sense that they may admit change, but they lay down the
pattern for that change. To understand oneself (Dasein) and the world (Being) only
through such descriptions is to become 'essentialized" as a thing and to immerse oneself
in an agenda-ridden, artiﬁcial construction rather than the reality of one’s experience.
For Heidegger the awareness of death as one’s ”ownmost possibility" forces a person
out of the trivializing mode of dos Man (just anyone) to an authentic life of realizing
unique circumstances and potential. For Cheney, bioregional narrative in the form of

myth serves a similar-but more communal and less anguish-ridden-function.

Narrative is the key then, but it is narrative grounded in geography rather than
in a linear, essentialrzed narrative self. The narrative style required for situating
ourselves without making essentializing or totalizing moves is an elaboration of
relations which forgoes the coherence, continuity, and consistency insisted on by

81

totalizing discourse. Our position, our location, is understood in the elaboration
of relations in a nonessentializing narrative achieved through a grounding in the
geography of our lives. Self and geography are bound together in a narrative
which locates us in the moral space of deﬁning relations (Cheney 1989, p. 126).

The kind of nonessentializing narrative needed is exempliﬁed in Native American
myths which were tied to a particular place (the tribal land) and therefore did not
become colonizing as did myths which severed their geographic roots such as those of
Christianity. Quoting Paula Gunn Allen, Cheney says:

She notes that ”myth” is synonymous with ”fable,” not "belief,” and that it has
the connotation of ”moral story." Myth, she says, "is an expression of the
tendency to make stories of power out of the life we live in imagination.” Here
she is noting the intimate connection between myth and ritual--m th as "a
language construct that contains the power to transform... Of course rt reﬂects
belief...but it is at base a vehicle..." Myth, then, is knowledge shaped by

transformative intent: ”Myth may be seen as a teleological statement, a shaped

system of reference thaltzallows us to order and thus comprehend perception and
knowledge...” (p. 123).

Cheney sees this type of mythmaking as serving two basic functions. One is to
integrate the understanding and activities of a people. As deﬁned, myth and ritual are
two aspects of the same thing; on a very basic level, knowing becomes living. Myths
cannot be reduced to a set of beliefs, propositions, or sentences (whether they are judged
on the basis of correspondence to an external world or coherence with other
beliefs/propositionslsentences). The other basic function is to serve as a tether and
orientation point for the constant 'recontextualization" which is necessary to prevent
“essentializing” oneself. Rorty’s cultural ”voice" cannot ﬂoat free of the world, but
must always return to the particular geography which it inhabits.

The result is an ethic considerably different from both the monistic and the
pluralistic positions previously examined. There was in each an attempt to lay claim to
some kind of value or worth on behalf of nonsentient nature. Cheney sees such a move
as wrongly directed and alienating; bioregional narrative has a more comprehensive
and immediate focus.

The reality that is knit together as story and parable carries not the "intrinsic
value” so much discussed in the literature in environmental ethics, but rather

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actual moral instruction. An important aspect of the construction or evolution of
mythic images is their ability to articulate such moral imperatives and to carry
them in such a way that they actually do instruct; that they locate us in a moral
space which is at the same time the space we live in physically; that they locate
us in such a way that these moral imperatives have the lived reality of fact....
For a genuinely contextualist ethic to include the land, the land must speak to us;
we must stand in relation to it; it must deﬁne us, and we it (p. 129).

Cheney thinks that myths can only perform this active integrative moral instruction if
we give up the pretense of universally applying them or ”meta-myths” from ecology or
other sciences.

The integrity of the objective scientiﬁc model must, for [select purposes]..., give
way to the requirement of the health and well-being of individual, community,
and land in the construction of an image of nature (with us in it) which
effectively instructs. If value is implicit in our descriptions of the world and our

llrlaazce in it, then the narratives we construct will embody value and orient us (p.
).

Here again, Cheney is at odds with previous positions, all of which have insisted on
some foundational role for the natural sciences. Neither Rolston nor Callicott would
object to a particular bioregion as a starting point, but only as a starting point, which
must then use natural history, evolutionary biology, and ecology as the correct form of
understanding to expand one’s moral consciousness to include nonsentient nature.
Rolston uses personal history and narrative to move us away ﬁom our concrete setting
to value excitement with the vast sweep and drama of geological and biological
evolution. Callicott admits that our strongest moral obligations are at the innermost
“rings" of community, but advocates an expansion of community to include the entire
terrestrial ecosystem. Cheney treats land as the place in which we are ”at home"

precisely because it is the home of our community and not that of another.

Difﬁculties for Cheney

Assuming that his interpretation of Rorty and Heidegger is viable, the kind of
oppositional consciousness to which Cheney grants a limited objectivity creates several
problems. First among them is how such consciousness can spot distortions in other

positions while remaining immune to the charge that the distortion is a projection

83

resulting from distortions in the oppositional view. The degree to which a theory or
concept is abstracted from its paradigm setting, including both local history and local
geography, is a warning ﬂag of colonizing and totalizing. That alone is insufﬁcient to
sort out cases of illicit special pleading ﬁom genuine cases of distorting and colonizing.
High level concepts like justice and utility are not discussed by Cheney (though be
readily utilizes high level psychological concepts in criticizing Mother Earth imagery).
Even though they are insufﬁcient to "articulate" local experience and to ”instruct" us in
what we should do, justice and utility could (I) serve an important refereeing function
among the various local mythologies and (2) set limits to actions within local
mythologies in the same manner that rights can function as side constraints.

The situation is aggravated by the murky role which biological science would play
in Cheney’s environmental ethic or plurality of ethics. The myth-sharing community
needs “a coherent model of health to draw on.”

A Western scientiﬁc description of the speciﬁcs of the ecosystem within which
one lives is not adequate. It provides the wrong kind of myth. It can and ought
to inform our construction of appropriate mythical images, but it cannot function
as the centerpiece of a viable environmental ethic, much less a mythos for our
times (p.132).
He criticizes the mythos of ecology as ”organicism, the ’dream of natural (unforced)
community." It would be helpful to know whom Cheney is criticizing here. A desire
to return to a primal paradise is quite rightly rejected as a basis for an environmental
ethic, but to insist that ecology leads to "organicism' is a very naive view of ecology
and treats the previously examined positions as straw men. Rolston and Callicott, for
instance, would agree to the inadequacy of a “scientiﬁc description” because they both
reject the fact/value distinction, though they would not single out ”Western” science
because neither thinks it has to be construed in the positivistic fashion to which Cheney
is reacting. Rolston and Callicott are well aware of the death and destruction, growth

and decay, in maintaining the stability and integrity of ecological communities. That

34

they try to come to an accommodation with it makes them neither Cheney’s
'organicists" nor its polar opposite, Regan’s ”fascists."

Cheney’s repeated appeals to the ”health" of the individual, community, and land
as the goal of bioregional narratives and the proper moral measure of actions earns him
a certain amount of intuitive sympathy. Unfortunately, he gives only hints as to how
this might be done: mythmaking must be local, integrative, and “informed" by ecology.
Clearly the community will have to be satisfying to the individual and give direction
and meaning to personal action. It will also have to be biologically responsible in its
treatment of land so that the land-culture symbiosis can be sustained. Beyond that the
community and individual will have a history and identity uniquely shaped by "their"
land. If setting criteria is too formal a methodology to develop Cheney’s concept of
health, he at least needs to offer an extended analysis of an example which could be
used as a paradigm case.

. . Cheney’s shift from ethics as principles and critique to bioregional narrative as
mythos is understandable in light of the power of myths to integrate cognitive and
affective functions which direct actions and make of life a meaningful whole. Though
Cheney utilizes only snippets of Native American mythmaking, his models have a
certain appeal, even allowing for overgeneralizations about cultures which differed
widely. The myths are rooted in a particular area understood as sacred land beyond the
borders of which they do not apply and cannot colonize. Nonetheless, there are several
unexplored questions which are crucial to Cheney’s position. To what extent are Native
American bioregional narratives altered by Western European culture and artiﬁcial
conﬁnement on reservations? The old narratives may have functionally integrated the
lives of the people when they occupied their original homelands and pursued a way of
life possible only when there was no overwhelmingly invasive culture. Can they so

function now, or be modiﬁed to so function? If not, they provide a seductive model for

85

the illusion of a return to paradise. Though they may lack the proselytizing of
Christianity, were Native American myths any less repressive internally? Warrior cults
tend to create great disparities in the status of men and women; women’s role is
primarily to produce a new generation of warriors on whom the community’s survival
depends (Tyrrell and Brown 1991). What moral instruction did the myths provide—if
any—for insider treatment of those outside the culture, those who are ”not-people”? The
Hopi, for instance, called the invading Navajo ”headpounders" for the way they killed
captives. Exterminating is not a morally satisfactory alternative to colonizing.
Somewhere between possibility and probability one may fairly guess that our views of
Native American myths have been molded by the constraining forces of an alien
culture, including its theoretical emphasis-conveniently neglected in practice-on
transcultural moral universals. Native Americans and their cultures have been ”made
safe” ﬁrst by nrilitary conquest, then by governmentally mandated programs of cultural
genocide, and now by economic onslaught threatening any communal form of life.
Conquered or threatened peoples have good reason to interpret—or reinterpret—their
narratives in light of notions of tolerance which may have been originally lacking.
Whether Native American myths and rituals would, in their original cultural setting,
have the paradigmatic appeal they now do for Cheney is uncertain.

Finally, there is a danger inherent in "oppositional consciousness" which,
following the Uncle Remus stories, I will call the Tar Baby eﬁect. To catch Br’er
Rabbit for dinner, Br’er Bear and Br’er Fox make a tar ﬁgure. When Tar Baby doesn’t
respond to Br’er Rabbit’s greeting, Br’er Rabbit teaches him manners by punching him.
When Tar Baby won’t let go, Br’er Rabbit hits him with the other ﬁst...and so on until
Br’er Rabbit is thoroughly stuck. So long as oppositional consciousness is focused on a
positive integration of its own experience, the Tar Baby effect is avoided. Once
oppositional consciousness begins to deﬁne itself mainly by what it is not, it becomes
enmeshed in the very thing it opposes and is as thoroughly stuck as Br’er Rabbit—more

86

thoroughly stuck, in fact, because Br’er Rabbit never deﬁned himself by the opposition.
One must live primarily for what one comes to understand as important in one’s life.
As a matter of logical negation, to be against oppression is to be for non-oppression. As
a matter of life, that tells one nothing about what non-oppression is. The ultimate test of
Cheney’s position is whether oppositional consciousness can sustain a positive form of
mythmaking or whether the myths will be ﬂawed by a defensiveness which overrides or

diverts their articulation of the fullness of a way of life.

87

CONCLUSION

Alienation and Integration

The major difﬁculty with the monistic cases for the moral considerability of
nonsentient nature was the argumentative leap from immediate personal land valuation
to high level consideration of ecosystems. The pluralists give up the hope of a single
principle bridging the gap, yet they are in their own ways plagued by the same disparity.
Stone lays out a comprehensive pluralism on the assumption that we do, should, or will
come to value ethically the ontological commitments of each moral plane. Hargrove
offers one argument for the direct moral consideration of natural beauty with no advice
about how we are to juggle this value commitment with others. Cheney’s proposal of
bioregional narratives morally integrates an individual and community with the land,
but leaves us with unresolved questions about the potential for mythic repression of the
individual, and in the dark as to how a mythic emphasis could handle intercommunal,
much less global, environmental problems.

It may be that the best that one can do is to try to strike a balance between the
intuitive value commitment to nonsentient nature at the level of knowledge by
acquaintance and the high level propositional descriptions of it in modern science. To
understand the notion of balance requires both a clear understanding of one’s unique,
historical commitments and an appreciation for disparate views. Two factors become
important in a balancing view of environmental ethics. One is a shift from
understanding ethical principles as strict rules to that of moral guidelines or ”rules of
thumb.” The other is an appreciation for compromise as something that does not
destroy one’s integrity. In succeeding chapters we will see how these factors come into

play when experiential gestalts are woven into a way of life.

CHAPTER 3:
DEEP ECOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

Ecology and Moral Philosophy

The complex networks of relationships that deﬁne life in the study of ecology
prompted Paul Shepard to dub ecology "the subversive science" (Shepard and
McKinley 1969). Just as the relational ﬁeld view of Einsteinian physics replaced the
Newtonian atomistic description of nature as bits of matter in motion, so ecology
substituted a web-of-life system for conventional biology’s focus on living individuals
or, in the case of species, groups of individuals. The shift to an holistic ontology was
considered by some philosophers to have broad implications for moral philosophy. The
Enlightenment paradigm of the isolated individual who is to be respected for her
autonomy, or who is to be allowed the rational maximization of his interests, was seen
as a holdover from an atomistic ontology which was no longer tenable either at the
subatomic level or at the level of living things.1

In the infancy of environmental philosophy Arne Naess identiﬁed two ways of
responding to the information supplied by the new science of ecology. The shallow
ecology movement was a ”[fjight against pollution and resource depletion. Central
objective: the health and afﬂuence of people in the developed countries” (Naess 1973,
p. 95). The deep ecology movement required an understanding of self relationally
integrated with nature, and had a far-reaching set of high level goals, the deep ecology
platform. The aim of deep ecology is both understanding and moral action on the
widest scale. Naess’s view of deep ecology involves several major components: (1) a

relational ﬁeld-view ontology, (2) careful attention to the content of experience as a

88

89

gestalt of secondary and tertiary qualities inclusive of feelings, (3) a pyramidal view of
norms from low levels based on personal experience to the high levels of the deep
ecology platform and Naess’s ultimate norm ”Self-realisationl", (4) a rigorous
methodology for bridging the mid-level gap between low and high level norms, and (5)
a sense of humility that comes from the awareness that all our knowledge systems are
fragmentary.

Superﬁcially, Naess’s basic argument is that once one understands that one is part
of a larger whole, the small (lower case) self of the isolated individual expands to
include all of nature in a larger (upper case) Self. Self understanding and Self love then
become understanding and love of nature as a whole. The ultimate norm, Self-
realisationl, is an imperative requiring the non-separate "individual" to act on behalf of
all nature. Deep ecology remains a movement for Naess because the complete
articulation of the direct experience of nature and its logical links to the highest level
sonata are always a practical impossibility. Each moral individual must continually
work on the articulation and linking process, and always operates from a somewhat
different experiential base than any other individual. Naess calls this effort ecosophy,
philosophy transformed by ecology, and his own system of understanding Ecosophy T
(named for his hut in the Norwegian mountains).

Naess straddles the line between moral monism and moral pluralism. The
methodology of precisation, reﬁning verbal statements and norms, suggests that in
principle a single comprehensive, logically consistent set of norms might be possible.
Although he claims that norms are rarely derived purely ﬁ'om other norms but include
hypotheses in combination with norms, the pyramidal structure with a master norm and
the common high-level goals of deep ecology suggest that lower level norms might be
derived from high level norms by logieal implication. This would not be srnprising as
Naess is a Spinoza scholar and the Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) of Spinoza’s

Ethics is an acknowledged forerunner of Naess’s 'Meus sive Natura“ ontology.

9O

Favoring a pluralist categorization of Naess are his humility about human
knowledge, his talk of norms as guidelines subject to continuing reﬁnement, and his
egalitarian insistence that each person must develop his own ecosophy. Perhaps he
could best be called a pragmatist on this issue since our de facto lack of perfect
knowledge prevents the monist-pluralist debate from ever being put to the test which
could yield decisive consequences. Naess would, I think, prefer to dodge such labels
altogether as there is something of a Buddhist master in him with his pointing the way
and go-ﬁgure—out-your-own-ecosophy attitude. The real point of ecosophy-as it once
allegedly was and sometimes still is with philosophy-4s to be lived, not to be admired

or debated merely as an intellectual construction.

91
NAESS AND ECOSOPHY

The Primacy of Ontology
The ﬁrst of seven characteristics which Naess cited as separating deep ecology
from the shallow ecology movement was deep ecology’s

[r]ejection of the man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-

ﬁeld image. Organisms as knots in the biospherical net or ﬁeld of relations. An
intrinsic relation between two things A and B is such that the relation belongs to
the deﬁnitions or basic constitutions of A and B, so that without the relation, A
and B are no longer the same things. The total-ﬁeld model dissolves not only
the man-in-environment concept, but every compact thing-in-milieu concept-
except when talking at a superﬁcial or preliminary level of communication
(Naess 1973, p. 95).

As the deep ecologist reﬁnes his descriptions of himself, he will more and more be
forced to see the arbitrariness of himself as an individual separated ﬁ'om or standing
above nature. This has two major effects: (1) the bridging of the epistemological gulf
between subjectivity and objectivity, and. (2) the expansion of the (valued) potential of
an individual human bei‘r'rgj‘to (valuing) the realization of Self inclusive of nature.2 The
second effect will be considered in discussing the deep ecology platform. The ﬁrst
effect we consider now.

Naess thinks that much of our environmental malaise can be traced to a faulty
notion of objectivity based on misconceptions about our sciences.

A strong philosophical tradition goes from Newton to Kant and his Ding an
sich about which nothing positive can be said. Our textbooks, with
impermissible inconsistency, usually stop half-way: form, weight, and certain
other qualities are objective whereas colour and smell are said to be subjective.

However, if we take characteristics like ’oblong’ and ’square’, for example,
they cannot objectively be qualities of a table, as the quality cannot be separated
from the concepts of time and velocity in the theory of relativity. The
mentioned characteristics are not subjective, but, like smell, bound in an
interdependent relationship to our conception of the world... It is justiﬁable to
refer to them as objective in the sense of being independent of a person’s likes or
dislikes. We arrive, not at the things themselves, but at networks or ﬁelds of
relations in which things grarticipate and from which they cannot be isolated
(Naess and Rothenberg l9 9, pp. 48-49.)

Naess has basically the same objection as Rolston (see Chapter 1) to the traditional

92

Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualiﬁes which still permeates our
understanding of the physical world: shape and movement, we tend to assume, are
obj ecﬁvely in things themselves, whereas color and taste are subjectively located in the
observer. Thus do we create a gulf between the obj ecﬁve and subjective.

To this is added the problem of tertiary qualities, I'the perceptually complex
qualiﬁes such as the quality of strength expressed by powerful orchestral chords
associated with the visual impressions of an attacking bull, and qualiﬁes such as
sorrowful, beautiful, threatening, patheﬁc" (p. 52). While secondary qualiﬁes may be
supposed the same for all normal observers under standard conditions, and therefore in
that sense be obj ecﬁve, the tertiary qualiﬁes are usually seen as hopelessly affecﬁve and
idiosyncraﬁc. These disﬁncﬁons support a bias against naturalism in ethics.

Viewpoints hosﬁle to nature and the environment are commonly presented as
descrrpﬁons of the factual/obj ective condiﬁons, while the opposing points of
view are referred to, analogous to the teachings of secondary qualiﬁes, as
manifestaﬁons of more or less incidental subjecﬁve evaluaﬁons, ’mere’ feelings
and senﬁments. The tertiary qualities such as melancholic are not accepted as
qualiﬁes in nature or the environment, but are placed within the person, for
example, as an experience or feeling of melancholy which is then projected out
in nature. A landscape may in itself be 40 km [square] but not melancholic. But
is it possible to stop half-way? It is difﬁcult to understand why it is not also
necessary to ’project’ length, and all other qualiﬁes from within the human
subject. If we do, we arrive at ’the thing in itself‘ as an x about which nothing
can be said, while everything is ascribed to a subject who ’creates’ the world as
i5t3is actually experienced. A very ﬂattering, albeit uninformaﬁve concepﬁon (p.
).
The point is the same as Rolston’s complaint that "subj ecﬁvity has eaten up everything.“

A relaﬁonal interpretation of qualiﬁes, claims Naess, removes their seeming
arbitrariness. Consider the "highly subjecﬁve' secondary qualiﬁes of hot and cold.
While it may be contradictory to say the water in a bowl is both hot and cold, to say that
it is hot to an individual in physiological state x and cold to an individual in
physiological state y is not contradictory. Terﬁary qualiﬁes simply require more
reﬁnement of speciﬁcaﬁon of the condiﬁons and networks of relaﬁons to remove their

“arbitrary and subj ecﬁve" epistemological/ontological statues

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Indeed, the autonomous subject/observer status of the rational knower in
epistemology is an impossibility since slhe cannot understand or be understood apart
from the milieux, the surrounding condiﬁons and relaﬁonal networks. Far ﬁ'om being
less reliable than primary qualiﬁes, secondary and terﬁary qualiﬁes are the only ones at
hand for a phenomenal descripﬁon~primary qualiﬁes are "entia rationis characterisﬁc
of abstract structures, but not the contents of reality. The geometry of the world is not
in the world" (p. 55). As knowers and as moral agents Naess claims we must ulﬁmately
rely on our concrete experiences which are gestalts that are simultaneously cogniﬁve,

conaﬁve, and affecﬁve.

When one’s attenﬁon is not deliberately focused upon perceptual gestalts, all
experience is appercepﬁve. Its units are appercepﬁve gestalts, not sensory
elements, not intellectual elements. The distinction between {facts ’ and ’values ’
only emerges from gestalts through the activity of abstract thinking. The
disﬁncﬁon is useful, but not when the intenﬁon is to describe the immediate
world in which we live, the world of gestalts, the living reality, the only reality
known to us (p. 60).

Reason is misapplied when we try to reduce the gestalts to their ulﬁmate constituents
and analyze these components as if they were more real than the gestalt of which they
are a part.

The gestalts of one’s experience; however, are not simple recordings of complexes
of secondary and terﬁary qualiﬁes, like so much videotape footage stored in the mind.
Gestalts have what Naess calls a ”symbol value" or "symbol funcﬁon" that plays an
important role in moral and intellectual growth.

In non-nomadic cultures, especially agrarian ones, a geographical sense of
belonging is crucial. More speciﬁcally: rooms, interiors, stairs, farmyards,
gardens, nearby trees, bushes-all these things become, on the whole
unconsciously, a part of that which is ours, a powerful lﬁnd of gestalt...

