Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Environmental Holistic Ethics: Leopold and Callicot
otherwise."/262/ According to such a formulation the good of ecosystems seems to be
of greater importance than the good of individuals; obviously such theoretical standpoint
stands in opposition to the Western traditional views. /Barbour 1973/. Personally, I would
rather reformulate Leopold's opinion in such way, as to suggest that individuals should
be at least as much taken care of as ecosystems.
Aldo Leopold considers biotopic community to be the biotic pyramid consisting of
layers hierarchically ordered. At the basis of such pyramid there are plants absorbing
solar energy in the process of photosynthesis, next come herbivorous animals and then
carnivorous ones. According to the author: "The pyramid is a tangle of chains so
complex as to seem disorderly" /Leopold, 252/, yet all components constitute a certain
organized structure. It seems that at the beginning of evolution the pyramid was fairly
low and nutritional chains rather short and simple. Man, appearing late on evolutionary
scale of time, introduced dramatic, negative changes into environment. But Leopold was
not a pessimist, he believed that harmonious coexistence of man with nature was still
possible, especially when ecological education was introduced and led on a great scale.
Notice, however, that the author expressed such optimism more than fifty years ago,
when the environment was not yet devastated to such an extent as it happens to be
nowadays.
Considering some greater ecosystemic wholes one must, sooner or later, touch the
problem of endangered species. It seems obvious that the endangered species must be
handled more carefully than the ones widely spread, because the extinction of the
former means the impoverishment of the biosphere, whereas there is no such immediate
danger in case of the latter. Especially in the light of the fact that man cannot bring the
vanishing species back to life, he should be extremely careful when handling them, in
order to avoid what Holmes Rolston III calls superkilling species /Rolston 1988, 143;
Pyra 1988, 162/. Leopold assumes that particular species are not equally important for
a given ecosystem, but man can hardly evaluate what is important and what is not in this
respect. He writes: "the scientist knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its
workings may never be fully understood."/241/
Leopold was accused of commiting all kinds of the so called naturalistic fallacy,
being hardly aware of the dichotomy of facts and values. Such fallacy, according to
George E.Moore, is the "fallacy which consists in identifying the simple notion which we
mean by `good' with some other notion." /Moore, 58/. In this context Leopold was
criticised, that his famous, above-quoted imperative, appeared as an ethical norm
formulated uncorrectly on the basis of the description of some ecological phenomena;
uncorrectly, because from the point of view of strict logic, values /norms/ cannot be
derived from facts, unless one introduces an additional, value-laden premise into a given
inference.
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