The Land Ethic & Eco Holism

[@davidmachado2858]

Teacher, please keep going with your videos they are AMAZING! Greetings from Venezuela you're an inspiration.

[@LikeARollingStone88]

No matter what degree I'm in the middle of working toward achieving. I "always" find myself referring back to one of your philosophy videos & quoting your interpretation of understanding from a particular context. I've never excelled in philosophy; my majors are the opposite of that field. However, you are the only person I've ever listened to for hours on end of lectures, and I did so in my own time because of the format of how you taught. Your enthusiastic, ostentatious way of teaching allows your listeners never to forget and become captivated by the works. The brilliant artists, ancient philosophers & theologies you teach about are done so in a way that "everyone" can comprehend and become enlightened. No one on any platform can explain the most complex philosophical discussions the way you do. You teach courses that most students have to take & usually fall asleep to, but within minutes, captivate the entire class with intrigue. I've had to re-watch several of your videos because I always remember certain things you say in some, and I use them in all the sciences, law school,& different psychological studies. None of these are philosophy, but because of you, all of them can be used to reference philosophy and historical data with human comprehension of fundamental understanding.

[@paulcrider]

This is a fantastic discussion of the land ethic. I'm pretty new to this whole field and now I'm looking forward to watching the rest of this series. One quibble: Adam Smith is *absolutely* a full-on philosopher of the highest caliber. He's been a major influence to Marx, Sen, and Nussbaum, among other notable philosophers. There's even a pretty strong case, contra Callicott, that Smith provides a better bridge to the land ethic to Hume because Smith's model of sympathy is less direct-affective and more cognitive-imaginative. Smith can actually entertain the possibility of "entering into" the experience of the ecosystem and projecting what human sentiments might arise in situations of analogous flourishing or languishing in a way that Hume cannot.

[@Orville9999]

does the college you work for police your social media? Cuz I've been dying to hear what you think about Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli.

[@fleidyleegyrson7361]

I’m having a tough time trying to personify ecosystems enough to see their actions as goal oriented. Their economy is driven by necessity and evolution. Even the most environmentally friendly organisms in a biological community (like beavers, let’s say) act in their own self interest. Humans are unique to the biological community in that our interests can no longer be aligned entirely with our survival impulses. Other very intelligent and sophisticated species learn to organize, categorize, memorize, and even improve their surroundings, but very few do so with a complete understanding of service to the ecosystem (the human environmentalist exception you mentioned being one such). Rather, animals contribute by the patterns of benefit which ecosystems have naturally created for themselves by means of life over time. So, the human role in this community is unique in that we must decide what is actually in our interest, that is to say, what we ought to do. As you say in this series, ethics can be said to be, at least so far, anthropogenic. If it was pantera-genic, the endless hunt for prey and sunny spots to lay in would be our unquestionable moral directives. As always, for humans, the path is unclear, and we must rationalize, justify, and modify our contributions based on our ever-evolving sophistication, bearing our goals in mind with every action we take in their service. All that said, this post is less comment than question: what does the other side of this conversation look like? If a tree supports other life around it, is that not its expression of some pro-biological ethical model? It certainly can’t write treatises to get its beliefs taken seriously. As with all such discussions, are we arrogant to discount good actions simply because they don’t fit my enlightenment-era impulse to see one understand and perhaps have to make sacrifice to their own interest for their action to be considered ethical? Would one argue that support of life is an obvious moral imperative, and then that ecosystems become the paragon of that value? Or perhaps that nature’s expression of its goals is merely written in a foreign language? Someone with a greater, as Dr. Rosenfeld says, ethical imagination, let me know what you think.