When a child grows up, the higher order gestalts of the home change gradually. , -
Certain things which were threatening cease to be so as one becomes larger and
stronger. Some things which were more distant or mystical move nearer
because of the improved abili to cross distances. The essence which remains
consﬁtutes the character of be onging, of being at home, an interwoven gestalt
diversity with extremely potent symbolic value: A has symbolic value B when
A stands for B in conceptual experience. (The ancient formula goes ’aliquid
stat pro aliquo’.) Symbolic function must be disﬁnguished from signal funcﬁon,

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as A can very well be a signal for B without combining in a gestalt. On the
other hand, A has symbolic funcﬁon in relaﬁon to B only if a gestalt is created
which includes both A and B. A red light makes us stop, and we can develop a
gestalt which makes it a symbol for stopping, but more likely, it will conﬁnue to
be an external association, a signal for stopping. In the symbolisaﬁon of B
through A, A and B are bound together in an internal and not merely external
relaﬁon (pp. 61-62).

To speak of the house in which one grew up, then, is not merely a physical descripﬁon
but an atﬁtudinallaffecﬁve one about home as well. Since the house stands for these
feelings in an ”internal" relaﬁonship, it is not something that can be replaced as the red
stoplight can in its ”external” relaﬁonship to stopping where any color or shape will do.

The symbol funcﬁon of gestalts allows us to make high-level value generalimﬁons:
One may, like Naess, love mountains because one grew up in a parﬁcular mountainous
area. An irriﬁal reacﬁon to a new mountain range may be one of nostalgia or terror or
delight. "Of course,” says Naess, ”outbreaks of feeling are not [moral] arguments, but
evidence that something is felt to be crucial."

Spontaneous posiﬁve or negaﬁve reacﬁons often do little more than express
what a person likes or dislikes. Value standpoints are reﬂecﬁons in relaﬁon to
such reacﬁons: ’Do I like that I like it?’ We get a four-way division: posiﬁve
evaluation--one likes that one likes, or likes that one dislikes; negaﬁve
evaluaﬁon—one dislikes that one likes, or dislikes that one dislikes (p. 64).

High level norms like those which consﬁtute the deep ecology platform are rooted in
personal gestalt experiences, but these experiences have to be understood, reﬁned, and
perhaps even transformed by reﬂecﬁon.

The process of building up a comprehensive system of norms in ecosophy is much
the same as hypothesis building in science where evidence underdetermines theory.
The difference is that gestalts supply both cogniﬁve and affecﬁve empirical content.
We do this through a process of interpretaﬁon and precisation. While we may share a
common language inculcated by a community, our personal gestalt experiences only
partly overlap and the words we use are general and imprecise. The common terms we
use as speakers require "mutually interpreﬁng what the other has said based on prior

understanding of what words and phrases mean'—especially in the case of the emoﬁonal

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subtleﬁes associated with symbol funcﬁon (p. 5). Naess is not suggesﬁng that language
works only by being conﬁned to phenomenal ﬁes, but rather countering views in which
"inner” and ”personal" and "emoﬁve" aspects of experience are deemed irrelevant or
illusory.4 By becoming aware of the emoﬁve and cogniﬁve differences in the gestalts of
others through precisaﬁon, we widen olu' experienﬁal network beyond our own gestalts
and reﬁne our experierrﬁally underdetermined—vastly underdetermined—hypotheses and
norms.

Naess depicts the network of norms (and hypotheses) in ecosophy as a pyramid.
On the bottom are low level norms highly supported by our gestalt experiences. On top
are a few wide ranging principles like the deep ecology platform. At the very pinnacle
in Ecosophy T, Naess’s personal system, is Self-realisaﬁon! The chief moral and
intellectual task of ecosophy is to link the high and low level norms by ﬁlling in the
middle level of the pyramid, so that the deep ecology platform does not degenerate into
a creedal dogma or sloganeering. The deep ecology platform is nonetheless necessary
as a guiding set of principles for which Naess and other deep ecologists would claim as
support, not only their overlapping experiences rooted in gestalts, but also considerable
reﬂecﬁon and the (perceived) biases and failings of the half-way measures of shallow
ecology posiﬁons.

The Deep Ecology Platform

The deep ecology platform put forward by Naess and philosopher George Sessions
is not meant to be deﬁnitive in any absolute sense (as Naess’s insistence on the
importance of precisaﬁon shows), but a useful and compact set of guidelines to which
most deep ecologists would assent. It is here quoted in enﬁrety:

(l) The ﬂourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value.
The value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness these may
have for narrow human purposes.

(2) Richness and diversity of life forms are values in themselves and contribute
to the ﬂourishing of human and non-human life on Earth.

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(3) Heedsum have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to saﬁsfy
vital n .

(4) Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the
situaﬁon is rapidly worsening.

(5) The ﬂourishrng of human life and cultures is compaﬁble with a substanﬁal
decrease of the human populaﬁon. The ﬂourishing of non-human life requires
such a decrease.

(6) Signiﬁcant change of life condiﬁons for the better requires change in
policies. These affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures.

(7) The ideological change is mainly that of appreciaﬁng life quality (dwelling
in situaﬁons of intrinsic value) rather than adhering to a high standard of living.
There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

(8) Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligaﬁon directly or
indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes
(Naess and Rothenberg 1989, p. 29).

The position is easily parodied by ignoring Naess’s insistence on the need for
interpretaﬁon and reﬁnement of the principles, and for an explicit linking of the deep
ecology platform with the diverse experienﬁal and situaﬁonal base of other reﬂecﬁve
moral agents. Rather than defend Naess against potenﬁal straw men--a hopeless task
given the many lesser lights than Naess in the deep ecology movement, and a general
social failing to employ the principle of charity in interpretaﬁon—it is beta to make two
general observaﬁons, oneabout the claims ;of intrinsic value and theiother about the
radically utopian appearance of the platform.

Intrinsic value in Naess’s system is derived from the emoﬁonal content of gestalts
through the process of reﬂecﬁon. Since the relaﬁonal ﬁeld-view ontology breaks down
barriers between the individual self and the ”external world," debates about whether
value is subjecﬁve or objective is a moot point for Naess. The expansion from the
egoistic self to the (potentially) world-inclusive Self is a simultaneous process of
understanding and valuing. ’Self-realisaﬁonl’ is a command to realize, make actual in
one’s own awareness, knowledge and value. To by to ground this process further is to
enter the noumenal realm and indulge in speculaﬁon that deteriorates into what Kant
called "rotten dogmaﬁsm.‘

As to the seeming outrageously utopian nature of the deep ecology platform, to see

how far Naess intends these principles to go, it is worth quoﬁng two more lengthy

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norms from his early characterizaﬁon of deep ecology:

(2) Biospheric egalitarianism--in principle. The ’in principle’ clause is
inserted because any realisﬁc praxis necessitates some killing, exploitaﬁon, and
suppression.... To the ecological ﬁeld-worker, the equal right to live and
blossom is an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom. Its restricﬁon to
humans is an anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of
humans themselves. This quality depends in part upon the deep pleasure and
saﬁsfacﬁon we receive from close partnership with other forms of life. The
attempt to ignore our dependence and to establish a master-slave role has
contributed to the alienaﬁon of man from himself.

Ecological egalitarianism implies the reinterpretaﬁon of the future-research
variable, ’level of crowding’, so that general mammalian crowding and loss of
life-equality is taken seriously, not only human crowding...

(3) Principles of diversity and of symbiosis. Diversity enhances the
potenﬁalities of survival, the chances of new modes of life, the richness of
forms. And the so-called struggle of life, and survival of the ﬁttest, should be
interpreted in the sense of ability to coexist and cooperate in complex
rg'glagtrSnships, rather than ability to kill, exploit, and suppress...(Naess 1973, pp.

If one accepts the relaﬁonal ﬁeld-view of Self, the biospheric egalitarianism does follow
argumentaﬁvely--’follow logically’ is too strong given the tentaﬁve nature of all our
underdetermined hypotheses and Naess’s insistence on the need for reﬂective
interpretaﬁon, reﬁnement, and a systemaﬁc development of an errﬁre pyramid of norms-
-as otherwise one is treaﬁng oneself as the egocentric self set apart from nature. At
issue is whether Naess’s view of deep ecology is too ludicrously utopian and
outrageously demanding to qualify as anything but supererogaﬁve fantasy. One would
have to reduce signiﬁcantly the present human populaﬁon of the planet as well as
signiﬁcantly reducing present levels and rates of consumpﬁon in the industrialized
naﬁons. For what? So condors‘can nest and buffalo roam?! Don’t we owe more to
people?! Naess’s answer would be ’yes’ to both quesﬁons, that it’s a matter of both/and
not either/or, and that’s exactly why the human populaﬁon and consumpﬁon must be
reduced. He is not proposing a Khmer Rouge system of mass execuﬁons and forced
slavery to turn us all into environmentally virtuous peasants. We have the ability to
reduce human population gradually over generations to bring it into line with

ﬂourishing of other species, even without resorﬁng to controversial measures such as

aborﬁon.

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One reason the deep ecologist platform appears so radically utopian is because the
convenﬁonal wisdom about resource use and moral intuiﬁons based solely on personal
experience have generally encouraged more use, more producﬁon, and more populaﬁon
for expanding markets. Garrett Hardin outlines the reasoning of a contemporary brand
of moral and poliﬁcal ”conservaﬁve":
He sees the effects of a high birth rate as this cascade of consequences: more
babies [creates] more customers[,] more customers [creates] more business[,]
more business [creates] more proﬁts[,] more proﬁts [creates] more prosperity for
alllltlllrat is not ﬁgured into this calculus are other consequences of the second in
the series: more customers [creates] greater demands on the environment,
causing an earlier exhausﬁon of nonrenewable resources and a higher roducﬁon
ﬁsgtfor other resources, thus decreasing real income per capita (Hardin 1985, p.
Hardin’s "conservaﬁve" also fails to take into account the fact that the growth of the
human populaﬁon is increasing exponenﬁally, that the frontiers which absorbed the
excess population of the Old World are all but closed, that technological change has
made individuals increasingly‘dependent on others even for basic. necessitieslike
drinking water, and that the kinds of technological development necessary to support
the increasing populaﬁon even in the short run requires large-scale capital investment
concentraﬁng vast economic and poliﬁcal power in the hands of a few corporate board
members who do not represent anything like a cross-secﬁon of society, that it creates
the sorts of jobs that are highly dependent on expanding markets and greater resource
use, and increases pollution and toxic wastes.’ This, of course, is only ﬂour a narrow
homocentlic perspecﬁve and raises no concern about the increasing rate at which animal
and plant species are being exterminated as habitat becomes resources to fuel the
economy. As I write this chapter (February, 1992) proposals are being made to end the
current recession by increasing auto sales and housing starts, both of which are prime
examples of the resource intensive demands of a life style we take as ”normal." The

stance and expectaﬁons of the good life from which Naess’s critics judge him as

utopian—parﬁcularly those criﬁcs who envision a moral goal of increasing Third World

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consumpﬁon to the proﬂigate and unsustainable levels of the average United States
citizen-are a holdover from the days in which we humans were too few and
technologically too primiﬁve to threaten a massive collapse of ecosystems as we are
now doing...and with the ecosystems, of course, the collapse of the economy.6 Those
who would brand Naess’s far-sighted vision as outlandish or ludicrous have an equal
obligaﬁon to show how their own short-sighted vision is not literally utopian or worse.

Difﬁculties for Naess

It is difﬁcult to make criﬁcisms of Naess sﬁck because of his care in poinﬁng out
the provisional nature of substantive claims in his own Ecosophy T, and because his
deep ecology platform is only a set of guidelines for a movement. A few major
quesﬁons may nonetheless be raised.

Most fundamental to Naess’s view is his relaﬁonal ﬁeld-view of Self. Granted, we
can see ourselves either as isolated individuals or as parts of a greater whole. But when
is the former view appropriate, and when does it become an arrogant egocentrism (or
homocentrism if we are engaged in joint projects with other humans)? Similarly, when
is the view of holisﬁc Self proper, and when does it degenerate into a form of quieﬁsm?
Naess qualiﬁes his bioegalitarianism with ’in principle’ admitﬁng that some killing and
exploitaﬁon is necessary, but adnritﬁng that, "the equal right to live and blossom' does
not seem intuiﬁvely obvious in any strong sense. It has to mean more than allowing
killing to maintain one’s own existence, since human ”blossoming” involves more than
staying alive. Most assuredly Naess would approve a "soft technology“ like wind
power over a ”hard technology” like nuclear power, but even then what consﬁtutes
human ”blossoming" will have a strong cultural component.

. Like Callicott’s attempt to extend family to include the ecospheric whole, Naess’s

attempt to extend the Self seems to suffer severe attenuaﬁon as we move outward in the

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network of relaﬁons. How much like the nuclear family is the enﬁre biosphere? How
much like me is the biosphere...or the universe?

Like Cheney, Naess also has the problem of the potenﬁal conﬂict between local
mythologies and ecological science. Reﬂecﬁon, precisaﬁon, and reﬁnement all allow us
to talk to each other, but there may be irreconcilable conﬂicts where one must decide
between the mythological richness of conveying the experiential gestalts and the
abstracﬁons of carrying capacities and statistical likelihoods of dinrly envisioned
environmental consequences.

Jim Cheney (1989) raises the feminist criﬁcism that Mother Earth imagery is an
attempt to make over something which ought to be appreciated as an ”other" in its own
right into something which males, like children, can alternately exploit and blame.
What happens when the ”other" is absorbed into one’s larger Self? Naess speaks of
moments of "joy," and there does seem to be a kind of ecstasy in brief moments of
being all-accepﬁng. One ﬁnds it expressed in poetry like Whitman’s ”Song of Myself“
where of all people of all walks of life—child, wife, husband, opium eater, patriarch,
lunaﬁc, prosﬁtute—he says:

And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to themJ And such as it is to

be of these more or less I am,l And of these one and all I weave the song of

myself (Whitman 1955, p. 61).
But this is an ecstasy which cannot be sustained. We cannot be all people, much less all
the world. The joy or ecstasy of the brief moment of idenﬁﬁcaﬁon may be--if not the
crowning glory of our human powers, as I think it is in some way for Naess and
Spinoza-extremely important in moral development as a full openness to life where one
accepts without fear and without judging. Our powers and condiﬁon, however, are not
the powers and condiﬁon of the gods. Always we must anchor ourselves in a humbler

idenﬁty. This, perhaps, is the most poignant criﬁcism of all.

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CONCLUSION

Deep Ecology and Ways of Life

Three major points ﬁ'om Naess’s view of deep ecology will carry over into the
arguments for sustainable ways of life in Chapter 4: His primary ontology of
simultaneously cogniﬁve and affecﬁve gestalts, his integraﬁon of name and culture in a
way of life, and the need to change unsustainable ways of life to bring them into balance
with the ability of other life forms to renew themselves.

Naess’s gestalts bridge the fact/value disﬁncﬁon and provide an empirical base for
moral theorizing that is anchored in personal experience. At this level knowledge by
acquaintance and knowledge how have both cogniﬁve and affecﬁve aspects. The moral
intuiﬁons arising from the gestalts can be tested against the gestalt experiences of
others, and then modiﬁed or transformed. This tesﬁng and adjusting process may
involve either knowledge by acquaintance, as when the passion or earnestness of
someone we admire causes us to re-examine our views, or it may be a more cool and
distant proposiﬁonal knowledge, as when a fuller awareness of complex condiﬁons
causes us to re-evaluate another’s character because we now understand they were
forced to act in extenuaﬁng circumstances. The primary ontology of gestalts is the
world of our life experience, and to be defensible our moral theory must be squared with
it. High level complexes like ecosystems are not something we experience directly as
such. They are not the same as the gestalts of a friend, a farm, or a forest area we have
visited. Granﬁng ecosystems direct moral standing requires more abstract scienﬁﬁc
proposiﬁonal knowledge, and addressing the problem of which theory or model of an
ecosystem one will morally acknowledge. Callicott’s choice of a family model rather
than an energy ﬂow model of ecosystems, for instance, is a deliberate attempt to extend

senﬁments on the basis of our more immediate gestalts of our human families and to

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create what Naess would call symbolic value. The sustainable ways of life posiﬁon
stresses nonsenﬁent nature as it is experienced directly in gestalts. It does not deny the
micro and macro worlds of modern science which tell us that we are made of star stuff
and are part of ecosystems in ongoing evoluﬁon. It does emphasize, however, that
moral imaginaﬁon be tethered in the world of our experience. Some, like Rolston and
Callicott, will boldly go the limits in granﬁng direct moral standing to "superorganisms"
or Stone’s more bureaucraﬁc term ’membership enﬁﬁes’. Others will grant nonsenﬁent
nature direct standing in less ambiﬁous forms. So long as evoluﬁonary and ecological
science is not denied as a signiﬁcant form of knowledge, it matters less that a land ethic
morally embraces ecosystems directly than that it acknowledges them to be real and
instrumentally valuable in the large scale funcﬁoning that sustains planetary life.

Naess argues that each person should work out his own ecosophy to ﬁll in the
intermediate level of norms which link low level gestalts with the high level deep
ecology platform. This makes ecosophy a way of arﬁculaﬁng the coherence of one’s
life while recognizing that many other coherent lives can be lived under the umbrella
norms of deep ecology. Naess is sensiﬁve to the idiosyncrasies that make lives different
and unique. His insistence on rigorous methodology is a way of forcing each individual
to an acute awareness of the implicaﬁons of his words and deeds. Naess’s claim to be
interested in ontology rather than ethics is in part due to his view that ethics as rules and
regulaﬁons mean little when blindly followed as legalisﬁc rules. Sustainable ways of
life will also focus on the need for personal coherence, but it will reject Naess’s
pyramidal view of norms for three reasons. First, sustainable ways of life’s pluralism is
based on the view that the self is heterogeneous in its aims and that what is valued
cannot be subsumed under a single norm but must instead embrace a balancing view
(Rawls 1971, Taylor 1989). Second, Naess’s personal choice of Self-realisaﬁonl as the

master norm too easily merges personal idenﬁty with nature and vice versa. Rather,

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nature will be treated as an "other" like a spouse in Wendell Berry’s marriage analogy.
Third, as Stuart Hampshire points out, we cannot be all good things but must pick and
choose among them fulﬁlling only some possibiliﬁes and letﬁng go of others.

Finally, although sustainable ways of life does not require Naess’s strong
bioegalitarianism, it deﬁnitely requires considerable reducﬁon and modiﬁcaﬁon of our
proﬂigate consumpﬁon and most likely requires a reducﬁon of the planetary human
populaﬁon. There are two facets of sustainability at work here. One is concerned with
maintaining what in narrow homocentric terms can be called a "resolu'ce base” and the
ability of the earth to renew its life support systems. The other is that it is not enough
simply to live, not even to live in material comfort. The way of life that is to be
sustained must be psychologically sustainable and worth passing on to others. This is
explicated in Berry’s view of meaningful work which binds human beings and
nonsentient nature into a community that extends through generations. If future
generaﬁons are to experience the richness of the life world we presently enjoy, then the
conﬁnued ability of most other life forms to ”live and blossom" can be accommodated
by sustainable ways of life.

CHAPTER 4:
SUSTAINABLE WAYS OF LIFE PLURALISM

INTRODUCTION

Grounding a Land Ethic

A common difﬁculty for all land ethics has been the problem of seeing: that is, of
going through a gestalt switch from a psychocentric position to one in which
nonsenﬁent nature also has direct moral consideraﬁon. We have seen in Chapter 1 that
the monisﬁc posiﬁons progressively weaken as they move outward from arguments
about our geneﬁcally programed valuing of immediate experience (Rolston) or our
altruism towards other humans (Callicott) to direct moral consideraﬁon for high level
complexes like ecosystems. The monisﬁc attachment to the doctrine of moral harmony,
the noﬁon that theoreﬁcally all ethical conﬂict can be resolved, also raised fears about a
monisﬁc land ethic sacriﬁcing senﬁent individuals for nonsenﬁent ecosystems. 'Ihe
pluralisﬁc posiﬁons in Chapter 2 abandoned the doctrine of moral harmony at the price
of opening themselves to criﬁcisms that they have no decision procedure or hierarchy of
value for resolving conﬂicts. Stone lays out a system of ontological mapping which
simply assumes a moral grounding for a land ethic. Cheney argues for an explicit and
local moral grounding of a land ethic in bioregional narraﬁve with little guidance for
handling conﬂict between narraﬁves. In Chapter 3 Naess’s ontology of gestalts
simultaneously incorporates personal, cultural, and ecological factors opening up the
possibility of some degree of synthesis of the concerns of both monists and pluralists
who advocate a land ethic.

In this chapter I argue that sustainable ways of life pluralism can provide a stronger
ground for a land ethic than the previous systems examined. Sustainable ways of life
pluralism acknowledges mulﬁple values with no completely decisive hierarchy in its

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105

ontological gestalts. Although this often puts the individual at odds with himself by
increasing moral conﬂict, it is a more accurate representaﬁon of the complexity of
moral situaﬁons. A balancing of value commitments and an avoidance of the worst
alternaﬁves is much preferable to precision in ordering value hierarchies when we lack
perfect knowledge of the circumstances prompting us to act and of the full
consequences of our acﬁons (Stone 1987). Through recognizing one’s own internal
conﬂict, one learns the simplistic nature of one-sided decisions--even when such
decisions are forced by circumstances-and comes to have more.tolerance for the views
of others. Appreciation of sustainable ways of life pluralism also fosters a moral
maturity that comes from realizing one must give up many things to preserve a valued
way of life. To choose one way of life is to give up other possibiliﬁes, and becoming a
responsible moral agent involves developing an awareness of what one is losing as well
as what one is gaining. This understanding prepares an individual to make
compromises that preserve moral integrity by. knowing, someﬁmes painfully, what slhe
stands for.

