PHIL2070 Week 2 Government regulation vs. the Land Ethic ...biophilosophy.ca/Teaching/2070materials/2070... · Aldo Leopold. He is best known for A Sand County Almanac, his book-length

PHIL2070 Week 2 Government regulation vs. the Land Ethic. Stefan Linquist January 13th & 15th, 2014 www.biophilosophy.ca

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Please do not quote or distribute without permission of the author.

1. Can government regulation avoid tragedies of the commons?

Recall that the Principle of Rational Depletion (as I call it) identifies three conditions

that, when satisfied, make it rational for individuals to deplete resources as quickly and

thoroughly as possible. The resource must be valued. Importantly, value can increase or

decrease according to such factors or market demand. Second, the resource must be limited.

This means that it can be depleted more rapidly than it is naturally replenished. Most important

perhaps, the resource must be unrestricted. This means that there is no legal or physical means

to prevent individuals from extracting the resource. We have considered widespread

privatization (Free Market Environmentalism) as a strategy for avoiding the tragic devastation

of resources. This approach attempts to restrict access through privatization, while at the same

time placing faith in people’s tendency to pursue long term interests. An alternative strategy

also places restrictions on access to valued resources as a way of preventing their depletion.

But instead of placing ownership in the hands of private individuals, resources are communally

held and access is administered by some central authority –a government. If individuals can’t

be trusted to act rationally on their own, the thinking goes, perhaps governments can motivate

them to do so.

At a very basic level this strategy has two preconditions. First, the resource must be

accurately monitored to avoid over-exploitation. Second, rules limiting extraction must be

enforced. If both components are in place, then a resource can (in principle) be managed

sustainably. Of so the Regulation Strategy would have it. By “managed sustainably” I mean that

the resource can be extracted indefinitely, for personal or social benefit, without the undue risk

of its depletion1.

What’s not to like about this proposal? Critics of government regulation question its

practicality. Perhaps it works in a perfectly “frictionless” environment, where government

1 I am admittedly being a bit cagey when I use the phrase “undue risk” of depletion. In the back of my mind is the fact that we

always run some risk that even the most carefully managed risk will become depleted. Natural disasters, climatic or biological, can wipe out a species that might otherwise have survived if humans were not also exploiting it. What I am taking for granted here, as an assumption, is that there is some reasonable margin of safety where the resource remains resilient against most foreseeable environmental perturbations.


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agencies respond nimbly and knowledgably to place limits on resource extraction. But can they

do it in practice, given the more cumbersome workings of your typical bureaucratic engine?

In class, I used the example of the west coast abalone fishery to illustrate these

challenges. (Abalone are univalve molluscs, think part snail part clam. They are fairly appetizing.

Or so I’m told.) Currently, there is a total ban on abalone fishing. In previous years the

Canadian and American governments attempted to sustainably regulate this fishery as they do

with other commercial species like salmon, halibut, or sea cucumber. Things didn’t go well. A

recent (2000) population survey in California and Mexico estimated a mere 1,600 remaining

abalone individuals2. This represents just 0.1 % of the estimated population size that existed

prior to 1960 when commercial harvesting began in earnest. Population densities in British

Columbia are slightly higher, but not by much. So what went wrong? Why has this resource

become depleted despite government regulation?

Part of the problem lies in identifying ecological factors influencing their reproduction

and growth3. Any wild population is difficult to monitor. When those organisms live in the

ocean, challenges are compounded for obvious reasons. Hence it has proven difficult to identify

sustainable rates of extraction for this resource. Problems also arise in enforcement. The

Department of Fisheries and Oceans imposes strong penalties for illegally harvesting abalone.

