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goat population and even protect forest fires from the fire brigade,
claiming that periodic fires are actively useful from the perspective of
the renewal of the ecosystem.*’
J. Baird Callicot took on the task of founding in a pragmatic spirit
the environmental-ethics school that had developed following the
initiative of Aldo Leopold.** Callicot’s argumentation relates to the
Humean tradition of moral psychology, according to which the
development and mastery of ethical feelings serves the survival of
society. The culturally inherited altruist patterns of behaviour force the
individual to limit his freedom in the struggle for existence, for the
benefit of his peers or the community. The ethical value of selfless
behaviour is due to its evolutionary success: the community that does
not pass down patterns of solidarity is not capable of survival and
perishes sooner or later, together with the unsuccessful patterns of
antisocial behaviour. (According to Konrad Lorenz and others, this is
probably the fate awaiting our own civilisation as well.*’) Biosocial
environmental ethics extends this altruistic model to the communities
of living beings to which man belongs as well, thus emphasising the
mutual dependence of species. The advantage of the theory of Callicot
and his colleagues is that it is based on the Darwinian theory of
evolution: he concludes to natural and ethical behaviour from common
explanatory principles. However, it is precisely this that is their position’s
weak point as well. According to Fritzell’s paradox,*° if man is truly
seen as part of nature, then there is nothing to stop him behaving
according to the amoral laws of natural necessity, since there is and can
be no compassion or selfless giving among the various species. If,
however, one maintains that he is a moral being and that his acts are
determined by ethical considerations and not the laws of evolution, then
one accepts the decisive significance of the difference that separates the
inhabitants of the ethical universe from other living beings and their
communities. Following Margaret Midgley, Callicot responds to this
counter-argument with the theory of pluralistic community holism: why
can we not view as a community a grouping in which beings possessing
%7 Holmes Rolston III: Challenges in Environmental Ethics. In Herbert Borman, Stephen
Kellert eds: Ecology, Economics, Ethics: The Broken Circle. Yale University Press, New Haven
1991.
38 J. Baird Callicot: The Conceptual Foundations of Land Ethic. In:J. Baird Callicot: In
Defense of the Land Ethic. State University of New York Press, 1989.
Konrad Lorenz: Civilized Mans Eight Deadly Sins. Harcourt, New York, 1974.
“ Quoted by J. Baird Callicot Ibid.