The basic argument for sustainable ways of life pluralism is simple. If one wants
to be a parﬁcular person or have a certain idenﬁty, one must stand for some things and
not others, and if one’s life is to stand for anything, one must make a commitment to
some parﬁcular way of life. If one values a way of life, one will want its value
commitments to be shared by others and carried on beyond one’s own lifeﬁme. For a
way of life to be sustainable in the long run, one must understand how it depends on
nonsenﬁent nature and--if necessary-modify the stress placed on it. This requires, at
the very least, environmental responsibility and an instrumental valuing of nature. For
someone who is thoroughly convinced (I) that only senﬁent beings have interests and
(2) that interests are necessary for direct moral standing, no further moral argument is
possible. However, when one begins to realize how one’s way of life is fostered and

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shaped both by nature’s provisions and by nature’s linritaﬁons, nonsenﬁent nature can
easily be valued directly as part of (and not just as a means for) a way of life. In this
type of argument the direct moral standing of a way of life encompasses nonsenﬁent
nature in an holisﬁc network with other elements of that way of life. At the same ﬁme,
the holisﬁc posiﬁon does not rule out other arguments for granﬁng direct moral standing

to nonsenﬁent nature separately.l

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WAYS OF LIFE

Identity, Liminality, and Ways of Life

Arguing against the adequacy of ethical theories which specify a single principle or
a deﬁniﬁve set of virtues, Stuart Hampshire points out the uniqueness of each individual
as a fundamental fact of human existence. The capacity for self-reﬂecﬁon and criﬁcism
which makes us moral agents also, of necessity, makes each of us singular in his sense
of idenﬁty. Hampshire refers to the individual’s memory as ”a kind of spiritual capital,
and the income from it, in the form of reviewed experiences, is merged with the
incoming experiences of...life in the present.” Metaphorically, memory is a ”compost
heap” in which old ingredients are ”modiﬁed, even transformed" by newer ones
(Hampshire 1989, pp. 120-121).

The singularity of memory and the plasﬁcity of the mind require that ethics at the
ground level of personal decision making consider the individual’s integrity asit is
worked out in Hampshire’s characterizaﬁon of a way of life.

A way of life...is not exactly a fact, or an assembly of facts, if only because
it can obviously be adequately described and interpreted in different ways
from different perspecﬁves; also because any descripﬁon of it will contain
theories used to interpret behaviour and social relaﬁons, and therefore the
’hardness’ and deﬁniteness suggested by the word ’fact’ is lacking.
Alongside repeated patterns of behaviour, a way of life includes admired
ideal types of men and women, standards of taste, family relaﬁons, styles of
educaﬁon and upbringing, religious pracﬁces and other dominant concerns.

I describe to myself, or to another, the way of life which is mine and I
specify the contribution to it made by the pracﬁce or activity that is in
quesﬁon. If I did not follow this pracﬁce, such-and-such other pracﬁces,
which are elements in my way of life, would be undermined and lose their
hold on me. The jusﬁﬁcaﬁon is in this sense holisﬁc. I would need either
to abandon the way of life to which I am now...committed, or I would ﬁnd
that many other activities and practices, to which I am at present
committed, have lost their signiﬁcance, and my acﬁviﬁes have come to
seem incoherent and confused (Hampshire 1983, pp. 5-6).

Three features of a way of life stand out immediately. (1) It may be described
differently according to the theories used to interpret it, especially by those who share it

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as opposed to those outside it. (2) It consists of gestalts encompassing a wide variety of
ontological commitments: persons, acﬁviﬁes, insﬁtuﬁons, and so on. (3) The holistic
justiﬁcation means that a way of life cannot be understood intellectually or morally by
assessing its components in isolaﬁon from one another.

To explain and defend a way of life philosophically, one must adopt a different
methodology than the deducﬁon of principles from agreed upon axioms. One cannot,
like those who extend uﬁlity or rights to animals, simply insist on a more consistent and
rigorous applicaﬁon of the interest principle as a moral bottom line. Instead, as Martha
C. Nussbaum comments on defending intuiﬁons, one must ﬁrst lay out a case in detail
and then demonstrate its connecﬁons with other valued aspects of life (Nussbaum 1986,
p. 32). The use of literature provides considerable help--novels, plays, and poetry
condense and concentrate key features in a "slice of life” or whole situaﬁon so that the
features and their interconnecﬁons may be seen readily. This is the major point of
biography as a literary genre: to trace the patterns that make an individual’s life a
coherent whole, and to mark events that mold and crises that threaten the person’s
integrity. The novels of Wendell Berry are especially instrucﬁve in making the
case for a sustainable way of life as they model a way of life that is integrated both
l'horizontally" across the community and 'verﬁcally" through the generaﬁons. Their
focus is the ﬁcﬁﬁous farming community of Port William, Kentucky. Though ﬁcﬁonal,
the novels have a strong autobiographical strain as they portray the country in which
Berry grew up and to which—after an interlude as an urban academic-he returned to
farm. As an author, Berry exhibits a wisdom that comes from an inﬁmate knowledge of
his subject and a kindness that comes from understanding human frailty. Berry’s
characters are unexcepﬁonal; they have a plainness which gives his novels the honesty
of the author choosing to celebrate the life he lives rather than spin a better one out of

fantasy.

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In taking the farmer as a model for a sustainable way of life I have chosen an
atypical paradigm, and in Wendell Berry an atypical farmer. The farmer, especially
Berry’s sort of farmer, is a liminal ﬁgure, one who stands on the threshold or margin of
our society.2 As such he is familiar enough to us so that we can understand and
imaginaﬁvely idenﬁfy with him, yet he is distant enough to be in touch with things
about ourselves and our perspecﬁves that we do not understand but need to understand.
Berry’s liminality is twofold. As a farmer he is in intense and protracted daily
interacﬁon with soil, plants, and animals in ways that the bulk of our urban populaﬁon is
not. This gives Berry a broader and more detailed understanding of the varied ontology
which makes up our life world and the varied sorts of relaﬁonships we can have with it.
Technological innovaﬁon, specializaﬁon of labor, and the demands of urban living have
by and large focused our attenﬁon away from these relaﬁonships. Soil, plants, and
animals have become mere things to be treated as one treats mass-manufactured
arﬁfacts: use, dispose, replace. The relaﬁonships the farmer has to nonhuman enﬁﬁes,
senﬁent and nonsenﬁent, nonetheless remain vital to human life. Berry recommends
gardening as a pracﬁcal exercise in consciousness raising, but if we cannot adopt the
farmer’s knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge how, we can at least acknowledge
his Iarowledge that healthy soil is vital for human existence. From Berry’s farmer we
can learn or re-leam the richness of ontology, the intricacy of our relaﬁons with it, and
the importance of nonhuman nature to meaningful work.

The second way in which Berry is liminal is in his historical perspecﬁve. Born
into a farming community in 1934, Berry has seen the results both of tradiﬁonal farming
methods with their concomitant way of life and of the vast post World War II changes
which have turned farming into agribusiness. He has observed in detail and over ﬁme
the effects of these changes on land he has known ﬁom boyhood, on his own life, on his
community, and on rural America generally. Berry’s generaﬁon is one of two or three

generaﬁons in the United States that has ﬁrst-hand experience of the thorough-going

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transformaﬁon from a predominantly rural and local culture to an overwhelmingly
urban mass ”culture.” A major purpose of scienﬁﬁc record keeping is to serve as a
benchmark by which to measure change and predict future events. Human memory
serves that same benchmark funcﬁon socially as Berry notes in arguing for the family
farm as a way of lengthening memory through generaﬁons to avoid repeaﬁng the
mistakes of the past. Human memory is important as a personal witnessing of what has
transpired. The scienﬁﬁc records of production per acre, rate of topsoil loss, and
demographic changes reveal little to those who have never had direct contact with the
events they encapsulate. Like the Pentagon’s daily Vietcong body counts during the
Vietnam War, the staﬁsﬁcs are just so many tedious numbers which can be given a
narrow interpretaﬁon and manipulated to show that ”progress” is being made...unﬁl one
realizes in personal terms the "price" of that ”progress.” It is not unﬁl one has direct
experience or inraginaﬁve idenﬁﬁcaﬁon via literary descripﬁon and story telling (which
rest on the author’s experience or imaginaﬁon to re-create experience) that one comes to
have an integrated affecﬁve and cogrriﬁve grasp of what the changes mean, of what it
means to lose a life or a way of life.

Through the coherence and wholeness of his way of life Berry shows us the
possibility of the direct moral consideraﬁon of many types of entiﬁes which Stone
includes in his moral planes. Through Berry’s depicﬁon of meaningful work within the
”order of Creaﬁon" he shows us the kind of dedicaﬁon that is necessary to make a land
ethic funcﬁon. Of course, Berry is only one of many liminal ﬁgures through whose way
of life one might demonstrate the moral signiﬁcance of the mulﬁfarious enﬁﬁes in

Stone’s ontology. John Rodman has observed that Aldo Leopold himself can be treated
in such fashion: .

The land ethic emerges in the course of [Leopold’s Sand County Almanac]
as an integral part of a sensibility developed through observation,
parﬁcipatory experience, and reﬂecﬁon.... It is an ’ethic’ in the almost
forgotten sense of a ’way of life’ (Rodman 1977, p. 110)

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Given the entrenched place of the interest principle in philosophical ethics and the
human need to use nature as well as to co-exist with it, Berry’s analogy of marriage to
describe the partnership between the farmer and his land is especially signiﬁcant for
those seeking to defend a land ethic. Berry’s eloquence, insight, personal knowledge,
and historical perspecﬁve make him and his wriﬁngs accessible for non-farmers of our
ﬁmes, and they exhibit two key human virtues without which all ethical theory comes to
naught: wisdom and kindness.

The life of the character Old Jack Beechum typiﬁes Berry’s concern for the
mutually formaﬁve relationships among people, land, and community. In A Place on
Earth Jack has become too old to live by himself and conﬁnue farming. His land is now
sharecropped by a young couple. During an inspecﬁon visit, which is as much a chance
to escape the conﬁnes of his rooming house in town and to be on the land again, Old

Jack observes his tenants:

' Standing rn front of the barn, he has already begun his exploraﬁon of '
the young man’s ways, looking into the fence corners and into the open
sheds and at the back porch of the house. All that he can see is orderly.
The tools that are not in use have been put into the sheds out of the
weather. The gates and doors are all closed and latched. Rows of young
vegetables are growing in the garden... These people are not the kind who
will be running to the grocery store to buy all they cat. That means a great
deal, to Old Jack’s way of thinlﬁng.

The young man’s wife rs carrying water from the well into the
kitchen... The ﬁrst ﬁme she came out she waved to him and called, ”Good
momingl" And he waved to her. Since then she has gone on with her
work, paying no attenﬁon to him...(Berry 1983a, pp. 203-204).

Jack’s inspection of his property is only superﬁcially part of a legal and ﬁnancial
transacﬁon. His 'exploraﬁon of the young man’s ways," and the ways of the young
man’s wife, is a probing of character of those who have come to inhabit the land which
deﬁned his life.

The orderliness is a sign of people who know what they want and who are willing
to work ungrudgingly for it. The care exhibited for the tools, the buildings, the animals,
the crops, and the land bespeak a concern for these things themselves and the farm of

112

which they are a part. To them farming is not a means of making a living; it is living.
They take pride and saﬁsfacﬁon in doing well what they are doing because it is way
they want to live and the best way of being who and what they conceive themselves to
be. The couple exhibit a self reliance which increases the signiﬁcance of their daily
acﬁviﬁes. The noon meal, which Jack is invited to share, is simultaneously an exercise
in the cook’s slﬁll of self expression, an act of love for her family and friends, a natural
extension of her efforts in tending the garden (where there is further saﬁsfacﬁon in
watching things grow), a willing division of meaningful labor shared and complemented
by the work of her husband in the ﬁelds, an opportunity to socialize on an inﬁmate
level, a ritual in which the very basis of life is shared. It is all these mutually
reinforcing things at once, and none of them can be neatly placed in an Aristotelian
ordinal hierarchy, a that-for-tlre-sake-of-which each is done unﬁl we reach the ﬁnal goal
of eudaimonia (happiness/prosperity). Eudaimonia, or something like it in the
saﬁsfacﬁon of a life well lived, there is indeed: But it is an holisﬁc life in which
(almost) every act is signiﬁcant in itself while it simultaneously lends signiﬁcance to,
and receives signiﬁcance ﬁom the conjointly enacted whole.3

The young couple’s ”ways" reveal to Jack that they are worthy of the land. In so
doing they also restore a lost meaning to Jack’s life. Jack is a widower estranged ﬁom
his wife early in their marriage and ﬂour his only child, a daughter who has married and
moved to the city. Watching the couple go about their tasks, he discovers a kinship that
he never had with his own family.

Old Jack stands and watches unﬁl the man and team reach the end of
the ﬁeld and make the turn and start back, and then he goes to the sled
again and sits down. The terms of an unexpected happiness have begun to
work themselves out in his mind, the possibility of an orderliness in his
history that he has not dared to hope for, a clean transiﬁon from his life to
the li e of another man. It is as though he has come to a window looking
out onto a lighted country where before there was only darkness (p. 206).

The couple have demonstrated, without knowing it, an appreciaﬁon for everything that
Jack has done to care for the land and keep it. His life, all his efforts which went

113

unrecognized by his own family-and even by himself because of the bitterness that
divided them—is suddenly afﬁrmed by the young couple.

The situaﬁon Berry portrays is neither romanﬁc nor self indulgent. It is based on
the common love of a way of life which can only be fulﬁlled from the inside-by
struggling with it on a daily basis in all its inextricably mingled satisfacﬁons and
frustraﬁons. Jack is not a stereotypical image of the long suffering, clean living farmer.
There are reasons for his estrangement from his wife, not the least of which are—or were
in his youth—a hot temper, too high expectaﬁons of what he could achieve, and an
inability to come to terms with his wife’s needs which he then casﬁgated as faults.

The decision Jack makes next is all the more poignant because the tenants are not
his kin: He will sell the couple his farm at a price low enough so that they can afford to
buy it. Though his act is one of self fulfillment, it is also one of generosity without
strings attached. He feels he has no right to make any claims on their affecﬁons and he
is scrupulous in respecﬁng their emoﬁonal autonomy.

His vision of the morning returns to him. He can see this place passing
out of his own good keeping into that of the younger man-can see him at
work and alive here long after he himself will be dead. He turns to the
young man, intending to tell him that he can depend on his good will and
can trust him-that he will help him to have what he wants. But he cannot
speak. He looks out the window, getﬁng hold of himself, and then he says:
”Son, you’re a ﬁne boy. And you’ve married a ﬁne girl. I’m going to strck
to you” (pp. 210-211).
Old Jack never tells the couple how they have restored his past and given him-despite
the fact that he is near the end of his days—a sense of outliving the biological limitaﬁons
of self. The couple is informed immediately after Jack’s funeral that his will sﬁpulated

they are to be offered the farm at half its market value.

"He didn’t want to leave it to you outright. He thought you ought to work
for it the way he did. It was his opinion, you know, that there were some
essenﬁal things he never learned until he got in debt." Wheeler [Jack’s
nephew and lawyer] laughs brieﬂy, and then, as if to keep his mind strictly
on its business, looks at the ground. "I was to tell you as soon as he w
bruied and not wait, so you could make your plans” (Berry 1974, p. 217).

Even in death, Jack is sﬁll setﬁng a moral example and instrucﬁng the next generaﬁon

by iniﬁaﬁng them into the responsibiliﬁes of adulthood. Old Jack’s help will require

114

further commitments of the young couple. Once they go into debt to buy the land, they
cannot simply take jobs elsewhere because they are ﬁred of farming. They will have to
love the land and the life it generates strongly enough to spend their lives at it, to risk
, hardship and frustraﬁon, and to give up other possibiliﬁes. The demands are not unlike
the kind of comnritrrrents a couple make to each other in taking wedding vows. For his
part, Old Jack, by his generosity, example, and teaching, lives on in the couple’s lives
the way parents in tradiﬁonal socieﬁes can hope to live on in the lives of their children.
Old Jack’s story is a story of failing and forgiveness, of sacriﬁce and humility, and
for Jack, a kind of resurrecﬁon through sharing his way of life. But there is nothing
preachy or other-worldly in it. The failings are human failings and the redempﬁon a
human one. The virtues of steadfastrress, hard work, loyalty, ﬁdelity, tolerance, charity,
and trust are exempliﬁed in the ordinary acﬁvities of common people in everyday
setﬁngs similar to those which confront us. The ideal types of men and women which
Hampshire cites as part of a way of life are here, but they do not have the majesﬁc and
anﬁsepﬁc aloofness of Dante’s angels of the Purgatorio each of whom exhibits a
cardinal virtue, nor the superhuman heroism of Sir Thomas More-morally saniﬁzed
through poeﬁc license—going to his death in A Man for All Seasons. Like us, Berry’s
characters have scuff marks and mud on their shoes and on their psyches. Their
decisions are nonetheless vital because they demonstrate how a life is typically spent or
misspent; few of us will have the one golden moment of decision that is the stuff of high
tragedy. Berry’s gift as an author is to honor the good in all its ﬂawed parﬁcularity,
often by showing us how it develops out of human petﬁness and error, later recognized
and regretted. Berry steadfastly refuses to denigrate this very human goodness by
invidious contrasts with an unreachable Olympian ideal or by relegaﬁng it to a prelude
ofabetterlifetocome. Thatthegoodisfoundin something as mundaneasameal, that
a meal can reﬂect the richness and coherence of an individual life which can in turn be

mirrored in an enﬁre community, focuses one on the here and now. Walt Whitman

115

made the point in ”Song of Myself‘:

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and

the endJ But I do not talk oftlre beginning or the end.

There was never any more incepﬁon than there is nowJ Nor any more
youth or age than there is now,/ And will never be any more perfecﬁon
than there is now,/ Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now
(Whitman 1955, p. 51).

Bery shows us the fullness that can come ﬁom a way of life, a fullness without which
moral principles turn into a cold legalism that can only command or forbid, a damning
idealism which we can never meet, or an irrelevant talk of talkers which has slipped its

tether to our lives.

Marriage and Land

At ﬁrst, the way of life Berry presents in his novels and essays might not seem to
exemplify a land ethic as sought by Aldo Leopold’s philosophical heirs because Berry’s
concept of stewardship seems to place the locus of value in humans (or God). In
addiﬁon, his rural way of life seems to model an appreciaﬁon of nature based on its
instrumental use in farming rather than nature valued in its own right. However,
Berry’s understanding of nature is ecologically and culturally holisﬁc in that self and
work are not separable from the nattual order.

[T]he quesﬁon of the propriety of an acﬁon...cannot be answered, or
even intellrgentl asked, except in terms of the question of propriety of
place-not just 0 the immediate human and worldly context of the acﬁon,
but of the place of the actor in the order of Creaﬁon. How you act should
be determined, and the consequences of your acts are determined, by whee
you are. To know where you are (and whether or not that is where you
should be) is at least as important as to know what you are doing, because
in the moral (the ecological) sense you cannot know what unﬁl you have
learned where. Not knowing where you are you can make mistakes of the
utmost seriousness: you can lose your soul or your soil, your life or your
way home (Berry 1983b, p. 117).

For Berry, morality is ecological in its etymological sense of the logos (raﬁonal order)
of oikos (home). One needs to be aware of what is home in order to understand how to

care for it so that one’s acﬁons produce (or preserve) logos instead of chaos. In the

116

example of Old Jack we have seen three aspects or manifestaﬁons of home: individual
pesons, community, and the farm itself inclusive of tools, buildings, animals, plants,
and ﬁelds. Berry’s other wriﬁngs widen these manifestaﬁons to include wild nature
such as woods and rivers as well. When the order of Creaﬁon is understood and
respected, home can ﬂourish; when it is ﬂouted home is destroyed. As a Chrisﬁan,
Berry’s capitalizaﬁon of ’Creaﬁon’ shows a respect for nature in its own right along the
same lines as the capitalizaﬁon of ’God’. (One need not share Berry’s theism to assent
to his views, ’creaﬁon’ being a common secular reference to the planet or universe.)5
The person who understands nature only as resources—however carefully husbanded—
misses the larger implicaﬁons that the ”limits" of nature also provide posiﬁve guidance
for a worthwhile life.

Berry’s analogy between farming and marriage makes the connecﬁon clearer. The
iniﬁal attracﬁon to land or lover is full of "possibiliﬁes irresisﬁbly imaginable” which
must change to make the farm or the marriage work.

Truth begins to intrude with its matter-of-fact... It invariably turns out, I
think, that one’s ﬁrst vision of one’s place was to some extent an
imposiﬁon on it. But if one’s sight is clear and if one stays on and works
well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s
visions gradually image possibilities that are really rn it. Vision,
possibility, work, and life—all have changed by mutual correcﬁon. Correct
discipline, given enough ﬁme, gradually removes one’s self from one’s line
of sight. One works to better purpose then and makes fewer mistakes,
because at last one sees where one is. Two human possibilities of the
highest order thus come within reach: what one wants can become the
same as what one has, and one’s knowledge can cause respect for what one
knows (p. 70).

Berry’s analogy between commitment to a senﬁent individual and commitment to
nonsenﬁent land is possible because he understands personhood in tems of networks of
relaﬁons which can exist neither apart ﬁ'om the individual nor solely within a Cartesian
cogito. Berry is fond of synechdoche and one must read carefully to unpack multiple
meanings from his metaphors. ”One’s place” indicates both owne'ship of the farm and

one’s ecological niche in the order of Creation. There is a parallel development

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between ﬁnding meaning and purpose in life, personally and culturally, and ﬁnding
One’s place in the ecospheric scheme of things.

