Ecological Morality and Nonmoral Sentiments

Radical environmentalists have often characterized Homo sapiens as a cancerous mutation, heedlessly devouring the planetary body that nurtured and sustains it, and thus veering toward its own destruction and that of its ecosystemic host. If this bleak scenario is to be reversed, a key ingredient of our collective rescue must be a mix of scientifically informed insight into the consequences of our assaults upon the planet; a clear view of our duties to our species, the ecosystem, and the future; and finally the motivation to do what that duty demands of us. Of these, the third, motivation, and the sentiments that support it, has arguably received the least attention. In several of his essays, J. Baird Callicott has enriched Aldo Leopold’s visionary land ethic with the insights of critical and normative ethics, thus bringing Leopold’s vision into the arena of philosophical debate and scholarship. To his credit, Callicott has recognized the essential role of moral psychology to a cogent environmental ethic. Although I share Callicott’s conviction that an environmental ethic cannot stand without a theory of sentiments, I dispute his suggestion that David Hume’s theory of moral sentiments adequately functions in this role.1 To the contrary, I contend that Humean moral sentiments are more likely to reinforce anthropocentrism and alienate humans from nature. If moral senti-