Post date: Feb 27, 2020 12:59:33 PM
Hi Nigel,
Things keep coming up that remind me of our discussion about land ethics the other day.
You mentioned a division between man-centered and land-centered ethics. I'd like to know more about what your professor means by that, but my concern is that it falls into a well-worn trap.
The trap goes like this:
These days, analysis of man (or human) centered points of view likely carry disapproval. They often end with a justification for humans to do as they please, and what they please tends to be self-serving in the short term and destructive in the long term, for the environment and everything else.
We wonder why. A common explanation is to lay the blame for this misguided ethic at the feet of a faulty pre-scientific metaphysical point of view. I'd prefer to pick the enlightenment, but the usual whipping boy is Christian theology, in particular, "dominion theology." On this account, Christians feel they can do as they please because God grants humans "dominion" in the early Genesis narratives, after telling them they are superior to creation by virtue of some special power (God's image). This facile reading is flawed in many ways, but the most important is that it mixes up what God says and what the Serpent says. It is the Serpent who whispers into humanity's ear that they should usurp the prerogatives of God and do as they please, not God.
What about land-centered ethics? Again, I'm not sure what all is meant by this, but much of what I've seen leans heavily on a scientific (actually rationalistic or even empiricist) point of view. No doubt wisdom should be well informed by knowledge, but often those well-versed in the details of how certain human behaviors disrupt the natural world are less well-versed in what the philosophers have long told us: we can't derive an "ought" from an "is," that is, a mere empirical description of what is going on does not lay an ethical imperative upon us without the intervention of some additional non-empircally derived principles. Science has great authority in our culture, including the authority to cross the line from descriptive science to ethical pronouncement without examining or justifying the assumed ethical principles in play. When this happens, I fear our ethics simply rides the winds of intellectual fashion. We still do as we please. Eating the whales used to please us, now saving the whales pleases us. In other words, land-centered and human centered ethics collapses in the same thing.
That's why I suggested a third way to you, one that moves authority away from humans, receiving our ethic from outside of us. Traditional Christian or indigenous points of view do exactly that. We could call is "spirit-centered" if you like, rather then man- or land- centered.