Love of the land, like love of a person, can neither be totally separated from nor
totally conﬁngent upon what the other does for one. Land or spouse cannot become
one’s own possessively unﬁl one sees them for what they are. They otherwise remain
fantasies and the relaﬁonship is dysfuncﬁonal. One is as much owned by the land as
owning it. One can waste ﬁme and effort and joy trying to make some nonarable land
"producﬁve'-or pushing good farmland beyond its range of producﬁvity—because one
is stuck in a narrow understanding of producﬁvity and is bent on a wholesale reordering
of Creaﬁon. The penalty for not recognizing whee one is—one’s place in the scheme of
things—is the destrucﬁon of one’s place in the sense of land owned, and the waste of
one’s life. Instead, one must be willing to work in a paﬁent and disciplined way, to
make sacriﬁces in having one’s fortunes limited by the other, and to subject oneself to
”mutual correcﬁon." .One’s fortunes and idenﬁty are simultaneously deﬁned by and
grow with the other, whethe' spouse or land.

This is not a shotgun wedding or marriage of convenience. "Human possibiliﬁes
of the highest order" are at stake. Wanﬁng "what one has“ is to take saﬁsfacﬁon and
delight in one’s possessions and activiﬁes rather than forever valuing them only
instrumentally—if they are valued at all—as a means to get something else in an elusive
future whee someday one will ﬁnally be able to ”really live.“ Valuing what one has in
the broadest sense is requisite to valuing one’s own life as one lives it. To respect 'what
one knows” can refer to many things including one’s skills, proposiﬁonal knowledge,
knowledge by acquaintance, and the objects of knowledge as well. As a knower, it is
also to respect oneself. From his examples it is clear that Bery means all these things
simultaneously. What epitomizes knowledge for Berry is the awareness of an integrated
personality, integrated with one’s occupaﬁon, one’s community, and with the order of
Creaﬁon.

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Work

Integrated knowledge is embedded in Berry’s noﬁon of "work," which itself is
what Bernard Williams calls a ”thick" ethical concept, one ”expressﬁng] a union of fact
and value” (Williams 1985, p. 129). Berry sees a loss of personal physical health and
cultural vitality in the ﬁagmentaﬁon that results from assuming that work which se'ves
basic necessiﬁes is menial:

We lose our health-and create proﬁtable diseases and dependencies—by
failing to see the direct connecﬁons between living and eaﬁng, eaﬁng and
working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with
the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for
excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eaﬁng
both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from
getﬁng fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a some of delight...

The "drudgey" of growing one’s own food, then, is not drudgery at all.
(If we make the growing of food a drudgery, which is what ”agribusiness"
does make of it, then we also make a drudgery of eaﬁng and of living.) It
is--in addiﬁon to being the appropriate fulﬁllment of a pracﬁcal need--a
sacrament, as eaﬁng is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness
with the Creaﬁon, the conviviality of one body with all bodies. This is
what we learn from the hunﬁng and farming rituals of tribal cultures.

As the connecﬁons have been broken by the fragmentaﬁon and isolaﬁon
of work, they can be restored by restoring the wholeness of work. There is
work that is isolating, harsh, destructive, specialized or trivialized into
mearringlessness. And thee is work that is restoraﬁve, convivial, digniﬁed
and dignifying, and pleasing. Good work is not just the maintenance of
connections-as one is now said to work ”for a living” or "to su rt a
family'-but the enactment of connecﬁons. It is living, and a way 0 living;
it is not support for a family in the sense of an exteior brace or prop, but is
one of the forms and acts of love (Bery 1977, pp. 138-139).

Berry here reiteates in different literary form the ideas encountered concretely in the
persons like Old Jack in his novels.

The ﬁrst point to be emphasized is the relaﬁonship between eaﬁng, working, and
loving. “Work," says Berry, "is the health of love. To last, love must erﬂesh itself in
the mateiality of the world—produce food, shelter, warmth or shade, surround itself
with careful acts, well-made things" (p. 132). We have already seen some of the
materiality of love in the meal Jack shares with the young couple. Berry contrasts

eaﬁng that is ”nourishing and joyful" with eaﬁng that is 'consumpﬁve.’ The latter

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occurs when the connecﬁons between eaﬁng, working, and loving are broken:

By regarding it as meely a consume of food, we reduce the funcﬁon of the
body to that of a conduit which channels the nutrients of the earth from the
supermarket to the sewer. Or we make it a little factory which transforms
fertility [of the earth] into pollution--to the enormous profit of
”agribusiness" and to the impoverishment of the earth (p. 136).

The imagery of the body as a conduit is designed to shock us by its simplisﬁc crudeness.

Berry’s complaint about the reduction of the body--or person--solely to a
“consumer” parallels Rolston’s criticism of the reducﬁon of the natural world to
”resources”:

Use of the word "resource” gradually changes unﬁl nothing can be
comprehended outside such a relaﬁonship, no matter if the paramount
emotion becomes appreciating these realms for what they are in
themselves. One ponders the pupﬁsh, the Supai and Redwall strata in
Marble Gorge, or spends a lonesome weekend amidst the glacier-cut
scenery in the Indian Peaks, wondering if a grandchild might ever share
such feelings on Alaskan slopes, steadily stretched out of local concerns to
the age-long flows of life over time. But these are aesthetic,
epistemological, and metaphysical resource relaﬁonships. Logically, the
claim has become trivialized, redeﬁning as resource whatever one ”takes
in,“ whether food, scenery, or informaﬁon about natural history (Rolston ~
1988, pp. 30-31).

The terms ’consumer’ and ’resource’ have an adaptability that makes them
epistemologically and morally virulent, especially in combinaﬁon. Just as a virus can
invade healthy cells and replicate itself to the detriment of an organism, so when people
begin to think of themselves and to act primarily as ”consumers of resources" they
become the conduits of Berry’s imagery. The orgy of consumpﬁon leads to demands
for more "efﬁcient” production of goods to be consumed by a growing market of
consumes. But efﬁciency is not measured by individual or public health, happiness, or
even by the quality of “goods.“ In the United States our ”standard of living” is
measured by pe capita consumpﬁon, whether what we consume is needed or not, fairly
distributed or not, enjoyed or not, wasted or not, good for us or not. The result, as Bery
says, is a people destroying themselves and their culture along with the natural

environment.‘5 For Bery, thee is a sense in which work becomes less meaningful as it

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distances itself from basics like eating. The crucial factor, however, is not the
stereotypical cleavage between basics and ﬁills. Bery is not advocating an austeity
like Plato in the Republic, albeit one championing the helot farmer rather than the
Spartan warrior. The crucial factor is the connectedness of life. "Careful acts” must be
done in consideraﬁon of their purposes and their long-term effects; "well-made things”
require ﬁme and skill and an anﬁcipaﬁon of saﬁsfacﬁon in their use.

The second major point is that Berry calls the work of growing food, as well as
eating it, a “sacrament” wherein "we enact and understand our oneness with the
Creation." From a secular point of view shaped by a long tradition of Western
European transcendent monotheism in which Godldivinitylthe sacred is decreed to be
totally ”Other” than the created world, the noﬁon of a sacrament may seem silly or
supesﬁﬁous. Chrisﬁarrity has become primarily creedal (especially afte the Protestant
Reformaﬁon’s emphasis on salvaﬁon by faith alone) with the focus on belief; a sort of
yet-to-be-veiﬁed "proposiﬁonal knowledge." However, many religions are—or wee—
primarily ritualistic in that special sorts of enactings bind the community together.
Once one has excluded the sacred from the material world, the purpose of ritual
becomes that of bridging the gap to the ”Other world” rather than renewing an
awareness of our vital relaﬁonships with this one. Berry clearly does not buy this sort
of sacred/profane cleavage of mainstream Chrisﬁanity, and it is not lost on him as a
farmer that God sﬁll comes in material, sharable, edible form in the Chrisﬁan ritual of
the Eucharist. For Berry eaﬁng and working in this world are in themselves sacred
(whatever he may think in private of a ”next world”). Theology and theistic
metaphysics are not essenﬁal to Berry’s posiﬁon vis a vis the intergeneraﬁonal shared
communal work of farming, and for a very good reason. Berry knows the divisiveness
religious disputes can bring to small, rural communiﬁes where economic and social

survival depend on people’s ability and willingness to work together and to aid each

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other. Berry’s Chrisﬁan heritage has given him a rich stock of poeﬁc images, an
historical awareness, and a sensiﬁvity to human capabiliﬁes and limitaﬁons. But this is
no more than any intelligent person--theist or nontheist--familiar with the Western
European civilizaﬁon can claim. In Berry’s novels one is hard pressed to discover a
theological position, much less a denominational one, in either the author or his
characte's who at most make an oblique refeence to ”the Old Marster.“

As a poet, Berry is also aware that the Iaﬁn sacramentum is related to sacer
(sacred) and refers to what binds or obliges one, such as an oath. Unless the Roman
soldier was bound by his sacramentum/oath, he would not be a Roman soldier but a
man of powerful ﬁghting skills without the loyalty to prevent those skills from
destroying the community. If one is not bound by anything, then there are no limits to
whatever one may do; if one is not bound to anything, then one’s life has no deﬁniﬁon,
direcﬁon, purpose, or meaning. The work of the farmer like that of the soldier must be
sacramental so that he does not destroy his own land. The sacrament of the Eucharist
properly enacted is, from the viewpoint of those within the tradiﬁon, a sharing of the
spiritual source of life which brings salvaﬁon. The sacrament of eaﬁng propely enacted
is a sharing of the mateial source of life which brings health, camaraderie, physical and
emoﬁonal saﬁsfacﬁon. What Bery emphaﬁcally denies is that the material world is less
spiritual for being material.

A third point is the relaﬁonship of work and leisure. Bery says that there is work
which is drudgery and work which is restoraﬁve. Work which is drudgery produces an

escapist atﬁtude which carries ove into leisure.

A man who does meaningless work does not have his meaning at hand. He
must go anxiously in search of it—and thus fail to ﬁnd it. The farmer’s
Sunday afternoon of sitﬁng at home in the shade of a tree has been replaced
by the ”long weekend” of a thousand miles. The difference is that the
farmer was whee he wanted to be, understood the value of being thee, and
therefore when he had no work to do could sit sﬁll. How much have we
spent to obscure so simple and obvious a possibility? The point is that
there is an indissoluble connecﬁon and dependence between work and
leisure. Meaningless work must produce meaningless leisure. The
freedom from work must produce not leisure, but an ever more franﬁc
search for something to do (Bery 1970, p. 119).

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Work gives meaning to one’s personal existence and provides foundaﬁons for social
relaﬁonships. One can take pride in working well because it requires skill on the part of
the worker, even if the skills are primarily those of strength and endurance. One can
take satisfacﬁon in work itself because one labors to a purpose. Berry constantly
emphasizes how land determines and supports the range of farming activities of
producing and socializing and creaﬁng. The knowledge required to work the land gives
the farmer respect for the land and self respect for his own skills. Good work creates
respect for the work of others forging elementary bonds of community. The love of the
land is reinforced by the network of human relaﬁonships, which, without the love of the
land, could not exist in the way that they do. The relaﬁonships among people, land, and
community arise mutually.

It may be objected that Berry’s farme is not a typical paradigm, and theefore not
a good one. There is some truth in the atypicality objecﬁon since farmers consﬁtute
only 2% of the US populaﬁon. The objecﬁon can be met in two ways. First, Bery can
rightly claim that the farme’s problems are typical of the problems suffeed by worke's
generally because of the industrializaﬁon and corporate control of moden life. Second,
Berry can claim that working intensely and directly with the land is an atypical but
much needed paradigm to remind us of the important things we are losing--we
individually, and as a naﬁon—in the increasing rush to ”urban nomadism.‘ Does that
make the farmer a bad paradigm? Only if one’s claim is that paradigms ought always to
be typical. But the typical, whether in science or in ethics, is not always what should be
perpetuated. Some paradigms are selected for their atypical clarity, or their atypical
presentaﬁon of a problematic situaﬁon, or their atypical illumination of a newly
discovered terra incognita.

Berry’s farmer is typical as a paradigm in showing us how work increasingly
subject to impersonal industrializing and corporate pressures can be made meaningful

again...and the “price“ the worker will have to "pay” to lead and control his own life

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again. The corporate industrial pressrn'es that drive agribusiness are ubiquitous forces in
modern life: Consider the industrial model of educaﬁon where ”teaches” can never be
mentors because they do not know their students and can only present them with
informaﬁon and challenge them with a few quesﬁons before the term ends and the
students depart to take new courses ﬁom new instructors in new ﬁme slots. Conside
the execuﬁve who is expected to move his family every few years and whose children
grow up having emoﬁonal investment in friends and communiﬁes rewarded with an
inevitable sundering of relaﬁonships. Is any real community possible unless people
evolve stable relaﬁonships based on an intimate knowledge of each other, knowledge
that can only come from years of attenﬁveness to the details of anothe’s life? Conside
the factory or ofﬁce worker who is now being told that slhe can expect to change the
types of jobs slhe does six or seven ﬁmes before reﬁrement. Would one want to change
jobs if one loved what one was doing? If one’s work is a matter of resentment or
indifference, does the work done suffer? And, if workers increasingly change types of
jobs where they must learn new ”professions" or ”techniques," is there a point at which
they cannot even evolve stable working relationships but must be more and more
directed by an increasingly Byzanﬁne corporate policy?

Not all technical, industrialized, or corporate work need be meaningless or soul
grinding, but it is harder to maintain a community when labor becomes so specialized
that people understand vey little of what others do. It also is harder to idenﬁfy with the
work if one feels one has little say in what is being done or how it is being done. When
work changes, parﬁcularly if it requires removal from family and friends, one’s personal
integrity can be threatened. As a fundamental part of life, work must not become
alienaﬁng or destrucﬁve of idenﬁty. Poet Robert Bly (here concerned primarily with
male socializaﬁon) comments on the confusion of personal idenﬁty, and the breakdown

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of family and community, that result from the breakdown of an holisﬁc sense work:

When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children
receive only his temperament, and not his teaching. If the fatlre rs working
for a corporaﬁon, what rs there to teach? He rs reluctant to tell his son what
is really going on. The fragmentation of decision making 1n corporate life,
the massive effort that produces the corporate willingness to destroy the
environment for the sake of proﬁt, ﬁre prudence, even cowardice, that one
learns 1n bureaucracy--who wants to teach that. .?

What the father brings home today is usually a touchy mood, springing
from powerlessness and despair mingled with longstanding sharrre and the
numbness peculiar to those who hate their jobs. Fathers in earlier ﬁmes
could often break through their own humanly. inadequate temperaments by
teaching rope-making, ﬁshing, posthole digging, grain cutﬁng, drumming,
harness making, animal care, even singing and storytelling. That teaching
sweetened the effect of temperament (Bly 1990, pp. 96-97).

One can point out corporaﬁons which are excepﬁons to Bly’s diatribe. One can also
point out useful work that can sﬁll be done with family such as gardening and home
repair. Bly’s criﬁcisms are nonetheless too uncomfortably familiar to be dismissed, and
his central point sﬁll stands: Seeing the useful work of parents provides a model which
the child can admire and emulate. The worker alienated from work is also alienated
from a full socializaﬁon into his community. His children grow up to see social roles as
odious burdens to be avoided as much as possible. Parents who occupy these roles are
too easily seen altemaﬁvely as objects of pity, rage, and contempt The land which the
farme grows to love in Bery’s marriage analogy constrains the farmer’s acﬁon but also
provides him with a meaningful existence. Moden corporate life, if it sees any order of
Creation at all, sees it mainly in terms of raw materials to be converted into
commodiﬁes in an eve-expanding acquisiﬁveness.

Berry’s farmer is an atypical paradigm in the immediacy of his reciprocal
relaﬁonship with the land: he takes from the land, but he must do so in a way that
safeguards the land’s ferﬁlity so that the relaﬁonship can conﬁnue. He may use the
land, but he may not use it up. Sara Ebenreck calls this a ”partnership farmland ethic,"
one "which recognizes that the relaﬁonship is a complex, two-way, ongoing process,

one in which both parﬁes are recognized as having intrinsic, if diffeing values, and in

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which both parﬁes give and take from each other" (Ebenreck 1983, p. 40). Given the
need for his constant care of the soil and his awareness that the soil is not itself inert, for
farnring to be a meaningful way of life it is almost a necessity that the farmer grant
some sort of direct moral consideraﬁon to the land. Though more sedentary, the farmer
is in this respect like many Naﬁve Ameican hunﬁng and gatheing tribes often held up
as models of environmental responsibility. The Lakotah whose survival depended on
the buffalo could not afford to treat the animal casually or hunt it to exﬁncﬁon. Like the
farmer who cannot survive without attending to the soil’s "life of its own," the Lakotah
had to know the buffalo inﬁmately. Inﬁmate knowledge of the vitality of soil or animal
militates against easy classiﬁcation of the farmer’s or Lakotah’s concern merely as
prudenﬁal, not moral. There may be a strong element of prudenﬁal concem—Is that not
so even in our ongoing human relaﬁonships which we praise as most "selﬂess” and
devoted?-but the soil or animal cannot be so thoroughly transmogriﬁed since one must
still work with it8

Neither the immediacy nor the ongoing nature of the farmer’s relaﬁonship with the
land is typical of most work today. The oil industry (and indirectly those of us who
depend on it), for instance, takes without giving back. So far as work goes, there is little
that can be characteized as a partnership between the worker and the land. When one
oil ﬁeld plays out, the drillers move on to take more elsewhere. The teaching industry
depends on the paper industry, but-a smattering of biologists, environmentalists, and
other ﬁinge elements aside—few give a second thought to whee the paper comes from.
Even food comes neatly packaged in ways that isolate us from the sources of our lives
and livelihoods. That is precisely why an atypical paradigm like Berry’s farmer is
necessary: to show us in an imaginaﬁvely accessible way the connecﬁon between land

and meaningful worlt’

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SUSTAINABILITY

A Moral Argument

If one is dedicated to a way of life, one will want it to be appreciated and taken up
by others so that it conﬁnues beyond one’s own life or generaﬁon. That requires some
minimal recognition of the negative limiting environmental factors of what can be
sustained. But as we have seen in the example of Old Jack, the environment also
posiﬁvely shapes a way of life by being an other, as is a spouse, with which one works
out one’s own idenﬁty. One imagines that Old Jack might find environmental talk
about bioregions and ecosystems a little highfalutin, but he certainly knew the
consequences of his long term “interacﬁons with the land in the gestalt of his farm, and
he loved the land enough to help those worthy of it to own it

The idea of a sustainable way of life is common in arguments for obligaﬁons to
future geneaﬁons. Principles of fairness or rights require constraints: cetain pracﬁces
are morally wrong because they use more than one’s fair share of resources or inﬁinge
rights of posteity. But thee are also posiﬁve reasons for constraining one’s acﬁviﬁes:
love of land, the saﬁsfacﬁon of meaningful work, the desire to provide for the well
being of one’s progeny or community. One wants something of what one is, as
expressed in a way of life, to conﬁnue, not for purely selﬁsh, egoisﬁc reasons, but
because it is a giving of self to others. One hopes for a transfe' from oneself to another
of a sense of devoﬁon to what one loves, admires, or respects. Thee is a human need to
share these things, there is joy or solace in the sharing and the terrible loneliness of
isolation when one cannot. Psychologist John Kotre refers to this process as
”geneaﬁvity" and sees its technological and cultural manifestaﬁons as deeply engrained
in the human psyche as the biological and parental funcﬁons of begetﬁng and nurturing
children (Kobe, 1984). Arguments for environmental presevaﬁon based on obligaﬁons
to future geneaﬁons have generally ignored these psychological and cultural factors in

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favor of discussions of rights or high-level questions of justice.m Ways of life pluralism
shifts the emphasis on questions regarding future generations in two ways. First, the
dedication to a way of life need not depend on questions of whether not-yet-existing
individuals can have rights (though a land ethic could be enhanced in this way).
Second, the locus of value does not exclude nonsentient nature since it is part of a way
of life.

To see what these differences in emphasis mean in a concrete setting, we can
return to Old Jack’s story. After Jack’s death, his nephew and lawyer Wheeler Catlett is
faced with an unanticipated problem: Jack’s only child, Clara, who has married banker
Glad Pettit, returns from the city to claim her inheritance. On the advice of her husband
she puts the farm up for auction. Although this is contrary to Jack’s dying wish, Clara
is not swayed by something so insubstantial as the wishes of a father she never really

knew. All Wheeler has is a note written by an old man whose memory was fading:

Wheeler see the] boy has his place! 200 $ an acre be! about right she! ought
to not! complain Wheeler] see to it

The slow, crooked legend of that page fell upon Wheeler’s conscience
with a palpable gravity, as if the old man had reached out from beyond the
grave and laid a hand on him. The letter, of course, was of no legal worth
whatsoever. In the eyes of a court it would answer no pertinent question.
Who was "the boy"? What was ”his place”? Who was ”Wheeler”? Who,
for that matter, wrote the letter? But Wheeler, had he been the one to be
held, would have been held tighter by that letter, that outcry, than by the
will itself (Berry 1985, p. 48).

Wheeler’s dilemma is caused by the conflict between what is technically legal and what
he sees as moral. It is not clear, however, that, if the case were put to an ethicist rather
than a judge, Wheeler’s position would be any stronger.

It is not obvious that any moral injustice is being done. No one has intentionally
deceived anyone; no promises were broken. Clara is Jack’s closest living relative, and
it is a common and defensible assumption that some moral duties apply more strongly
to family. Jack never told the young couple, Elton and Mary Penn, that they would get

the farm. Even Wheeler’s conveyance of Jack’s offer to sell the farm at half its market

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value occurs after Jack’s death, and Wheeler does so simply assuming Clara would
approve without consulting her. Isn’t she, as her banker husband insists is a matter of
”principle,” entitled to the ”fair market value" of her property? As for Jack’s wishes,
who knows what might influence a lonely old man growing increasingly senile? Does
Jack’s scrawled note really present a case of informed consent in the transfer of the
property? If one considers issues of utility,'there are other farmers besides the Penns
who would be happy to farm the land even though they purchase it from a couple who
regard it only as a commodity. Jack, no longer being sentient, no longer has direct
moral consideration. Can Wheeler’s preferences offset those of Clara and Glad Pettit?
The moral case easily becomes a free-for—all.

