J. Baird Callicott - Criticisms

Criticisms

In response to Callicott’s elaboration of the Aldo Leopold land ethic, the land ethic (and, by implication, Callicott’s own non-anthropocentric, holistic environmental ethic to the extent that it may differ from Leopold’s) has been subject to the charge of “ecofascism,” notably leveled by Tom Regan. If members of overpopulous species, such as deer, ought to be “culled” or “harvested,” in the name of preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, and if staggeringly overpopulous Homo sapiens is also but “a plain member and citizen” of the biotic community, then why should culling and harvesting humans be any less obligatory? In “The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic,” Callicott replies that Leopold presented the land ethic as an “accretion” to our evolving complex set of ethics. In other words, the land ethic burdens us with additional moral obligations; it does not substitute for or replace our previously evolved moral obligations, among them the duty to respect the rights of our fellow human beings to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This reply led to another criticism: that Callicott provides no “second-order principles” to prioritize duties to fellow humans and those to the biotic community when they conflict. In response, Callicott offered two second-order principles as a framework to adjudicate between conflicting first-order duties: 1) “obligations generated by membership in more venerable and intimate communities take precedence over those generated in more recently emerged and impersonal communities”; 2) “stronger interests take precedence over duties generated by weaker interests.” Because our various human community memberships are both more venerable and intimate and because human interests in enjoying rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are very strong, Callicott argues that our traditional obligations to individual fellow human beings trump our obligations to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community — at least, he believes, when it comes to the prospect of culling members of the overpopulous Homo sapiens species.

Additionally, Callicott has been criticized for espousing an overbearing and impolitic monism in environmental ethics. He does not reject pluralism in environmental ethics outright; he only rejects theoretical pluralism, not interpersonal pluralism or normative pluralism. Callicott claims that philosophers and laypersons should not adopt one theory, say utilitarianism, for one purpose or in one context and another theory, say Kantian deontology, for another purpose or in another context (this would be theoretical pluralism). Such theories are mutually contradictory, and he believes that one’s moral life should be coherent and self-consistent; however, he also believes that each person should be free to adopt the theory that to them is the most intellectually compelling (interpersonal pluralism). The general theory that Callicott espouses, Humean communitarianism, correlates ethics to community membership. And because each moral agent is subject to as many ethics as his or her community memberships, therefore each person is subject to a plurality of duties and obligations (normative pluralism). In sum, Callicott is a theoretical monist and an interpersonal and normative pluralist.

Callicott’s comparative environmental philosophy also involves a tightrope walk between pluralism and monism. In Earth’s Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback, he seems to embrace pluralism by exploring the conceptual resources for environmental ethics in a wide variety of religious and indigenous worldviews. This work has been criticized, however, for privileging the Leopold land ethic as a norm in reference to which such alternative environmental ethics are evaluated. As Andrew Light observes, Callicott does not insist that the Leopold land ethic is based on the uniquely true worldview of evolutionary biology and ecology. He agrees with multicultural pluralists that the evolutionary-ecological worldview is but one story among many stories. But he does argue that the worldview of evolutionary biology and ecology is more tenable than any other, that the evolutionary-ecological epic is a better story than any other grand narrative.

Callicott’s justification for this claim is an analysis based on the following criteria for tenability: self-consistency; comprehensiveness; self-correction; universality; and beauty. The first test of a scientific worldview is logical self-consistency and the evolutionary-ecological worldview passes that test. A tenable scientific worldview must comprehend all known facts and so far the evolutionary-ecological worldview does account for all the facts, such as the existence of the fossil remains of extinct species. When the details of that worldview are shown to be inconsistent with themselves or unable to account for all the facts, the theory is revised accordingly; the evolutionary-ecological worldview is thus self-correcting and is therefore, Callicott believes, becoming ever more refined. The evolutionary-ecological worldview has global currency and enjoys international credibility; that is, it has universal appeal. And finally, as to beauty, Darwin himself observed in the final sentence of the Origin that “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Most recent criticisms have been leveled at Callicott’s works addressing the idea of wilderness, the sanctum sanctorum of the twentieth-century environmental movement. Some scholars acknowledge the intellectual merits of Callicott’s critique of the wilderness idea, but regard it as both a betrayal of one of Aldo Leopold’s most cherished causes and as giving aid and comfort to the environmental movement’s enemies. Callicott counters that his quarrel is with an idea, not the places trammeled by the idea, the preservation of which places he appears to be as ardently supportive as any other environmentalist. In “Should Wilderness Areas Become Biodiversity Reserves,” he argues that the pressing conservation needs of the twenty-first century are better served by the biodiversity-reserve idea. This idea indicates by its very name what the primary goal of wildland preservation is, whereas the wilderness idea is historically associated with outdoor recreation and thus, Callicott claims, confuses the preservation issue and fosters incoherent and contradictory wildlands-use policies.