[....] We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at
the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was
a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed
the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a
wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and
all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was
literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at
the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a
chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with
more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always
confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was
dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce
green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that
there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to
the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that
because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters'
paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf
nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
* * *
Since
then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched
the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes
wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and
seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen
every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain
looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all
other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead
of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under
the high-lined junipers.
Leopold, Aldo: A Sand County Almanac,
and Sketches Here and There, 1948, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 129-132.
SERMON
Killing is a fact of existence. All things that arise into being will
eventually pass away. On the
microscopic level, a war rages within each of us as white blood cells surround
and destroy toxic bacteria threatening our homeostasis. No matter how you slice it, the food we eat
requires the termination of life, or in the case of an egg or seed, a potential
life, of an animal or plant. We are
hardly alone in our consumption. Teeth chew and claws scratch up the world on a
daily basis. Billions and billions of
life forms are ending and beginning each minute in the grip of a constant life
and death struggle played out on our isolated blue-green planet hurtling
through empty space.
Even though taking life is a natural part of having
life for animals like us, we have built into our social mammalian programming a
reluctance to kill, particularly those of our own species. Having the genes to hunt and also the
socialization to refrain from killing drives our need to create and follow an
ethics of non-violence.
The inspiration for this service comes from Reese
Satin who bought this sermon slot during the 2001 service auction. When he suggested I outline a generalized
ethic of killing, I wondered how I would handle the topic in an uplifting and
inspiring way. Topics like infanticide,
murder, suicide, and triage just don't send people home with a smile on their
face. But as I explored what such an
ethic might look like, I found the topic opening up in some unexpected
directions that I hope will have personal meaning for many of us.
I have but a short time to present my generalized
ethic of killing. This topic would
easily make a good PhD dissertation or a series of books. I'll sketch out some of my ideas and hope
there is a graduate student in the congregation or on the Internet who will
find this interesting and refine it with my blessing.
Reese was emphatic that the topic would need to
cover more than individual decisions such as murder, suicide, abortion and
euthanasia. He wanted me to cover
society as a killer. Society can become
a killer through war, police actions or capital punishment. Society can also become a passive killer
through its social policies. If our
society has the capability to feed everyone but withholds food, people will die
from starvation. If our society has the
capability to house everyone but doesn't make sure there is a place for
everyone to be housed, some will die from exposure. If our society has the capability to provide medical care and
doesn't provide access, people will die from disease.
Whatever ethic I construct will need to meet three
criteria. First the ethic must be self-consistent. The elements of the ethic cannot work against each other so
contradictions are discovered. The
second criteria for this ethic of killing must be adequacy. One should not need to go outside the ethic
to make a life or death decision.
Finally it must be practical. We
must be able to live with it and use it as we make decisions and choices in our
lives.
The inspiration for the ethic I'll be presenting
this morning comes from some of the research I've been doing at the SUNY
library. Much has been written about
some of the subject areas this ethic covers but not very many have looked
carefully at a generalized ethic of killing.
In fact, I couldn't find anything on the subject. The closest I came was an interesting
anthology called, Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in
Moral Philosophy (Second Edition).
The book covered the areas I've already mentioned and the concluding
chapter was on a search for an environmental ethic. In reading that chapter, I came across an idea of Aldo Leopold,
the author of the meditation I offered, called "the land ethic" he
outlined in his 1948 book titled, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches of
Here and There. Born in 1887,
Leopold has been called the father of wildlife conservation and inspired many
others to begin to think about the environment ethically.
The land ethic is rather simple but at the same
time quite profound in its implications.
Stated simply: The land ethic enlarges the boundaries of the community
to include soils, waters, plants, and animals,
collectively called the land.
Leopold writes:
This sounds simple: do we not
already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home
of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil,
which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which
we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off
sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities
without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated
many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot
prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does
affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their
continued existence in a natural state (p204).
This got me thinking, what if we took the land
ethic seriously as the foundation for all ethics. If we step off the evolutionary throne we claim and consider
ourselves just one species among many, what ethic might we construct that would
stand above and include a human ethic?
Could I create an overarching ecological framework for humanity just as
personal ethics must function within a social ethical framework? Thus the highest ethic would be planetary
followed by a social ethic and lastly a personal ethic.
The axiom of this ethic, my central value begins
with this statement:
What is currently alive should have a preference of
continued existence. Our actions should
support and encourage the continuation of life that currently exists and, in
addition, the growth of life. This argues for the maintenance and the growth of
the quantity of life.
Rainforests are thus better than lifeless deserts because they support
vastly more insects, plants and animals.
Following this closely is the second axiom of this
ethic:
The whole direction and result of the process we
call evolution seems to be the growth of more and more complex organisms in
greater and greater diversity. A fierce
unrest, a restless wish, throbbing through the world urges the project of
creation on. From organic molecules, to
single celled organisms, to multi-celled organisms, from trilobites, to ferns,
to fish, to insects, to dinosaurs, to mammoths, and finally to homo sapiens,
life keeps increasing in quality of life
Notice I haven't made any God references in laying
the foundation for his ethic? The ethic
I seek to construct will be independent of belief in God and revelation. The earth will not be considered a launching
pad for the trip to another place nor an expendable means to another realm such
as heaven. This ethic will rest on what
we can know about this universe. Being
independent of revelation, it is an ethic that can cross religious boundaries.
The continuation and the expansion of life and its
increasing complexity and diversity form the moral universe out of which I will
next construct an ethic for human society.