Being caught with a single specimen entails confiscation of your dive gear, your boat, your

truck, and a fine of $40,000 or more. The tricky part of this equation is that, as abalone become

increasingly scarce, their value on the black market appreciates. Ramping up enforcement

effectively increases scarcity. At some point it becomes profitable for poachers to absorb the

legal and financial penalties, viewing them as an operating expense4. Suppose you can gross

2 Hobday, A.J. & Tegner, M.J. (2000), Status Review of White Abalone (Halitiotis sorenseni) Throughought its range in California

and Mexico. NOAA Technical Memorandum, Ddepartment of Commerce, USA. http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/statusreviews/whiteabalone.pdf 3 Shane, PE. (1995), Recruitment variation in abalone its importance to fisheries management. Marine and Freshwater

Research, Suppl. (Special Issue) 46.3: 555-570 http://eurekamag.com/research/037/363/recruitment-variation-in-abalone-its-importance-to-fisheries-management.php 4 Korstrom, G. (2012), “$40k fine not enough to stop abalone poaching: fisheries officer.” Business Vancouver. Thursday, June

7, 2012. http://www.biv.com/article/20120607/BIV0104/120609967/-1/BIV/-40k-fine-not-enough-to-stop-abalone-poaching-fisheries-officer

http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/statusreviews/whiteabalone.pdf

http://eurekamag.com/research/037/363/recruitment-variation-in-abalone-its-importance-to-fisheries-management.php

http://eurekamag.com/research/037/363/recruitment-variation-in-abalone-its-importance-to-fisheries-management.php

http://www.biv.com/article/20120607/BIV0104/120609967/-1/BIV/-40k-fine-not-enough-to-stop-abalone-poaching-fisheries-officer

http://www.biv.com/article/20120607/BIV0104/120609967/-1/BIV/-40k-fine-not-enough-to-stop-abalone-poaching-fisheries-officer


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$120,000 a year by poaching abalone. Even if you are fined every second year at $60,000, that

results in a net annual profit of $90,000 per year. Add to this the fact that there are more

poachers than enforcement officers. We are also talking about a rather large stretch of ocean

for them to police. The message, then, is that it is both difficult to monitor their ecology and

equally, if not more, difficult to restrict access to this resource. As fines increase, so do the

rewards for poaching. Legal machinery tends to move more slowly than the market. So,

enforcement systems must play catch up5.

Of course, the failure of government regulation in this one case does not condemn the

strategy on the whole. Nor do I have the time and space to explore principles of good

environmental governance in sufficient detail (for this, you should enrol in more philosophy

courses). My aim in these lectures is to encourage students to question the often automatic

reaction, to expect a legislative solution to evbery environmental problem. You have perhaps

found yourself wondering, “Why doesn’t government step in and do something about this?”

The answer, sometimes, is that it is more easily said than done.

2. Why does Leopold reject privatization and government regulation?

Over the next few lectures we will consider candidate ethical solutions to the Principle

of Rational Depletion. A natural starting point for this discussion is the work of environmentalist

Aldo Leopold. He is best known for A Sand County Almanac, his book-length reflection on

humanity’s relationship to nature. Later, we will adopt a philosophical approach to this work,

focusing on just one chapter in which Leopold espouses his famous Land Ethic. This means that

we will reconstruct and critically assess Leopold’s argument for the Land Ethic. However, I want

to say in advance that, although some of Leopold’s arguments might not withstand logical

scrutiny, I nonetheless consider his work profound and important. It is no surprise that this

book remains influential. Not only did Leopold foreshadow the “economization” of land-use

issues, a practice that has since become commonplace in contemporary society, he also offered

5 Part of the reason that demand for abalone is resilient to rising prices is because it serves as a ceremonial dish in certain

cultures. There is currently a grass roots effort to abandon this tradition.


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the beginnings of an alternative, moral foundation for valuing nature — regardless of its benefit

to humans.

Before considering Leopold’s Land Ethic it is important to consider why he rejected the

Privatization and Government Regulation strategies. His dismissal of these alternatives raises

some important issues that we did not touch upon earlier. They also form the backdrop for his

alternative, ethical solution.

Leopold did not have the phrase “tragedy of the commons” at his disposal. However, it

is clear from his writings that he understood the logic of rational depletion. In one example, he

is discussing the effects of farming in the Southwest.

This region, when grazed by livestock, reverted through a sense of more and more

worthless grasses, shrubs, and weeds to a condition of unstable equilibrium. Each

recession of plant types bred erosion; each increment to erosion bred a further

recession of plants. The result today is a progressive and mutual deterioration, not only

of plants and soils, but of the animal community residing thereon” (p. 165)

Like the villagers of Businga, the farmers in the south western United States observed the

gradual deterioration of their soil. They realized that this slow decline could be prevented. Yet,

the farmers continued to over-graze the land.

