ENVS 202 Environmental Ethics Essay

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ENVS 202

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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.

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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 Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 78 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). Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 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) Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 80 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 Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. 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) Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 82 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 Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. 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 natural and the supernatural in the American Indian world version. According to Hallowell (1960), one does not find this fundamental Western distinction in the Native worldview because there is no analogue of the concept of the natural world—understood as an inanimate material world governed by fixed physical laws—in American Indian traditions. Using the example of the Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 84 The Dance of Person and Place Ojibwa conception of gizis, the “day luminary,” Hallowell observes that the sun is not a natural object in the Western sense; it is a nonhuman person. So, he concludes, if the concept of the natural is absent, so must be the concept of the supernatural. Considering powerful nonhuman spirit persons to be “supernatural persons,” he says, . . . is completely misleading, if for no other reason than the fact that the concept of “supernatural” presupposes a concept of the “natural.” The latter is not present in Ojibwa thought. It is unfortunate that the natural–supernatural dichotomy has been so persistently invoked by many anthropologists in describing the outlook of peoples in cultures other than our own. (28) Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. Deloria (1999) concurs in his reflections about how Western thinkers separate the material and the spiritual—that is, the natural and the supernatural—into two realms. “We are not dealing, therefore, with a conception of nature in the same way that Western thinkers conceive of things” (357). So, without a conception of the supernatural, it is obvious that powerful nonhuman spirit persons in American Indian traditions cannot be supernatural gods. Nor are they infallible; indeed, if the story about Coyote, Iktome and Iya doesn’t make clear that these powerful spirit persons can make mistakes, the Shawnee origin story does. As Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, told it to Trowbridge: When the Great spirit made this Island he thought it necessary to make also human beings to inhabit it, and with this view he formed an Indian. After making him he caused him to stand erect, and having surveyed him from head to foot he pronounced the work defective, and made another, which he examined in the same manner with great care and particularity and at length pronounced him well made & perfect. (Kinietz and Voegelin 1; all idiosyncrasies are faithful to the text) But this second creation was still defective, for the Great Spirit had placed the “privates” under the arm of the man and the woman. After some reflection—and vexation—he rearranged the different members of the body, “and at last made them as they now are, and was satisfied.” Unlike infallible Western deities, the Great Spirit’s first two human creations were mistakes; like humans, it took multiple tries—a little practice—to finally get it right. Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. An Expansive Conception of Persons 85 So, Coyote, Iktome, Iya and other powerful nonhuman spirit persons are neither supernatural nor infallible; and although quite powerful, they are not omnipotent. Recall that Tenskwatawa informs Trowbridge that white men were made by another spirit over whom he had no control. In short, then, these Indian powerful nonhuman spirit entities are not supernatural godlike deities; they are, we will see, no different in kind than human beings, although they differ in power. Now, this account began with the universal American Indian belief that entities like Coyote, Iktome, and Iya are nonhuman spirit persons in order to consider how they are like and unlike human beings and human persons—for the two are not equivalent. Doing so will help us begin to understand both human beings and personhood in American Indian traditions. First, to similarities: Coyote, Iktome, and Iya all have, to a greater or lesser extent, some of the attributes of human beings qua animate beings. Coyote and Iktome eat pemmican and fry-bread, smoke pipes, and shiver in the cold, just like we do. Moreover, they have needs and desires, as well as the rationality and volition to satisfy them. More importantly, Coyote, Iktome, and Iya participate in a network of social and moral practices and relationships, just as human persons do. Coyote and Iktome are friends—although the Spider Person will not stand with his friend when “the chips are down”; Coyote has moral obligations to Iya—although he ignores those obligations by taking back his gifted blanket. They speak and scheme together, and they make mistakes in dealing with others—just as human persons do—and bear the consequences of those missteps. There are also obvious differences between these powerful nonhuman spirit persons and human beings and human persons. The first and most obvious difference is that, contrary to Poole’s Western philosophical notion, Coyote, Iktome, and Iya are nonhuman persons, although they can assume human form. And it is far less obvious from outward appearances that Iya has any of the attributes of a human being—let alone a person—until, of course, the rock acts on the moral impulse to retrieve his blanket—the kind of impulse on which a person would act. And it is a moral impulse; Iya’s motive is righting a wrong, not merely regaining the blanket he really doesn’t need, for “What is given is given.” Second, Coyote, Iktome, and Iya are extraordinarily powerful entities—indeed, apparently far more powerful than human beings. Although a huge boulder, Iya is able to swim a river as though he were made of wood and then smash a forest, “splintering the big pines to pieces”; Iktome has the power to transform himself into a spider and escape down a mouse hole; and Coyote—although smashed flat by Iya—has the power to “make himself come to life again.” Great power, then, seems to be an attribute of these nonhuman spirit persons. Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. 86 The Dance of Person and Place Because we adopted the American Indian belief that Coyote, Iktome, and Iya are nonhuman spirit persons at the outset, it should be clear that we will not agree with Poole that being human is a necessary condition for personhood in Native traditions. However, in our development of an American Indian expansive conception of persons we can embrace his other fundamental insights that (1) personhood does not constitute the essence of a human being; (2) an entity is a person by virtue of its membership and participation in a network of social and moral relationships and practices with other persons; and (3) moral agency is at the core of personhood. There are, then, two questions that need to be carefully distinguished as we proceed. First, what is essential to being human qua animate entity in the Native worldview? This is what human beings will share with nonhuman spirit persons, because they are animate beings too. Second, what do Indians believe is essential to personhood? Human persons will share this with Coyote, Iktome, and Iya, because they are persons—as well as animate beings.3 First, human beings qua animate beings are essentially spirit beings— who just happen to have a changeable outward human form—and it is this that human beings have in common with other animate beings. It usually is at this juncture that the skeptical Western scientific and philosophical minds guffaw, then disengage, because the claim has nothing but the air of the supernatural—which endangers, by the way, our constructivist claim that the American Indian world version is nonempty. For, apparently one cannot perceive a spirit, so the predicate “spirit” is as empty as other empty predicates—“angel,” “devil,” and “possible entity” among them—in Goodman’s gallery of rogues. There is no counter to this argument; however, it has force only if the American Indian linguistic category that is translated as the Western term “spirit” is equally empty. In the Algonquinspeaking tribes (e.g., Shawnee, Lenni Lenape, Ojibwa, Pottawatomie, and Ottawa), the word translated as “spirit” is “manitou.” I propose—perhaps remarkably—that the experiential content of the Native concept manitou is closely akin to the experiential content of the Western concept mind. And if there are no constructivist qualms about minds, then manitouki should not be rejected out of hand, simply because they seem to be supernatural by Western lights.4 It is not surprising that the American Indian world version has an unjustified reputation for introducing the supernatural into the account of animate beings, for that is the overwhelmingly accepted scholarly and popular interpretation. Notice, for example, how James Howard’s (1981) otherwise admirable anthropological treatment of past and present Shawnee culture and ceremony describes a vision quest: Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. An Expansive Conception of Persons 87 Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. At the age of puberty or slightly before (about twelve or thirteen years of age), Shawnee boys were sent out into the woods to fast and seek a spirit helper. This spirit helper was a supernatural creature who usually appeared to the supplicant in the form of an animal or a bird after the individual had fasted and prayed for a sufficient period. (136; emphasis added) However, we have seen that there is no distinction between the natural and the supernatural in Native traditions; that a manitou should come during such a ritual is no doubt a very profound experience—but it is at the same time utterly commonplace. Howard’s rather matter-of-fact assumption that a spirit helper is supernatural is wholly the contribution of the standard anthropological interpretation of the ritual, as it tends to be in general when Western interpreters impose their conceptual categories on the American Indian world version. I have mental experiences, so the predicate “mind” is not empty. Although I do not have direct access to the beliefs and desires, private internal conversations, and secret unspoken aspirations of other human beings—although I cannot directly experience the minds of others—I know other human beings have minds.5 I rehearse the familiar argument if one is required: I exhibit outward behaviors in conjunction with and sometimes caused by my mental events. I grimace when in pain, blush with the occasional lie, and smile when I think of Linda. But I see others exhibiting the same sorts of outward behaviors; others grimace, blush, and smile—they also sing and drum, make love, and wage war. I infer, then, from their outward signs that other human beings have pains, sometimes play fast-and-loose with the truth, and think fondly of their mates just as I do when I behave in similar ways; I infer from the outward sign that other human beings have minds like I do. I know that you have sentience and volition, desires and beliefs, memories and self-reflection, and the same kind of rich inner mental life that I have. So, there is pretty good empirical evidence—although not the conclusive evidence demanded by the curmudgeon in the philosophy department—that other human beings have minds. However, if philosophers were honest, they would admit that no argument is really necessary, for the fact that others have minds is as deeply ingrained in our world version as the fact that there were three red cardinals around my feeder last spring. Indeed, the idea that other human beings could be mindless strikes us as bizarre as the notions that “the three cardinals redded” or “there was red cardinal at the feeder.” Minds are both a part of our constructed world—and what are required to construct that world. Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 88 The Dance of Person and Place Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. Now, the traditional Algonquin speaker experiences her own animation—her own life force, if you will—so “manitou,” like “mind,” is not empty. As an animate being, she eats pemmican and sometimes smokes, shivers in the cold and sweats in the heat, and has a living body now that will probably die. She directly experiences other human beings eating and smoking, living and dying, and she infers from their outward signs that they, too, are animate and have a conscious mental life replete with beliefs and desires. So she knows that other human beings have manitouki as well. But human beings are not alone in eating and shivering, living and dying; nor are they alone in exhibiting the kinds of behaviors indicative of animation. Other things in the world—animal, plant and place, physical force, and cardinal direction—are experienced to be or to act as animate beings; they have manitouki, too. And exactly like the deeply ingrained Western conviction that other human beings have minds, the notion that such things do not have manitouki would strike our traditional Algonquin speaker as bizarre—manitouki are a part of the American Indian constructed world. J. Baird Callicott (1989) echoes and embraces our argument from his own Western philosophical perspective: The Indian attitude . . . apparently was based upon the consideration that since human beings have a physical body and an associated consciousness (conceptually hypostatized or reified as “spirit”), all other bodily things, animals, plants, and, yes, even stones, were also similar in this respect. Indeed, this strikes me as an eminently reasonable assumption. I can no more directly perceive another human being’s consciousness than I can that of an animal or plant. I assume that another human being is conscious since he or she is perceptibly very like me (in other respects) and I am conscious. To anyone not hopelessly prejudiced . . . human beings closely resemble in anatomy, physiology, and behavior other forms of life. . . . Virtually all things might be supposed, without the least strain upon credence, like ourselves, to be “alive,” that is, conscious, aware, or possessed of spirit. (185–86) Although we agree “in spirit” with Callicott’s defense of the “eminently reasonable assumption” that virtually all things might be supposed to be conscious as we are, he frankly overstates the case. Although the category manitou is fundamental in the Native world version, it is not true that everything in the grammatical animate class is alive. When Hallowell asks an Ojibwa informant whether all stones, which are in the animate class, are living, he replies “No! But some are.” Hallowell (1960) explains that the Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. An Expansive Conception of Persons 89 Ojibwa no more believe that all stones are animate than we do, but that their conception of the structure of the world, as well as their confidence in direct experience, force them to leave open the possibility that animate stones will be encountered in the future: Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. Whereas we should never expect a stone to manifest animate properties of any kind under any circumstances, the Ojibwa recognize, a priori, potentialities for animation in certain classes of objects under certain circumstances. The Ojibwa do not perceive stones, in general, as animate, any more than we do. The crucial test is experience. Is there any personal testimony available? In answer to this question we can say that it is asserted by informants that stones have been seen to move, that some stones manifest other animate properties. (25) Deloria (1999) concurs, observing that “it is not an article of faith in any Indian religion that everything has spirit,” that is, that everything is animate (224). Even so, we see in the Ojibwa informant’s cautious response both the kind of reliance on direct experience for verification and the belief about a world that unfixed and unfinished that we have earlier discussed. Now, it is a commonplace in Native stories and, indeed, in everyday experience, that animate beings have an outward form that can change. Iktome, the Spider Person, transformed into a spider and escaped from Iya by scampering down a mouse hole. Calvin Martin (1999) tells the story about an Inupiaq called Katauq, whose spirit went traveling to a great meeting of bowhead whales to learn their habits and ways. Black Elk (2000), as well, conveys a traveling experience when, while touring with Buffalo Bill’s show in England, his spirit traveled to Pine Ridge and saw his parents. And everyone has had a dream experience where a friend from afar, or perhaps a loved one who has passed, visits. Although Hallowell mistakenly identifies such metamorphoses as attributes of persons—and not of animate beings as we do—he correctly emphasizes “that the capacity for metamorphosis is one of the features which links human beings with the other-than-human [beings] in their behavioral environment . . . Human beings do not differ from them in kind, but in power” (39). Although human beings have the capacity to transform, they may not have the power to do so without the help of other powerful spirit beings. In the American Indian worldview, then, personhood does not constitute the essence of a human being qua animate being, just as Poole correctly concludes in his analysis of the Western conception of personhood. In general, animate beings are conceived of as they are by the traditional Ojibwa, as having “an inner vital part that is enduring and an outward form Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. 