Leopold's Land Ethic

Leopold wants to think about ethics in evolutionary terms.  His background is as a biologist.  Philosophically speaking, an ethic is what distinguishes social from anti-social behavior.  In other words, an ethic says what you should and should not do.  Ecologically speaking, an ethic is a restriction on individual behavior in the struggle for life.  Leopold says that the sequence of ethical evolution is to recognize a broader range of entities as being morally relevant.  For example, in the history of Western Civilization, women and various other minorities were, at one point or another, thought to be morally irrelevant.  Many humans were once considered property.  Property issues are not moral issues.  But just as we now recognize that women and minorities are not property, Leopold thinks that we have good reason to think of land as more than property.  Land has moral value even if we do not love, respect or admire it.

What is the basis of the value of the land?  Leopold describes what he calls the land pyramid.  At the base of the pyramid is the soil.  Plants live on the soil, insects live on the plants, rodents and birds live on the plants, and smaller predators live on birds, rodents and plants.  Apex predators occupy the top of the pyramid, as they are consumed by no other creatures.  Beings near the top feed off of beings lower on the pyramid.  Beings at the bottom are nourished by the decaying matter of higher species.  Leopold  says that the way this biological community functions is like an energy circuit.  Energy (nutrition, calories) transfers from the lower levels to the higher levels and back down.  Natural and native species keep this energy circuit open.  Sometimes, invasive or introduced species interrupt this energy circuit.  For example, the kudzu vine will cover all native plant species and rob them of energy from the sun.  When local plants die, local insect populations do not get appropriate nutrition.  Hence, local rodent and bird populations suffer, as well.  Eventually, this domino effect reaches apex predators.  Whereas natural changes in biological communities are slow and local, man-made changes are fast and large-scale. 

Humanity can either think of itself as a conqueror over nature or as in community with nature.  Leopold says that attempts to be conquerors will be self-defeating because true domination and control require perfect knowledge of how nature functions.  Because we lack this perfect knowledge, we cannot control nature.  Also, a long history of attempts to control nature show that our scientific and technological efforts are often met with negative consequences that are neither foreseen nor intended.  As such, we should recognize that just as species within a biological community have co-evolved in order to function as a larger system, we are also part of the biological community.  We are not masters of nature.  We are in community with natural systems and species.

Foot's Defense of Morality

Foot gives a brief account of the arguments between objectivists and subjectivists.  Objectivists think that the word 'good' refers to some real moral property of objects.  Subjectivists think that 'good' refers instead to a preference or feeling about an object or state of affairs.  Foot is critical of objectivists because they tend to beg the question, meaning that they assume the truth of their conclusion in their premises.  Foot notes that the subjectivists seem to have something right about the words 'good' and 'bad'.  Although we could give these terms stable definitions within a community, there is nothing to stop an outlying individual from using these terms in a different way.  The 'logical thesis' that seems to result from the subjectivist arguments is that moral disagreement is inevitable. 

Foot then says that there are two ways to interpret the logical thesis.  First, we can take this to be a merely descriptive claim.  Second, we can take this as a normative suggestion to give up on trying to seek agreement.  But Foot says that just because we accept the descriptive claim, this is does not entail that we must accept the attitude according to which we give up all attempts at agreement.  Foot also uses a metaphor to explain the difference between objectivists and herself.  Imagine that someone wants to defend her king by saying that he is super-human.  Another person may say that the king is just a mortal human being like the rest of us.  Foot says that the defender of the king is mistaken if she thinks that her loyalty depends on the super-human nature of the king.  In other words, one can be loyal to the king even if she thinks that the king is an ordinary human being.  Likewise, we can be loyal to morality and ethics even if we don't think that it has some privileged super-natural status.

Korsgaard and Kantian Animal Ethics

In this essay, Korsgaard begins by noting the unstable attitudes that we have towards animals.  On the one hand, we seem to agree that it is wrong to inflict pain on an animal or to kill an animal without good reason.  On the other hand, it seems like any reason other than mere enjoyment is a good reason to harm or kill an animal.  Korsgaard notes that generally, those who want to argue for better treatment of animals will often emphasize the similarities between humans and non-humans whereas those who want to defend the status quo will emphasize the difference between humans and non-humans.  Korsgaard will follow neither of these tactics.  Instead, she thinks that there is a big difference between humans and non-humans and that it is because of this difference that we ought to treat animals better. 

