Abstract
The deep and lasting changes to human behaviour that are required to address the global environmental crisis necessitate profound shifts in moral foundations. They amount to a change in what individuals and societies conceive of as progress. This imperative raises important questions about the justification, ends, and means of large-scale changes in people’s ethics. In this essay I will focus on the ends—the direction of moral change as prescribed by the goal of sustainable human flourishing. I shall present a meta-ethical critique of anthropocentrism and propose that only an ecocentric ethic can support the sustainable flourishing of humanity. This proposition does not necessarily contradict itself. My claim will be that the values subsumed under the broad concept of anthropocentrism are categorically counterproductive, informing an undesirable concept of “progress”. I support this claim with two lines of argument. On the one hand, the end values of anthropocentrism are shallow and the “flourishing of humanity” is ill-defined. The conceptual constraints of anthropocentrism itself preclude a more concise definition which would take into account the utter dependence of the flourishing of humanity on the health of ecological support structures. On the other hand, pursuing the values that inform the actions of anthropocentrists (which may be identical with the “flourishing of humanity”) leads to unintended and undesirable outcomes, even from the view of the anthropocentrist herself. Those problems are not encountered with an ecocentric ethic, and the conceptual steps necessary to adopt it are not insurmountable.
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Notes
Wenz (1988, 333) argued that the inescapable dependence of future generations on our goodwill results in a fiduciary relationship in which future generations enjoy full negative rights and some positive rights. Many current practices in agriculture, resource management and other areas represent gross violations of those rights.
Those beliefs are: Nature is separate from and of less value than people; it is also of less value than the dependence of humans upon economic growth. Care and compassion should be exercised only for those ‘near and dear’ and need not be extended to non-human species. Risks to people and nature are acceptable in order to maximise wealth. There are no natural limits to growth. The present structures, institutions and processes of society are satisfactory. The current forms of politics and environmental decision-making are satisfactory. (Lautensach & Lautensach 2004) Those beliefs are more easily compatible with narrow anthropocentrism than with its wider forms.
As a scientist I am particularly embarrassed when I find anthropocentrist language tainting scientific literature. Many scientists welcomed the notion of Homo sapiens being the ‘most evolved’ species on earth. After all, that helped them justify their Cartesian approach to scientific inquiry and their Lockean manipulative attitude toward nature. The language of science, especially the language of reports on scientific topics in the popular press, abounds with evidence of this manipulative attitude characteristic of the anthropocentrist. A headline on the “Science Alert” newsletter of the Royal Society of New Zealand (no. 31, June 1998) reads “Venus submits to chemists’ probe”. So familiar has this kind of language become, few readers are likely to notice how utterly unscientific such a choice of terms is.
As Regan (1992) has convincingly argued, such differences in moral standing cannot be a result of intrinsic value. They can arise from instrumental value (say, its role in maintaining an ecosystem; not all species are equally important in that capacity) or from some other attribute of value such as sentience. Evaluation of either one of those depends on our degree of understanding and is therefore prone to errors. Despite those difficulties, the crucial difference between the ecocentric and anthropocentric ethics remains: the former does not allow for any species or individual to be branded as worthless just because we are either unable to understand its ecological significance or we believe that its disappearance will do us no harm.
Jeffrey Masson, a popular author on the emotional lives of animals, suggested that scientists hesitate to accept the idea of emotional lives of animals because of the profound practical implications of such insights for their own professional practice. Many other professionals, such as farmers and breeders, share those sentiments. (Interview on New Zealand National Radio, 14 October 2001)
The status of bullfighting in Spanish society is only one of many examples. In an interview on NZ National Radio with Kim Hill (NZ National Radio, 25 February 1998), Dawna Grow, who operates a centre for the rehabilitation of chimps mostly discarded from research laboratories, described how circus chimps around the world routinely get their teeth pulled and their thumbs broken at the onset of their training.
I use the term “conversion” tongue-in-cheek. The ways by which one’s concept of how one ought to live can change or be changed is a complex question that cannot be addressed here. What seems certain is that anthropocentrists will not be able to change themselves into ecocentrists merely because they perceive in it better chances at survival for humanity. As Dower (1989; 6) put it, “what makes an obligation a moral obligation is not the fact that following it promotes one’s interests, however wide or enlightened one’s understanding of ‘interests’ is”.
In 1997 an international conference on environmental justice was held at the University of Melbourne that included among its aims to formulate “global ethics for the twenty-first century”. A considerable fraction of the participants seemed to interpret environmental justice in a distinctly non-anthropocentric sense where the concept was extended to non-human species and to ecosystems. The extension of the justice principle to populations of non-humans proceeds along four incommensurable key concepts: vulnerability of a population, its habitat dependence, degree of sentience, and the extent of anthropogenic damage (Armstrong 1997).
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Acknowledgments
The groundwork for this essay was completed during my doctoral project. I am indebted to my thesis supervisors and examiners, particularly Dr Neil Pickering at the Otago Bioethics Centre for his patient and constructive advice in numerous conversations and readings of the original text.
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An expanded version of this essay was presented at the Conference on Ecological Integrity and Sustainable Society, 24–29 June 2007, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. I also thank Dr Marc Pratarelli for his helpful comments.
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Lautensach, A.K. The Ethical Basis for Sustainable Human Security: A Place for Anthropocentrism?. Bioethical Inquiry 6, 437–455 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-009-9200-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-009-9200-3