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Dissertation: The Relevance of the Animal Liberation Movement to Environmental Ethics
2006
Many environmental philosophers currently hold that animal liberation theories are not relevant to the development of the field of environmental ethics. Instead, they contend that the field is traversed most successfully within the context of ecocentric and/or wilderness perspectives. In this thesis, I utilize textual and conceptual analysis to argue that animal liberation theories are vital to environmental ethics. I examine and critique the reasons given by prominent environmental ethicists—including, most notably, John Rodman, Baird Callicott, Robert Elliot, and Val Plumwood—for marginalizing animal liberation views within environmental ethics. While most of human-centered ethics has rested on a human/nature dichotomy in which the human side is overvalued, much of environmental ethics (especially that developed by ecocentric and wilderness proponents) rests on the same dichotomy, but weights the value on the nature side instead. I hold that many of the reasons for claiming that animal liberation theories fall outside of the scope of environmental ethics rest on a commitment to the nature/human dualism. I maintain that our contemporary world is not divided into the natural and the human, but, rather, consists of an ongoing, shifting relationship between human and nonhuman nature. I claim that the appropriate aim of environmental ethics is to explore the human relationship to the nonhuman natural world, and that this aim cannot be accomplished by theories committed to a human/nature dualism. I conclude that, by focusing on the significance of our choices as human beings in relationship to morally considerable others, the animal liberation movement offers us a way to theorize about environmental issues that transcends the human/nature dichotomy. This project is morally and politically compelling because the way in which environmental ethics as a field is defined has ramifications not only for the relationship of individual nonhuman animals to the natural environment, but for the relationship of humans to the natural environment as well. Looking at the relationship between human and nonhuman nature allows us to address the human roles and responsibilities not simply in the human community, but in the broader context of nonhuman nature as well.
The Other in A Sand County Almanac: Aldo Leopold’s Animals and His Wild-Animal Ethic
2011
Much philosophical attention has been devoted to “The Land Ethic,” especially by Anglo-American philosophers, but little has been paid to A Sand County Almanac as a whole. Read through the lens of continental philosophy, A Sand County Almanac promulgates an evolutionary-ecological world view and effects a personal self- and a species-specific Self-transformation in its audience. It’s author, Aldo Leopold, realizes these aims through descriptive reflection that has something in common with phenomenology—although Leopold was by no stretch of the imagination a phenomenologist. Consideration of human-animal intersubjectivity, thematized in A Sand County Almanac, brings to light the moral problem of hunting and killing animal subjects. Leopold does not confront that problem, but it is confronted and resolved by Jose Ortega y Gassett, Henry Beston, and Paul Shepard in terms of an appropriate human relationship with wild-animal Others. Comparison with the genuinely Other-based Leopold-Ortega-Beston-Shepard wild-animal ethic shows the purportedly Other-based human and possibly animal ethic of Emmanuel Levinas actually to be Same-based after all.