What is the difference between humans and non-human animals?  Humans have a capacity for reflective self-awareness.  We don't merely act on instinct--we think about our actions and have the capacity to choose to act other than our instincts drive us.  Although Korsgaard seems to be open to the possibility that some non-humans have a rudimentary level of self-awareness, humans seem to be rationally and reflexively aware of their own consciousness in a way that other animals are not.  Hume seems to think that this difference means that we have no obligations to animals whatsoever.  Kant thinks that although we have no obligations to animals, we should treat animals well as a duty to ourselves and other rational beings.  In short, Kant thinks that to ignore the suffering of animals is to dull our capacity for sympathy and empathy.  To treat animals well is a sort of practice to treat humans well.  Because animals are analagous to humans in some ways, we should treat animals well in order to keep up our capacity to care about other people.

Korsgaard on Agency

In this article, Korsgaard is concerned with agency.  Agency is the ability to perform actions.  Someone who can perform actions is an agent.  Korsgaard describes two different kinds of theories about agency: the normative account and the natural account.  On the natural account, an action is just what happens when there is a causal relationship between a belief and a behavior.  This is a purely descriptive account.  The normative account of agency is not purely descriptive.  On the normative account, an action only happens if the agent's beliefs and actions are organized in a certain way.  For example, Plato's account of agency includes the theory that an action is performed only if one's rational capacity is in control of the other parts of the person (spirit and appetite).  Kant's account of agency includes the theory that an action is performed only when an agent reflectively considers the axiom that is guiding his action and then proceeds only if the axiom can be made universal law.  Korsgaard thinks that any natural account of agency must also be supplemented with a normative account because only a normative account of agency can explain two implications that arise when we attribute agency.

When we attribute agency to someone, Korsgaard says there are two resulting implications.  First, it seems like an action is somehow expressive of who a person is and the agent has some kind of ownership over his or her actions.  She calls this the identity implication.  In other words, actions express the identity of a person.  Second, actions can fail in a way that simple causal linkages cannot.  For example, the action of dodging a ball has a goal of avoiding being hit by a ball.  Even if I move my body in response to a belief or desire, my action has failed if my goal has not been met.  Korsgaard calls this the activity implication.  Only a normative account of agency can help to explain these two implications.

Nietzsche on Promising and the Sovereign Individual

In the second essay in The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche begins by noting how the development of morality seems to be leading towards some final end.  The paradoxical task that humanity has set for itself is to keep promises.  Promising requires making a memory of the will.  But humans have an active capacity for forgetting, which hinders our ability to make promises.  The person who can make and keep promises is the sovereign individual.  The sovereign individual is someone who lives a life with a certain organization or order.  This allows him to know what promises he can make and keep.  He also knows himself well enough to predict whether he will be able to keep a promise.  In addition, the sovereign individual can identify causes and effects, allowing him to perform calculations necessary for making and keeping promises.  He also judges himself according to no standards other than his own.  In other words, he is his own measure. 

The sovereign individual calls his own dominating instinct his 'conscience'.  Guilt, or what Nietzsche calls 'bad conscience' has another origin: the creditor-debtor relationship.  Nietzsche says that in earlier societies, sacrifices were made to ancestors in order to attempt to repay a debt.  We owe our forefathers something because they created the society in which we live.  The more powerful a society gets, the larger this feeling of debt becomes.  Eventually, ancestors are thought to be so powerful that they are given some kind of divine status.  This reaches a peak with the conception of an all-powerful, perfect god of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  The debt owed to an all-powerful God can never be repaid; this is why the debt gets internalized as a feeling a guilt.  Nietzsche notes that in German, Schuld is the word for both guilt and for debt. If you think about it, both conscience and bad conscience are ways of calculating and measuring ourselves in comparison to others or to ourselves.