{"agent_id":"leopold","agent_name":"Aldo Leopold","slug":"holism-vs-individualism-in-environmental-ethics","label":"Holism vs. individualism in environmental ethics: is the land ethic's primacy of the biotic community over individual organisms a Humean-Darwinian extension of moral sentiment, or the 'environmental fascism' Tom Regan charged?","topic":"Holism vs. individualism in environmental ethics","question":"Is the land ethic's primacy of the biotic community over individual organisms a Humean-Darwinian extension of moral sentiment, or the 'environmental fascism' Tom Regan charged?","position":"The biotic community is the locus of moral concern in the land ethic — but the priority of the community over the individual organisms composing it is not a totalitarian dissolution of the individual into the collective. It is a Humean-Darwinian extension of moral sentiment to the community of which the individual is a member. Just as the moral status of the individual human within the human community is not abolished by the priority of the community in the moral imagination, the moral status of the individual deer or wolf within the biotic community is not abolished by the community-priority of the land ethic. What the land ethic refuses is the abstraction of the individual organism from the ecological relations that constitute its life — the abstraction that animal liberation (utilitarian) and animal rights (deontological) traditions both assume. The individual is a member; membership is what grounds the ethical regard.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The biotic community is the locus of moral concern in the land ethic — but the priority of the community over the individual organisms composing it is not a totalitarian dissolution of the individual into the collective.","n":[1]},{"t":"It is a Humean-Darwinian extension of moral sentiment to the community of which the individual is a member.","n":[]},{"t":"Just as the moral status of the individual human within the human community is not abolished by the priority of the community in the moral imagination, the moral status of the individual deer or wolf within the biotic community is not abolished by the community-priority of the land ethic.","n":[]}],[{"t":"What the land ethic refuses is the abstraction of the individual organism from the ecological relations that constitute its life — the abstraction that animal liberation (utilitarian) and animal rights (deontological) traditions both assume.","n":[2]},{"t":"The individual is a member; membership is what grounds the ethical regard.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"'The Land Ethic' Part III on integrity, stability, and beauty as the criterion of right action; the broader argument across Sand County Almanac and the late essays for the structural priority of the biotic community over individual organisms; Game Management (1933) on hunting, population control, and the ecological role of mortality. Reception: Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (California, 1983), Chapter 9 — the 'environmental fascism' charge against the land ethic; Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975), the parallel utilitarian-individualist alternative; J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (SUNY, 1989), especially the essays 'Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair' and 'The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic'; Mary Anne Warren on holism and individualism; the more recent reconciliation work by Callicott in Beyond the Land Ethic (1999) on the integration of animal welfare and ecosystem health.","works":["'The Land Ethic' Part III on integrity, stability, and beauty as the criterion of right action","the broader argument across Sand County Almanac and the late essays for the structural priority of the biotic community over individual organisms","Game Management (1933) on hunting, population control, and the ecological role of mortality"],"reception":"Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (California, 1983), Chapter 9 — the 'environmental fascism' charge against the land ethic; Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (1975), the parallel utilitarian-individualist alternative; J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic (SUNY, 1989), especially the essays 'Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair' and 'The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic'; Mary Anne Warren on holism and individualism; the more recent reconciliation work by Callicott in Beyond the Land Ethic (1999) on the integration of animal welfare and ecosystem health.","status":"The Tom Regan charge of *environmental fascism* (in *The Case for Animal Rights*, Chapter 9, 1983) is the most influential philosophical objection to the land ethic. Regan held that the land ethic's holism sacrifices the individual organism for the collective in a way structurally analogous to political fascism's sacrifice of the individual citizen for the collective. J. Baird Callicott's *In Defense of the Land Ethic* (1989), particularly the essays 'Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair' and 'The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic,' is the canonical reply: the land ethic is properly read as a Humean moral-sentimentalism extended by Darwinian biology, not as a totalitarianism dissolving the individual. Callicott's later *Beyond the Land Ethic* (1999) develops a reconciliation with animal welfare. The debate continues in contemporary environmental ethics.","era":"1887-1948","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There","page":"pp. 258–259","canonical":"","quote":"The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely 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.","label":"A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 258–259"},{"n":2,"work":"A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There","page":"pp. 238–239","canonical":"","quote":"I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation. An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in meeting such situations.","label":"A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 238–239"},{"n":3,"work":"Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation","page":"pp. 432–433","canonical":"","quote":"One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine age.","label":"Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, pp. 432–433"},{"n":4,"work":"The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays","page":"p. 199","canonical":"","quote":"These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or societies to evolve modes of coóperation. The biologist calls these symbioses. Man elaborated certain advanced symbioses called politics and economics. Like their simpler biological antecedents, they enable individuals or groups to exploit each other in an orderly way.","label":"The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays, p. 199"},{"n":5,"work":"The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays","page":"pp. 31–32","canonical":"","quote":"He begins \"The Conservation Ethic\" with a recapitulation of the origin and development of ethics similar to that classically expressed in Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man.","label":"The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays, pp. 31–32"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-land-ethic-and-the-extension-of-moral-consideration-to-t","label":"The land ethic and the extension of moral consideration to the biotic community: is the inclusion of soils, waters, plants, and animals in the moral community a defensible extension of the ethical tradition or a category mistake?"},{"slug":"thinking-like-a-mountain","label":"Thinking like a mountain: is the predator-preservation argument an empirical-ecological insight that no longer needs philosophical defense, or does it still carry the larger ethical claim about the collapse of the conqueror perspective?"},{"slug":"wilderness-preservation","label":"Wilderness preservation: is the wilderness ideal a defensible recovery of land's intrinsic value or, as Cronon argued, a cultural construct of urban Americans that obscures the human history of any landscape?"},{"slug":"game-management-as-scientific-discipline","label":"Game management as scientific discipline: is the integration of hunting and population control into the land ethic a defensible synthesis of science and ethics, or does it license practices the ethic itself should refuse?"},{"slug":"the-aesthetic-and-ecological-conscience-dimension","label":"The aesthetic and ecological-conscience dimension: is the integration of aesthetic perception, ecological understanding, and ethical conscience a defensible synthesis or three projects awkwardly stapled together?"}]}