ENVS101 University of Michigan Environmental Ethics Essay Total word count: 400 For this first reading response, I’d like you to focus on your own ideas

ENVS101 University of Michigan Environmental Ethics Essay Total word count: 400

For this first reading response, I’d like you to focus on your own ideas about what environmental ethics means and why it is important. Our approach to the course is grounded in philosophical inquiry, which means it is important to be clear about our terms and their meanings. For this response, please respond in complete sentences to the following prompts:

Define ethics. What does the term mean to you? For this part of the response, write two to three sentences, drawing from your own experience. Do not refer to any other text or source.

Second, define environmental ethics. What does this term mean to you. For this part of the response, write two to three sentences, drawing from your own experience. Do not refer to any other text or source.

Next, choose one text that was assigned for week one and define environmental ethics according to the author or authors of the text. Do not simply copy and paste – use your own words and explain the definition according to the authors. Include the name of the text and the author(s) in your response.

Lastly, in a few sentences, describe why environmental ethics is an important field of study to you personally. You can write about what you’d like to learn in this class, or an aspect of environmental ethics you find compelling, significant, or problematic.

Your response should be constructed in well-formed, organized sentences and paragraphs. You response should be at least three full paragraphs and not more than five paragraphs in length. 5
An Expansive Conception
of Persons
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.
This chapter begins with the insightful critique of a prominent Western
conception of persons by Ross Poole, which will nicely frame our development of an American Indian expansive conception of persons. We will find
that human beings are essentially “spirit beings” in a changeable human form
who become persons by virtue of their relationships with and obligations
to other persons in a social group that is more closely related to a family
than to a Western civil society. Unlike Western conceptions, however, we
will see that the Native conception of persons is expansive, for all sorts of
nonhuman spirit beings—ancestors and animals, plants and places, physical forces and cardinal directions, the Sun, Earth, and other powerful spirit
beings—are members of the American Indian familial community, and so
are persons.
A Western Conception of Persons
In Chapter 1 we noted the deeply ingrained Western conviction—reinforced
by science, religion, and common sense—that human beings are different in
kind from other nonhuman animals, but that cultural anthropologists and
ethnographers often observe that American Indian traditions regard human
beings and other nonhuman animals as in some way equal. “They do not
separate man from the beast,” says J. W. Powell (1877), “[s]o the Indian
speaks of ‘our race’ as of the same rank with the bear race, the wolf race
or the rattlesnake race” (10). But we will see that what Powell regards as
a “very curious and interesting fact” is an often-repeated misinterpretation
undoubtedly born of an imposition of Western categories and prejudices on
the American Indian worldview. Instead, I will argue that a recurring theme
in Native traditions is an expansive conception of persons, in which nonhuman animals—and other sorts of other-than-human beings—are recognized
77
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The Dance of Person and Place
as persons in a sense as or more robust than a Western conception of human
persons. Thus, the value of human beings is not diminished, but the value
of other kinds of entities in the world is enhanced. It is not that “[m]ankind
is supposed simply to be one of the many races of animals” in Native worldviews—as Powell haughtily asserts—but that Indians regard the many races
of animals to be people like humankind:
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.
Behind the apparent kinship between animals, reptiles, birds,
and human beings in the Indian way stands a great conception
shared by a great majority of the tribes. Other living things
are not regarded as insensitive species. Rather they are “people”
in the same manner as the various tribes of human beings are
people. The reason why the Hopi use live retiles in their ceremony goes back to one of their folk heroes who lived with the
snake people for a while and learned from them the secret of
making rain for the crops. . . . In the same manner the Plains
Indians considered the buffalo as a distinct people, the Northwest Coast Indians regarded the salmon as a people. (Deloria
1994: 89–90)
A Native expansive conception of persons in which not only animals
but plants and places, physical forces and cardinal directions, even the Sun,
