Nature, Freedom, and Responsibility: Ernst Mayr and Isaiah Berlin - eminent scientists from early 20 century - Abstract

Social Research, Winter, 2000 by Strachan Donnelley

Acknowledging the need here for philosophical speculation, I want to exploit the fact that we are naturally evolved organisms with culturally, humanly derived capacities and information. Given our historical worldly situation, what does "like knowing like" mean theoretically and practically?

For a specific and revealing example, I want briefly to turn to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Leopold's land ethic. The land ethic proposes that we humans should become plain members and citizens (not conquerors) of the land, upholding the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community or the "land" (all flora and fauna, including ourselves, and the supporting abiotic elements) (Leopold, 1949:203 ff.; Mayr, 1997: 268). How and from whence could he derive this novel ethic? According to A Sand County Almanac, the ethic emerged from Leopold's firsthand experiences of nature, as informed by his personal, cultural, and scientific upbringing.

In "Thinking Like a Mountain," Leopold tells of a mountain trip to eliminate wild predators for the sake of game populations (deer) and their human hunters. On the trip, one of Leopold's party kills a she-wolf, and the fading of the "fierce green fire" in the wolf's eyes prompts a radical conversion in Leopold's way of thinking about the world, specifically the importance of top predators in maintaining robust ecological and evolutionary processes (1949:129 ff.). In a chapter entitled "Marshland Elegy," Leopold ponders sandhill cranes, with their time-honed (evolutionary, ecological, and ethological) wisdom and beauty. The cranes carry him back to times immemorial, to natural and human origins, to an appreciation of the ecological role of cranes in building marshland reality and goodness past, present, and hopefully future (95 ff.). These are only two of countless such instances recounted in A Sand County Almanac that deliver Leopold's substantive and normative land ethic.

Leopold's ethic may strike us as coming dangerously close to deriving moral "oughts" from an "is," a cardinal sin in traditional philosophical ethics. What is going on here?

In brief, we have the culturally informed human organism, Leopold, encountering other living organisms (animals) in their natural landscapes. With the interaction of the human experiencer (with a complex, historically and culturally engendered self) and the natural animate world encountered emerges an experience and an interpretation of the world rich with meaning, significance, and values, ascribed or ascribable to humans and nature. Are not such experiences the result of interactors and interactions within a worldly context, a biologist's definition of an "emergent property" (Mayr, 1997: 19-20)? Who or what is responsible for Leopold's experience and interpretations? Leopold the experiencer? The wolf and mountain, the cranes and marshland? Or both in their interactions? The most philosophically natural explanation is the latter. Leopold no doubt brings a culturally (humanly) learned Darwinian biological perspective to these worldly interactions, but the scientific perspective is "swept up" into the immediate, value-laden world experience prompted by the encounter and interaction. Moreover, such episodes of personal experience can make sense and have meaning only because Leopold is a naturally evolved organism himself. Like can only appreciatively know like. Our being natural worldly organisms and cultural interpreters of the natural and human world go hand in hand. (Here in a specific example is the epistemic expansion or broadening of Vico and Berlin). What else possibly could account for the kinship, solidarity, and other values that Leopold feels for flora and fauna?