Introduction to Philosophy of the Human Person

1
Order and Disorder in the Environment

Module 005 – Order and Disorder in the

Environment

This module will contain the following topics:

1. Environmental Ethics
2. The Challenge of Environment Ethics
3. Anthropocentrism

Environmental Ethics
Environmental ethics is defined by Conserve Energy Future as a branch of ethics that
studies the relation of human beings and the environment and how ethics play a role in
this.” Its belief is that humans, plants and animals are a part of society and play an
important part in the world. Environmental ethics believes that it is essential for humans to
respect and honor the other living creatures in the world and use morals and ethics in
dealing with them.
Nature.com, on the other hand, gave the following definition: “Environmental ethics is a
branch of applied philosophy that studies the conceptual foundations of environmental
values as well as more concrete issues surrounding societal attitudes, actions, and policies
to protect and sustain biodiversity and ecological systems.”
According to Wikipedia, “Environmental ethics is the part of environmental philosophy
which considers extending the traditional boundaries of ethics from solely including
humans to including the non-human world. It exerts influence on a large range of
disciplines including environmental law, environmental sociology, ecotheology, ecological
economics, ecology and environmental geography.”
There are many ethical decisions that human beings make with respect to the environment.
For example:
 Should humans continue to clear cut forests for the sake of human consumption?
 Why should humans continue to propagate its species, and life itself?
 Should humans continue to make gasoline-powered vehicles?
 What environmental obligations do humans need to keep for future generations?
 Is it right for humans to knowingly cause the extinction of a species for the
convenience of humanity?
 How should humans best use and conserve the space environment to secure and
expand life?
The academic field of environmental ethics grew up in response to the work of scientists
such as Rachel Carson and events such as the first Earth Day in 1970, when
environmentalists started urging philosophers to consider the philosophical aspects of
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environmental problems. Two papers published in Science had a crucial impact: Lynn
White's "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis" (March 1967) and Garrett Hardin's
"The Tragedy of the Commons" (December 1968). Also influential was Garett Hardin's later
essay called "Exploring New Ethics for Survival", as well as an essay by Aldo Leopold in
his A Sand County Almanac, called "The Land Ethic," in which Leopold explicitly claimed
that the roots of the ecological crisis were philosophical (1949).
In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental
value and intrinsic value (in the sense of “non-instrumental value”) has been of
considerable importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other
ends, whereas the latter is the value of things as ends in themselves regardless of whether
they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental
value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the
bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can
likewise think of a person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who
want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a
person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own right independently of
his or her prospects for serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild
plant may have instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine
or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself
independently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the
pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the
intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that
something’s possession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the
part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O’Neil 1992 and
Jamieson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value).
Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-
centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we
might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount
of intrinsic value to human beings than to any non-human things such that the protection
or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of non-human things turns
out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense).
For example, Aristotle (Politics, Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that “nature has made all things
specifically for the sake of man” and that the value of non-human things in nature is merely
instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find it problematic to articulate what is
wrong with the cruel treatment of non-human animals, except to the extent that such
treatment may lead to bad consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant (“Duties to
Animals and Spirits”, in Lectures on Ethics), for instance, suggests that cruelty towards a
dog might encourage a person to develop a character which would be desensitized to
cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards non-human animals would
be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often
recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused)
environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human
beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable
environment (see Passmore 1974; Bookchin 1990; Norton et al. (eds.) 1995).
When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early
1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it
questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on
earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning
intrinsic value to the natural environment and its non-human contents. It should be noted,
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Order and Disorder in the Environment