Moon, and Earth are persons is clearly different from various Western conceptions in which being human is a necessary condition for personhood.
Indeed, the commonsense notion of a person, as captured by everyday usage,
is telling: A person is “a human being, whether man, woman, or child . . . as
distinguished from an animal or a thing” (“person” 2004). And according to
Irving Hallowell (1960), persons and human beings are categorically identified in psychology and the social sciences (21).
Thankfully, philosophers have been a little more careful and reflective
in their attribution of personhood to or identification of persons with human
beings. In fact, a widely embraced contemporary philosophical view—with
roots in John Locke and Immanuel Kant—has it that being human is not
essential to being a person. After rehearsing the historical and conceptual
development of this view, Ross Poole (1996) poses an interesting Hegelian
sort of challenge that will shed light both on the Western and American
Indian conceptions of a person.
Poole argues that John Locke’s notion of a person entrenched an earlier Hobbesian conception, which was informed in turn by an even older
Roman notion that to be a person is to take on a public role—to be a full
subject of the law and thereby have legal rights and duties, as well as to
have the right to participate in certain public rituals and ceremonies (39).
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
79
Hobbes’ transitional view incorporates this older notion that a person is one
who has the legal right to act on the public stage with the dawning idea
that a person is also “the inner being of the agent who occupied the role,”
as Poole puts it. Thus, Hobbes melds the earlier tradition that rights and
obligations are grounded in one’s person qua public entity with the idea that
“person” refers to some intrinsic nature of the one playing that public role
(40). It seems, then, that Hobbes began to combine the two components of
personhood that Daniel Dennett (1978) finds in John Locke’s later account,
namely, a moral notion and a metaphysical notion.
In developing the metaphysical component of personhood, Locke
(1991) famously distinguishes the idea of a person from the idea of a man
(i.e., a human animal). The identity of a man over time is understood as
“the same Animal . . . the same continued Life communicated to different
Particles of Matter, as they happen successively to be united to that organiz’d
living Body” (332–33). On the other hand, Locke proposes that any selfreflective rational being can be a person, and that the identity of a person
over time is a function of a being’s conscious identification of recollected
past selves with its present self:
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.
[T]o find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider
what Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent
Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self
as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places;
which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable
for thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it. (335)
However, Locke also is concerned about the legal and moral responsibilities and rewards incurred by and due to persons—just as Hobbes was—
and he locates these in a second moral component of personhood, where,
as Dennett observes, the metaphysical notion of a person as a special kind
of self-reflective rational being appears to be a necessary condition for that
being’s moral accountability. For, one can take credit or blame for some
past action only if one appropriates the past action as one’s own—and that
requires consciously identifying a past self with the present self:
[“Person”] is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their
Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law,
and Happiness and Misery. This personality extends it self beyond
present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby
it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to it
self past Actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same
reason, that it does the present. (Locke 1991: 346)
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The Dance of Person and Place
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.
Poole (1996) nicely summarizes the Lockean person as the self-conscious, language using, corporeal, rational being who is “cognizant of and
thus subject to the demands of law and morality”—an amalgam of the metaphysical and moral notions—but not the human organism at all. As such,
in Locke’s view not all human beings are persons; and, Poole importantly
observes, “it is at least conceptually possible that some nonhuman animals
might be counted as persons” (40–41).
The distinction between persons and human beings is more sharply
drawn by Kant, who developed the concept of a person as a moral agent
wholly independent of actual facts about human beings. Moral laws are
universal and necessary, so they cannot be mere empirical generalizations we