What makes the case a free-for-all is the lack of detail that can only be supplied by
considering the ethical centrality of Jack’s way of life. Wheeler makes a last plea on
behalf of Jack: "Clara, I don’t know anybody more worthy to walk in your daddy’s
tracks than Elton Penn. And your daddy loved him.” Her response is devastating: ”My
father’s loves are not mine" (p. 51). Clara is Jack’s child only biologically, never
emotionally or spiritually. She is not hardhearted, spiteful, or intentionally cold.
Because of Jack’s estrangement from his wife, Clara grew up in the house, isolated from
the farm and her father (perhaps sympathizing with her mother’s anger and resentment—
Berry does not indulge us with psychoanalysis). In Kotre’s terms, Jack’s generativity
with Clara was purely biological. If she has propositional knowledge of her daddy’s
"tracks" she certainly never experienced them in terms of knowledge how or knowledge
by acquaintance, the ldnds of knowledge that bind us most directly to others and to our
environment. Her father never taught her his meaningful work, and this is tragic for
both of them. Clara’s only inheritance from her father is money. Money-historical and
numismatic interests aside-has value only as a convenient medium of exchange; its

value must be measured by converting it into something useful, or by the psychological

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feelings of "freedom" and "security” based on the assumption that it can be so
converted, one more commodity among the goods for exchange. Like the terms
’resource’ and ’consumer’, ’money’ and ’goods’ and ’commodity’ have an alluring
verbal versatility because of their spiritual and emotional emptiness. The allure easily
becomes a moral siren song. Unless money’s use is subordinated to a coherent value
system, one winds up with anxiety driven consumerism as an attempt to establish value
on the basis of consumption rather than consuming for meaningful ends.

Personally, Clara lacks a certain gratitude to her father. Socially, she lacks a
certain magnanimity to Wheeler and the Penns. The key phrase is ’a certain’. Clara is
not an ungracious person nor does she seem the sort to scorn charity. But how could
she know gratitude to her father when she never knew her father’s work and hence did
not know what the man’s life meant to him and to his friends? Lacking that
understanding, she must treat Wheeler politely and distantly as a legal counsellor, not as
a cousin who loved and protected her father. To her, :the Penns are simply renters. In
Clara’s life these people function in narrow legal roles, not the broader social roles of a
community and certainly not the roles of friends whom her father loved. For Clara,
once the contract is completed these people cease to exist.

Wheeler understands Jack’s way of life, and his understanding morally entitles
Wheelerto speakforJack. As alawyer, Wheeleris inaposition to sell his servicesasa
commodity for their ”fair market value” thereby becoming a legal counterpart of banker
Glad Pettit. Unlike Glad, Wheeler recognizes both that there is an "order of Creation“
and where he is in that order:

...Wheeler’s fidelity has been given to the human homesteads and
neighborhoods and the known ways that preserve them. Through dark time
and bad history he has been keeper of the names that bear hope of light to
human clearings, and an orderly handing down. He is a preserver and
defender of the dead, the more so, the more passionately so, as his
acquaintance among the dead has increased, and as he has better
understood the dangers to their living heirs. How, as a man of law, could
he have been otherwise or less? How, thinking of his own children and

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grandchildren, could he not insist on an orderly passage of these frail
human parcels through time (1985, p. 128).

Given the coherence of Jack’s and Wheeler’s way of life (and Berry’s fondness for
synechdoche), the "frail human parcels" wanting an "ordely passage...through time” are
manifold. Most obviously, they are the "homesteads and neighborhoods"--words
carefully chosen for their roots of ’home’ and ’neighbor’-—the places where one lives
and one works out (literally and ﬁguratively) one’s identity as a self and one’s identity
with others. The issue is whether Jack’s land will remain a "homestead” or become a
"property" for Clara and Glad Petit to retain or exchange on a commodity market. The
frail human parcels are also the ”known ways” which preserve the homesteads and
neighborhoods, the forms of working and playing and socializing, the attitudes or
dispositions with which they are enacted (and which, Aristotle would point out, they
foster), and the emotional ties they engender. These "known ways” have made
Wheeler, adapting his non-farming profession to the needs and ways of his rural
community, a defender of the dead rather than a settle of estates. Jack doesn’t have to
reach out to Wheele from beyond the grave because Jack’s hand was on Wheele from
his boyhood. The dead as well are frail and vulnerable, for their identity and impact on
the world are not limited to a consciousness which ceases at death. They live on in their
biological, psychological, cultural, and spiritual heirs, even in later generations who
may know nothing of the dead individual’s pesonal history yet share the same sort of
loves and commitments in a way of life. The living heirs too are frail (if awkwardly
described as parcels). Those like Wheele who are acquainted and allied with the dead
may fail to keep faith with them. Those like Clara who are estranged from the dead
lack a personal tradition with--or against-which they may deﬁne themselves with
passion. Tolerance is not the equal valuing of any and all ways of life with their often
conﬂicting value commitments and practices; that would lead only to a meaningless
quietism in which whateve one did would make no difference to oneself, all choices

being equally acceptable. Rathe, toleance is the willingness to understand why othes

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may be passionately committed to ways of life diffeent from one’s own, to re-examine
and possibly modify one’s own way of life in virtue of these diffeences, and to allow
othes, whee vital inteests are not irreconcilably at risk, to pursue goals in conﬂict with
the goals with which one passionately identiﬁes. A Clara enraged at her father for who
he was and what he had done would be preferable to the mousy creature comfortably
kept by Glad Pettit. At least then she would have the possibility of ﬁnding he own
positive identity.

In the end Jack’s farm is put up for auction. His spiritual heirs Elton and Mary
Penn are ready to drop out of the bidding once the price exceeds what they think they
can prudently pay based on what they can earn from the land. At this point Wheeler
intevenes promising the Penns ﬁnancial assistance. They decide to take the risk and
they win the bidding war. The Penns will have to work harde, make more sacriﬁces,
and be subject to more ﬁnancial strain than they had anticipated. But it will be worth it
because they will be doing meaningful work for the land and the way of life they love.
Wheele is also taking a risk, not so much with the money, but with the possibility of
soured friendships if it eventually turns out that Elton and Mary Penn feel humiliated
because they eannot repay him. The episode is brought to an appropriate close beeause
Wheele and the Penns have kept faith with Old Jack in the ordely passage of the frail
parcel of a homestead from his good keeping into that of anothe, and because in
preserving the known ways of the community Elton and Mary Penn will re-enact the
sacramental work which deﬁned Jack’s way of life.

Biological and Cultural Carrying Capacity
Ecologist Garrett Hardin draws a distinction between an ecosystem’s biological
carrying capacity to sustain a limited numbe of individuals (of any given species) and

its cultural carrying capacity to sustain a ﬁxed numbe of humans living a particular

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lifestyle.ll Even from a narrow value pespective of nature-as-resources, the numbe of
humans that the planet or a particular bioregion can sustain is at minimum a function of
the rate of consumption, the amount of consumption, the types of resources consumed,
and the ability of the ecosystem to renew them. Given that thee are myriads of possible
ways of life, thee is no formula for sustainability. At some point, howeve, there is an
inverse relationship between the numbe of human beings and the resources they can
continue to use. At current rates of growth it is estimated that the present world
population of 5.2 billion people will reach 8.5 billion by 2025. At the same time arable
land will decrease.

Soil erosion, if unchecked, may result rn a 20 percent loss in global food
production potential by the end of the century. Deforestation and
devegetation create additional damage or turn productive rangelands into
deserts. Poor irrigation practices create salinity and waterlogging problems
that lowe crop ields. Already, an estimated 580 million poor people live
on marginal or e lands, damaging them furthe 1n their struggle to feed
themselves.

Cropland area per person has been falling steadily since mid-century.
The current world average of 0.69 acre pe capita is expected to decline to ‘ ‘
0.42 acre by the year 2025, if current population trends continue. Such a
decline will make it very difﬁcult to avoid human and environmental
disaster (World Resources Institute 1992, p. 13).

The statistics portray the problem chieﬂy in terms of biological carrying capacity.
Berry’s distinctions between consumptive and sacramental eating, and between
drudgery and sacramental work, illuminate the problem in terms of cultural carrying
capacitY-

People who work as an act of desperation to keep a family alive do not, generally
speaking, engage in the kind of work that Berry prizes as ”restorative, convivial,
digniﬁed and dignifying.” The poverty stricken are forced to the work they do by
extenal circumstances rather than being bound to their work by their love or sense of
obligation to it. There is all the difference in the world between the attitude of the
Roman soldier who voluntarily takes the sacramentwn out of personal loyalty and the
slave chained in the galley, and thee is all the diffeence in the kinds of effort each puts

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forth...othewise the slave would not need to be chained. Like the slave, the desperately
poor are denied what Berry sees as "two human possibilities of the highest order“:
without the dignity and satisfaction of meaningful work, what they want cannot become
the same as what they have, and their knowledge cannot cause respect for what they
know. If, in Berry’s terns, work ceases to be "one of the forms and acts of love" and
becomes ”an exteriorbraceorprop" thee is noreason to dogood work, tocarefor tools
or land. Or, if the sharecropper does happen to love the land, slhe is forced to betray
that love in orde to survive, as parents were forced by economic necessity to send their
children off to the sweatshops of the industrial revolution. The bored factory worke
who sabotages the production line is the industrial counterpart of the desperately poor
sharecroppe exhausting his-or someone else’s--land. The diffeence is that in wealthy
nations the factory worker has more alternatives and opportunities, and hence less
excuse.

Soil erosion, deforestation, devegetation, and salinization are not problems only for
the Third World poor living on marginal land. They have also become problems for the
(comparatively wealthy) American heartland. In addition, modern agribusiness
practices have led to pollution of groundwater through extensive use of chemical
fetilizers. The buying up of local seed companies by multi-national corporations has
diminished genetic divesity and acceleated a tendency towards monocultures as non-
fertile hybrids are developed for speciﬁc use with company brands of herbicides and
pesticides. The reduction of genetic diversity increases the likelihood that a single
disease strain could decimate a signiﬁcant portion of a crop. Dependence on chemical
fertilizers requires more mechanization, and larger and more expensive equipment.
Heavier tractors cause soil compaction, large plows are less adaptable to the contours
of the land theeby increasing soil erosion. Fields are laid out for "efﬁcient" use of farm

machinery, not to best preserve arable land. Woods are cut, hedgeows are plowed

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nude, and swampy areas are drained. Natural windbreaks and wildlife habitat are
destroyed and the water table is lowered. The once relatively self-sufﬁcient farmer
must incur massive debts to pay for the machinery, and as farms grow large and large
to compete, the rural population shrinks. The large the farm, the less attention the
farme can pay to his land and the less eare he can give it (Berry 1977, Jackson 1980).

Disturbing as well is the prospect of a few multi-national companies controlling
food production in the way that a handful of oil companies now monopolize enegy in
the United States, whether through genetically tailored seeds and fetilizers, or through
outright ownership of the land reducing the farmer to an employee who must follow
company regulations. (The latter scenario is less likely as farmland is already being
stressed for maximum short tem economic gain, and most corporations are not eager to
waste their own investment capital on depreciating land assets if someone else’s capital-
-in this case the farme’sncan be used.) Multi-national corporations, it is true, can be
regulated within a nation state, but their enormous economic powe makes their ability
to lobby and fund political campaigns all out of proportion to individuals or groups of
individuals. Thee is also an insidious tendency of those held economic captive by their
jobs to embrace corporate inteests diametrically opposed to their own basic values,
whether through fear or naivete. Further, corporate boards have proﬁt as their
overiding interest rathe than the value commitments or interests—even vital inteests—
of any particular nation state.

Underlying this complex web of problems are three basic assumptions which Bery
calls "tenets of industrial optimism”:

When people speak with conﬁdence of the longevity of diminishing
agricultural resourcesnas when they speak of their good intentions about
nuclear power--they are probably not just being gullible or thoughtless;
they are likely to be speaking from belief in several tenets of industrial
optimism: that life is long, but time and work are short; that every problem
will be solved by a ”technological breakthrough” before it enlarges to

catastrophe; that any problem can be solved in a hm-ry by large applications
of urgent emotion, information, and money. It is regrettable that these

135

assumptions should risk correction by disaster when they could be cheaply
and safely overturned b the study of any agriculture that has proved
durable (Bery 1983b, p. ).

The study of durable agriculture, claims Berry, reveals the small family farm as its
basis. "[AJny public program to preseve land or produce food is hopeless if it does not
tend to right the balance between numbers of people and acres of land, and to encourage
long-term, stable connections between families and small farms.” This would open up
six ”possibilities” for broad scale changes that make agriculture sustainable:

l. '[M]ost important would be the lengthening of memory. Previous
mistakes, failures, and successes would be remembered. The land would
not have to pay the cost of a trial-and-error education of each new owne....
[The farm’s] present state of health could be measured against its own past-
-something exceedingly difﬁcult to do outside of living mem ."

2. ”[T]he land would not be overworked to pay for itself at value with
evey new owne.”

3. ”[H]aving some conﬁdence in family continuity in place" would
motivate "good care for the land not for the sake of something so abstract
as ’the future’ or ’posterity,’ but out of particular love for living children
and grandchildren."

4. ”[T]he human establishment on the land would grow more pemanent by
the practice of bette carpentry and masonry. People who remembered long
and well would see the folly of rebuilding their barns every geneation or
two...."

5. “[T]he development of the concept of enough. Only long memory can
answer, for a given farm or locality, How much land is enou h? How
much work is enough? How much livestock and crop pro notion is
enough? How much powe is enough?"

6. '[L]ocal culture. Who could say what that would be? As members of a
society based on the exploitation of its own temporariness, we probably
should not venture a guess. But we can perhaps speak with a little
competence of how it would begin. It would not be imported from
criticall approved cultures elsewhere. It would not come from watching
certiﬁ classics on television. It would begin in work and love. People at
work in communities three generations old would know that their bodies
renewed, time and again, the movements of other bodies, living and dead,
known and loved, remembered and loved, in the same shops, houses, and
ﬁelds” (Bery 1983b, pp.78-79).

The ”possibilities” show us the linkage between culture and agriculture, between love of
place and love of life, between the living, the dead, and those yet to come. In Berry’s
sacramental view of work, the shops, houses, and ﬁelds are never mee “resources."
They are the sacred physical places which deﬁne the work to be done, the ritual

movements which each generation of bodies renews. Had Clara loved her father

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deeply, the most she could retain of Old Jack would be private memories, for his ways
are not hers. But every time Elton Penn plows a furrow, he enacts the movements of
Old Jack, doing it with the same care, the same love of the soil, the same purpose, the
same satisfaction. Being part of a community that shares these loves across generations,
Elton Penn’s plowing is a shared public act. So long as his way of life continues, Old
Jack will live on in actions of the community, even when he has passed out of its living
memory.

Though there are compelling reasons for altering agribusiness practices, and
although Bery provides an intelligent (and empirically tested) altenative, entrenched
thinking and vested interests are still likely to caricature Berry’s position as an
impractical attempt to turn back the clock or a selﬁsh attempt to safeguard his way of
life at the socially borne costs of highe food prices and subsidizing of inefﬁcient
farming methods. Three points need to be made in Berry’s defense. First, agribusiness
problems are threshold problems—they do not depend on single actions of individual
persons; they are the results of cumulative and collective actions by many people ove
time, and of govenmental policies which have encomaged industrial agriculture, and of
propaganda which molds ”commodity thinking." The cumulative effects are often seen
as overwhelming or inevitable, but they are not so if we take cumulative and collective
action. We do not have to continue thinking or acting destructively out of any
economico-metaphysieal necessity. Second, both the biological carrying capacity and
the cultural carrying capacity of the land are at risk because thee is a linkage between
lifestyle and the fecundity of the land. Ecology teaches us, says Garrett Hardin, that
"lee can never do merely one thing” (Hardin 1985, p. 58). It works both ways.
Changes in lifestyle have the potential to solve or alleviate-as well as to cause or
exacerbate-multiple problems simultaneously. Third, Berry’s criticisms of
agribusiness and his paradigm solution are consistent with basic Ameican cultural

values such as hard work, individual dignity, political equality, and democratic decision

137

making. His concept of community is based on self-reliant individuals who voluntarily
aid each other. Given the need to change agricultural practices to make food growing
sustainable, the relationship between a meaningful way of life and environmental
responsibility, the fact that Berry’s views are consistent with longstanding values of our
culture, plus Berry’s ﬁrst hand knowledge of farming and pesonal willingness to live
by his own recommendations, thee is no obvious reason to rej ect—and a great deal to
recommend-his position.

It might still be objected that Berry violates utility or fairness because highe food
prices will have to be paid by the many to support the way of life of a minority. The
objection that small farms are inefﬁcient has been nicely answeed by Mark Sagoff in
discussing governmental resource policy:

[E]conomists have too often proposed that society pursue efﬁciency in the
allocation of resources rathe than the ethical and cultural goals stated in
public law... [A] more efﬁcient allocation of resources. .is no bette than a

less efﬁcient one; efﬁciency [not subordinated to a value system] has no
normative or ethical worth (Sagoff 1988, p. 217).-

Social goals, says Sagoff, ought to be set by public, democratic debate and decision.
The role of the economist should be conﬁned to implementing publicly chosen goals
efﬁciently rather than surreptitiously usurping democratic processes by imposing his
disciplinarily and inescapably value-laden agenda in the name of efﬁciency.

One might accept Berry’s proposal to reestablish the small farm simply for lack of
a bette way to make agricultural production sustainable, because it is the most
"efﬁcient" way to guarantee long-tem a food supply which the public values. One
might accept it because a multiplicity of relatively self-sufﬁcient farmers is a safeguard
against corporate monopolizing of the food supply. One might also conside it out of
multiple shared values with Berry, whethe one shares his way of life and love of soil
directly, or whether one sees it as an admirable paradigm of an integrated way of life
which develops praiseworthy virtues. The greater wisdom might dictate entetaining

Berry’s suggestions for all these reasons.

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Further Constraints

Any ethical system incorporating ways of life will need constraints to set limits on
what can be required by a way of life. lntellectually, unless one is to embrace what
Stone calls "rank relativism,” one needs to be able to explain and defend one’s way of
life to those outside it; something more is required than a hee-it-is, take—it—or-leave-it
response. Morally, as understood within the libeal Western tradition, respect for
pesons and for the freedom of the individual preclude certain sanctions against those
who do not share one’s way of life. The pain of torture and the humiliation of ostracism
are unjustiﬁable forms of physical and psychological cruelty. An appreciation of the
contingent and fallible nature of human knowledge also counsels the constant
monitoring of one’s own views and tolerance of the views of othes. While thee is no
deﬁnitive and detailed characterization of constraints to be placed on a way of life,
Hampshire explicitly recognizes three theoretical forms they take: (1) the principle of
utility, (2) justice as fairness, and (3) a convegent set of virtues. As additional factors
he explicitly acknowledges (4) the historical context, and, in an updated explanation of
Spinoza, he implicitly acknowledges (5) the modern natural and social sciences as
important forms of knowledge available to us.

Hampshire ﬁnds nothing wrong with high level principles used as guidelines and
constraints. What he thinks we need to avoid is the temptation to view them as axioms-
-or some condensed form of jointly necessary and sufﬁcient moral conditions-~from
which all requisite moral principles can be deduced for a definitive decision of every
moral issue. In place of the axiomatic deductive view of utility and justice, Hampshire
advoeates a balancing view:

Cetainly one can reasonably compare family customs...from the standpoint
of justice as fairness, and erefore from a moral standpoint. It might be
concluded, for example, that a certain practice, with its injunctions and
prohibitions, involved discrimination against women as such and was
unfair and unjust, while a comparable practice in anothe society respected
the rights of women, rights which in the name of fairness ought to be

139

respected everywhere. This also is a legitimate appeal to a general
principle, and the same considerations apply as in the appeal to a general
principle of utility. The evil of the unfairness must be balanced against a
possible counterbalancing consideration: that the practice, taken as a
whole, makes a contribution to the way of life, and is an essential element
in it, and the comparative value of the wa of life from a moral point of
view must ente the balance (Hampshire 19 3, p. 6).

Any balancing view itself will be furthe qualiﬁed by the historical development of the

inteplay between the personal perspective of a way of life and the general principles:
Our descendants will criticize, from the standpoint of justice and utility,
habits and institutions which to us seem scarcely alterable features of

human nature as we know it. In reality many of them are just essential
featm'es of particular ways of life (1983, p. 7).

Hampshire’s point is that thee is no formula to tell us when a cetain practice should be
defended or eliminated; there is an act of human judgment involved. Justice and utility
can only be given empirically relevant deﬁnition through some interpretive act relying
on some particular perspective howeve broad one tries to make it.” A way of life can
be judged reﬂectively by comparing it with othe ways of life and employing principles
like justice and utility. There is no Archangelic view, as Hare would have it (see the
introduction to Chapter 1). Instead there is a dynamic tension, like that in Heraclitus’
image of the bow, between the personal perspective of a way of life and the general
principles of justice and utility which transcend that way of life, but are never
_ themselves sufﬁcient to generate a full and meaningful moral perspective. Morality,
contra Kant, can neve be completely freed from anthropology, but neither is it meely
anthropology. Contra utilitarianism, making all preferenceslpleasureslgoods
commensurable destroys the very basis for prefeence, nor is there any nonarbitrary way
of ordering prefeences into a hierarchy since the hierarchy must rest on preferences of
prefeences or appeal to nonutilitarian standards.