Earlier, our discussion of the Privatization Strategy focused on the questionable idea

that people will behave rationally, that is, according to self interest, if placed in command of the

land. Leopold seems to take it for granted that humans cannot be trusted in this regard. But his

rejection of the Privatization Strategy is grounded in a different concern. Leopold draws

attention to the many organisms that lack economic value. People will not be motivated to

protect these creatures, even if they were to behave rationally, according to Leopold, because

there is no economic advantage in doing so: “One basic weakness in a conservation system

based wholly on economic motives,” he explains, “ is that most members of the land

community have no economic value.” (p. 166)

Let’s stop and think about this objection. Leopold is making two assumptions: (1) unless

something has economic value, there is no motivation to conserve it under a private ownership


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system; and (2) non economically valuable entities in nature really do have value, and hence

should be preserved.

I do not want to dwell on the first assumption except to say that it admits of exceptions.

Some people do set aside private land simply because they love it. The Privatization Strategy

assumes that this will be common. As for the species that no-one loves enough to protect, and

for which there is no economic motivation to use sustainably (pick your most boring organism –

for me it is the countless species of sphagnum), the Privatization theorist says “so much the

worse for them.” Why assume that all species deserve protection in the first place?

This brings us to the second assumption, that non economically valuable species really

are valuable. What reason does Leopold provide for thinking that this is true? Isn’t Leopold

committing the logical fallacy of begging the question? That is, isn’t he presupposing the very

thing that he hopes to demonstrate6?

A common reply on behalf of the environmentalist, when faced with the question “why

care about species x (sphagnum, or whatever)?” is to invoke some indirect or hypothetical

benefit to humans. Such and such a species is valuable because other species (the economically

important ones) depend on it indirectly. Perhaps the cherished species has some yet-to-be-

discovered ecological role. Or maybe, one day, it will produce the cure to cancer. Often this

argument is buttressed by the so called Precautionary Principle, which says (basically) that the

burden of proof is on the person who claims that a given species is not economically valuable7.

Leopold recognizes this as a weak argument. One problem is that it is often self

defeating. Environmentalists lose credibility each time they propose some organism’s vital

importance, only to be later shown that this turns out not to be the case. As Leopold explains,

6 Students should be aware that begging the question is not the same thing as raising the question. News reporters

always make this mistake. Begging the question is a kind of logical fallacy. For example, suppose I want to convince you that astrology is true, and my proof is that your star sign makes it difficult for you to believe astrology. I have ‘begged the question’ in the sense that I am assuming the truth of that which I aim to prove. 7 The precautionary principle admits of many formulations, and it would take us too far afield to explore it in detail

here. However, students should be aware that this “principle” is not a sound basis for environmental decision making. Don’t be fooled by the fact it gets involved by policy makers (or, for that matter, by some professors). For a good discussion of this issue I direct you here:


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When one of these non-economic categories is threatened, and if we happen to love it,

we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century

songbirds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with

some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to

control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to be valid. (p. 167)

Another problem is that there are bound to be some species that simply do not have economic

value under any stretch of the imagination. Leopold hopes that he can justify his strong feeling

that these organisms really do deserve protection. As we shall see momentarily, his hope is that

this feeling can be grounded in an ethical argument.

So much, then, for Privatization. It is also worth considering why Leopold had no faith in

government regulation. This is despite (or perhaps because of) his years working as Federal

wildlife manager. Leopold’s pessimism stemmed partly from his skepticism about ecology as a

predictive science, and partly from his cynicism of government agencies. We have already

discussed the second point. Earlier, we left open the question of whether government scientists

can achieve adequate monitoring. Maybe not for abalone. But what about other species?

In the case of a forest, like Businga, in its former glory, setting quotas would have

required determining exactly how many trees could be harvested each year without depleting

this resource. Leopold observes that such estimates are difficult to pinpoint. Part of the

challenge stems from threshold effects. Thresholds are non-linear responses to an external

pressure, such as a sudden population crash in response to logging or fishing. A system’s

behaviour as one approaches a threshold provides a misleading picture of how it will respond

once the threshold is crossed. That is, you often don’t see a threshold coming until after you’ve

crossed it, and then it can be too late.

