Review of Wayne Ouderkirk & Jim Hill's edited volume "Land, Value, Community: Callicott and Environmental Philosophy" (2002), from "Organization and Environment", Vol. 16, No. 2, 2003, pp.255-8. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Callicott and the Metaphysical Foundation of Eco-Centric Morality
The theory of eco-centric morality states that the environment and its many eco-systems are entitled to a direct moral standing, and not simply a standing derivative from human interests. J. Baird Callicott has offered two possible metaphysical foundations for eco-centrism which attempt to show that inherent goodness can apply to environmental collections and not just to individual agents. I argue that Callicott's first theory fails since it relies on a problematic theory of moral sentiment. I argue that his second theory also fails since it rests on an unsupported parallel between the break down of the subject-object dichotomy suggested by quantum theory and an alleged actualization of morality upon the interaction of environmental collections with consciousness. Finally, I argue that Callicott overrates the need for a metaphysical grounding of inherent value, and that the metaphysical question has little bearing on the normative issue of eco-centrism.
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.
On Sacred or Secular Ground? Callicott and Environmental Ethics
Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 1997
In Earth's Insights Baird Callicott develops a science-based but religiously influenced global environmental ethics that attempts to resolve the relationships between science, religion, and morality. He proposes to privilege science and relegate religion to a supportive and corrective role in environmental ethics. I argue, on the contrary, that a rationally compelling environmental ethics is dependent on religion and that, ironically, the only way to resolve conundrums regarding science, religion, and morality, is to stand environmental ethics on sacred ground.
Hume and Contemporary Ethical Naturalism
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1983
A sider what goes on in cases of reductive explanation in science. As an example -and without paying too close attention to historical details-rake the case of the explanation of genetic facts by their reduction to facts of molecular biology. Mendel and others made claims and discoveries about heredity and could even be said t o have offered theoretical explanations of these using the notion of the gene. Statements about genes, in a rudimentary way, explained many features of the transmission of characteristics between generations of organisms. Nonetheless, these facts and their genetic explanations remained somewhat mysterious inasmuch as they were not yet anchored in facts about the physical makeup of organisms. The eventual identification of genes with stretches of DNA molecules provided us with a largely satisfactory answer t o the mystery. All of this is, of course, quite familiar, and, even though it is no more than a philosopher's textbook example, it will serve my purposes in this paper.
Naturalism in Question Edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur
Philosophical Books, 2006
Here is a strong intuition: [I]n the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not. (Wilfrid Sellars, 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', in Science, Perception and Reality (Ridgeview, 1963), §41, p. 173) This is known as Sellars's scientia mensura dictum. And who would want to disagree? There is a massive intuitive appeal to its metaphysical tidiness. And to its lack of philosophical pretension. There is a methodological lesson to be found here: when we want to understand 'what there is', our methods and explanatory resources must be continuous with those of the natural sciences. And an ontological: we must reject an a priori metaphysics that invokes unmoved moving first principles, forms, or a substance inaccessible to scientific investigation. The natural world is whatever the natural sciences adopt as a going concern. At the core of this intuition is an orthodox naturalistic ontology. However intuitive this might appear to the contemporary philosopher, the papers collected in this volume all question the consequences this has for accounts of key phenomena such as science itself, the mind, agency, ethics, and personal identity. It is a remarkably congenial collection of papers by a distinguished line-up of philosophers. All but two of the entries are published here in English for the first time. There are papers on the naturalistic (mis-)conception of science by Barry Stroud, John Dupré, Hilary Putnam, and Huw Price. The papers on the problematic role of orthodox naturalism in the philosophy of mind are written by John McDowell, David Macarthur, Akeel Bilgrami, and Donald Davidson. There are contributions on the consequences of the socalled constricted conception of 'nature' and 'naturalism' for an account of agency and freedom by
2021
After the Death of Nature (ATDN) is a testament to Carolyn Merchant's widespread in uence. Focusing primarily on Merchant's landmark The Death of Nature (TDN), sixteen scholars re ect on their personal and scholastic relationships with Merchant and testi ed to the 'prescience, diversity, dynamism, and robustness of her work' (p. 247). ATDN is divided into three main parts. The rst focuses on environmental philosophy and ethics, as well as ecofeminism, especially Merchant's emphasis on partnership ethics. The second examines her contributions to environmental history and as mentor, teacher, and friend. The third explores the connections between theory and practice, after which Merchant responds about how we might develop an ethic in light of a 'new "death of nature" in the Age of the Anthropocene' (p. 278). In part one, the strongest contributions are from J. Baird Callicott, Kenneth Worthy, and Elizabeth Allison. Other contributions, including those from Norman Wirzba and Holmes Rolston, I found both insightful and problematic. Callicott reviews Merchant's earliest publications, written under the name Carolyn Iltis. Illuminating how Merchant's academic interests developed and ourished, Callicott praises Iltis for 'doing what her contemporaries in the philosophy of science were not'; that is, focusing on the 'neglected' 'metaphysical and ontological implications of science' (p. 20). Drawing on Iltis's critique of the mechanistic worldview and Merchant's later rejection of it (1980), Callicott says that the 'metaphysical and ontological legacy of Western natural and moral philosophy and religion is both pernicious and dangerous' (pp. 32-33). He questions why the second scienti c revolution has failed to profoundly alter our prevailing worldviews to the same extent as the rst and whether, in the face of the impending threshold of global climate change, we have time to await the next 'Great Transition' in scienti c thought (pp. 35-36). Worthy argues that the mechanistic cosmology of the scienti c revolution led to the 'dissociation' from nature that pervades Western thought (p. 43). Examining depictions of nature as dead or inert matter, Worthy says that 'early modern philosophers drove an antagonistic wedge between people and nature', where 'nature envisioned as dead, passive object allows exploitation' and 'nature imagined as female invites domination' (p. 51). Echoing Merchant, Worthy says that our dependence on nature necessitates that we develop an ethic of care and relationality in order to care for ourselves (p. 53).