August 25, 1947

THE LAND ETHIC

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on
one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of
misbehavior during his absence.

This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property.
The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not
of right and wrong.

Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus’ Greece:
witness the fidelity of his wife through the long years before at last
his black-prowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home. The ethical
structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to
human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since
elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct,
with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.

The Ethical Sequence

This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is
actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be
described in ecological as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic,
ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for
existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social
from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The
thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or
groups to evolve modes of cooperation. The ecologist calls these
symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the
original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by
cooperative mechanisms with an ethical content.