Abstract

Leopold’s principle of the land ethic has been modified, vilified, and ignored as a useful scientific and ethical insight. Issues concerning the nature of the three properties and their relations to biotic communities are mostly responsible for this problem. An ontology which takes integrity, stability, and beauty as dispositions is both consistent with what Leopold says and, more importantly, clarifies their relations to biotic communities. This approach, which relies on some developments in the philosophy of science, presents a dilemma for defenders of the principle: to retain the scientific reality of the properties, which results in them being largely indistinguishable from each other or to keep them conventionally distinct at the expense of their scientific usefulness.