Leopold argues that due to the “complexity” of ecological systems, accurate quota

setting is difficult or impossible. Although lay people (non scientists) have faith that ecology

can identify sustainable quotas; but according to Leopold this arrogance is not shared by the

scientists themselves.


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The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community

clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that the biotic

mechanism is so complex that its workings may never be fully understood. (p. 164)

Once again, let’s stop and think about this argument. Perhaps Leopold is underestimating

ecological science. Computational power has advanced in ways that Leopold couldn’t have

imagined. This provides one reason for being optimistic about ecologists’ abilities to model and

predict complex systems.

Looking closely at the previously quoted passage, we can also detect a subtle flaw in

Leopold’s argument. Notice his claim that ecological systems maybe never be fully understood.

This is perhaps so. But it is a mistake to assume that effective management requires perfect or

complete understanding. Many farmers sustainably manage their crops year to year without a

complete understanding of the microscopic soil communities supplying their nutrients. This

holds true for virtually every system that we harness or engineer: understanding is always only

partial. But often it is good enough.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the prospects for ecology are better than

Leopold imagines, and also that the bar for adequate understanding is lower than he assumes.

The regulation strategy is still not out of the proverbial woods. The second requirement for its

success is an effective system for policing quotas. Here Leopold draws on his experiences with

the Wisconsin Legislature, and its failure to set quotas to mitigate soil erosion, as a decisive

case study. Farmers were given the opportunity to draft laws that would mitigate the amount

of damage being done to the land. Yet they utterly failed in this task. Leopold seems to draw

from this example a lesson about human nature. He infers that people are generally

unmotivated to create effective systems for policing environmental quotas. Whether he is

correct in this assumption is not an issue that we can decide here. Instead, let’s go on to

consider whether the Land Ethic offers a superior solution to environmental issues.

3. What is the Land Ethic?

A third strategy for avoiding tragedy of the commons outcomes is to provide some means of

internally motivating people to refrain from over-exploiting valued resources. The simplest way


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in which this might be achieved is for people to recognize over-exploitation as morally wrong.

Of course, this attitude will not prevent some people from behaving immorally, from taking

more than their fair share. However, most people are motivated to avoid the condemnation of

their peers. Provided that moral attitudes are widely shared, it is conceivable that moral norms

could override self interest and prevent tragedies of the commons8.

The first step in analyzing an argument is to identify the conclusion. This is somewhat

difficult when it comes to Leopold’s writing. He spends most of his time discussing the Land

Ethic in abstraction, explaining what it is supposed to achieve without stating its actual content.

The closest he comes to a clear statement of the Land Ethic is this:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic

community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (p 172)

Here we encounter what is undoubtedly the most frequently cited passage in all of

environmental philosophy. But what on earth does it mean? Let’s assume that Leopold would

agree that some resource extraction is morally acceptable. After all, a human’s gotta eat. The

idea seems to be, rather, that too much extraction is a bad thing. A morally bad thing. In other

words, to push a biotic community beyond the point where its “integrity, stability and beauty”

is compromised is, according to Leopold, morally objectionable behaviour.

But what, you ask, are these properties of integrity, stability and beauty? For that

matter, what is a biotic community?

At this stage it becomes necessary to offer an interpretation. The second step in

reconstructing an argument is to state the conclusion in your own terms. I think that preserving

integrity and stability means that we should avoid actions that result in large scale

disturbances. For now, I am going to rely on a common sense understanding of what a large

8 We have brushed up against an issue that causes much confusion in budding philosophy students. So let me

make it explicit. I am suggesting that perhaps morality will motivate people to forgo resource depletion, even when the resource is valuable, limited and unrestricted. Some will notice that I am essentially suggesting that morality might cause people to behave irrationally. Some students get carried away with this conclusion, even to the point of endorsing Rayndian ideals. The trick is to see that we are using “rational” is a restricted sense to refer to personal self interest. The person who acts morally is acting contrary to her self interest. She is forgoing a resource that would otherwise benefit her. If everyone can become motivated to do this, perhaps the resource can persist without depletion.


