Book Review : A Thinking Man’s Guide to the New Morality

Earth and Other Ethics: The Case for Moral Pluralism by Christopher D. Stone (Harper & Row: $18.95, 280 pages)

Should the tree be able to sue the woodman? Does a robot have rights? What about a pit bull, a fetus, a severely deformed infant? These are the questions that USC law professor and legal philosopher Christopher D. Stone raises in “Earth and Other Ethics,” a mostly fascinating (if ultimately unconvincing) exercise in the fabrication of a wholly new code of ethics by a working philosopher.

Back in the early ‘70s, Stone earned a certain passing celebrity by arguing for the civil rights of trees and other inanimate objects in “Should Trees Have Standing?: Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Stone suggested that it should not be necessary to show a threatened injury to human beings or a violation of environmental law in order to afford legal protection to a tree which is endangered by suburban sprawl or environmental pollution; the tree itself, Stone argued, should be able to sue, albeit through the medium of an attorney hired by the Sierra Club or some other environmental activists. Justice William O. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court elevated Stone’s legal-philosophical conceit to the status of obiter dictum in his dissent in the case of Mineral King v. Morton:”Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium,” wrote Douglas, referring to Stone’s seminal work, “should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”

As it turned out, Stone’s argument was an idea whose time had come and gone. The courts have found it unnecessary to bestow the standing to sue upon trees and rocks in order to hear and decide environmental controversies, especially now that various state and federal laws for the protection of the environment enable the courts to accomplish precisely the same result without going to the trouble of appointing a lawyer to represent some endangered snail darter.

Returned to His Theme

But now Stone has returned to his theme in “Earth and Other Ethics,” and he delves deeply and thoughtfully into its moral and philosophical roots, so to speak. “On what basis, and in what manner, might a non-human, a thing, be accorded moral standing or considerateness?” he ponders. “Once begun, such an inquiry bores to the very bedrock of law and morals.”

Stone’s thesis is that orthodox unitary ethics, which he dubs “Moral Monism,” are inadequate to accommodate the ethical existence of non-humans or to afford non-humans any moral rights. The alternative is what Stone calls “Moral Pluralism”--”I would displace the quest for a single, all-encompassing framework, pretentious to govern all moral thought, with an effort to develop different planes that may be appropriate to separate moral activities and morally salient universes.”

Thus, for example, life-or-death decisions concerning a critically ill human being would be considered in a different context from those concerning an experimental laboratory animal or an endangered lake--but none of these “unconventional moral clients” would be excluded from consideration in at least some ethical context. To distinguish among these moral “planes,” Stone urges us to rely on mood, intuition, and “moral texture” as well as logic: “The richer the range of variables,” he writes, “the greater the potential to construct a flexible community of moral frameworks, each appropriate to its respective domain.”

The Right to ‘Intactness’

As a practical matter, it is difficult to imagine how a non-human would assert its moral rights except as a reflection of various human interests--the “right” of a lake to what Stone calls “intactness” is hardly distinguishable from the interest of humanity in clean air and water, preservation of scenic recreation areas, and even the setting aside of pristine wilderness. Stone himself recognizes the fallacy of establishing “pure physical intactness” as the supreme interest of non-human objects: “That would be ironic,” he writes, “since nothing seems quite as ‘unnatural’ as enduring unchange.”

The danger here, of course, is that “pluralism” is awfully close to “relativism,” although Stone anticipates the argument: “The answer is,” he writes, “not necessarily.” Still, our recent history has taught us that the failure of a universal ethical code can visit the most devastating consequences on humanity. What’s more, the genius of the law itself--at least the jurisprudence of Western tradition--is its unitary system of justice; the same law applies equally to all. In such a system, there must be a single benchmark against which all notions of justice are measured. And the only such benchmark is, by necessity, humankind itself.

Stone has devised an artful, complex and intellectually challenging philosophical construct, which is exactly what a philosopher is supposed to do, I guess. But I am unconvinced that fundamental philosophical revisionism is necessary to achieve the goals that Stone embraces. Man is still the measure of all things, and it is man’s interest that is served when our courts afford protection to a river, a fetus, or a generation yet unborn.