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?

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

The position in brief

Ethics has always been a matter of community membership. The boundary of the community has historically extended itself: from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the nation, from the nation to humanity. Ecology has shown what the moral imagination must now catch up to: the human community is embedded in a biotic community of soils, waters, plants, and animals whose mutual dependence the modern science of ecology has documented.¹

The next ethical extension is therefore the inclusion of the biotic community itself in the sphere of moral consideration. The land owner ceases to be a conqueror of the land and becomes a plain member and citizen of it. *A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.² It is wrong when it tends otherwise.*³⁴

Sources

1. Later accretions dealt with the relationship between the individual and society. Christianity tries to integrate the individual to society, Democracy to integrate social organization to the individual. There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relationship to land and to the non-human animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls, is still property.

   Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, pp. 433–434

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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' (the concluding essay of A Sand County Almanac, 1949) on the three steps of ethical extension and the famous summary moral maxim
• 'The Conservation Ethic' (1933, in The River of the Mother of God and in the Library of America volume) — the earlier statement of the same project
• 'The Ecological Conscience' (1947, in River of the Mother of God) — the ethical-pedagogical version

How the argument was received

The land ethic is the founding text of modern environmental ethics. J. Baird Callicott's In Defense of the Land Ethic (SUNY, 1989) is the canonical philosophical defense, grounding the ethic in a Humean moral-sentimentalism extended by Darwinian biology of social instinct and Leopoldian ecology of the biotic community. Anthropocentric-pragmatist critics (Bryan Norton, Andrew Light) read the ethic more conservatively as policy-relevant rather than metaphysically committed. Deep ecology (Arne Naess, Devall and Sessions) extends Leopold in a more metaphysical direction. The summary moral maxim — integrity, stability, and beauty — is one of the most quoted lines in twentieth-century American philosophy.