Exemplars in Environmental Ethics: Taking Seriously the Lives of Thoreau, Leopold, Dillard and Abbey

Abstract

It is argued that certain individuals can and should be considered ‘morally exemplary’ with respect to the environment. This can be so even where there is no universally applicable ethical principle they employ, and no canonical set of virtues they exhibit. The author identifies Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey as potential ‘environmental exemplars,’ focusing for the purposes of the essay on individuals who have written compelling autobiographical works in defense of a way of life that is both attuned to the values of a particular place and attentive to the humanistic concerns that have more traditionally been the locus of ethical thought.

Notes

1. Callicott (1987). See also his subsequent clarifications of the land ethic in response to charges of ecofascism, in ‘Holistic environmental ethics and the problem of ecofascism,’ in Callicott (1999).

2. Perhaps most prominent has been the work of Philip Cafaro (1995, 1997, 2001). See also Frasz, 2004; Sandler and Cafaro, 2005, Van Wensveen, 2000; Shaw, 1997.

3. When I speak of the ‘lives and works’ of the thinkers I am discussing, I have in mind their lives insofar as they are written about and defended in their works. I am not so much interested, for example, to defend the exemplarity of the historical Henry David Thoreau as I am interested in learning from the life of the Thoreau who built for himself a home at Walden Pond and wrote about his life in Walden (Thoreau, 1997), reading Walden as both autobiography and philosophical apology.

4. Aristotle, 1985, 1098a8–18. I am indebted to Francis Sparshott's excellent commentary for my reading of this analogy: Sparshott, 1994, pp. 48–54.

5. As Aristotle cautions in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘Each of our claims, then, ought to be accepted in the same way … since the educated person seeks exactness in each area to the extent that the nature of the subject allows; for apparently it is just as mistaken to demand demonstrations from a rheteorician as to accept persuasive arguments from a mathematician’ (Aristotle, 1985, 1094b23–5); and again: ‘But let us take it as agreed in advance that every account of the actions we must do has to be stated in outline, not exactly. As we also said at the start, the type of accounts we demand should reflect the subject matter; and questions about actions and expediency, like questions about health, have no fixed [and invariable] answers’ (Aristotle, 1985, 1104a1–5).

6. Owen Flanagan treats ‘saints’ as moral exemplars in Varieties of Moral Personality (Flanagan, 1991), arguing in his prologue that ‘saints’ can be widely acknowledged to be morally exemplary even where they do not appear to have a moral algorithm they follow and even where they may lack some ‘canonical’ virtues.

7. The most obvious disanalogy between artistic creation and moral exemplarity, especially where artistic traditions tend to no longer to take beauty as an ultimate aim, is that successful works of art (that is, works that are at least both appropriately responsive to tradition, and non-derivative) call for attention and consideration, while moral exemplars demand respect (even of the kind Wendell Berry reports for Edward Abbey, when he writes that: ‘For me, part of the experience of reading him has always been, at certain points, that of arguing with him. My defense of him begins with the fact that I want him to argue with’ [Berry, 1990, p. 41]).

8. Blunt criticism and bold admonitions are not hard to find scattered throughout Walden: ‘Men labor under a mistake … It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before’ (Thoreau, 1997, p. 3); ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation ’ (Thoreau, 1997, p. 6); ‘Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest sense … Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them’ (Thoreau, 1997, p. 70); ‘Love your life … Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things … Do not seek so anxiously to be developed’ (Thoreau, 1997, p. 307).

9. ‘No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof … Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new … The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad’ (Thoreau, 1997, pp. 6–9); ‘I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on any account … I would have each one be very careful to pursue his own way’ (Thoreau, 1997, p. 66).

10. He does quote, approvingly, a Confucian maxim that parallels Socrates’ own avowals of ignorance (‘To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge’ [Thoreau, 1997, p. 9]), but it is significant that this formulation does not deny that ‘we’ know something, and also that the passage appears in the context of his general criticism of the attitude of others—that there is only one appropriate way to live, an attitude he rejects as ignorant.

11. Francis Bacon, one of the earliest and most emphatic advocates for experiment as a privileged way of knowing, was quite explicit on this feature of experiment (borne up in contemporary practice). He writes: ‘I have not sought (I say) nor do I seek either to force or ensnare men's judgments, but I lead them to things themselves and the concordances of things, that they may see for themselves what they have, what they can dispute, what they can add and contribute to the common stock’ (Sergeant, 1999, p. 74).

12. Cafaro, 2001, p. 6. It is to Cafaro's credit that in his more comprehensive analysis of Thoreau's ethics he does not confine himself to finding insights in Thoreau that confirm a particular ethical approach. Cafaro's Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Value (Thoreau, 1997), presents a rich and varied analysis of Thoreau as an ethical thinker that rests in a careful reading of a wide range of his writings, focused on Walden.

13. My reading of Thoreau's Walden as presenting a ‘moral exemplar’ parallels the inquiry laid out by Stanley Cavell in his effort to discover the sense in which Walden might be thought of as a ‘heroic book’ (Cavell, 1972).

14. Callicott, 1987; see also Callicott, 1999.

15. I am indebted for discussion of the theme of exemplars to John Russon and Jason Sears.