Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Leszek Pyra
And it is just here that J.Baird Callicot comes to the rescue. Generally he tries to
articulate, defend and develop the ideas of Leopold, and is interested in such elaboration
of Leopold's ethic which results, ethically and metaphysically, in producing a new
paradigm, the ecocentric paradigm, remaining in contrast to the so far existing
psychocentric or homocentric paradigms. Callicot admits that one of the main
weaknesses of Leopold's legacy was the author's naive presumption that it was easy to
shift from is to ought. He writes: "Leopold has blithely stepped across the barrier
separating is from ought, that is, he has commited the naturalistic fallacy...". /Callicot,
117/ The author searches for the new solution of this traditional problem and therefore
he reaches to David Hume's theory of moral sense introduced in A Treatise of Human
Nature /Hume ,469/, and to the theory of feelings presented by Charles Darwin in his
The Descent of Man /Darwin, 107/. From the philogenetical point of view it seems that
feelings are much older than reason - on the one hand, and that they are common in
organisms other than human - on the other. As such they constitute a good basis for
building a shift from facts to values, referring not to any kind of formal logic - where the
problem seems to get no good solution at all - but to psychology. In this context Callicot
pays particular attention to Hume's opinion that morality was not the question of reason
but of feelings, of certain moral sentiments - natural and universal - in which everyone
was endowed /Hume, 469-70/. But eventually Callicot too easily, I think, makes little
account of the problem under discussion writing: "The naturalistic fallacy is dismissed as
an issue too parochial to be practically relevant to contemporary environmental ethics."
/Callicot, 118/. The reasonings sketched above point to the conclusion that from the
knowledge of facts there do not follow any moral obligations conceived in any strictly
logical sense. But one should accept such a theoretical position in which the knowledge
of facts constitutes the psychological reason for obligations. It simply means that
empirical biological knowledge makes us take care of the environment which eventually
conditiones our well-being.
Callicot claims that his axiology is humanly grounded but not humanly centered. He
claims that holistic ethic wants to overcome the limitations of traditional ethical theories
which attribute values only to individuals /primo loco: humans/, and wants to attribute
values to biotopic communities /wholes/. Therefore it seems, I think, that the more
holistic ethic is the more attention it pays to some greater wholes and the less to
individuals. But it certainly cannot be totally holistic, because then it would attribute
almost no value to individuals.
The author radically distinguishes wild animals from domesticated ones. According
to him the latter are simply some kind of artifacts, therefore it is nonsense to speak even
about granting freedom to them, as animal liberation movement suggests /Callicot, 30-1/.
If people set free domesticated animals, e.g. feral cattle and sheep, such animals would
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