Environmental
Ethics,
13:3 (1991), 215-234.
Using
concepts from abstract algebra and type theory, the paper attempts to analyze
the structural presuppositions of any holistic ethical theory. The study is
motivated by recent holistic theories in environmental ethics like Aldo
Leopold's land ethic, James E. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, Arne Naess' deep
ecology, and various aesthetic ethics of the sublime. Also discussed are the
holistic and type theoretic assumptions of standard ethical theories like
hedonism, natural rights theory, utilitarianism, Rawls' difference principle,
and fascism. It is argued that though there are several senses of part-whole
common in ethical theory, the central sense of holism in ethics is that of a
theory that defines its key moral idea as an emergent group property grounded
in the relational properties of its individual constituents. Hedonism and
Kantianism do not count as holistic in this sense. Natural rights theory does
in a degenerate way. Utilitarianism and various environmental ethics are
paradigm examples. It is pointed out as a general structural weakness of
environmental holistic theories that their first-order grounding in non-moral
vocabulary seems to preclude an explanation of many moral intuitions about
human ethics.