Mrinalini mahidhar
Phil 1102 sec 01
Chapter 8

8.1
Eco centric ethics was systematically presented first by Aldo Leopold in his collection of essays a sand county almanac in his essay titled the land of ethics. The author says that this chapter of the book by Aldo focuses on land ethics as the best example of eco centric ethics
Leopold was the one who changed the thinking about the predators in his early research he was In agreement about the Pinchot idea that all natural resources are commodities and this is one of the reasons why he wrote a book called game management which had the ways of increasing our harvest by natural resources. According to him the biggest threat to higher productivity was predators and they needed to be controlled and his view all the hunter gamers and conservationist should come together and try to stop this.
After years of experience Leopold understood that the conservationist approach had problems and he jotted it down to two main concerns, first it doesn’t understand the interconnectedness of nature we cannot manipulate one part of nature and the expect the other to be same. Secondly it sees earth as dead whereas ecology views everything on this earth as living.
He talks about how Leopold recognized that we need to look at a broader perspective and think like a mountain so that nature can be saved.
8.2
According to Leopold’s land ethics all land should be treated ethically we as humans have some obligation to it and should be viewed as a human.
He says that we should extend ethical behavior to soil birds animals and they should be given equal moral consideration.
But at same time Leopold still believes that natural resources should be used as commodity and this is the reason he cannot be in the same belief with animal rights authors such as regan and singer.
Leopold develops a highly organized structure called land pyramid in which he arranges species according to their trophic levels. Any change that is sudden has a genuine threat to a disaster.
There are many reasons why land ethics is attractive to follow 1. It gives us normative conclusions for most problems like wilderness preservation, pollution, conservation etc. 2. It avoids counterintuitive conclusions which generally interfere in the individual bio centric approach it says that we should be concerned with small issues because healthy functioning of the ecosystem should be our primary concern 3. It doesn’t give any extra benefits to humans it considers humans as part of this system instead of conquerors and this point is the attractable points of land ethics.

8.3
Leopold is committed to ethical holism. The three reasons leoplold gives as to why ethical holism is reasonable to adopt in regard to ecological communities a. It’s the most practical approach in terms of resource management. b. Implied by epistemological holism implicit in ecology –we can understand ecology only from functional explanations, the value of an organism comes of its function or role in ecology. c. Acknowledges the metaphysical reality of an ecological whole-we have to recognize the earth as a whole just as we recognize our body as a whole with all its organs.
Leopold’s model for understanding ecological whole’s was the organic model but he later abandons it but if we have to give an honest answer this is it.