Passmore John Arthur
1914-2000
John Passmore, an Australian philosopher, was the author of the first philosophical monograph on environmental ethics, Man's Responsibility for Nature (1980; first edition, 1974). Although Passmore's anthropocentric approach was widely rejected in favor of nonanthropo-centric alternatives in the decades immediately following the appearance of his book, Passmore was enormously influential in persuading philosophers that environmental issues merited serious attention.
Unlike his professional colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s, who ignored environmentalists' charges that the anthropocentrism of Western traditions of metaphysics, morality, and science made these traditions incapable of criticizing or condemning large-scale environmental destruction, Passmore took these charges seriously. In Man's Responsibility for Nature, he evaluates arguments for these charges and for the solutions critics were proposing: a radical revision of Western metaphysical, moral, and scientific theories. Passmore argued that while the dominant metaphysical traditions of Western thought are guilty as charged, Western moral and scientific traditions are not. Divested of the metaphysical baggage that has distorted them, these latter two branches of the Western tradition, despite their anthropocentrism, provide sufficient resources to condemn our environmentally destructive practices. He presented his argument in three parts.
In part 1 of Man's Responsibility for Nature Passmore considered and largely endorsed the charge that the Christianizing of Western metaphysics encouraged Westerners to see human beings as possessing a value and destiny fundamentally divorced from that of the natural world and to view the latter's value and purpose as limited to its utility in helping us to fulfill divine injunctions to multiply on and subdue Earth. This conception of our status in relation to nature, Passmore agreed, licenses our adoption of environmentally destructive practices. But although this view of our relation to nature has long been dominant, he argued, it has always had rivals. Even within Christianity, we find minority traditions holding that our role is to act as nature's steward, preserving its fruitfulness for the future, and/or to cooperate with nature in the ongoing creation of the world.
In part 2 he considered and rejected the charges that Western moral and scientific traditions lack the means to condemn environmentally destructive practices and thus should be replaced by nonanthropocentric alternatives. Passmore's strategy was to adopt the anthropocentric outlook typical of Western moral and liberal political theories and then apply it to current controversies about human exploitation of nature to show that it neither blinds us to the problematic character of human exploitation of nature nor denies us grounds for criticizing destructive exploitation as harmful, unjust, selfish, and/or wrong. From an anthropocentric perspective, he argued, any environmental practice is problematic whose consequences are undesirable in themselves without also being unavoidable byproducts of those human practices genuinely essential to desirable social life. Using this anthropocentric definition, Passmore argued that he is no less able than nonanthro-pocentrists to recognize that industrial pollution, depletion of nonrenewable resources, extermination of wild species and wilderness areas, and unrestricted human reproduction are all problematic. In each case, Passmore argued, the responsible practices have consequences that are undesirable while being largely nonessential for desirable social life. Hence, our standing moral and social traditions can and rationally must condemn the greed, insensitivity, and shortsightedness that motivates these practices, as well as the callousness and injustice inherent in imposing their avoidable consequences upon their unwilling victims, present and future.
Unless the dominant metaphysical conception of humanity's relation to nature can be displaced by conceptions more in keeping with the minority traditions of stewardship and/or cooperative partnership with nature, the forces of greed, shortsightedness, and insensitivity cannot readily be overcome by appeals to morality and justice alone, Passmore felt. He argued that Western scientific reasoning is playing an important role in helping to bring about this change in perspective. Science has challenged the old belief that Earth's resources exceed our ability to consume them, forcing upon us the realization that they may not sustain future generations if loving stewardship is not practiced. Furthermore, as scientific understanding of ecological complexity increases, it becomes increasingly evident that bending nature to our will is an impossibility. Ongoing creativity in art, science, morality, and culture will become impossible unless we learn to partner with nature to develop more sustainable practices. Passmore concluded that enlightened anthro-pocentrism, coupled with conceptions of humanity as stewards of nature and cooperative partners with nature, possesses the necessary resources to condemn our current destructive practices and demand their reform—if only we can find the will to act accordingly.
SEE ALSO Christianity; Stewardship. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hargrove, Eugene. 1979. ''The Historical Foundations of
American Environmental Attitudes.'' Environmental Ethics 1: 209-240.
Passmore, John. 1977. ''Ecological Problems and Persuasion." In Equality and Freedom: International and Comparative Jurisprudence, ed. Gray Dorsey, Vol. 2, 431-442. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications. Passmore, John. 1980 (1974). Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions, 2nd edition. London: Duckworth. 1st edition, 1974. Passmore, John. 1999. ''Philosophy and Ecology.'' In Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ethics, ed. Klaus Brinkmann, 141-151. Bowling Green, OH: Philosophy Documentation Center. Routley, Richard [later Richard Sylvan]. 1973. ''Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?" In Proceedings of the Fifteenth World Congress of Philosophy, vol. 1, 205-210. Sofia, Bulgaria: Sophia Press. White, Lynn, Jr. 1967. ''The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis." Science 155: 1203-1207.
Jennifer Welchman
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