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scale disturbance is. The collapse of a fishery. The loss of a forest. The extinction of species.

These are familiar examples.

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to set aside the question of whether preserving

their beauty is an ethical requirement. This is an issue we will explore separately, later in the

semester.

By “biotic community” I take Leopold to refer to multi-species assemblages that tend to

occupy the same habitat. Leopold often speaks of Land, both as a collection species and as a

cohesive entity through which energy flows. Later, we will consider different ways of thinking

about communities as more or less functionally integrated. For now, I use “Land” and “biotic

community” interchangeably to refer to more or less cohesive assemblages of species.

Hence we can restate Leopold’s conclusion as follows:

C) One should not perform any action resulting in large scale disruption of biotic

communities.

Note that I have indicated this as the conclusion with a “C)”. This is standard philosophical

practice. Let us now turn to a reconstruction of the rest of Leopold’s argument. Why should

anyone accept this dictum? If we were to boil down Leopold’s chain of reasoning down to its

purest form, what does it look like?

4. The moral expansion argument

The third step in reconstructing an argument is to identify the individual premises or

assumptions provided by the author in support of the conclusion. Note that arguments don’t

always follow a logical progression. Sometimes the conclusion is stated before the premises.

Other times the premises are only partially stated. Some are implicit or unstated, and it is up to

us to figure out what they are.

Turning, then, to the text. Leopold opens his discussion of the Land Ethic with a

discussion of Odysseus’ attitudes towards his slaves. Upon returning from wars in Troy, and

suspecting infidelity, he ordered his slaves hanged. It sounds utterly horrifying to our ears. But

presumably to the average Athenian, reading Homer’s Odessey, this detail would not have


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struck us out of accord with prevailing norms. Slaves were not considered part of the perceived

moral community. Leopold continues,

During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been

extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by

expediency only (p. 163)

Undoubtedly this is correct. We might say that there has been an expansion of humanity’s

moral horizons. You might note that this expansion has not been universal. In some corners of

the earth people cling to objectionable views about certain casts, races, genders, etc. But they

are wrong to do so, or so I argue, for reasons that I will suggest presently.

Leopold was certainly no moral relativist. Expansion of our moral horizons marked, for

him, genuine moral progress- and as I am suggesting I think he was right about this much. We

have extended our moral horizons to the edge of humanity with the recognition that all people

are fundamentally equal the morally relevant respects. On the pain of inconsistency one cannot

claim that he or she deserves moral consideration while denying it to another person. For there

is no morally significant difference among fellow humans. Any moral preference oneself or

one’s own kind must be arbitrary. Of course, some will resist this claim by suggesting the

inferiority (psychological, biological, moral...) of some casts, races, genders or whatever. But

they’re wrong; simple as that.

So, let’s grant that moral horizons have legitimately expanded. Leopold would have us

also believe that the next logical step in this process is a further expansion beyond the human

boundary. Those horizons can, and should, be extended all the way to the edges of our biotic

community. “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils,

waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (164). Leopold does not explain whether

the biotic community has the same moral standing as humans. In this case it would imply that

large scale harm to the biotic community is akin to a comparable moral sin that one might

commit against a fellow human.

Let’s reconstruct the argument by stating these premises in our own words. Here’s

what we have so far:


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1.1 The (partially reconstructed) moral expansion argument

P1) Human moral horizons have expanded over the course of history.

P2) Moral expansion is part of a progressive trend that can be extended further

to include the entire biotic community.

P3)

____

C) One should not perform any action that results in the large scale disruption of

biotic communities.

The fourth and final step in an argument reconstruction is to determine whether the premises

logically entail the conclusion. We do this by asking for the sake of argument, What if the

premises were true? Would it then follow necessarily that the conclusion must also be true? Or,

is it possible to accept the premises while potentially denying the conclusion? Note that we are

asking a hypothestical question: what if the premises were true, could the conclusion be false?

In fact we might suspect that the premises are false, and we might in face suspect that the

conclusion is true (perhaps for some reason not mentioned in this set of premises). At this stage

we are simply interested in the argument’s structure or form. Does it have the structure of a

good argument? If not, what else would need to be added?