The first social ethic, really a corollary, will be derived from the
value of increasing complexity. If
increasing complexity has value then:
This seems intuitively obvious but needs to be stated. Lower life forms like bacteria do not have
the same moral weight as human beings.
Killing a mosquito has less moral weight than killing a person. Eating bread made from the termination of
the life project of thousands of wheat seeds should concern us less than the
morality of killing a cow for a hamburger or a steak. This ranking becomes very important as killing one life form is
compared against killing another.
For human society, the most important value we can
articulate follows directly from the highest good being the continuation and
expansion of life:
As I said earlier, we must kill to survive so
killing is necessarily part of what we can and will do. But to uphold the value of continuing and
expanding life on this planet, we must keep our killing to a minimum level that
does not interfere with the continuation and expansion of life.
So what are the implications of minimizing
killing? War is definitely immoral …
but cannot completely ended. A society
is sanctioned to use lethal force as a deterrent in self-defense. Allowing one's people to be killed is as
wrong as killing others. Society must
act to prevent a group of its members being killed, especially in the case of
genocide. And if they can do it without
killing, all the better. The goal of any military action will be to minimize
killing. But total war such as nuclear
conflict, the use of biological or chemical weapons would be wrong as they do
not minimize killing. But there still
could be a chance that their use could minimize killing. The morality of killing depends on the
situation.
Minimizing killing has a direct use in social
policy. Society has a strong obligation
to feed, house, and care for its population.
It must work to care for all the people not just a resource rich
few. Resources must be shared to
support everyone's continued existence.
And there are limits to what any society can
do. The next corollary expresses that
limit:
Society cannot consume the environment to serve
only those at the top of the complexity heap.
To support the continuation and expansion of life in greater complexity
and diversity, we must limit ourselves.
We cannot drive other species to extinction. We cannot wipe out other species habitat. Yet we can act as a planetary steward to
cull herds of deer or stimulate the wolf population, relocate plant and animal
life, and use breeding techniques to come up with new species and
varieties. We are part of the biosphere
but only a part and we dominate it at our own peril.
Part of living in sustainable balance requires us
to prevent life by controlling our own population. Our population can only expand at the rate life on the planet
expands and supports that growth. Some
scientists believe we are already exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet
and need to reduce our population.
This could be used as an argument for euthanasia
and abortion but that goes against the social ethic of minimizing killing. We need one more layer of ethics to complete
this system - the individual ethic.
The primary individual ethic may surprise you:
The origin of this is biological. To maximize complexity and diversity in
biological systems, randomness is required.
Mixing up genes during reproduction allows for mutation. The maximum mix will be driven by
unorganized mating patterns. Randomness
and disorganization as seen from the systemic viewpoint is another name for
freedom.
Like society, maximized individual freedom also has
limits in this second individual ethic:
When applied to killing, the individual should have
the freedom to decide whether to begin new life or bring its life to an end
within the constraints of social and environmental ethics. The individual must weigh the decision to
terminate a life in the womb based on it's complexity (a blastocyst is far
different than a fetus that is viable outside the womb) and the social context
(the balance of society and the environment).
This individual ethic could change based on the state of the
population. In threat of extinction,
having a baby has far more value than in the state of overpopulation.
In this ethical system, the ending of a life racked
by disease and old age a few days or months early has little impact on society
and the ecosystem as a whole and could be even supportive of it in a condition
of overpopulation. Suicide, capital
punishment and murder however would violate the overarching principle to
minimize killing as well as disrupting the sustainable balance within society.
So there you have my generalized ethic of killing
built using an ecological approach. It
begins with the highest value on the continuation and expansion of life in
increasing complexity and diversity. It
affirms that killing must be minimized while acknowledging that killing can and
will continue. It recognizes that
social systems must live in sustainable balance with the environment. It honors the need to maximize individual
freedom to support the continuation and expansion of life in increasing
complexity and diversity. It also
recognizes that the individual must live in balance with the larger society
and, by implication, the environment.
Again, notice this whole system is built without
any revelation or religious commandments about killing. It is an ethic that is built on two axioms
that make eminent sense. Their
opposites, the ending and elimination of life and decreasing the complexity and
diversity of life would be abhorrent to us.
Even maintaining life exactly the way it is would be ridiculous since
change cannot be stopped. Growth is
built into this ethic.
We don't need tablets brought down from the
mountaintop to build an ethic that prevents killing. But the ethic isn't dualistic.
Minimizing killing doesn't rule it out.
Let's test my ethic to see if it meets the
requirements of self-consistency, adequacy and practicality. Minimizing killing and maximizing individual
freedom in balance with society and the ecosystem seems eminently simple and
practical to me. It is adequate as it
covers all the areas of killing from abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, murder,
capital punishment, war, suicide, animals, and the environment. It extends from individual action to social
action. And while it needs far more
rigorous testing, I believe it is self-consistent.
What I like about this ethic is it is useful for
each of us as we make our personal decisions.
In fact, this is critically important if the ethic will have social
significance in a democratic society made up of individuals. The individual is granted wide freedom for
growth and creativity, high ecological values, while subordinating that freedom
to live in sustainable balance with society and the environment. The individual and society are directed to
minimize killing as way to create a good life and generate ethical social
policy.
As we are a non-creedal congregation, I offer you
this ethic not as a commandment or even revelation, but as stimulation for your
own reflection as you consider how to decide whether or not to kill. It is a wide ethic that includes all life on
this planet and could be logically extended beyond it. Yet it is specific enough to be used to make
individual decisions in daily life.
I offer this generalized ethic of killing to you
hoping you too will share these values and use them to reshape our world which
desperately needs them.
Copyright
© 2002 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All
rights reserved.