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?

Aldo Leopold, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.¹ 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.² The individual is a member; membership is what grounds the ethical regard.³

Sources

1. 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.

   A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 258–259

2. 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.

   A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, pp. 238–239

3. 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.

   Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, pp. 432–433

Where the argument is made

• '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

How the argument was received

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.