In this series, I have argued that there are good Christian reasons to adopt the land ethic [1] and I have explained some of the key features of the land ethic [2]. Recall that the land ethic has at its heart, the following principle: 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 [3]. Recall that I also claimed that there are some common objections to this view, and that I promised to explain why I believe a Christian formulation circumvents them and is therefore preferable. This is the task I wish to take up here.
The land ethic is an often-criticized environmental approach, and, in many cases, unfairly [4]. However, for present purposes, I want to focus on two distinct, but related objections. The first objection suggests that the land ethic commits the naturalistic fallacy, that it suggests that some action is right because that action is natural. The second objection suggests that the land ethic problematically subordinates environmental ethics to environmental science.
One might think that the first objection is easy to dismiss from a theistic perspective. After all, theists believe that God creates the universe and everything in it, and that in doing so, God determined the ends of all creatures. In that case, one might think that some action is right because it is natural. Perhaps the naturalistic fallacy is a symptom of some misconceptions [5].
I am going to sidestep this conversation for the moment because I think the second objection is serious and that an answer to that objection may deliver the resources needed for a response to this first objection. In one sense, of course, even the second objection is weak. Every environmental ethic requires an understanding of environmental science. In order to care for oak trees, we need to understand what is good or harmful for oak trees just as much as caring for babies requires an understanding of what is good or harmful for babies. Nevertheless, this is not what a critic levying the second objection has in mind. This critic is not concerned with the fact that we need to discover that oak wilt is bad for oak trees in order to protect them from it. Rather this critic is concerned with the fact that the land ethic fixes right action too closely to the facts.
One way to understand this objection is as a species of the first objection, and, for this reason, I described the two objections as interrelated. However, it is possible to understand this objection in another manner. In this manner, the land ethic is problematic because it is problematically contingent. To use theistic language, it suggests that God only fixed the moral facts after God fixed all the physical facts.
For the theist, this view suggests a peculiar conception of divine sovereignty. In this view, the moral destiny of human beings is contingent upon the destiny of land. Of course, an environmentalist might wonder whether this implication is so problematic. An environmentalist might think it right to suggest that the moral destiny of humans is entangled with the physical destiny of the land. I agree, but I think the problem is not as much emplacement, as it is contingency. This view seems to suggest that the moral law can only be contingently discovered, that it is not transcendental, and that it only emerges in certain conditions. For the Christian environmentalist, this is potentially problematic [6].
For these reasons, I propose amending the principle at the heart of the land ethic. In this amended version, we can say that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of Creation. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. Here, we simply replace Leopold’s concern with the biotic community for the explicitly Christian concern with Creation.
This amendment blocks the objection that the land ethic problematically subordinates environmental ethics to environmental science. That is because when we focus the land ethic on Creation, we move to a transcendental concern. At the heart of every transcendental approach to ethics, there is the recognition that for there to be a moral law at all, there need to be certain conditions in place. The Christian land ethic recognizes this by diverting our attention away from contingent environmental facts to the transcendental conditions that make Creation possible. When the integrity or stability of Creation is threatened, whether we are concerned with a group or an individual, we are facing a condition in which existence is not viable. In such conditions, the moral law cannot be universalized, and so, the very existence of the moral law is threatened in these conditions.
This transcendental, Christian reading of the land ethic is not open to the objection that it commits the naturalistic fallacy. That is because this version of the ethic does not look to prior patterns of adaptation for correct action. Of course, and to return to an earlier point, if we believe that moral agents are designed to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of Creation, then, there is a sense in which the right action is natural [7]. However, in this context, naturalness is fixed by looking forward, teleologically, and not backward, to precedent. In this light, we can see why theists and atheists may disagree on whether it is possible to derive an ought from an is. In the atheistic world of nothing but efficient causation, it is simply impossible, and often improper, to derive an ought from an is. However, in the theistic world of ends, it is not impossible, or improper, so long as we focus our attention on how, in fact, things are designed to be and not on the way they have functioned in the past, particularly when they malfunction.
Notes
[1] Stepanenko, Walter Scott. Prolegomena to Christian Environmental Ethics ~ Part 1. Mother Pelican, Vol. 17, No. 12, December 2021.
[2] Stepanenko, Walter Scott. Prolegomena to Christian Environmental Ethics ~ Part 2. Mother Pelican, Vol. 18, No. 1, January 2022.
[3] Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 18.
[4] Millstein, Roberta. 2018. Debunking myths about Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Biological Conservation 217, 391-6.
[5] Daston, Lorraine. 2014. The Naturalistic Fallacy is Modern. Isis 105, 579-87.
[6] Stepanenko, Walter Scott. 'Fratelli Tutti' and the Place of Human Ecology in an Integral Earth. Mother Pelican, Vol. 16, No. 11, November 2020.
[7] For this reason, one might understand the land ethic as an extension of Aquinas’s natural law ethic, but investigating this possibility is outside the present scope of this essay.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Scott Stepanenko is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. His current research focuses on issues that emerge at the intersection of science and theology in philosophy of religion. He received his PhD from the University of Cincinnati where he completed a dissertation on the limits of moral demandingness with attention to the demandingness of the obligations of individual human actors with respect to climate change. He is a former Research Associate at the Center for Religious Understanding at the University of Toledo (Ohio).
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