Let me say two things about the reconstruction process. First, why bother? Specifically,

why worry about the logical relations among the premises and conclusion of an argument? The

answer to this is that this often reveals implicit or hidden assumptions which everyone assumes

without realizing it. Exposing these hidden assumptions to the light of day is partly what makes

philosophy rewarding. The second thing to note is that this is often difficult. One might have to

think both carefully and creatively to assess whether a conclusion is strictly entailed by its

premises. So don’t feel bad if it doesn’t come easily at first. This skill takes practice.

In fact, philosophers have developed rules of thumb to make the task quicker and

easier. One of the helpful hints in critical thinking says that you cannot derive and “ought” from


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an “is.” I now need to introduce a bit of philosophical jargon. A descriptive claim is one that

states how the world is (potentially or actually). Here is a short list: octopuses have three

hearts. Apples are blue. The universe is ultimately either analogue or digital. A normative claim

states how the world ought to be. People ought to have freedom of expression. No one should

unnecessarily harm sentient beings. Everyone should own a hat. Notice that either type of claim

can be either true or false. The difference is that when normative claims are true, they make a

certain kind of demand upon us. They express a norm. The easy way to tell the difference is to

look for “must,” “ought,” “should,” or other clues that usually (but not always) suggest that a

claim is normative.

The reason that you can’t derive an ought from an is (a normative claim from a set of

purely descriptive claims) is because it is always possible to ask, given a set of putative facts

whether things really ought to be that way. Suppose I tell you that there has been a steady

increase over history in the categories of people whom are eligible to vote in democratic

societies. First it was only land holders. Then it was all men. Then men and women became

eligible. You might still ask the question, “but is this how the world should be?” The fact that

one can always ask the further normative question, no matter the set of descriptive facts being

presented, implies that normative claims cannot be derived from descriptive claims. You can’t

derive an “ought” from an “is.”

What this means is that a structurally valid argument with a normative conclusion must

have at least one normative premise. To make a good moral argument you need to assume

some general moral principle, which can always be stated with an “ought”, “must,” or “should.”

So is argument 1.1 structurally valid? No. Because even if moral horizons have

expanded in the past, it doesn’t mean that they should expand into the future. Even if they can

be extended to biotic communities, it doesn’t imply that they should be. I will defend these

claims in a moment. Before doing so, let’s fill in the missing normative premise. Notice that I am

often doing something as mechanical as connecting the existing premises to a conclusion using

an “if... then...” statement. Nonetheless, it is often revealing to make these steps explicit.


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1.2 Leopold’s moral expansion argument


P2) Moral expansion is part of a historical trend.

P3) If moral expansion is part of a historical trend, then we should extend moral

consideration to entire biotic communities.

____


biotic communities.

It is now time to analyze the argument. We do this by selecting the premise (or premises) that

seem most questionable. Then we consider first how the author might defend that premise.

Afterwards, we raise potential objections. Then consider potential replies. So on it goes until

the investigation bottoms out somewhere.

I take the controversial premise in the argument to be P3. How might Leopold defend

this premise? Perhaps his thinking is that because moral expansion has been genuinely

progressive in the past, future extensions will be similarly reliable. This seems to rely on the

image of our minds existing in some previous state of darkness, and that with each expansion

we become slightly more enlightened. If moral attitudes change, they only do so for the better

– or so the thinking seems to go.

Are there reasons to resist this assumption? In class I offered two potential counter

examples. First, I noted that there are many life forms that are obviously harmful to humans:

the ebola virus, the aids virus, etc. A society could conceivably extend its moral horizons to

include these obnoxious life-forms. However, I take it as obvious that this would be a morally

absurd outcome. Therefore, it follows that not just any expansion of society’s moral horizon is

good. In other words, it is possible that some expansions are misguided. This possibility


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suggests that we need better criteria for distinguishing legitimate expansions from illegitimate

ones.