Systems of virtue ethics must also allow for a range of interpretation and for a
balancing whee virtues conﬂict. Aristotle was indeed ethnocentric in assuming that the

polis was the only prope living arrangement for developing and intepreting the virtues

140

that constitute human arete. Nevertheless, says Hampshire, thee is a convergence of

virtues that are inte-cultural:
[H]istorically conditioned moralities do convege upon a common core and
are not so diverse as the relativists claim. Courage, justice, friendship, the
power of thought and the exercise of intelligence, self-control, are
dispositions that in the abstract ideal are the essential Aristotelian virtues,
although the concrete forms that they take greatly vary in the difference
socially conditioned moralities. The virtues of splendid aristocratic
warriors are not the same as the virtues of a Christian monk; but they are
not merely different. Each of the two ways of life demands courage,
fairness or justice, lo alty, love and friendship, intelligence and skill, and
some self-control (19 3, p. 37).

Given the convergence of virtues, it is possible to undestand, tolerate, and even admire
othe ways of life that are not one’s own by seeing shared concerns and ideals though
institutions and practices may vary widely. The recognition of the historical
contingency of one’s own way of life allows one to see how othes’ ways of life may be
equally appropriate or in some respects supeior to one’s own, especially in eases whee
circumstances diffe radieally. Considering the divesity of factors and diffeent types
of value required in any full way of. life, the kind of coherence a person of integrity
achieves is less a matte of logical consistency than of balance and proportion among
basic commitments, some of which will inevitably conﬂict with each other. Struggling
to achieve intenal harmony or equilibrium prepares one to balance factors in a way of
life with high level constraints like justice and utility (Nagel 1979, pp. 128-141). While
justice and utility may be thought of as arising from an abstract impesonal pespective,
internally most ways of life probably geneate something like speciﬁc forms of justice
and utility because appeal to some sort of fairness or happiness is basic to ensuring
social cooperation. Few people would admit to themselves—much less to others—that
their ways of life wee grossly unfair or increased the misey of the geneal population.
Since Berry’s rural communitarianism is likely to arouse suspicions of
clannishness and narrow-mindedness among cosmopolitan urbanites (who themselves
are prone to mistake indiffeence for tolerance and rootlessness for cosmopolitanism),

two recurrent themes in Bery deseve furthe mention. First, Bery’s undestanding of

141

sacramental ritual in work and eating is epistemologically grounded and judged in the
actual words and deeds of the community. Its sanction comes from a community of
self-reliant and cooperative equals, not from the authority of church or state, nor from
metaphysical dogma whether theological or secular. Sacramental work can be
understood and evaluated empirically both by those who share Berry’s way of life and
those outside it. Berry’s aspiration of "local culture” is necessary to preserve and
explain a way of life whee the "culture" has a literal and ﬁgurative grounding. It is also
necessary to understand the "cetiﬁed classics" by giving one an epistemological and
moral standpointuwhich one recognizes as one’s own standpointufrom which to ”read
into” and evaluate the ”great books." Berry would not deny that ”local culture" can
become chauvinistic, ideological, and propagandistic. But this is true of any "culture."
The fact that the chauvinist is not your neighbor makes the chauvinism no more
justiﬁable. Local culture begins, says Berry, in one’s own work and love. If the
"certiﬁed classics" have nothing to do with one’s own work and love-whether
challenging it or supporting it, illuminating it or offering alternativesuthey cannot
achieve the liberating effect of the libeal arts.

Second, the kind of coheence or integrity or equilibrium Hampshire sees in a way
of life is expressed by Berry in terms of ’harmony’ and ’hsalth’. Harmony and health
are only achieved when one ﬁts one’s way of life into the 'orde of Creation“ which
Bery describes ecologically. Berry’s strength as a paradigm of a sustainable way of
life is the care with which he integrates culture and ecology. Since the holism of a land
ethic has been suspect by those who maintain the interest principle (e.g., Tom Regan
who charges the holist with of ”environmental fascism"), and since there are totalitarian
forms of harmony--one thinks of Plato’s organic view of the state, or the drab
paternalism of More’s Utopia-Bery deseves a defense by example. He speaks of the
repetitions of pattens in lives through generations as "a kind of community dance. And
such a dance is perhaps the best way we have to describe harmony" (1983b, p. 79).

142

Death is accepted in this intergenerational dance as part of the natural order. The
heartache of loss is no less (perhaps it is more considering the impersonal distance
between those who do not share a way of life) but the grief is shared and purposeful,
and the dead remain part of the community in its thoughts and actions. The parallel
between an individual’s life and the cycle of the seasons has been exploited by poets for
millennia. Individuals must die, but nature continues and so does Berry’s community.
This is the kind of solace appropriate to our biological limits in the orde of Creation.

In moden life thee is a parallel between the treatment of waste and the treatment
of a corpse: both are unpleasant things which are technologically removed from life in
a denial of natural cycles of growth and decay. They simply disappear from our daily
activities. If morality is to be ecological, Berry claims, it requires an awareness and
acceptance of organic decay as part of natural cycles:

[The ﬂush toilet’s] technological puriﬁcation of the bod requires the
pollution of the rivers and the starvation of the ﬁelds. It es the alleged
~ offensiveness [attributed by Berry to the "old ’religious’ division of body
and soul"] of the body truly and inescapably offensive and blinds an entire
society to the knowledge that these ”offensive wastes" are readily puriﬁed

in the topsoil—that, indeed, from an ecological point of view, these are not
wastes and are not offensive...(Bery 1977, pp. 136-137).

People who see the necessity of organic decay do not have to live as ”conduits"
.channeling nutrients from the supermarket to the sewe. People for whom the dead
remain part of the community do not have to live in terror of death or be offended by a
corpse. Undestanding whee one is in the orde of Creation allows one to be culturally
and ecologieally responsible, and, not detesting life for the death and decay that are part
of life, to make one’s peace.

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CONCLUSION

The Problem of "Seeing”

From the beginning I have maintained that the fundamental problem for a land
ethic is ”seeing," of going through a paradigm shift in which nonsentient nature has
direct moral standing instead of being peceived meely as resources which are only
valued instrumentally by sentient beings. Though thee is no neutral moral ground from
which a staunch adherent of the interest principle can be argued out of his position,
sustainable ways of life pluralism softens the supposed moral disparity between beings
with inteests and nonsentient nature in two ways: (1) it does not pit nature against
culture in its primary ontology of gestalts, and (2) it advocates a balancing view which
recognizes that it is not irrational to hold multiple, incommensurable values which often
will be in conﬂict.

The primary ontology of gestalts is exempliﬁed in Old Jack’s farm without which
he would have no identity as a farmer, just as in Berry’s marriage analogy one would
have no identity as a spouse without a comprehensive commitment to an 'Othe" even
through peiods of extreme adversity. The farm gestalt does not set off the work of the
farme against the well-being of the land. Quite the opposite, the farmer must
understand and respect his land. Although sustainable ways of life pluralism focuses on
long-tem use of the land, the use is not based solely on an instrumental valuing of the
land. The farme needs to use his land but needs to love it to make farming a way of
life (rathe than an "external prop” to make a living). The prudential and moral reasons
for care of the land coalesce so thoroughly in ways of life that one may suspect that
separating them at this level is drawing a false dichotomy. The preservation of
wildeness has occupied much attention of land ethic proponents from Leopold on, and
has become popular as a defacto litmus test for a land ethic by delibeately invoking the

prudential/moral distinction.13 Thee are cases in which drawing this distinction is

144

appropriate, but it has had a subtle inﬂuence on much land ethic argumentation: While
attacking the fact/value distinction as a false dichotomy has become common among
defendes of a land ethic, thee is a dange of tacitly accepting a new false dichotomy in
a rigid prudential/moral distinction. For its part, sustainable ways of life need not
preclude the valuing of pristine nature even in (supposedly) extremely "useless” forms.
Bery himself says:

The reason to preseve wilderness is because we need it.... We need to

go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our
hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the unqualiﬁed
and mysterious formality of Creation. And I would agree with Edward
Abbey that we need as well some tracts of what he calls ”absolute
wilderness," which "through general agreement none of us enters at all"
(Berry 1987, p. 146).

The cosmic humility and the awe of nature that Bery invokes as a ”need,” is likely to be
treated as a frill or foolish sentimentality by those who have not come to undestand the
cooperative encounter with nature in the broad and prolonged fashion required by a way
of life. The meaningful work that Bery advocates helps to develop virtues of patience,
self discipline, and dedication to something beyond one’s immediate and shallow
gratiﬁcation. This prepares one morally to grant consideration to that which cannot be
bent to one’s own purposes, whether it be in the form of a sentient individual or
nonsentient nature.

Also inherent in Berry’s marriage analogy is the balancing view of ethics, for
spouses must willingly subject themselves to an intense and prolonged mutual molding
process in which each must neve totally relinquish pesonal identity nor totally absorb
the othe into oneself (as in the ”totalizing” and ”colonizing” charges of Cheney’s
ecofeminism). A marriage or a land ethic will work only if the moral agents involved
recognize that incommensurable ”goods" make up the good life, that these are often in
conﬂict, and that conﬂict must be resolved in a way that preserves both oneself and the
Othe. Although conﬂicts can often be resolved through mutual agreement on some

kind of value hierarchy, there are times when the hierarchy does not reﬂect the

145

A subtleties of the moral situation or the divesity of deeply held moral commitments.
Then thee is need for compromise which preseves the integrity of the moral agents.

In the ﬁnal chapte we will see how sustainable ways of life can be combined with
Christopher Stone’s idea of ethics comprising different moral planes, and how
unresolved inter-planar conﬂict can be handled by Martin Benjamin’s notion of

integrity preserving compromise.

CHAPTER 5:
MORAL PRIMACY AND A LAND ET HIC

INTRODUCTION

Problems with Planes

Christopher Stone proposes his system of moral planes as a comprehensive
pluralistic approach to the many types of entities--sentient and nonsentient,
individualistic and holistic-to which we can have moral commitments. As such it can
accommodate the varied ontology required by a land ethic while not ignoring the
concerns of ethical humanists and animal extensionists. Two major criticisms of
Stone’s approach, howeve, are that (1) he presupposes that entities in each plane
deserve direct moral standing, and (2) pluralists in general have no decision procedure
.torresolve ethical conﬂict. Although ways of life could be subsumed unde Stone’s
category of ”membership entities" in planar mapping, sustainable ways of life pluralism
would invert this process and give methodological and moral primacy to the moral
agent’s own sustainable way of life. In so doing, the above two criticisms would be
answeed to the extent that any moral pluralist can answe them.

The. ﬁrst criticism is addressed by the variety of gestalts and moral intuitions that
comprise the ground level of a way of life. Valuing a varied ontology allows one to use
Stone’s planar maps to articulate and make perspicuous the sorts of relations humans
can have with each othe and with nonhuman entities whethe individual or holistic.
The mapping ean be used to critique, qualify, modify, and to extend moral intuitions.

The second criticism may be met in part by the legitimate pluralist counte-charges
that moral monists (I) ignore, distort, and oversimplify the subtleties of ethical
situations for the sake of theory, and (2) appeal to the impossibility that human
lmowledge could eve approach the unchanging omniscience required to make monism

146

147

workable even in principle, much less in practice.1 These charges by themselves,
howeve, are likely to produce a pyrrhic victory for the pluralist. A monist could admit
the charges and still reasonably argue that the general framework and practicality of,
say, prefeence utilitarianism make it far superior to the chaos or quietism engendeed
when pluralists offe us no way to decide an issue. To avoid abusing the philosophieal
tern ’pragmatic’, one might dub this position "convenience monism."

The case for pluralism needs to be strengthened by indicating how major sorts of
decisions could be handled generally. Stone tries to do this in two ways. First he
suggests the possibility of a I'lexical" ordering of planes. The orde would seemingly
come from Stone’s implicit value hierarchy based on what is morally familiar and best
known to Persons (probably, but not necessarily, human) as the only moral agents.
Second, he discusses a process of ovelaying planar maps to see whee joint agreement
can be reached or new solutions can be found. Thee will still be cases, howeve, whee
overlaid planar maps indicate unresolved moral conﬂict.2

The commitment to a sustainable way of life provides a moral foundation for both
methods of resolving planar conﬂict. In addition, the moral awareness demanded by a
sustainable way of life prepares one for difﬁcult moral cases in which there seems to be
no solution that satisﬁes all parties or satisfactorily handles all the relevant moral
concens. Martin Benjamin’s notion of integrity preseving compromise can be applied
to at least some of these cases. Dedication to a way of life readies one for such
compromise by requiring one to balance incommensurable goods and by making one
aware of what is most vital to one’s own integrity. Acknowledging one’s way of life as
a way of life—that is, one among many morally defensible ways of life—provides a basis
for pluralism and libeal toleance that foster the attitude of mutual respect necessary to
make moral compromise work.

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PLANES AND MORAL STANDING

Moral Intuitions and Perspicuity

The criticism that Stone meely assumes that his ontological planes are also moral
planes is not easily met by arguing from high level moral principles, at least not as
undestood in contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophy. Because interests are
widely accepted as being of obvious moral importance, partisans of the interest
principle as a moral bottom line occupy the argumentative high ground. But Stone can
appeal to his critic to consider the varied entities which the critic in fact does
incorporate into his own way of life. Failing (or reinforcing) that, one can also make
the richness of Stone’s moral ontology perspicuous by laying out an example of a
coheent way of life such as we have seen in Wendell Berry’s writings. Sustainable
ways of life pluralism begins with a way of life to which a person already has some
moral commitment. Adding a sustainability requirement. is almost axiomatic as it is a
reasonable assumption that anyone who values a way of life will want it to continue on
through future geneations. Sustainability must be formulated at a cetain level of
abstraction since thee are many relevant variables including population, consumption
levels, and types of ”resources” consumed. Theefore, sustainability requires a wide ’
awareness of historical circumstances, ranges of choices, and an ability to estimate
probable long-tem consequences of one’s decisions. This means that a sustainable way
of life depends on a thoughtful reﬂectiveness open to cultural evolution, a
reﬂectiveness which must be itself valued and modeled for the next generation if one’s
way of life is to survive. This reﬂectiveness requires that moral intuitions themselves
come under scrutiny and reﬁnement. Only in a Parmenidean world of no change-
biological or cultural-could every detail of a way of life be set in concrete. Change
must, howeve, proceed at a pace which allows one to absorb and understand its broade

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implications and which preserves enough continuity in a way of life to allow the
individual to adapt. Because a way of life involves value commitments to many types
of entities in its primary ontology of gestalts, the moral case for mapping planes othe
than sentient beings already has some grounding in moral intuitions. The moral and
empirical mapping advocated by Stone can then be used to critique and reﬁne the
chosen way of life, its sustainability, and to enlarge its boundaries by increasing the
awareness of the moral agent(s) involved. Since I have commented extensively in
Chapte 4 on both the methodology of moral argumentation/persuasion, and given an
extended example in the paradigm of Berry’s farme, I will say no more.

What can one say in response to a critic who, afte careful examination of he own
views and a sympathetic examination of the proffeed paradigm, still ﬁnds the notion of
direct moral standing for nonsentient nature incoheent or self-deceiving? Nothing.
The problem is the same as that encounteed by Rolston when his critic fails to be
moved morally by (scientiﬁcally informed) encounters with projective nature

One may, of course, suggest othe paradigms or construct thought experiments like
the last person experiment in which you are asked to assume that you are the last
sentient creature on the planet. A series of nuclear bombs (or othe doomsday devices)
circling the planet are set to go off sometime afte your death unless you disconnect the
control mechanism (which is easily done). Would allowing the destruction of
nonsentient nature be morally wrong given that there are no sentient creatures to whom
nonsentient nature is of instrumental value?3 A ’yes’ answe--provided that it is not
attributable to othe moral reasons-—nudges one beyond the interest principle and into
"seeing” that nonsentient nature is morally considerable in its own right.4 If the answe
remains ’no’ thee is nothing more one can do morally or should do.

The thought experiment works by forcing one to look at a situation from a

perspective not previously consideed. Rolston, like most land ethic philosophers,

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hopes that ecology and geological and evolutionary science will make plain to the
mind’s eye what is not immediately seen by the physical organ. Berry, like Charles
Dickens, uses the novel to make visible in imagination the wrongs (and virtues) that go
unnoticed in an age that is transforming the (planetary) countryside and the kind of lives
that people live. Stone hopes moral mapping will show us features—individually and in
combination with map ovelays—that previously wee unnoticed. After one has drawn
ecological and social connections, shown the vast and ﬁne dependencies between
sentient and nonsentient life, pointed out the narrow boundaries and assumptions of the
sentientist view, and depicted undreamed of consequences of our impact on the planet,
one has reached the limits of making perspicuous the case for moral consideability of
nonsentient nature. As in a trial, one must ﬁnally rest one’s case. Beyond this point
what began as moral pesuasion becomes more and more a pressure tactic of (im) moral
manipulation. The "true believer” who is convinced that the only reason people
disagree is that they don’t understand has replaced respect for pesons with the hubris of
his own infallibility. Depending on the degree to which the We believe is willing and
able to force compliance, the effects vary from annoying to honifying. In such cases of
intractable disagreement, the moral pluralist is less likely than a monist to assume he
antagonist is muddle-headed or perverse because there is no need for an exclusive
theoretical position. Much of ethical behavior often overlooked by moral theory
involves tolerating, sometimes even appreciating, in others what one would neve

choose for oneself.

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RESOLVING PLANAR CONFLICT

The Hierarchy Method

One method of addressing the criticism that Stone has no way of resolving planar
conﬂict is Stone’s suggestion that thee be a "lexical” ordering of planes. An implicit
hierarchy of planes can be attributed to Stone based on his comments about the
eandidates for moral standing which we know best, beginning with present Persons and
extending outward to creatures most like us. However, Stone never develops this
hierarchy in any extensive way. Donald C. Lee has separately proposed a three laye
environmental ethic that would give Stone’s form of pluralism a more comprehensive
way of ranking moral commitments so that cases of conﬂict could be decided rationally.
Lee bases his theory on human developmental psychology as expounded by Abraham
Maslow and augmented by insights from Herbert Marcuse. Of attempts to ground an
ethic on single features of "human nature" Lee says: .

Rationality and subjective caring are not, as Enlightenment thinkes presumed,
a priori common to all human beings. Lockean political theory presumed a
God-given rationali , and Humane [i.e., David Hume’s] ethics presumed a
common sentiment o sympathy. But now it is clear that not all human beings
develop their faculties of rationality, love, or sympathy, and certainly not to the
same degree. These are not a prrori features of human nature, but must be
nurtured by love, moral example, and education.

There is a hierarchy of human needs, and the development of each level of
psychological/moral growth is dependent upon the satisfaction of needs at the preceding
level. The hiearchy of needs, claims Lee, dictates the priority of ethical concerns (or
what would be the planar hierarchy in Stone’s system).

...I see three compatible and hierarchicall related levels of environmental
ethics. The most basic and of highest prionty is the objective anthropocentric
concen for the health and stability of the environmental and social systems we
live within. These have to do with our most basic biological and social needs
for survival, health, and well-being, and are preconditions of meeting om' ethieal
duties at othe levels. This is the level most amenable to rational legislation and
political control. The anthropocentric aspects of the land ethic, as well as the
human concen for proportional economic justice in the social sphee, and the
humanistic concen for equality before the law, petain hee.

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The second level is the subjective caring about those non-human or future
human beings most like us because they do (or will) share faculties similar to
our own (rationality, self-consciousness, sentience, etc.). This is caring for the
other for its own sake. Much of humane and humanistic ethics fall into this
level.

The third level is an aesthetic or religious caring about even those beings very
unlike us: e.g., land-formations, species of insects, biosystems, or Mother
Nature. The non-anthropocentric aspect of the land ethic pertains hee (Lee
1990, pp. 9—10).

To fulﬁll one’s potential as a human and moral being, one would have to reach the third
level. The person who does not reach an aesthetic or religious stage is, so to speak,
morally stunted in his growth.

Lee’s position brings about as much hierarchical order to Stone’s planes as any
pluralist could reasonably expect. Even so, it does not decide the ordering of planes
within the same level, such as conﬂict between utility plane. Person preferences and
nonutility plane Persons as right holders. Moreover, as the development of ”human
faculties” requires nurturing and moral modeling, the teaching by action and example
can only come from a mentor who undestands and is committed to some particular way
of life. This is not to deny the usefulness or viability of Lee’s position, but only to note
that it requires somewhere the kind of detail and dedication that Williams and
Hampshire see as the bedrock of ethics.

The kind of teaching that is necessary for Lee’s hierarchical system is what John
Kotre refers to as ”cultural generativity” on analogy with the biological generativity of
begetting and bearing children. Kotre says:

When an old man shows his grandson how to preseve seeds from the best
produce in his crop, he is ostensively passing on a craft. But he is also, by
implication, passing on a culture-a belief, in the case of one man I spoke with,
in the ”miracle of life.” In teaching how to do it, the technically generative
individual also teaches what it means--but only indirectly. To the extent that
body and mind can be separated, the teaching of technique deals with the body
of a culture but not yet its mind.

The fourth pe of generativity is directly concerned with mind. When a
teacher turns m how to do it to what it means, when she speaks of the idea of
music or healing or law, when she brings to the fore the symbol system that
stood in the background and offers her student the outlines of an identity, she
becomes culturally generative. She is no longe a teache of skills but a mentor,
and he apprentice has become a disciple (Kotre 1984, pp. 13-14).