might make about actual human behavior, since an empirical generalization
can be falsified by a single disconfirming instance. However, moral laws are
never falsified by actual human actions and circumstances; despite the fact
that human beings actually murder, the moral imperative “Thou shalt not
murder” is still true and necessarily binding on all moral agents—that is,
binding on all persons. Now, the only way Kant (1964) can account for such
universal, apodictic imperatives—and a person’s categorical duty to obey
them—is by ignoring altogether the contingencies arising from particular
human desires and inclinations, and grounding the moral law in reason. As
such, the moral law is necessarily binding not just on human beings, but
also on any rational creature whatsoever:
Every one must admit that a law has to carry with it absolute
necessity if it is to be valid morally—valid, that is, as a ground
of obligation; that the command “Thou shalt not lie” could not
hold merely for men, other rational beings having no obligation
to abide by it—and similarly with all other genuine moral laws;
that here consequently the ground of obligation must be looked
for, not in the nature of man nor in the circumstances of the
world in which he is placed, but solely a priori in the concepts
of pure reason. (57)
So, as Poole observes, it is not the contingencies of our actual human
nature or situation that makes us persons in Kant’s view. Reason makes us
persons; and by virtue of our reason—imperfect though it may be—we are
creatures with an intrinsic value. So, Kant identifies our rational nature as
what we are essentially, and he abstracts that which is essential to us—our
personhood—from our humanity (44–45).
After tracing the development of the view that being human is
not essential to personhood through contemporary philosophers Frankfurt
(1971), Dennett (1976), and Nerlich (1989), Poole (1996) argues that
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
81
something has gone awry: Philosophers in the Lockean/Kantian tradition
begin by identifying certain features they take to be essential to personhood—perhaps moral agency, self-consciousness, or rationality—and then
observe that not every human being has that essential feature, so being
human is not sufficient for being a person. Nor is it necessary, for one
can imagine other sorts of nonhuman beings with these essential features.
Therefore, they conclude, being human is neither necessary nor sufficient
for personhood; being a person is thus wholly abstracted from a particular
kind of existence—a human existence (46–47).
Poole proposes instead that the interesting sorts of features various
philosophers have identified that distinguish persons from other kinds of
things—moral agency, rationality, language use, and self-awareness among
them—arose from, hence cannot be understood apart from, a specific kind of
organic, social life that gave rise to them in the first place. Self-consciousness—Locke’s criterion of personhood—is an embodied human self-consciousness; rationality—Kant’s criterion—is an embodied human rationality;
moral agency—their common concern—is a human moral agency constituted by a human being’s actual participation in a network of human social
and political practices and relationships. Indeed, one’s personal identity is
a special kind of social identity. Ignoring this, Poole (1996) argues, leads
to the “calamitous consequence” in moral philosophy that persons, as the
bearers of moral rights and responsibilities, are abstracted from the very
concrete, human situations that engender moral dilemmas in the first
place—including abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, and consuming nonhuman animals (48–51). Our attention is instead drawn toward
concerns about our moral obligations to Vulcans, machines passing the
Turing test or any similar nonhuman “persons” in the fantasy world of
thought experiments.
Importantly, Poole (1996) argues against the metaphysical notion that
personhood—however conceived—is our essential being, because there are
all sorts of interesting features about human beings besides the usual candidates for personhood that could reasonably serve as the core of a conception
of persons, so no one of them should be identified as that which is essential
to being human:
Cognitive scientists, for example, may be more impressed with
our capacity to draw and evaluate certain kinds of inference,
than the fact that we can dance or make love, so they construct
a concept of a person on the basis of these preferred attributes.
In itself this move is harmless enough, and may even be useful
in certain contexts. But we should be wary of assuming that this
concept signifies what we most essentially are. (55–56)
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The Dance of Person and Place
Likewise, we should be wary of the seemingly plausible proposals that
our essential being is constituted by personhood construed as self-awareness,
rationality, or moral agency—even participating in a certain kind of social
