A Critical Evaluation of Callicott's Turn to Anthropocentrism in His Earth Ethic

Date

2024-9

Author

DEMİREL, Ali

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

101
views

264
downloads

Cite This

In this thesis, I will examine J. Baird Callicott, who developed and defended Leopold's non-anthropocentric land ethic for many years, and his efforts to extend Leopold's local-scale wisdom and land ethic on environmental issues to a larger, planetary scale, the Earth, the biosphere. The main reason behind Callicott's effort is that impending global climate change will cause catastrophic consequences that will affect the entire planet. Callicott evaluates Leopold's land ethic and the embryo of a non-anthropocentric Earth ethic in his 1923 article, Gaia Hypothesis and Rational Individualism, to see whether they can provide a scientific and ethical basis for an Earth ethic, but he does not seem to achieve the goal he initially set eventually. In this thesis, I will offer reasons why Callicott eventually thinks a non-anthropocentric Earth ethic is impossible and evaluate the possibility of whether Leopoldian norms such as integrity and health and concepts such as respect for biotic communities, possible moral sentiments toward wholes and thinking like a planet, which Callicott used in his previous defense of land ethic, can also be valid for the Earth ethic. Without seriously considering these possibilities, Callicott maneuvers from a possible non-anthropocentric Earth ethic to an anthropocentric Earth ethic, arguing that there cannot be a non-anthropocentric Earth ethic because the scale and focus of the surrogate "global human civilization" are limited only to humans. Finally, I claim that the Leopoldian norms of integrity and health, especially the norm of health, can serve as a norm for an anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric Earth ethic.

Subject Keywords

Callicott, Earth ethic, Leopold, Land ethic, Anthropocentrism, Callicott, Yeryüzü etiği, Leopold, Toprak etigi, İnsanmerkezcilik.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111008

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis