I guess Jim that I could sum up the thesis of moral monism in one slippery
term: caring. Care is the desire to fulfill the longing of others
(Kiergekaard). This term which in latin is carita is similar to many other
terms such as agape, ev, and so on. But the term care is not the love of
cupid, the love of pleasure. The erotic and the noetic 'meaning sense' are
united in human existence through care. 

Care can be explained through the categories of the 'pure understanding' or
the 'ontological' categories. 

For instance the synthesis of the antithesis contained in  the categorical
"unity of identity and difference" according to Aristotle and Kant (various
the Categories and the Antinomies of Pure Reason) has a tremendous meaning
to it as a set of pure antinomies. This antinomy has universal application.
So when the idea of a 'founding' to establish an edifice where an
'indication of an ethics', that is an edifice of caring, or ethos, as an
habituation is concerned, then it is possible to begin the exercise of
dialectical reasoning amongst cooperating participants to bear. Otherwise
there is strife, and no love. The pre-archic originary meaning of care is  a
sensibility regarding habituation, or inhabitation since ethos means
pre-archically habit. So the pre-archic sense of caring is to be habituated
in an environment both cultural and ecological. 

When applied to the 'situation type of ethics' that  families have to
encounter in their daily existence, it is apparent that no set of strict
rules always works in resolving conflicts and the arrangment of equal
opportunities. The operative definition of the family from an anthropologic
basis is that the family is a 'feeling' and the family cannot be
conceptualized. The family is purely 'intuited' as an object of sympathetic
and imaginary proportions, as magical as realism, and the feeling of family
can extend to animals and even plants, and even rocks. So there is no pure
intellectual, nor calculative, differentiable reason for the family to
exist, except via the 'selfish gene' which is equally absurd as is most
other 'theories' of care. 

The exercise of dialectical reasoning is said to be the method by which
rational and caring people arrive a statements of truth, i.e. logos (an
account in the sense of a 'gathering lay' or 'agora' - those who bring in
the sheafs of wheat for the threshing, or the artesanal fishing village
where the fish are brought to a place to process) [Socrates, The Republic]. 

I would contend that a logos is a multiple accounts analysis and therefore
as Rappaport indicates we need to invent a new paradigm or consensus which
he calls the 'ecological logos'. He says that most neolithic societies were
already at this point of conceptualization via sympathy, or caring, and the
exercise of dialectical reasoning. Since the term ecosystem is a concept,
rather than simply a directly intuited object, it would necessarily follow
that the most knowledgeable ecologists are the persons that are most
intimately familiar with their own environs (the neolithic hunter-gatherers,
pastoralists, swidden agriculturalists and so on). 

So in the application of my creative approach to resolving the issue you
bring to the attention of the list, I thought that I would raise the item
which has been neglected. The 'Other who will not come along' is feeling,
value, what Jung calls in his essays on Western Religious Tradition, the
Trinity, is not a proper nor traditional foundation for an ethical edificio,
nor source of inspiration in the subject of environmental ethics. Heidegger
has mentioned this in his works that 'care' is  'equiprimordial' and
[Dasein] fundamental mode of being. Feeling, emotion and intuition are said
to be 'undifferentiable thought' but, as well, emotion (in the strict
psychological sense) has an object corresponding to its existence which is
erotic (has the quality of the beloved). That is why I brought into the
discussion something forgotten: kinship through affinities by marriage and
geneology. This is a good starting point for the discussion about what
environmental values are in reality. These are the 'elective affinities',
the strong forces in the universe. 

Spinoza wrote "reason does not overcome an emotion. Only a more powerful
emotion overcomes an emotion." Fear is lost through love. But hate engenders
more fear. Hate cannot be overcome by hate, but hate can be overcome by a
more powerful act which is love. Love is - in the most ultimate sense - an
act. Love is only known through enactment. True love of the other can only
be expressed through an act of caring. Cupitatus is simply the love of
pleasure that beloved begets in the lover and the beloved is never enriched.
There is a strict enactment sense to love. To do nothing for the beloved is
to not love the beloved, so by the strength of this analogy referred to as
the 'enactment sense' in which care operates on behalf of the beloved then,
to  hurl abuse (which ultimately is emotional abuse) is a form of  fencing
in of the Other or wrangling, but it certainly is not a means for the
acceptance of differences. 

