How Holistic Can We Go?
J. Baird Callicott provides a helpful and much needed analysis of Leopold's "Land Ethic". Callicott correctly points out that the holistic characteristic of Leopold's land ethic deserves careful and patient examination and consideration and it is this move to holism that must be tackled before we can evaluate the deeper content of an ethical system, such as the one Leopold is proposing. Callicott takes this holism to the extreme; which can be seen in his references to Tansley's concept of energy as the "economy of nature" and Morowitz's claim that individuals "do not exist per se" (209). While reading these articles I was very interested to see how a holistic ethical theory would be shaped. However there are some serious problems that any holistic theory must face. One is that if nature is a pyramidal structure of energy relations with process as its fundamental piece (209) then does it still make since to say that someone is the cause of an action? If this seems to be an odd question, remember that this model essentially dismisses the perspective of the individual for the view of the system; So does it make since to say that part of a system, an 'individuals'(which effectively exist only as stabilized energy perturbations) can act? Does it make since to assign moral responsibility to it and say that it is causally responsible for actions? My worry is that the holistic view will make accounting for causality impossible and thus make acting ethically meaningless.
-Callicott argues that the familiar ethical models of Kant and Bentham "provide no possibility whatever for the moral consideration of wholes". Do you think that we must abandon reason or sensibility to account for whole systems in an ethical theory? Must we abandon principles themselves?
-If we accept a holistic understanding of the universe is it possible for something to be "unnatural"?
No comments:
Post a Comment