and moral life. Because there are so many attributes that could serve as
the core of personhood, identifying any one attribute as our essential being
is unjustified.
Perhaps remarkably, we will find elements of Poole’s Western development of the concept of a person in our consideration of an American Indian
expansive conception of personhood. First, human beings are not persons
by nature; that which makes them persons cannot be abstracted from a
particular, concrete kind of existence. Human beings become persons—and
sustain their identity as persons—by virtue of their participation in certain
forms of social practices and performances, and through their relationships
with and obligations to other persons. Second, the social practices and performances, relationships and obligations that engender and sustain human
beings as persons are moral in nature, that is, moral agency is at the core of
personhood. Finally, being a person is not what is essential to being human.
However, we will see that these three elements are entirely consistent with
the view that there are nonhuman persons!
Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved.
Native Conceptions of Animate Beings and Persons
We begin with the now familiar traditional Native story of “Coyote, Iktome,
and the Rock,” told by Jenny Leading Cloud (Erdoes and Ortiz 1984). It
has versions in at least the Lakota, Blackfoot, and Apache traditions, and it
has even slipped into popular Western culture. It will serve as a touchstone
as we clarify the American Indian notion of a human being as an animate
being, the Native expansive conception of persons, and the important difference between them.
As the story goes, Coyote and Iktome were going about in their usual
way when they came upon Iya—a quite old and powerful Rock—and Coyote
(quite uncharacteristically) gifted him his thick woolen blanket. In response
to Iktome’s surprise, Coyote replied: “It’s nothing. I’m always giving things
away. Iya looks real nice in my blanket.”
“His blanket, now,” Iktome reminded.
Well, the weather turned off wet and cold, and the pair took refuge in
a cave. Coyote, without his warm blanket, was freezing, so he sent Iktome
back to retrieve the blanket from Iya. The Rock rebuffed him saying, “No,
what is given is given!”
Coyote was beside himself when Iktome returned empty handed, so
he confronted Iya himself—and he took back the gifted blanket.
Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
83
“So there; that’s the end of it,” Coyote said.
“By no means the end,” said the Rock.
Coyote returned to the cave with the blanket and found Iktome fixing a lunch of pemmican and fry-bread. The pair dined and then settled
down for a smoke to enjoy the fair weather that followed the storm when
they heard a rumble that shook the very ground. It was Iya, returning to
retrieve his blanket.
“Friend, let’s run for it!” cried Iktome. “Iya means to kill us!”
Iya chased Coyote and Iktome across the river and through the woods;
Iya’s power enabled him to swim the river as though he were made of
wood, and to splinter trees left and right in the forest. Iktome recognized
the peril and “excused” himself, turning into a spider and scampering down
a mouse hole.
Iya caught Coyote—and rolled right over him, squashing him flat.
After collecting his blanket, the Rock returned to his place, saying, “What
is given is given.” (Leading Cloud, in Erdoes and Ortiz 1984: 337–39).
Coyote is a Trickster in many Native traditions; his role is played by
Raven and Hare in others. One of Trickster’s many purposes in stories is
to show most graphically what is bound to happen when one forgets one’s
proper place, failing to be mindful of one’s relationships with and responsibilities to others, or giving into one’s own desires at the expense of others.
When Trickster acts on impulse, is greedy, vain, sometimes just mindlessly
self-absorbed—or when he reclaims a gifted blanket—then he disrupts a
delicate equilibrium between persons in a dynamic network of relationships
sustained by mutual respect, courtesy, and equality. This should be his lesson—and we should learn as well, for we all too often act in the same ways
(Martin 1999: 59–62). It often ends badly for Coyote; but like his contemporary animated relative, Wiley Coyote, he seems always to recover—and
never to learn from his missteps. Iktome, the Spider person, is usually the
butt of laughter—human, plant, and animal alike—because he always seeks
shortcuts; Deloria (1999) shares that his stories teach humility and “the
consequences of attempting to be what one is not supposed to be”1 (26).
The first misconception to dispel is that these and like powerful
nonhuman spirit persons are gods as understood in Western religious traditions.2 For, if they were such entities, then they would be quite different
from human beings in kind—they would be supernatural, infallible, and
omnipotent. But there is, first of all, no distinction between the natu…
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