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Switch to: References
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Open Access: What if it doesn’t get better? Against more hopeful and optimistic views that it is not just ideal but possible to put an end to what John Rawls calls “the great evils of human history,” I aver that when it comes to evils caused by human beings, the situation is hopeless. We are better off with the heavy knowledge that evils recur than we are with idealizations of progress, perfection, and completeness; an appropriate ethic for living with such (...) |
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The 70th anniversary of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) approaches. For philosophers—environmental ethicists in particular—this text has been highly influential, especially the ‘Land Ethic’ essay contained therein. Given philosophers’ acumen for identifying and critiquing arguments, one might reasonably think a firm grasp of Leopold’s ideas to have emerged from such attention. I argue that this is not the case. Specifically, Leopold’s main interpreter and systematiser, philosopher J. Baird Callicott, has shoehorned Aldo Leopold’s ideas into differing monistic moral theories (...) |
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I argue that a reasonable understanding of Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ is one that identifies possession of health as being a sufficient condition for moral consideration. With this, Leopold extends morality not only to biotic wholes, but to individual organisms, as both can have their health undermined. My argument centers on explaining why Leopold thinks it reasonable to analogize ecosystems both to an organism and to a community: both have a health. My conclusions undermine J. Baird Callicott’s rhetorical dismissal of the (...) |
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The “land community” (or “biotic community”) that features centrally in Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic has typically been equated with the concept of “ecosystem.” Moreover, some have challenged this central Leopoldean concept given the multitude of meanings of the term “ecosystem” and the changes the term has undergone since Leopold’s time (see, e.g., Shrader-Frechette 1996). Even one of Leopold’s primary defenders, J. Baird Callicott, asserts that there are difficulties in identifying the boundaries of ecosystems and suggests that we recognize that their (...) |
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Many philosophers have become familiar with Leopold’s land ethic through the writings of J. Baird Callicott, who claims that Leopold bases his land ethic on a ‘protosociobiological’ argument that Darwin gives in the Descent of Man. On this view, which has become the canonical interpretation, Leopold’s land ethic is based on extending our moral sentiments to ecosystems. I argue that the evidence weighs in favor of an alternative interpretation of Leopold; his reference to Darwin does not refer to the Descent, (...) |
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Aldo Leopold was a pragmatist in the vernacular sense of the word. Bryan G. Norton claims that Leopold was also heavily influenced by American Pragmatism, a formal school of philosophy. As evidence, Norton offers Leopold's misquotation of a definition of right (as truth) by political economist, A.T. Hadley, who was an admirer of the philosophy of William James. A search of Leopold's digitised literary remains reveals no other evidence that Leopold was directly influenced by any actual American Pragmatist or by (...) |
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Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac emphasizes values of receptivity and perceptivity that appear to be mutually reinforcing, critical to an ecological conscience, and cultivatable through concrete and embodied experience. His priorities bear striking similarities to elements of the ethics of care elaborated by feminist philosophers, especially Nel Noddings, who notably recommended receptivity, direct and personal experience, and even shared Leopold’s attentiveness to joy and play as sources of moral motivation. These commonalities are so fundamental that ecofeminists can and should (...) |
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Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, an extremely influential view in environmental ethics and conservation biology, is committed to the claim that interdependence between humans, other species, and abiotic entities plays a central role in our ethical responsibilities. Thus, a robust understanding of “interdependence” is necessary for evaluating the viability of the Land Ethic and related views, including ecological ones. I characterize and defend a Leopoldian concept of “interdependence,” arguing that it ought to include both negative and positive causal relations. I also (...) |
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Aldo Leopold's land ethic has been extremely influential among people working in conservation biology, environmental ethics, and related fields. Others have abandoned the land ethic for purportedly being outdated or ethically untenable. Yet, both acceptance of the land ethic and rejection of the land ethic are often based on misunderstandings of Leopold's original meaning – misunderstandings that have become so entrenched as to have the status of myths. This essay seeks to identify and then debunk six myths that have grown (...) |