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Kotre’s distinction between technical and cultural geneativity is one way of pinpointing
Wendell" Berry’s concerns about meaningful work. Whee Kotre may be faulted from
Bery’s point of view is the implicit faith he places in the separation of body and mind.
Kotre deﬁnes culture as "an integrated set of symbols intepreting existence and giving
a sense of meaning and place to membes of a peduring collectivity" (p. 14). Kotre
seems to regard symbols as primarily, if not exclusively, linguistic. Bery’s insistence
on the material life, the bodily and sacramental reenactment of the motions of previous
generations in the same settings—like Elton Penn plowing the same ﬁelds for the same
reasons as Old J ackuwould require an amended deﬁnition of culture. At minimum the
deﬁnition would include nonlinguistic items, particularly ritual movements—think of the
importance of dance in many traditional cultures--in symbols, and it would assign
peformative and interpretive functions to linguistic and nonlinguistic symbols alike.
Kotre is right that technique and meaning can be separated, both in intellectual
undestanding and in practice. That is exactly what is wrong with much of modern
corporate life, including the industrial model of education. When human existence
‘suffes a bifurcation of meaning and technique, it results in meaningless work and moral
schizophrenia. Kotre gives us a beautiful example of the grandfathe showing the
grandson how to preserve seeds and pass on "the miracle of life.” But then he makes a
comment worthy of Nietzschean scorn: The grandfathe is teaching what the technique
means, "but only indirectly." Only indirectly! As if, believing in the miracle of life, the
grandfathe would not exhibit a loving tone and touch in speaking of and handling the
seeds, the same sort of tone and touch which reassures and guides children long before
they undestand intellectually and which remains an essential part of intimacy through
adult life. To any grandcth intent upon a grandparent, thee would surely be an
awareness of affective aspects of meaning as well as the mechanical procedure. What
would the teaching be like if it were taught only directly? Would children—or adults for
that matte—really learn if they heard wonderful panegyrics about the miracle of life and

154

never dirtied their hands by planting seeds? How many generations would it take
before the only pe0ple interested in planting seeds were those who could make money
at it? What kind of cultural generativity would that be? Would it be a culture worth
passing on? Kotre, like many intellectuals, has a tendency to become what novelist
Tom Robbins calls a ”symbol junkie. "5

The moral and methodological primacy of a way of life comes from its
requirement that one act out one’s commitments as well as reﬂecting linguistically upon
them, and in acting put them to an empirical test which cannot be externalized or
alienated from the moral agent. It demands an integration of knowledge by
acquaintance, knowledge how, and propositional knowledge. Much of culture
presupposes what Aristotle called rnimesis (imitation)-usually in forms that are ”second
nature" and taken for granted with no overt awareness of them-and it is doubtful that
cultural generativity could occur at all without the knowledge by acquaintance and
knowledge how that are given daily emphasis in a way. of life.

The Map Overlap Method

Stone’s second method of resolving planar conﬂict is to overlay moral maps.
Stone claims that many moral problems can be handled without combining planar maps
at all, and that in cases requiring more than one map an ovelay will often indieate the
same solution. Given common basic needs of sentient and nonsentient life forms for
relatively clean air, water, and nontoxic soil, this is not surprising. Preserving
wilderness, for example, provides airsheds and watersheds, plant and animal habitat (the
most critical factor in species preservation), and aesthetic, historical, recreational,
scientiﬁc, and psychological beneﬁts for humans.6 Multiple values multiply held
reinforce a legitimate moral agreement.

Stone’s overlapping of planes begins to go sour morally, however, when

conﬂicting values that dictate the same actions are not recognized as being in conﬂict.

155

To continue with the example of wilderness preservation, thee is heavy pressure for
what Edward Abbey calls ”Industrial Tourism" and turning the National Parks into a
ldnd of Disney World amusement:

Accustomed to this sort of relentless pressure since its founding, it is little
wonde that the Park Sevice, through a process of natural selection, has tended
to evolve a type of administration which, far from resisting such pressure, has
usually been more than willing to accommodate it, even to encourage it. Not
from any peculiar moral weakness but simply because such well-adapted
administrators are themselves believers in a policy of economic development.
"Resource management" is the current term. Old foot trails may be neglected,
back-coun ranger stations left unmanned, and interpretive and protective
sevices ina equately staffed, but the administrators know ﬁ'om long experience
that millions for asphalt can always be found...(Abbey 1968, p. 57).

Are the National Parks even meeting their narrow politically chartered purpose as
'pleasuring grounds” when one drives hours in bumpe to bumpe trafﬁc for a ten
minute postcard glimpse of Yellowstone Falls? This is not to say that a moral
compromise might not be reached between designating some areas for high tourist
trafﬁc (and theeby creating badly needed jobs and providing some access to the park’s
beauties for the handicapped and infirm) while preserving other areas from
development. But for the compromise to be a moral compromise, the parties involved
must recognize what they are trading away and why.

The need for moral awareness becomes even more pronounced when dealing with
subtle cases than the avarice and political empire building that drive Industrial
Tourism. Thomas H. Birch has pointed out that the very method of preserving
wilderness can vitiate legitimate reasons for its preservation. Many presevationists
who "love nature" and want to secure it against a corrupt and polluted outside world,
then try to contain it legally and morally by the very same ideological thinking and

institutions—the imperium in Birch’s tems—which have fosteed the corruption of our
daily lives:

For the inrperium, only that which is othe can be sacred, because all of the usual
world, the mundane and the not-so-mundane, is taken to be profane, secular,
objective. The imperium is committed to cordoning off sacred space, to
separating it as othe, effective] keeping it out of the cente of our practical
lives, and keeping us out of it an thus safe from its subvesive effect. Wildness

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as wilderness land is incarcerated as sacred space. This is perhaps one of the
main uses to which the imperial orde puts wilderness. It consigns sacred space
to the museum of holy relics, as one of the prime manifestations of the wildness
‘ it is compelled to incarcerate in orde to demonstrate its total triumph (Birch
1990, p. 3).
We have already encountered Birch’s point in Bery’s refusal to create an opposition
between the material and the spiritual, in Berry’s insistence on talking of a way of life
being perpetuated in bodily motions (on an animalistic level which traditional
philosophers have tended to denigrate or ignore as nonrational, or worse, interpret as
meely mechanical), and in Bery’s insistence that a nation which does not care for its
farms and cities will not care for its wildeness areas. By requiring work and personal
sacriﬁce, sustainable ways of life develops a moral awareness that helps one to avoid

the potential seductions of easy planar overlaps, and that prepares one to make

responsible decisions in difﬁcult cases of compromise.

Integrity Preserving Compromise

A third method for settling planar conﬂict is suggested by Martin Benjamin’s work
on integrity preserving compromise (IPC). As a pluralist, Benjamin builds on
Hampshire’s notion of a way of life and its acceptance that thee are incommensurable
moral values. Thee are, according to Benjamin, conﬂicting world views that are
equally consistent and that treat empirical evidence with equal adequacy so that thee
can be no rational methodology to decide between them. Benjamin nonetheless thinks
that genuine ethical-as opposed to tactical--compromise is possible between such
drastically differing positions in some cases and under carefully circumscribed
conditions. Though most of Benjamin’s work has been done in the area of medical
ethics, the conditions he sets out for ethical compromise are readily adaptable to
environmental ethics, especially in the form of sustainable ways of life.

Benjamin notes that genuine integrity requires a harmony between both internal

and extenal views of the consistency of one’s life:

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Individual integrity...requires that one’s words and deeds geneally be true to a
substantive, coheent, and relatively stable set of values and principles to which
one is genuinely and freely committed. Integrity can be viewed internally from
the point of view of the agent, and externally, from the point of view of others.
One’s life is ”of a piece" only if it is integrated from both points of view.
Neithe the hypocrite, who possesses intenal but not extenal integrity, nor the
alienated victim of coercion, who possesses extenal but not internal integrity,
leads a genuinely integrated life (Benjamin 1990, pp. 51-52).

Intenal and external consistency, howeve, is not the complete measure of integrity.
Integrity also requires some degree of wholeness, and Benjamin grants that aspects of
consistency and wholeness will not always be in perfect accord:A peson of strong will

whose words and deeds ﬂow from a deliberately restricted, comparatively small
set of closely related and coherent values and principles may have little
difﬁculty in maintaining overall consistency. But as such single-mindedness
shades into fanaticism or distorts the self by systematically disregarding
important aspects of it, we may question the peson’s humanity.... For integrity
involves wholeness as well as consistency. If a preoccupation with consistency
requires that we deny or repress a numbe of authentic feelings, attachments,
commitments, values, and principles that are not in themselves ethically
untoward and that occasionally incline us in contrary directions, we will have
sacriﬁced wholeness. A ﬁxation on one dimension of integrity will result in
neglect of anothe (p. 55).

This wide, embracing view of integrity makes it compatible with Stone’s attempt to lay
out a comprehensive approach to pluralism, and with the exemplar of Berry’s farme.
While Benjamin pesonally regards the inteest principle as a moral bottom line, he
readily acknowledges that there are ways of life with moral integrity in which
nonsentient natrn'e could have direct moral standing.

The kind of compromise which concerns Benjamin is that in which two parties
have opposing moral values and are not able to reach an undestanding that satisﬁes
both, nor are they able to come to a new understanding that supersedes the moral
opposition. Benjamin distinguishes between ”extenal" compromise between two (or
more) parties, and the ”intenal” compromise an individual makes because, quoting
John Rawls, ”Human good is heterogeneous because the aims of the self are
heterogeneous" (p. 22).7 The heterogeneous nature of self has been evident in a
sustainable way of life through the need for balancing different goods. (Jack’s loss of
his wife and daughte because of his single-minded determination to succeed ﬁnancially

158

is a liteary warning to those who would sacriﬁce wholeness of self.) The internal
compromise required prepares one for external compromise as both process and
product. As a formal requirement a sustainable way of life must be communal ove
geneations. It must also meet cetain practical requirements. Most notably it must be
ﬂexible enough to cope with changing conditions, and it must foster the kinds of caring
and respect that bind humans to each other as a precondition for what Kotre calls
technical and cultural geneativity. Anothe formal requirement for sustainable ways of
life is its pluralistic recognition that thee is no one single way of life equally fulﬁlling
for all pesons. The tight kinship structure of the tribe provides emotional support at the
expense of personal privacy and freedom; industrialized, urban nation states provide
social mobility by breaking up the extended family. It is an anthropological truism that
each culture emphasizes only a few of the inﬁnite range of possible human choices and
theeby must forego others. The situation becomes much more divese at the level of
individual choice. To recognize a way of life as a way of life is to be aware that thee
are altenative ways of life which people take up and pass on, not out of ignorance,
bigotry, or naivety, but because these diffeent ways of life have their own coheence,
their own satisfactions and their own sorts of fulﬁllment. Tolerance is a corollary of
this kind of pluralism since one cannot claim exclusive understanding, much less
possession, of moral virtue. The ﬂexibility, tolerance, respect and caring required to
make sustainable ways of life workable also enable the moral agent to make integrity
preseving compromises in the impefect and often uncetain world of human existence.
According to Benjamin, integrity preserving compromise (IPC) is appropriate when
four circumstances obtain:

First, the facts are uncertain... Second, the issue is morally complex.... Third,
the parties are involved in a continuing coopeative relationship.... And fourth,
we ace what appears to be an impending, nondeferable decision (p. 164).

To see how these circumstances can be applied to environmental ethics we can conside

159

a parallel to Benjamin’s attempt to resolve the debate ove abortion in the controvesy
ove the spotted owl and the logging of old-growth forests.

The spotted owl which requires the high cove for nesting provided by old-growth
forests has been declared endangered under the Endangered Species Act. A federal
court ruling has resulted in the suspension of timbe sales in the owl’s habitat of the
national forests of the Paciﬁc Northwest. Estimates of potential jobs lost if the owl is
pemanently protected vary consideably from 20,000 to the logging industry’s ﬁgure of
100,000. The Secretary of the Interior has convened the "God Squad,” a committee
which has the authority to override the Endangeed Species Act which is up for renewal
in Congress this year. Environmentalists want to save the owl and the old-growth
forests. Developes want to use the forest as economic resources and to supply jobs.
Neithe group is cetain of victory and both stand to lose a great deal. If the Endangeed
Species Act is overridden by the ”God Squad” or gutted in a Congressional revision, it
will likely set a pattern in which threatened species are stripped of legal protection
wheneve thee is any signiﬁcant conﬂict with economic development. For its part, the
government loses money on its timbe sales and many membes of Congress want to
add rides to new legislation requiring the logging indusu'y to pay the full price for
govenment timber. If the spotted owl protection decision is upheld by the ”God
Squad” and the Endangeed Species Act is renewed or strengthened, it will seve as a
legal precedent for bringing similar suits in othe areas of the country (Lemonick 1991,
Turque 1991, Alexande 1992).

Benjamin cites as examples of the ﬁrst condition for IPC, uncetainty about the
facts, the questionable I'metaphysical--and hence moral--status of the fetus“ and the
unknown long-term effects of abortion policy (p. 164). The parallel in the case of the
spotted owl is the questionable metaphysical and moral status of species (whethe that

of the sentient owl or that of the nonsentient trees) and other holistic entities such as

160

forests and ecosystems. The spotted owl assumes additional signiﬁcance because of its
use as an indicator species, one whose increase or decrease serves as a bencth for
measuring ecosystem health. Some evidence indicates that the spotted owl can nest in
second growth forests; the marbled murrelet has been suggested as a better indicator
species for the studies required to detemine environmental impact of forest use. There
are immense practical difﬁculties in monitoring even a few species for reliable statistics.
The cost of ﬁnding a spotted owl nest is estimated at $200 to $300 while the murrelet is
pegged at $100,000 pe nest (Abate 1992).

Benjamin’s second condition for IPC is moral complexity. "Each party to the
debate bases its position on plausible moral considerations, none of which clearly
violates the principle of utility or the principle of respect for pesons” (p. 164). Whethe
or not species pe se have direct moral consideration, their loss is permanent once they
become extinct. This not only deprives present and future human generations of
recreational and aesthetic enjoyment, but it is a pemanent loss foriscientiﬁc study and a
reduction of genetic diversity. large scale losses of certain species and destruction of
ecosystems, notably forests, now threaten life support systems of the planet. Thee are
clearly signiﬁcant risks to humans if we pursue business as usual. On the othe hand,
the developers can point to the very basic human need to make a living, and to the
disproportionate amount of land held by the federal government in the West which
makes economic development difﬁcult without fedeal cooperation. In theory national
forests (not designated Wildeness) are multiple use areas. It would be extremely
difﬁcult to calculate utility in any decisive way, especially if animals and future
generations are included. As for justice, the logging industry is being subsidized by
public timbe sales, but local economies are also not as free to develop in ways possible
whee most land is in private hands. Is it fair, for instance, given that Michigan,

Wisconsin, and Minnesota having beneﬁtted (temporarily) from the clear-cutting of

161

their forests, that forest land use should now be seveely restricted in Washington,
Oregon, and Idaho? If we have learned about the need to conseve resources from past
bad practices of the lumber barons, then the historical and contextual sensitivity
required to judge changing conditions and save endangeed species ought to be applied
as well to humans caught in similar contingencies. But the loggers and locals are also
pawns in the logging industry’s corporate game. Neithe appeals to utility nor justice
seem capable of decisively settling the issue in favor of eithe party.

The third condition for IPC, a continuing coopeative relationship, involves the
nation as a whole both in Benjamin’s paradigm problem of abortion and in the conﬂict
between the developers and environmentalists. Not only do we require a ”uniform
policy on matters of life and death,“ but we also require a uniform policy on conditions
under which economic development and environmental protection can be
accommodated. Large scale capital investments require reasonable assurance that the
rules will not suddenly be changed or wealth tied up inland turned into an economic
liability by unexpected legislation or court decree. Environmental protection and
presevation requires regulations that are not overturned at evey recession or exempted
by ideologieal fiat.

Of the fourth condition, facing "an impending, nondeferable decision,” Benjamin
says: "The continued moral and politieal impasse on this issue is now spilling ove and
advesely affecting many areas of public life" (p. 164). Wheeas Prochoice activists
have much to lose if Roe v. Wade is overturned, so Prolife activists have much to lose if
Congress passes legislation ensuring a woman’s right to an abortion. Similarly,
environmentalists have much to lose if the Endangered Species Act is not renewed in
any meaningful way, and developes have much to lose if their projects can be blocked
by lawsuits at every turn.

Benjamin’s solution is to split the diffeence by requiring concessions ﬁ'om both

sides. While some extremists from both Proer and Prochoice camps may feel that the

162

issues are simple and clear, and that they cannot compromise without losing their
integrity, the generally conceded complexity of the abortion issue creates a larger
middle (and muddled) ground. Benjamin says:

Inasmuch as the consistency and independent validity requirements for an

adequate political solution are not as stringent as those rn philosophy or
constitutional law, it might be best. .to shift the focus from the Supreme Court to
Congress. If a moderate position cannot be shown to be morally or
philosophically superior to eithe of the polar positions, it may be defensible as a
legislative compromise—one that at the congressional level acknowledges our
national ambivalence and divisions rathe than papering them ove (p. 166).

Benjamin suggests as a hypothetical solution a policy which permits early abortions
(eg, the ﬁrst 10 weeks) but prohibits later abortions unless special circumstances apply
(e.g., anencephalic fetus, dange to the mothe’s life).

A similar sort of solution could be envisioned in the case of environmentalists and
developes. With each party recognizing the threats to its own position and (pehaps)
the legitimacy of some of the opposing party’s concerns, there might be enough
consensus to support a revision of the Endangeed Species Act which would recognize
diffeent levels of protection depending on two factors: the viability of the ecosystem
and its owneship.

Bryan Norton notes that preseving remnant populations can be done in zoos and
through germ plasm samples. Like Rolston, he sees the real value of species
presevation as part of a functioning ecosystem. Norton says:

Having a broad range of species available“ .as potential colonizers and
competitors for niche space strengthens the forces that lead, through niche
packing, to diversity in successional communities. Each species has
contributory value as it comes in contact with other species. it offers a context
of competition and opportunities for synergisms that create new adaptations and,
eventually, new species. Species existing in varied habitats" .are valuable

because they give rise to long-term genetic variation. But divesity of biological
life rs also a valuable aesthetic and cultural resource (Norton 1987, p. 261).

Species that have to be nursed along as tenuous remnants of now defunct ecosystems,
and that could not be transferred to ecosystems where they would survive on their own,

would not be given the same level of legal protection as those which had a reasonable

163

prospect of ﬂomishing. Functional ecosystems and the diverse species in them would
be given high levels of protection.

In the case of land ownership, species in the National Wilderness Preservation
System might be given an almost sacrosanct legal status, while those in ”multiple use”
lands such as national forests—with the proviso that such lands really are managed for
multiple use in perpetuity--might be protected subject to certain well-deﬁned
contingencies, but species in lands unde private ownership would have a minimal sort
of protection subject to important needs of the owne (such as not suffering great
economic harm). Procedures would also have to be established for land swaps and
priorities in the cases in which large functioning ecosystems wee in private hands.

The compromise, if it is viable, is a moral compromise not because everyone
thinks that nothing important was lost or is pleased with the outcome. Developes can
still complain that environmentalist lock up Wildeness lands ignorlng human needs;
environmentalists can still complain that developers are engaging in biological:
genocide. N erthe party has abandoned its commitments and values. Since the facts are
uncertain and the situation is morally complex, thee is, at this point, no adequate
method by which eithe party earl be judged clearly in the right or clearly in the wrong.
The compromise is moral because the parties realize that the only thing worse than
compromising is the risk to what they value if they do not compromise. Not only does
the compromise center on a moral issue, but all things consideed the compromise
respects the not clearly immoral views of one’s advesary as well as oneself. The
compromise is integrity preseving insofar as one’s values include respect for others
holding differing, but not unreasonable views, as well as a commitment to one’s own
values and world view. Finally, the compromise is a means of maintaining a degree of
social harmony while preseving the rich divesity that is a special mark of the human
species.

164

CONCLUSION

The Primacy of Sustainable Ways of Life

We have seen how a way of life can provide a foundation for answering critics of
Stone’s pluralism who asset that Stone’s ontology lacks direct moral standing and that
his system lacks an adequate procedure for deciding between competing ethical
concens. In particular, Wendell Berry’s marriage analogy has demonstrated how a
partnership ethic with nonsentient nature is possible and how it can be sustained through
generations. The virtues of meaningful work celebrated by Berry focus on basic
satisfactions in living well rather than in a consumptive life of acquisition. The self-
knowledge and dedication in the kind of life Berry models prepare one for making hard
ethical choices while the way of life grounds all three methods of resolving planar
conﬂict in Stone’s pluralism. Without that rich and detailed ground level awareness of
who and what we are, high level ethical principles can be given no real content nor do
we have analogies from which to work when we are presented with new situations.
This is not due to any failure of ethical systems but to the human condition. As Jeffrey

Stout remarks:

None of us starts from scratch in moral reasoning. Nor can we eve start ove
again, accepting only beliefs that have been deduced from certitudes or
demonstrable facts. We begin already immersed in the assumptions and
precedents of a tradition, whether religious or secular, and we revise these
assumptions and set new precedents as we learn more about ourselves and our
world. Our starting point is not so much arbitrary as inescapable: we are who
we are, the heirs of this tradition as opposed to that one, born into one epoch
rathe than anothe, our intuitions shaped by the grammar of our native tongue.
We demonstrate our rationality, if at all, by how we move out from that starting
point—subjecting this or that assumption or precedent to criticism as real doubts
arise, employing old vocabularies or inventing new ones, the bette to think and
live well (Stout 1988, p. 120).

Our own ”epoch” is one in which philosophers have come to question
foundationalisrn not only in epistemology but also in ethics. One of the driving forces

of moral pluralism is the awareness that we live in a contingent situation trying to

165

balance many different and incommensurable goods. The transitory nature of an
individual’s existence can to some extent be ovecome through the continuity of a way
of life. But always that way of life is contingent upon many things not under our
control, what Martha Nussbaum refers to as ”the fragility of goodness." Perhaps it is
ﬁtting that in this same "epoch” we have become aware of the transitory nature of
nature itself, that it too is ﬁagile and contingent on our actions in ways that our great-
grandparents neve could have dreamed. Wendell Berry shows us in the paradigm of
the farme who loves his land the intimate connection of the fragility and strength of

both. In undestanding that paradigm we afﬁrm the same possibilities for ourselves.

