Rolston, Duties to Ecosystems


Holmes Rolston talks about the separate duties that humans and organisms owe to the ecosystem through distinct lenses. He states that the apparent harmony in ecosystems is superficial. Like business, politics, and sports ecosystems thrive on competition. He talks about how environmental necessity involves conflict, selection pressure, niche fittedness, environmental support, etc. These section pressures will routinely drive adaptation and counter adaptation; therefor the ecosystem is forcing a check on competitions by forced cooperation.  He believes us humans need to see that, an ecosystem has no centeredness at all, and we ought to simply value organisms for their evolutionary journey and purpose. The members of the biotic community have no shared needs; each species is individualistic in the sense that they are focused on the needs of their own survival.  He further explains how an ecosystem is far from being a satisfactory community, instead it is rather sloppy. The focal point for our cultural value is the individual, or “the person”, while the moral focus in ecosystems should be the organism. In comparison to humans, an ecosystem has no brain and no self-identification. Rolston admires ecosystems for seeing them as value capture. He points out that plants do not intend to help out falcons and cheetahs, nor does any eco systemic program direct this coaction. Ecosystems have no “character” instead they simply undergo succession, and episodically reset, because of this we might seem to give ecosystems less value and worth in comparison to humans and intelligent organisms. Rolston presents us humans as role players in an historical drama; we enter and exit in different geological time scales. He makes a distinction between the organization methods us humans put towards culture, and how this mode of working will not fit for an ecosystem. He states that we cannot tell environmental ethicists what is right or wrong in amoral ecosystems. He believes that duties may concern ecosystems but must be to subjects. We as humans, have duties to preserve the integrity, beauty, and stability in the biotic community that we enjoy and resourcefully use.
I thought Rolston presented a very realistic view on how our ecosystem is set up. We like to ascribe all these morals and ethics, when in reality the natural world is one of survival. Although the ecosystem is not a cognitive organism or “thing”, I believe it still deserves respect, and as humans its our duty to uphold the maintenance and beauty of the ecosystem. It’s interesting to see how Rolston talks about animals eating other animals, random tragic events that happen to animals, and just the ever-changing landscape of our world and ecosystem. It was interesting to look at the ecosystem from an alternative perspective.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kenneth Goodpaster: On Moral Consideration

Kenneth Goodpaster leads us through many principles and perceptions of different philosophers to tackle the overall question, “ to whom principles of morality apply?” In order to begin to develop an answer for this question, we must first understand the framework of moral consideration, and then proceed to the application of this framework. Goodpaster presents to us distinct viewpoints on the sorts of entities that can and should receive moral consideration. He believes that neither rationality nor the capacity to experience pleasure and pain are necessary conditions on moral considerability. Instead, the simple act of being alive, for Goodpaster is a plausible criterion in terms of moral consideration. He believes that the universe of moral consideration is more complex that just individual persons and their joys ad sorrows. Goodpaster begins to draw the distinction between rights and considerability. He believes that the notion of rights are more specific that those of considerbaili...
Read more

Class #23: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene”

Heather Davis and Zoe Todd point out the failure of the Anthropocene, as a name to be assigned to today’s epoch. The start date that is being chosen for the Anthropocene is mid twentieth century 1964.  They are drawing connections saying that the Anthropocene, is explicitly linked to the beginnings of colonization. By linking the Anthropocene with colonization, it draws attention to the violence at its core, and calls for the consideration of Indigenous philosophies and processes of Indigenous self-governance as a necessary political corrective, alongside the self-determination of other communities and societies violently impacted by the white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist logics instantiated in the origins of the Anthropocene. They feel that the Anthropocene betrays itself in its name: in its reassertion of universality, it implicitly aligns itself with the colonial era. Heather Davis and Zoe Todd propose a 1610 start date to coincide with colonization p...
Read more