Speaking of absurdities, the second example involves the Church of Kopimism, an official

religion that recently originated in Sweden. Its central doctrine holds that copying (for example,

file sharing) is a sacred act. Copyright laws are morally objectionable to this religion. This also

counts as an obviously absurd extension of society’s moral horizons. Of course, one might

question the motives behind this organization. One suspects that The Church of Kopimisim is

really a political ploy to draw attention to copyright issues. That possibility aside, a survey of the

world’s cultures will reveal many examples where moral consideration has been extended, in all

seriousness, to questionable entities. An interesting recent example is the Ecuadorian

government’s extension of legal rights to Nature. The recently amended constitution states

that, “nature, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, maintain and generate

its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”9 This is an extension of legal

recognition to Nature - not a moral expansion per se. Nonetheless, this case raises similar

issues about what, if anything, justifies the extension of rights to these types of entity.

My point in raising these examples is to illustrate that moral expansion cannot be taken

for granted. Some entities (people and other sentient creatures) genuinely deserve moral

consideration. Other kinds of entity (viruses and copied files) are not morally significant. The

controversial cases (nature, biotic communities) are difficult to assess. Those who think that

biotic communities are morally significant will of course place them in the same category with

persons and sentient creatures. However, this merely assumes the conclusion that requires

rational support. The proponent of the Land Ethic must provide some rationally compelling

argument for why biotic communities belong in this category.

5. Can moral expansion be grounded in natural selection?

The philosopher Baird Callicott is an influential thinker who bases many of his own views in

Leopold’s writings. Callicott has written several books on the interpretation of Leopold’s

thought. So we might turn to him for an alternative (and perhaps more compelling) 9 http://www.rightsandresources.org/blog.php?id=358

http://www.rightsandresources.org/blog.php?id=358


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reconstruction of Leopold’s argument. At this stage, if you are following along in these notes, I

suggest that you stop and re-read Callicott’s article. See if you can reconstruct his version of the

moral expansion argument.

You’ll notice that Callicott offers an evolutionary interpretation of the moral expansion

argument. Here is a key passage in which this argument appears.

“Here in outline, then, are the conceptual and logical foundations of the land ethic... Its

logic is that natural selection has endowed human beings with an affective moral

response to perceived bonds of kinship and community membership and identity; that

today the natural environment – the land- is represented as a community, the biotic

community; and that, therefore, an environmental or land ethic is both possible –the

biopsychological and cognitive conditions are in place—and necessary, since human

beings have acquired the power to destroy the integrity, diversity and stability of the

environing and supporting economy of nature.” (178)

This is an extremely long sentence. One almost gets impression that Callicott is being

intentionally difficult to pin down. Let me first offer a simple summary of what I take him to be

saying. We will then consider how Callicott rationalizes his assumption. Here is what I take his

view to boil down to. Essentially, he offers two modifications to the moral expansion argument:

1.3 Calicott’s moral expansion argument


P2c) The next step in human social evolution is to extend our moral horizons to include biotic communities. P3c) If including include biotic communities is the next evolutionary step, then we shouldn’t harm them by causing large scale disruptions. ____


biotic communities.


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In defense of P2c, Calicott appeals to a Darwinian account of how humans evolved their moral

sentiments. On the Darwinian view this occurred by a process of group selection. At first, we

imagine, there existed some ancestral human who cared only about himself and his kin. By

some mutational accident a descendant might have extended moral consideration to fellow

group members. Now, suppose that groups of more “morally extended” individuals receivd

some fitness benefit. Perhaps they became more competitive against groups containing only

selfish individuals. Perhaps this made them better able to survive difficult times, whereas selfish

groups tended to go extinct. This is one scenario under which moral sentiments might evolve –

or so Darwin imagined.

Now, to turn this into a defense of P2c (for the sake of argument) we need to take this

idea a step further. Callicott suggests that as a general rule, natural selection tends to favour

the higher level entity over the lower level one. Cooperative groups are fitter than cooperative

individuals. Likewise, cooperative biotic communities are fitter than ones that extent moral

consideration more narrowly to only members of the same species. At least, that is what

Callicott seems to assume.