90 The Dance of Person and Place which can change. Vital . . . attributes such as sentience, volition, memory, speech are not dependent upon outward appearance but upon the inner vital essence of being” (Hallowell 1960: 42). However, in American Indian traditions an animate being is a person by virtue of its membership and participation in an actual network of social and moral relationships and practices with other persons, so moral agency is at the core of a Native conception of persons, just as Poole finds in his analysis of the Western conception of personhood. This means that one cannot be a person in isolation in Native traditions, even with something like Lockean self-reflection or Kantian rationality. However a significant difference from Poole’s Western conception is that membership in the network of social and moral relationships goes well beyond the merely human to include many other sorts of nonhuman persons—some very powerful—like Coyote, Iktome, and Iya. Moreover, the relationships one finds in the American Indian community of human and nonhuman persons are closer in nature to kinship relationships (i.e., familial ties), than to the sorts of contractual relationships and obligations between persons one finds in Western accounts of civil society. Hallowell observes that human and the nonhuman spirit persons participate in the same sorts of familial relationships and practices in his study of the Ojibwa. The Ojibwa share in the widespread American Indian practice of using the kinship term “grandfather” to refer to persons, both human and nonhuman—without any discernable distinction drawn between them—because human and nonhuman grandfathers stand in similar relationships with their human kin. For example, nonhuman persons share their power with human beings by bestowing blessings on them, just as a human grandfather bestows blessings of power through the naming ceremony, in which the elder dreams a child’s name. “In other words,” says Hallowell (1960), “the relation between a human child and a human grandfather is functionally patterned in the same way as the relation between human beings and grandfathers of an other-than-human class” (22). So, the Grandfathers (and sometimes Grandmothers, for the Shawnee creator Kokum␪ena is Our Grandmother) are powerful nonhuman spirit persons whose intimate familial relationships with human persons are evidenced by the use of the kinship term “grandfather.” However, a similar use of other kinship terms indicates that there are other kinds of persons in the nexus of social and moral relationships in the Native world version—in the Native familial social group—besides human persons and the Grandfathers. At the very beginning of Black Elk’s (2000) narrative, he shares that his story is “of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is one spirit” (1). Black Elk’s conception of nonhuman animals and plants—the “four-leggeds,” “wings of Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. An Expansive Conception of Persons 91 the air,” and “all green things”—as siblings mirrors similar relationships in human families, reinforcing the notion that these other sorts of nonhuman beings also stand in the kinship relationships that constitute personhood. In the human sphere, of course, persons have very special responsibilities arising from their familial connections to parents and siblings—responsibilities that go well beyond the minimal contractual obligations extant in Western civil society. The use of familial kinship terms in conceiving of human relationships with nonhuman animals and plants reinforces the notion that human beings have similar sorts of responsibilities to them as well—to honor and respect the Great Spirit and Mother Earth, and especially their children, as they honor and respect their human family members.6 So, human persons participate in a familial social group with other human persons, with powerful spirit persons—Our Grandmother, the Thunderbirds, and Cyclone Person among them—and also with their plant and animal siblings; and it is participation in this actual, concrete nexus of moral relationships and obligations that constitutes their personhood. But other nonhuman entities are members of the Native social group, including the manitouki of the ancestors sometimes experienced in dreams. As well, particular places can have manitouki, when “people live so intimately with environment that they are in relationship to the spirits that live [there]. This is not an article of faith; it is a part of human experience. I think that non-Indians sometimes experience this also when they are in natural environments” (Deloria 1999: 224). Indeed, I have experienced such a presence while visiting the Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico. The real meaning of transformation, Calvin Martin suggests, is the kinship of the apparently different sorts of persons in the American Indian familial social group. Animate beings are spirit beings, all of whom have the capacity—if not the power—to change their outward forms. Iktome can transform from human to spider form; Kopit, Old Beaver Person, transforms from human to beaver form; the Three Sisters bring corn, beans, and squash to the Seneca—an then become corn, beans, and squash; White Buffalo Woman transforms into a buffalo after bringing the sacred pipe to the Lakota. The profound lesson is that all animate beings are essentially the same kind of entity—a manitou with a changeable outward form—so they are all related. We are not making a silly claim that what Westerners understand as the natural world is viewed by Indians as “one big family.” Kinship groups are fairly small, and relationships within them are close, concrete and directly experienced. Although I might have a contractual sort of obligation not to violate the property rights of every person in a Western civil society, I don’t care for every person as I do about kin; the relationships in a civil society are too minimal and too abstract. Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 92 The Dance of Person and Place Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. Figure 5.1. The American Indian kinship group The American Indian kinship group (Figure 5.1), then, has human and nonhuman members of various outward forms, standing in social and moral relationships with other persons, and it is by virtue of these actual, concrete relationships that animate beings are persons. I was taught that respect for others grounds these relationships and is the principle moral attitude in the Shawnee tradition; I was taught to “respect every living thing as a person.” And Viola Cordova (2004) emphasizes a second important Indian value that undergirds the relationships between persons in the Native familial community—equality: The Native American recognizes his dependence on the Earth and the Universe. He recognizes no hierarchy of “higher” or “lower” or “simple” or “complex,” and certainly not of “primitive” and “modern.” Instead of hierarchies he sees differences which exist among equal “beings” (mountains, as well as water and air and plants and animals would be included here). The equality is based on the notion, often unstated, that everything that is, is of one process. (177) That is, all persons in the nexus of relationships have equal value and are due respect by virtue of playing creative roles in the same dynamic pro- Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. An Expansive Conception of Persons 93 cess—making and sustaining the American Indian world. We see in the next chapter how gifting, the most important normative Native practice, serves to sustain this network of relationships, but Black Elk provides a glimpse. After he and his father kill two deer, Black Elk (2000) felt the moral pangs of having been gifted the deer, but then not being appropriately grateful for the gift or sharing it with other flesh eating nonhuman persons: “Father, should we not offer one of these to the wild things?” He looked hard at me again for a while. Then he placed one of the deer with its head to the east, and, facing the west, he raised his hand and cried, “Hey-hey” four times and prayed like this: “Grandfather, the Great Spirit, behold me! To all the wild things that eat flesh, this I have offered that my people may live and the children grow up with plenty.” (64–65) Notably, sharing the gift of the deer with “all the wild things that eat flesh”—gifting to them—helps to ensure that the Lakota will have plenty—unsurprising, because “we are all related.”7 And it should not escape our attention that Coyote’s error in our story was violating this most fundamental of Native moral practices! Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. An American Indian Expansive Conception of Persons We began with Poole’s insightful critique of a prominent Western conception of persons, finding that in our development of an American Indian conception we could agree that personhood is not what is essential to being human. Human beings are, instead, “spirit beings”—manitouki—who just happen to have a human form. We agreed as well that human beings become persons—and sustain their identity as persons—by virtue of their participation social and moral relationships with other persons. In the Native worldview, the relationships and obligations that engender and sustain persons are familial in nature and are based on respect and equality, so they are moral relationships. Thus, moral agency is at the core of the Indian conception of personhood. Unlike Poole’s analysis of the Western notion of persons, however, we saw that the Native conception 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 manitouki—are members of the American Indian kinship group, and so are persons. Although there are nonhuman animal and plant persons in Native traditions, not all animate beings are persons, for the standards for personhood Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12. 94 The Dance of Person and Place Copyright © 2010. State University of New York Press. All rights reserved. are pretty high—one must participate in a social nexus more akin to a family than a civil society. More generally, not everything that is in the grammatically animate class of things is a person, although it is fair to say that being animate is a necessary condition for personhood. But for that matter, not all human beings are persons on most Western accounts. Indeed, I would argue that not all human beings are persons on the American Indian account as well. I imagine that cultural anthropologists Hallowell observing the Ojibwa and Howard the Shawnee never became a part of the familial Native groups they were studying; that would have negatively influenced the kind of objectivity required for a proper scientific investigation. I doubt that they performed the requisite ceremonies and participated in the life of the tribe in the way that would make them real persons. I close with a story recounted by Lee Hester of the visit of John Proctor—the oldest living Creek medicine man—to a class Hester was teaching entitled “Native American Identity.” In response to a student’s question, “What makes you Creek?,” Mr. Proctor replied, “If you come to the stomp ground for four years, take the medicines and dance the dances, then you are Creek” (Cheney and Hester 2001: 327). This seemingly simple and straightforward response masks a quite profound notion: Becoming Creek—becoming a real person—requires taking the medicines and dancing the dances; one must perform the ceremonies, assume the tribal roles and participate in the Creek life and familial social group to be a person. Norton-Smith, T. M. (2010). Dance of person and place : One interpretation of american indian philosophy. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from uoregon on 2019-06-22 15:51:12.
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Environmental Ethics
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Environmental Ethics
Ethics refers to the system of norms that seek to regulate behavior and conduct that is
capable of causing harms to the elements that surround it, like other human beings or the
environment. In other words, the research and study that goes into ethics seeks to discover what
makes an action or a behavior good or bad. For me, they represent a guideline of basic human
behavior, the rules that should dictate the way in which different aspects of our lives are carried
out – fr...


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