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None dispute that Aldo Leopold has made an invaluable contribution to environmental discourse. However, it is important for those involved in the field of environmental ethics to be aware that his works may unwittingly promote an attitude of domination toward the nonhuman world, due to his frequent and unregenerate hunting. Such an attitude runs counter to most strains of environmental ethics, but most notably ecofeminism. By examining Leopold through the lens of ecofeminism, I establish that the effect of such narrative (...) |
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The Anthropocene and the Holocene are coeval. Preserving the Holocene/Anthropocene climate is the overarching concern of twenty-first-century environmental philosophy and ethics. The second wave of the environmental crisis—ozone thinning, biodiversity erosion, and climate change—crested in the mid-1980s and is global in scale. The land ethic is local in scale. Therefore, an earth ethic is needed. Leopold sketched several in 1923: a three-pronged virtue ethic, a care ethic for posterity, an ethic of respect for the living planet. An individualistic ethic for (...) |
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In their book, Defending Biodiversity, Newman, Varner, and Linquist (NVL) cast doubt on whether Leopoldian defenses of biodiversity, in their current form, have been successful. I argue that there is a more accurate interpretation of Leopold that is not subject to the criticisms made by NVL, and that Leopold’s body of work as a whole, including but not limited to the essay “The Land Ethic” in A Sand County Almanac, provides quite a bit of useful guidance and perspective. I begin (...) |
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This volume - the joint effort of the research groups on practical philosophy and the history of political thought of the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences - brings together scholarly essays that attempt to face the challenges of the contemporary situation. The authors come from rather divergent disciplinary backgrounds, including philosophy, law, history, literature and the social sciences, from different cultural and political contexts, including Central, Eastern and Western Europe, (...) |
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As a conservation policy advocate and practitioner, Leopold was a pragmatist (in the vernacular sense of the word). He was not, however, a member of the school of philosophy known as American Pragmatism, nor was his environmental philosophy informed by any members of that school. Leopold's environmental philosophy was radically non-anthropocentric; he was an intellectual revolutionary and aspired to transform social values and institutions. |
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Dispersal of biota by humans is a hallmark of civilization, but the results are often unforeseen and sometimes costly. Like kudzu vine in the American South, some examples become the stuff of regional folklore. In recent decades, "invasion biology," conservation-motivated scientists and their allies have focused largely on the most negative outcomes and often promoted the perception that introduced species are monsters. However, cases of monstering by scientists preceded the rise of popular environmentalism. The story of tamarisk (Tamarix spp.), flowering (...) |
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Mindful of how the history of bioethics has often been presented, we explore the background, contributions, and influence of Van Rensselaer Potter on the roots of bioethics. In the last few decades, dozens of papers have been written and published, including several doctoral theses and defenses on V. R. Potter‘s concept of bioethics. In those works, the context of the emergence of Potter’s bioethics has sometimes been suggested, but never analyzed thoroughly. We identify seven pillars of influence for Van Rensselaer (...) |
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The etymological origin of ecology in the human house is the point of departure of this article. It argues that oikos is not merely a vague metaphor for ecology, but that built households provide a key to understanding the household of nature. Three households support this claim: the cabins of Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Arne Noess. The article suggests that their views on the household of nature stand in direct relationship with their respective homes. They also have a distant (...) |
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In this paper, I address the motivation gap that prevents many people from acquiring and activating environmental values. In the face of this gap, I analyze Aldo Leopold’s conservation philosophy as a potential solution. This is done by reading Leopold through John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience, in which motivated action develops out of unified aesthetic experience made up of three phases: action, emotion, and intelligence. Showing that Leopold’s approach to conservation exhibits this aesthetic structure not only gives it a (...) |
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Around 1960, leading figures in the international conservation circuit – such as Julian Huxley, Frank Fraser Darling and E. Barton Worthington – successfully propagated new visions about the value of undomesticated African mammals. Against traditional ideas, they presented these mammals as a highly efficient source of protein for growing African populations. In line with this vision, they challenged non-interventionist ideals of nature preservation, and launched proposals for active management through game ‘ranching’ and ‘cropping’. As such, they created a new socio-technical (...) |
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