Ethics and the Environment, 2020
Lenart A Wholesome Anthropocentrism 99 goodness: (1) the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods, and (2) the distinction between ends and means. two HolIsts on tHe IntrInsIc Value of tHe envIronment Aldo leopold Aldo Leopold understands ethics as originating from the "tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation" (1993, 373). He is concerned with the lack of an ethic that deals with the relation between human beings and the land, where the "land" includes various systems, the waters, the soil, and the numerous and diverse inhabitants of the "land." Leopold's land ethic aims at enlarging the boundaries of the "community," which presupposes interdependency of the various parts that constitute a given whole, to include soils, waters, plants, and animals as fellow members of an intricately interdependent system whose survival and "health" depends on an appropriate understanding and evaluation of the various interdependencies. "In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such" (1993, 374). Leopold criticizes conservation systems based solely on economic motives; he states that such conservation systems do not assign value to most of the members of the "land-community" because most members do not have any economic value. However, the land ethic points to the fact that such members, being integral parts of the biotic community, contribute to the stability of the entire system. Therefore, a system of conservation based solely on the economic self-interest of human beings "assumes, falsely… that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts" (1993, 178). Although Leopold does not explicitly state it, one can infer that in such a manner, shortsighted economic self-interest not only destroys the integrity of the environment upon which the stability of the various life-generating (as well as resource-generating) systems depends, but also, by direct entailment, endangers the very resources it values (since their existence is deeply intertwined with the stability of the entire system). Leopold offers the metaphor of The Land Pyramid, which consists of interrelated layers of energy transfer. At the bottom layer, plants absorb energy from the sun, which continues to flow upward through a circuit called the biota (represented by the layers of the pyramid). The bottom layer consists of the soil with a plant layer resting on top of it and "an insect layer [resting] on the plants, a bird and rodent layer [resting] on the insects, and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the large carnivores" (1993, 378). Each layer depends on the one below it for food and various other services. The lines of
The Journal of Environmental Education, 2011
A philosophy of action consists of a theory about how and why we do things and what motivates us to act. By juxtaposing the theory of environmental action implied by the works and life of John Muir with the philosophy of action suggested by Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic, we will illuminate the importance of a philosophy of action in determining one's approach to environmental decision making. This discussion is important for environmental education and the ethics these experiences inspire because both philosophies advocate very different visions of environmental action. In short, Muir demonstrates an ethic guided by the expected results of actions, an approach parallel to the responsible environmental behavior model (REB) of environmental education, whereas Leopold, demonstrates the role of intention and emotion in ethical decision making through the lens of community.
CETAPS, 2022
Conference program Coining the term ‘the land ethic’ in 1949, Aldo Leopold has become an influential figure for the development of ecology until today. Despite Leopold’s enduring legacy, however, many have increasingly come to challenge and expand on his thesis. This paper proposes to take a brief look at Leopold’s seminal land ethic in contrast with strands of contemporary environmental ethics that see the intersectional entanglements that make up ‘land.’ It reconsiders Leopold’s notion of ‘land’ in light of postcolonial, queer, feminist and environmental ethical philosophies. Not only Leopold, but other prominent biocentrist thinkers such as Arne Naess, have been criticized for neglecting the importance of good human-to-human relationships as part of their ecological thinking about nature. Indigenous environmental ethics, for instance, goes further than Leopold by considering the reciprocities and interdependencies between both sentient and non-sentient beings. Our responsibilities to the land are connected to our responsibilities to one another. Moreover, it should go without saying that Indigenous peoples had to be murdered and dispossessed of their land in Turtle Island, so that Leopold could stand on and make an argument for ‘his’ North American land. Notwithstanding, the ethical qualities of the land must be addressed across the world. This may be done, one could argue, by taking into consideration not only the biological imperative for land conservation and sustainability, but also my relationship with the land as socially, historically, culturally, and affectively constructed. This requires that I learn and feel with my land and the land that I stand on. The approach taken in this paper hopes not only to displace Western, capitalist and anthropocentric notions of the land from environmental ethics, but also to recognize my own embeddedness to the land as an ethical principle which includes all human and more-than-human ecologies.
Critique of Callicott's Biosocial Moral Theory
Ethics & The Environment, 2007
Callicott's claim to have unified environmentalism and animal liberation should be rejected by holists and liberationists. By making relations of intimacy necessary for moral considerability, Callicott excludes from the moral community nonhuman animals unable to engage in intimate relations due to the circumstances of their confinement. By failing to afford moral protection to animals in factory farms and research laboratories, Callicott's biosocial moral theory falls short of meeting a basic moral demand of liberationists. Moreover, were Callicott to include factory farm and research animals inside the moral community by affording them universal or noncommunitarian rights, his theory would fall foul of environmentalists who seek to promote ecosystem stability and integrity via therapeutic hunting. If factory farm and research animals can have rights irrespective of their particular circumstances, then so can freeroaming animals from overabundant and exotic species.