Without the appreciation of the family as the enemy of bureaucracy, as Fox
points out, the discussion of an environmental ethics ends in a morass of
tragi-comic proportions. This is why the author of "Watersheds" - an
environmental text - discusses  the most absurd (but believeable) forms of
environmental conflict resolution. For instance the environmentalist Chico
Mendes in Brazil was actually a communist that organized the rubber tappers
to protect their opportunities in engaging in a sustainable practice of
tapping the native rubber trees growing in the forest. The plight of these
poor people was very much worse off prior to their organization, but the
improvement came at a cost. That cost was the conflict that the rubber
tappers encountered with land speculators who simply 'felt' and 'valued'
solely the ownership of the land. So as a result of the rubber tappers being
organized and engaged in non-violent means to improve their wages which were
being sapped by labour barons, the new land owners, who only desired to
clear the land and own and sell the timber, and then raise cattle for a few
years, began murdering the rubber tappers.  

Private property is not simply theft in Brazil, it often results in murder. 

The funny thing is that one of the most important persons to help the rubber
tappers was a Republican congressman from the United States. His concern was
twofold: the plight of the workers, and the meaningless destruction of
rainforests. So that is interesting how a communist could make friends with
a capitalist, and how a Marxist could become a environmentalist.
Environmental ethics sounds like an absurd pastime if you were to read the
more abstract tracts by Minteer, and Regan and Callicott, but that is my
point. One has to get involved in a real issue that affects onself and ones
family before one can really appreciate the power of 'principled
negotiations' otherwise all we hear is abuse thrown over the fences that we
are trying to take down to allow communication. 

Chico Mendes was finally killed by hired gunmen. The family that killed him
(the patriarch) was already charged for a similar type of murder, and when
the authorities rendered the conviction and sentence against the murderer,
nothing actually happened because the prison had no security, and the area
where Chico Mendes has no police forces to maintain law an order. 

The mind grapples with it's limited powers of comprehension (as opposed to
emotion which apprehends and intuits)  to actually 'grasp' being, and the
truth about being. But due to its' inability to understand 'undifferentiable
thought' the intellect is often sundered on the 'slippery slopes' of
'calculative rationality' or cast in terms that Kant uses, dogma &
mathematics. This is why the use of en-principation (heirarchies) to
engender first principles (the sole task of philosophy)  is so valid in the
elaboration of ethical standards; since without principles there can be no
sense of causality, and therefore no inferences. I know that much of what
Minteer is saying is nothing but rhetoric, and actually mumble jumble
because his use of specialized philosophical terms occassionally occurs in a
colloquial manner. The Greeks were very great dramatists. And what they
dramatized is the utter futility of pure reason (Blakes mind forged mancles)
alone to solve immense problems (opportunities?) regarding existence. 

" Those whom the gods love first make crazy." 

When thinking begins to grasp rather than be granted the object of
consciousness, some thing happens. 

Monism, Foundationalism....sounds like a great debate going on and then the
bastards start shouting fascism to each other, well at least Callicott does
not. He admits he is by consequence a fascist for being an enemy to
bureaucracies. 

But Callicott uses the most spurious of reasoning himself. He actually
thinks that vegetarianism would result in an increase in the human
population, rather than less people simply because there would be more to
eat thus more people reaching reproductive age that would otherwise die of
starvation. Well as if starvation is a really good way to control
populations. This does not imply that he is fascist but it does imply that
people cannot control their own reproduction. We have birth control methods,
many of them...so why should we necessarily think that eating meat will save
the ecosystems of the world. That may be a plausible hypothesis, but there
are exceptions to the rule. Bhuddists do not kill animals, and the countries
where Bhuddists still live such as in Bhutan and Nepal are not full of
starving people, nor on the brink of ecological collapse, and neither are
the religious groups of practical vegetarians. 

Callicott mentions 'God served meat' as the proper form of food for man. He
of course is borrowing the idea from Leopold. 

Like I said in plain english, if the world is going to improve for one's
children in the future, then the most logical and caring thing to do is to
limit the procreation of even more children than one already has. This is
not something for the state or corporations to engage in as a form of social
engineering, but it is something for the individual person to acknowledge
and consider. Is it any less valuable to have 2 children than it is to have 7? 

Who knows? Are vasectomies in men good? Is the spaying of pets good? Of
course as long as the person getting it done realizes the consequences in
advance....so you don't have to stop or start eating meat to save the
biosphere, you only need to limit the number of children that you bring into
the world...that is purely democratic because you cannot deprive the unborn
that were not conceived, you can only deprive the living. Vegetarianism is
an immediate solution to reducing human consumption of resources, so that is
good too. 

john foster







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