Review of Michael P. Levine's article

"Pantheism, Ethics and Ecology"

     Levine goes on to examine previous scholarship concerning pantheism and environmental ethics. Many writers have optimistically cited pantheism as a world view more congenial to the environment than the prevailing ones. He criticizes Genevieve Lloyd and George Sessions for finding a metaphysical basis for environmental ethics in Spinoza, whose ethics, though pantheistic, seem to be irredeemably egocentric. Lloyd's appeal to Spinoza's statement that "`It is good for man to perceive things as independent of himself'" (125) and Session's expansion of Spinoza's ethic of self-interest cannot establish a viable environmental ethic because they are unable to attribute rights to the non-human. Levine also examines the widely held idea that pantheism would be beneficial for the environment because it engenders an "`attitude' that might prove environmentally beneficial" (128). He points out that this attitude is really beside the point because "even if a pantheistic environmental ethic has an essential affective component, being objectivist it must be based on something more than an `attitude'" (128). Levine then goes on to stress the metaphysical and transcendental nature of pantheist claims.

     Having made this emphasis, Levine defends the `religious' framework of pantheism. Much of his defense consists of a thorough analysis and attack of Andrew Brennan's "ecological humanism" (129), which seeks to dispose of the various speculative religious frameworks and replace them with a more scientific view. Levine points out that Brennan, too, in emphasizing the position of the moral being, rests his system on metaphysics. Brennan's system is further criticized as being inherently anthropocentric.

     Finally, Levine expounds the correct position of pantheists with regard to environmental ethics. He sees the metaphysical idea of divine Unity in everything as the key to extending morality to the environment. He asserts the pantheist's ethic "will be based on the Unifying principle which accounts for an important commonality, and it will be the grounds for extending one's notion of the moral community to other living and non-living things. Everything that is part of the divine Unity (as everything is) is also part of the moral community" (132). He adds, "Looking towards pantheism as a metaphysical justification of, for example, Leopold's `land ethic' is not unreasonable - or rather no more unreasonable than pantheism itself is" (132). Levine ends his article by criticizing Brennan's anthropocentrism some more, emphasizing the need to include the non-human world in the moral community, and stressing the dependence of all these systems on metaphysical assumptions.

     Levine's thinking about pantheism is clear and his emphasis on the metaphysical nature of pantheism is appropriate, but it seems to me he makes a strange leap from Unity to environmental ethics. If, as he claims, "The divine Unity is, after all, `all-inclusive'" (122), every area of human action is part of the Unity and inherently divine. This would seem to include all anthropocentrism, pollution, destruction and modification of nature, as well as social and personal injustice and violence. If the whole world is part of the divine self-realizing itself, than all evil must be a necessary part of that realization, and therefore divinely good. The choice of the pantheist to sympathize with nature is no more or less good to the Unity than a decision to destroy nature. This inherent negation of ethics reduces Levine's expansion of the moral community to a personal and supremely relative ethical option and defies his attempts to find metaphysical ground for environmental ethics in pantheism.