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72 | Tue Puttosopuy oF Eco-Potirics 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.
