The Ambiguity of Environmental Ethics: Duty or Heroism
Author(s)
Dooley, Patrick
Abstract
The classical American statement of ecological ethics, Aldo Leopold’s “A Land Ethic,” contains a fundamental ambiguity: should the land be conserved “as if” it has intrinsic value or should it be preserved “because” it has intrinsic value. Subsequent to Leopold, Dooley shows that the long-standing conservation-preservation tension in ecological ethics can be traced to a metaphysical clash: homocentric vs. biotic world views. Dooley argues that the biotic world view collapses into the homocentric stance so that from an ethical point of view, a policy of preservation amounts to superogation and the ethic of conservation is vulnerable to several economic challenges.