EPILOGUE

Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay ﬁeld to ﬁeld, till thee be no
place, that they may be placed alone in the gnigdst of the earth!
-Isarah' :

When I return to the small Minnesota town where I grew up in the 19503 many
things have changed. The black earth of the newly plowed ﬁelds lightens to brown then
yellow at the crests of the gently rolling hills. In less than two lifetimes, and grown
visible within my own, the rich prairie soil, rnillennia in forming, has been worn to the
clay. To the urban vacatione driving west on Interstate 90 there is nothing alarming. If
the color change is noticed at all, it is a minor relief in a tedious landscape, the 600
miles of boredom that one must cross between the Mississippi Valley and the South
Dakota Badlands, Wall Drug, Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore.

The; country roads are paved now and the farmsteads at greate distance. Town

0": 1"

children riding in pickup trucks no longe bounce through ruts and slide ‘over gravel on
the way to see a new ealfor litte ofpiglets and to be invited in for coffee and cake, the
vital tasks of community life accomplished unde my fathe’s thin pretext of delivering
bottled gas to rural customers. Nor do the farm children, of whom thee are fewe,
know these things. Farms have become large and more ”efﬁcient" concentrating on
one or two cash crops. Most farms do not have animals, and those that do lack the
variety of my childhood. These farmes are specialists, professionals: milk producers,
beef producers. pork producers»

Along Main Street there are more empty buildings, more vacant lots where
buildings once stood, more buildings housing craft shops rathe than the clothing,
hardware, and shoe stores, the restaurants and bakeries that wee once mainstays in a

healthy local economy. Thee is only one grocery now, a supemarket. In a farming

166

167

community used to eating well, the single supermarket is an omen ominous as the
yellow hilltops in the ﬁelds. These people live unde Isaiah’s warning.

If the prophet were alive today, he would inveigh against those who join
corporation to corporation, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the wealth.
But, coming from a pastoral people, Isaiah would also warn that thee can be no wealth
if thee is no land. While Aldo Leopold and Wendell Bery are children of a new age of
ecology, they too are heirs of an historical tradition that makes their wisdom a variation
on a theme. How could any Hebrew prophet treasure the gift of the Promised Land and
not value the land itself?

The development of ecology and evolutionary biology have given us the means to
comprehend beyond the range of our immediate experience, to project likely
consequences of our numbers and actions, and to envision a more intricate ontology
than any ancient prophet could foresee. What the natural sciences have not given us is
the wisdom to recognize that. Isaiah’s warning applies not on; to greed butalso to
technocratic pride. In consequence, we lack the pesonal will and understanding to
form new moral relationships with the varied ontology which has been revealed. For
this we need the witness of those who have been attentive to the details of a way of life,
who have the practical experience which ethieal theory always glosses, and who have in
'living memory” the knowledge how and larowledge by acquaintance which immese us
in the affairs of the world by making our own identities inseparable from the many
”othes” we encounte. The debate ove holism in environmental ethics has focused on
the ontological and moral standing of species and ecosystems. But thee is anothe kind
of holism undestood in terns of individual integrity whee one’s life is "of a piece.” A
truly environmental ethic needs both. Whethe that is accomplished by aimonistic
theory or a kind of balancing unde pluralism is less important than that we undestand,
as Berry might say it, the relationships among people, land, and community which
determine both who we are and whee we are in the orde of Creation.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION NOTES

1. ’Sentientists’ is gaining favor as the preferred term, but I will use the clumsie
label ’animal extensionists’ to emphasize the methodology as well as the locus of value.

2. Peter Singer (1975) remains the foremost exemplar of utilitarian defense of
animals, while Tom Regan (1983) is the best known deontologist.

3. Animal ethics is probabl the mainstream moral position today among
philosophers. Benard Rollin (1981, 1989), who argues for animal rights on the basis of
an animal’s genetically programmed telos or nature, and who stresses on the importance
of knowing the kind of animal unde consideration, is a possible borderline exception to
this group’s dichotomy between the conceptual and the empirical.

4. My usage of ’land ethic’ departs from a stricte Leopoldian sense as expounded by
Callicott (1987, 1989).

5. Taxonomies quickly grow unwieldy. Holistic biocentrists might argue for species,
but not accept ecosystems, as loci of value; then again they might espouse the Gala
principle asserting the entire planet is one supeorganism. An ecosystem may be
anything from a pond to the plane biosphee. Taxonomies are furthe complicated
by diffeent types of values, many 0 which ovelap distinctions between conventional
individuals, species, and ecosystems. Holmes Rolston (1988), for instance, discusses 14
different types of values I'carried by nature,” some of which are intrinsic while othes
are instrumental.

6. The most celebrated example is Callicott, 1980. Callicott excoriates animal
libeationists for failing to distinguish wild from domesticated animals, and for viewing
pain as an evil rathe than as an evolutionary mechanism for information vital to animal
survival. Of domesticated animals he says, "They have been bred to docility,
tractability, stupidity, and dependency. It is literally meaningless to suggest that they be
liberated" (p. 330). Though Callicott has distanced himself from the article, he has not
repudiated it, and the issues remain divisive.

7. Pete S. Wenz (1988) also deseves mention as a major pluralist. Because Stone’s
moral ontology is as broad as that of Wenz, and because Wenz’ position involves
extensive technical discussion of rights and obligations, I have limited my use of Wenz
to that of occasional critic and commentator.

168

169
CHAPTER 1 NOTES

1. Cf. Varner 1991. Varner denies the legitimacy of Callicott’s move from
individuals to holistic entities. "It is because an ecosystem has no welfare of its own, in
the sense that each individual membe of an ecosystem has a welfare of its own, that a
holistic environmental ethic must be pluralistic" (p. 179). I think Callicott is correct in
saying that moral sentiments can attach to holistic entities, but Varne’s point is valid
because Callicott’s ethical altruism requires that candidates for direct moral standing be
appreciated morally for what they are themselves according to their respective-if not

mettle—properties.

2. Native American cultures, frequently cited as models of ecologieal responsibility,

do not share the scientiﬁc outlook in an extensive and uniform way. They may share

insights with ecology that everything is interconnected, but the mythic descriptions of

these interconnections and the ritualistic means of inﬂuencing natural events are

considerably diffeent. Also, a positivistic fact/value chasm is still the popular norm for

lﬁag'emen who ﬁnd science "cold” and practicing scientists who make claims to ”value
" research.

3. Cf. Wenz 1988, pp. 316-317, for an outline of a ”concentric circle theory" which
presents in more thoroughgoing and legalistic form the kinds of obligations which
Callicott might have in mind. Wenz, howeve, is a pluralist.

4. Of the mixed community Callicott says: "Leopold...regales his reade with a rustic
idyll in which the wild and domesticated ﬂoral and faunal denizens of a Wisconsin
farrnscape are featheed into one anothe to create a harmonious whole. In addition to
cash and the usual supgly of ve etables and meat, lumber and fuel wood, Leopold’s
envisioned farmstead a ords its family venison, quail and othe small game, and a
variety of fruit and nuts from its woodlot, wetlands, and fallow ﬁelds; its pond and
stream yield pan ﬁsh and trout. It also affords intangibles--songbirds, wildﬂowers, the
hoot of owls, the bugle of cranes, and intellectual adventures aplenty in natural his "
. 19). Though the examples in the quote are treated as instrumentally valuable for e
e, the mutually reinforcing relationships of the mixed community are the same as
those found in the works of Wendell Bery and discussed in Chapte 4.

5. In addition to formal training in physics, Rolston is an accomplished bryologist.
6. See "Duties to Endangeed Species” in Rolston 1986, pp. 206-220.

7. Jeemy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), Chapte XVII,
Section 1, as quoted in Regan and Singe 1976, p. 130.

8. Cf. Callicott 1980.

9. On the distinction between pain and suffering (Rolston’s 'afﬂiction") see Eric
Cassell (1991) who says: "The ideas, beliefs, or conceptions used to interpret
perception virtually always contain expressions of value. When interpreting natural
facts, obseves employ their own values, and these values should not be confused with
the second kind of information required to know the subject of observation-~the values
of the suffering individual. The same sensory information ma be assigned very
diffeent values by the obseve and the suffee. For example, di eent observes of a
particular person...may read the same behaviors as taciturn, withdrawn, or hostile”
(p. 28).. In addition to the interpretation of ”natural facts” and the values of the tient,
detenunmg whethe someone rs suffering requires "[a]esthetic judgments [whrch] are

170

beliefs about the presence or absence of correctness, pleasantness, or completeness in a
combination of characteristics” (p. 29). Given the complexity of Cassell’s analysis, the
case for animal pain is easier to establish than that for animal suffering, but (some)
animals do have values in the sense of preferences that are exhibited in regular
behaviors ove time.

10. See Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

11. See, for instance, Andrew Brennan (1988) who denies Rolston’s claim of systemic
value in nature because a ”natural system, like a natural community, has no good of its
own, and so cannot be harmed or helped in its own right” (p. 157). Brennan elaborates:
"Even if we can make sense, in the way Taylor suggests, of the good of individual
creatures, sustaining their existence in the face of a co-opeative, but often challenging,
environment, ecology furnishes us with no ’objective’ account of the goods, the ends or
the directions of biological communities or ecosystems. As species populations come
and go, as whole species die out and others emerge, there is no natural pattern, no
direction, no end to be served. Rolston, admittedly, has argued...that evolution shows a
certain direction--namely a tendency to produce a greater and greater diversity of
species. But this is simply to associate a direction with what has in fact happened.
Over aeons of time, more and more species have appeared. This obsevation by itself
has no moral force, for just as the tendency of scorpions to maintain their lives against
environmental challenges shows nothing about the moral worth of scorpions, so the
tendency for s ecies to diversity shows nothing about the moral worth of such

diversity” (p. 1 3).

12. PVS victims live for many years and require enormously costly care diveting
medical resources from other patients. Genetic engineering creates even more
difﬁculties in arguing for a ”good” based on telos. Conside Harvard Univesity’s
recently patented "Oncomouse" designed to be more susceptible to canoe. Is part of
the mouse’s "good" to become diseased? Can it be treated as an artifact? The patented
animal is perhaps still close enough biologically to its healthier ancestors for the
changes introduced to be treated morally like a case of delibeate mutilation, but if and
when wholesale changes in genetic structure are possible, it is not clear how one would
handle the issue of an engineeed animal’s telos and its ”good.”

171
CHAPTER 2 NOTES .

1. For a discussion of relativism see DeCew 1990.

2. An early draft was of Stone’s position was cited in the Supreme Court minority
opinion in Sierra Club v. Morton. His argument is much more extensive than hee

represented.

3. Stone part1 anticipated this objection by suggesting that a trust fund of monies
from successful’suits on behalf of nature could established to compensate persons
injured by natural disasters. Even disallowing suits by those who insist on building
cities on fault zones or homes in ﬂood plains, the magnitude and unpredictability of
natm'e’s forces make Stone’s suggestion a formula for environmental disaste. Any "act
of God" could bankrupt the fund and force a selloff of nature’s "assets" such as the
National Wildeness Presevation System.

4. Cf. Putnam (1983) who criticizes moral reasoning that becomes so unwieldy and
convoluted in its quest for absolute decision procedures as to bewilde rathe than guide
the moral agent.

5. Cf. Rolston 1988 on in situ presevation of species, pp 153-154.

6. See Robert L. Holmes, ”Violence and Nonviolence,” in Violence, ed. Jeome A.
Shafe (New York: McKay, 1971), pp. 103-135.

7. This strategy is advocated by Donald Schee who says: "[D]ifferent combinations
of values seem to be at stake in diffeent environmental problems, and the research
agenda for many environmental philosophers reﬂects the hypothesis that fruitful
conclusions about appropriate courses of action may best emege, not from an all-
encompassing ethieal theory, but from a careful consideration of recurrent situations in
which particular constellatrons of values 'eld pical conﬂicts" (Schee 1991, p. 5).
By way of contrast see Thomas Nagel 1973,1 pp. 28-141.

8. Quoted in Benjamin 1990, pp. 120-121.
9. I owe this point to Mr. Mark T. Voss.

10. The extent to which Rorty does seve language from the world may be questioned
since Rorty is much concerned about action within linguistic commumties. He might
more justly be condemned as a human chauvinist because of his emphasis on language
which, conventionally understood, would exclude animals and Leopold’s ”biotic
community” from Ro ’s community. My intent hee is meely to follow Cheney’s
criticism of Rorty to Cheney’s position clear.

11. Cf. W.V.O. Quine 1985. Quine argues that "natural ln'nds" are based on our innate
ability to discern similarities which he calls ”quality spaces.” But, he concludes: ”In

eneral we can take it as a very special mark of the maturity of a branch of science that
rt no longe needs an irreducrble notion of similarity and kind. It is that ﬁnal stage
where the animal vestige is wholly absorbed into the theory. In this caree of the
similari notion, starting in its innate phase, developing over the years in the light of
accumu ated experience, passing then from the rntuitive phase into theoretical
similarity, and ﬁnally disappearing altogethe, we have a paradigm of the evolution of
unreason into science” (p. 46). Despite the fact that evidence undedetenrines theory

172

and that rn Quine’ s model of a ”web of belief" any part of the web may be alteed,
Quine still requires observation sentences. His disdainful attitude toward the innate

"animal vestige” of ”quality spaces” which inﬂuence how we experience the life-world
is a reaction against positivist notions of empiricism. It also rs the result of making
theoretical physics, with its reliance on instrumentation to ”show" us micro and macro
worlds not open to our ordinary experience, as the paradigm of the sciences. Many
moral theorists seem to have (unwittingly?) adopted Quine’ s attitude. Ethics, howeve,
unlike theoretical physics and more like biology and ecology, must deal with the life-
world as we ordinarily experience it in all its messy actuality.

12. Allen 1986, pp. 103-105.

173
CHAPTER 3 NOTES

1. See, for instance, Rolston 1982, and Callicott 1985 and 1986.

2. Naess prefes to talk in terms of realization of potential rather than valuational
teminology. David Rothenbeg quotes deep ecologist Warwick Fox: "The appropriate
framework of discourse for describing and presenting deep ecology is not one that is
fundamentally to do with the value of the non-human world, but rather one that is
fundamentally to do with nature and possibilities of the self, or, we might say, the
question who we are, can become, and should become in the large scheme of things"
(Naess and Rothenberg 1989, p. 19). Naess regards the fact-value distinction as
artiﬁcially drawn in thought; our experience is of cognitive and affective gestalts.
’Realisation’ avoids splitting facts from values and encompasses both.

3. Again there rs a similarity with Rolston who claims that rn many cases "value
excitement" is not an arbitrary or idiosyncratic response to nature. As with Rolston,
anomalies can be explained by searching out other conditions affecting those who
experience conﬂicting tetiary qualities.

4. Among the philosophic positions Naess rs opposing would be those drawing any
hard fact/value distinction, srmplistic arguments against "private language," and just
about any form of eliminative materialism that really rs elinrinative.

5. For an analysis of problems with traditional assumptions undergirding moral
norms see Donald Schee’ s Introduction and ﬁrst chapte, "The Molding of Norms and
Environment," in Schee 1990.

6. See, for rnstance, Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981.

174
CHAPTER 4 NOTES

1. Parts of this chapte wee ﬁrst published in my article "Pluralism and Prospects for
a land Ethic," Michigan Academician 23:2 (Spring 1991): 191-200.

2. Liminality is relative to social and historical context. The farme is a suspect
paradigm for many environmentalists as Max Oelschlaege (1991) notes in discussing
the change from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to Neolithic farmers: "Although
prehistoric pe0ple were relatively content in accepting the natural order and sought
above all to maintain the integrity of their world, the agriculturists experienced an
enormous quickening of the human potential to modify the naturally given. Rathe than
attempting to live in harmony with wild nature, as hunte-gathees had done since time
immemorial, farmers literally rose up and attempted to dominate the wilderness.
Boundaries were drawn between the natural and the cultural and conceptual
restructuring was inevitable" (p. 28). It is a reasonable assumption that a wild-is-
badldomesticated—is-good dichotomy is exaggerated by adopting settled agriculture; the
wolf and the "weed" are "natural" enemies of the sheep and the bread wheat (see
Oelschlaege, Chapte 1, and Diamond 1987). However, hunter-gatheres did not ﬁnd
all plants equally useful nor were all animals likely to have been viewed benignly.
What Oelschlaeger sees as Western Europe’s environmentally virulent heritage in the
combination of agriculture with transcendent religion, even if historically correct, is
only one of many possible scenarios for farming. In the Near East the problem may
stem not so much from farming per se, but farming dependent on vast irrigation projects
which breed social inequality due to the bureaucracies necessary to plan, oversee, and
protect these projects. Farming on rain-wateed land does not require the same kinds of
sevices and hence leaves the farme more self—dependent. The contemporary parallel
to-the ancient Egyptian or Mesopotamian farme’s dependence on the state for water is

the dependence on corporations for seed, fetilizers, and machiney, a dependence Berry
wishes to reverse by making the small family farm viable again.

3. Wes Jackson (1980) describes how his work as an author and researcher'of
sustainable agriculture "began as much in the kitchen of m youth as in the ﬁelds. In
our farm kitchen scarcely a meal began without a praye o thanksgiving for food and
othe blessings or ended until the plate had been wiped clean with bread. During dishes
and clean up following the meal even so little amount of food as half of a ﬁied egg
would be returned to the refrigerator.... This wasn’t poverty, just frugality well-

ed by an imaginative mothe. I have become increasingly aware that more values
about land and its relationship to people are taught in dining areas than anywhee else in
America. I am foreve indebted to my parents for providing this treasured environment,
for it concentrated my mind on land as the true source of sustenance and health" (p.
154). The tendency to see praise for the housewife as sexist is legitimate if the role
does not have equal inﬂuence and digni with other work, or if it is used to deny
women the opportunity for othe work. Nerthe Berry nor Jackson is defending a sexist
position. For Berry’s response to critics claiming sexism see his essay "Feminism, The
Body, and the Machine" (Berry 1990, pp. 178-196).

4. Though Be ’s novels and short stories can be understood as self-contained
works, the same c cters recur in diffeent novels at diffeent stages of their lives.
They grow up, mature, die, and live on in the memories and lifestyles of others in the
community who share their way of life. Berry’s essays have essentially the same
concerns abstracted from the particular setting of Port William. As a farmer who
practices sustainable agriculture Berry has a personal commitment to the way of life he
difsculslses. This gives his writing an integrity both in the sense of honesty and the sense
0 co eence.

175

5. Berry is sensitive to environmental criticisms of the Judeo-Christian tradition
raised by Lynn White, Jr., in "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crises" (1973).
White argued that God’s giving man "dominion" over the earth and telling him to
"subdue" it in the Genesis creation account has been taken as a cultural license to do
whatever we please to nonhumans. Thee is nothing in Berry’s comments on the "orde
of Creation" or its moral implications for a land ethic that requires a comnritrrrent to any
sort of theism. All that is required is a little humility in recognizing the tenuous nature
of human knowledge. Berry’s position does exclude two sorts of people: those who
have a fundamentalist’s absolute certainty (whethe it is theistic or atheistic), and those
with an unbounded optimism—an intense faith one might call it—about our technologieal
ability to overcome any problem. For an interpretation of Genesis diffeing from White
see Callicott 1990b.

6. For many—and not meely those living in povety-the culture is already destroyed.
As Dale W. McCollough put it, "We don’t have a culture; we have an economy"

(personal convesation).

7. Cf. Schumache 1973. In a chapte titled "Buddhist Economics" Schumache says:
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to grve
a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to ovecome his ego-
centeredness by joining with othe pe0ple in a common task; and to bring forth the
goods and services needed for a becoming existence... [T']o strive for leisure as an
alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the
basic truths of human existence, name] that work and leisure are complementary parts
of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work
and the bliss of lersure" (pp. 54-55). .- . . .. ’ ‘

8. The abuses of animal factories (Mason and Singe 1980) are in part due to the total
control ove the animal which allows the "factory farme" to think of the animal as a
"product" with no will, life, or existence of its own. Berry’s farme does not have this
kind of control ove the soil nor does the Lakotah have this kind of control ove the wild
buffalo, and both are aware of it.

9. The reasons for using the farme rathe than the Lakotah as a paradigm is that the
farme’s way of life is still viable and slhe is less easily dismissed as "primitive." It
would be consistent with a deep ecology position and with sustainable ways of life
pluralism, howeve, to reduce the human population to a point at which those who
choose to do so could take up a hunte-gathee way of life.

10. See Partridge 1981. Notable exceptions include the articles by Partridge (pp. 203-
220) and that of Hohnes Rolston, III (pp. 123-132).

11. Hardin 1987.
12. SeeRorty 1989, especially chapters 1-3.

13. For historical accounts of the idea of wilderness in contempo philosophy see
Nash 1989, pp. 121-160, and Oelschlaege 1991, pp. 205-242 and 281- 19.

176
CHAPTER 5 NOTES

1. Given the case made by Kuhn (1970) and others for the theory-laden nature of
perception and periodic "revolutions" in science, moral monists could be charged with
relying on a sort of knowledge that is a conceptual as well as a practical impossibility.

2. For criticism of moral pluralism in general, and Stone and Cheney in particular, see
Callicott 1990a.

3. The thought experiment is recounted with variations. It is originally attributed to
Richard Routley (1973).

4. One can argue an intuitionist position that waste and unnecessary destruction are in
themselves wrong, or a virtue ethics position that they demean one’s moral character
even if they cause no pain or suffeing. A rejoinde to the virtue ethics position is that
’waste’ and ’destruction’ can have no meaning or moral force to a "sentientist" once
they are robbed of their practical consequences of harming inteests.

5. Robbins comments via one of his characters: "[Symbol junkies are] so addicted
that they prefe the abstract symbols to the concrete things which symbols represent.
It’s much easier to cope with the abstract than with the concrete; there’s no direct
pesonal involvement-and you can keep an abstract idea steady in your mind wheeas
real things are usually in a state of ﬂux and always changing. It’s safe to play around
with a man’s wife than with his cliches" (Robbins 1971, p. 253).

6. See Godfrey-Smith 1979; Hendee et a1. 1978, pp. 11-22; Nash 1980; Henbeg
1984; Rolston 1985.

7. Rawls 1971, p. 544, Benjamin’s emphasis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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