How might someone defend P3c? Here, the best I can do is to imagine an analogy

between our moral sentiments and our perceptual systems. Some thinkers argue that our

perceptual mechanisms evolved (more or less) to deliver accurate representations of our

environment. If they didn’t represent the world as it is, the thinking goes, humans would not

have survived. Let’s take this at face value (if only for the sake of argument). One might then

argue that our moral faculties are just like our perceptual faculties. If our moral faculties are the

product of natural selection, Callicott suggests, they can be relied upon to render accurate

judgments. In other words, errors of moral judgment would have been evolutionarily

maladaptive. Therefore, the deliverances of our faculties of moral perception (so to speak) are

trustworthy.

To support this idea, Callicott might invite us to imagine what would happen to a society

that extends moral consideration to viruses or copied files. Such misguided moral judgments,


17

he might argue, would reduce the reproductive fitness of any such group. This view of natural

selection, as a mechanism for tracking moral truth, would certainly lend structural support to

Callicott’s argument. He could then argue that if humans have been selected to recognize biotic

communities as morally significant, those communities are in fact morally significant. From this

it would follow that one ought to protect them from large scale harm.

It is time to consider potential objections to Callicott’s two premises If this view of

evolution strikes you as somewhat plausible, it might be partly due to the mistaken, but widely

held belief that evolution progresses towards some goal. We tend to think of evolution as a

linear process with humans at the pinnacle. However, evolutionary biologists routinely warn

against this idea. Natural selection does not push a species towards any particular outcome.

Rather, natural selection is a process by which populations respond to changes in their

environment. Sometimes those changes result in the loss of some apparently beneficial trait.

For example, many species of cave fish lack eyes. They are born blind, even though they are

descended from sighted fishes. The reason that natural selection removed eyes from these

populations is because these structures are costly to produce and maintain. In an environment

where eyes are almost useless there is no point in retaining them.

The example of blind cave fish reminds us that the environment determines whether

some trait will appear or disappear in a population. It doesn’t matter how complex or seemingly

advanced the trait might seem. There is no inherent trend in evolution, because environments

are always changing. This is the first point that one must hold in mind when assessing Callicott’s

argument. The second important point is that some environments favour psychological

mechanisms that distort reality. Let me offer a few examples.


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The late evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould illustrated this point by looking at the

ways that images of Mickey Mouse changed over time. Early Mickey had sharp features, a small

head, and beady eyes. Eventually, Mickey took on more rounded features, a larger head, and

bigger eyes. Interestingly, as Mickey underwent this physical transformation he also became

nicer. Gould suggests that the cartoonists at Disney, perhaps unintentionally, were tapping into

a psychological bias that humans share. The bias is that we tend to show relatively more

fondness for creatures with big heads, rounded features, and large eyes. For a primate, like us,

that engages in an enormous amount of parental care, it is easy to hypothesize why such a

mechanism might have evolved. What else in our environment has a large round head and big

eyes?

My point in raising this example is to illustrate how natural selection might favour

psychological biases that distort reality. Humans are unique among primates in having

extended periods of infant dependency. Any mechanism that makes us more tolerant, more

patient, and more generous to our offspring would assist individuals during these periods. So

perhaps we have evolved a psychological bias which tells us (essentially) that large-eyed, large-

headed creatures can do no wrong. This mechanism is adaptive, but it can be misleading. Do

you know anyone with a ‘baby-face’? There is psychological evidence suggesting that we are

more trusting of these individuals than we are of people who look, well, more like the early

Mickey Mouse. Are we correct in making this judgment? Of course not! So why then would

your moral judgments about biotic communities, assuming that they are similarly structured by

natural selection, be any less prone to biases?


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Let me make this point slightly differently. Suppose that Gould is correct, and evolution

has supplied us with a perceptual bias that makes any individual with certain features seem

trustworthy. We have this bias regardless of whether she a baby-faced politician, or an actual

baby. In order to know when to trust someone, we need to rationally evaluate these impulses.

That is, we need to figure out when to trust our impulses and when to resist them. In

philosophy, we have a strategy for undertaking such rational evaluations. Calicott might be

correct (despite considerable evidence to the contrary) that humans are evolved to extend

moral consideration to biotic communities. The fact that some tendency has evolved doesn’t

make it rational. Only rational arguments can justify moral expansions.

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