however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-
anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be
called enlightened anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudential
anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the
environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practical
purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social
policies aimed at protecting the earth’s environment and remedying environmental
degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical
purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of
policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the
latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the non-human
environment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996).
Deep Ecology
“Deep ecology” was born in Scandinavia, the result of discussions between Næss and
his colleagues Sigmund Kvaløy and Nils Faarlund (see Næss 1973 and 1989; also see
Witoszek and Brennan (eds.) 1999 for a historical survey and commentary on the
development of deep ecology). All three shared a passion for the great mountains.
On a visit to the Himalayas, they became impressed with aspects of “Sherpa culture”
particularly when they found that their Sherpa guides regarded certain mountains
as sacred and accordingly would not venture onto them. Subsequently, Næss
formulated a position which extended the reverence the three Norwegians and the
Sherpas felt for mountains to other natural things in general.
The “shallow ecology movement”, as Næss (1973) calls it, is the “fight against
pollution and resource depletion”, the central objective of which is “the health and
affluence of people in the developed countries.” The “deep ecology movement”, in
contrast, endorses “biospheric egalitarianism”, the view that all living things are
alike in having value in their own right, independent of their usefulness to others.
The deep ecologist respects this intrinsic value, taking care, for example, when
walking on the mountainside not to cause unnecessary damage to the plants.
Feminism and the environment
Broadly speaking, a feminist issue is any that contributes in some way to
understanding the oppression of women. Feminist theories attempt to analyze
women’s oppression, its causes and consequences, and suggest strategies and
directions for women’s liberation. By the mid 1970s, feminist writers had raised the
issue of whether patriarchal modes of thinking encouraged not only widespread
inferiorizing and colonizing of women, but also of people of color, animals and
nature. Sheila Collins (1974), for instance, argued that male-dominated culture or
patriarchy is supported by four interlocking pillars: sexism, racism, class
exploitation, and ecological destruction.
Emphasizing the importance of feminism to the environmental movement and
various other liberation movements, some writers, such as Ynestra King (1989a and
1989b), argue that the domination of women by men is historically the original form
of domination in human society, from which all other hierarchies—of rank, class,

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 and political power—flow. For instance, human exploitation of nature may be seen
as a manifestation and extension of the oppression of women, in that it is the result
of associating nature with the female, which had been already inferiorized and
oppressed by the male-dominating culture. But within the plurality of feminist
positions, other writers, such as Val Plumwood (1993), understand the oppression
of women as only one of the many parallel forms of oppression sharing and
supported by a common ideological structure, in which one party (the colonizer,
whether male, white or human) uses a number of conceptual and rhetorical devices
to privilege its interests over that of the other party (the colonized: whether female,
people of color, or animals).
Disenchantment and the New Animism
The new animists have been much inspired by the serious way in which some
indigenous peoples placate and interact with animals, plants and inanimate things
through ritual, ceremony and other practices. According to the new animists, the
replacement of traditional animism (the view that personalized souls are found in
animals, plants, and other material objects) by a form of disenchanting positivism
directly leads to an anthropocentric perspective, which is accountable for much
human destructiveness towards nature. In a disenchanted world, there is no
meaningful order of things or events outside the human domain, and there is no
source of sacredness or dread of the sort felt by those who regard the natural world
as peopled by divinities or demons (Stone 2006).
Whether the notion that a mountain or a tree is to be regarded as a person is taken
literally or not, the attempt to engage with the surrounding world as if it consists of
other persons might possibly provide the basis for a respectful attitude to nature
(see Harvey 2005 for a popular account of the new animism). If disenchantment is a
source of environmental problems and destruction, then the new animism can be
regarded as attempting to re-enchant, and help to save, nature. More poetically,
David Abram has argued that a phenomenological approach of the kind taken by
Merleau-Ponty can reveal to us that we are part of the “common flesh” of the world,
that we are in a sense the world thinking itself (Abram 1995).
In her work, Freya Mathews has tried to articulate a version of animism or
panpsychism that captures ways in which the world (not just nature) contains many
kinds of consciousness and sentience. For her, there is an underlying unity of mind
and matter in that the world is a “self-realizing” system containing a multiplicity of
other such systems (cf. Næss). According to Mathews, we are meshed in
communication, and potential communication, with the “One” (the greater cosmic
self) and its many lesser selves (Mathews 2003, 45–60). Materialism (the monistic
theory that the world consists purely of matter), she argues, is self-defeating by
encouraging a form of “collective solipsism” that treats the world either as
unknowable or as a social-construction (Mathews 2005, 12).
Instead of bulldozing away old suburbs and derelict factories, the synergistic
panpsychist sees these artefacts as themselves part of the living cosmos, hence part
of what is to be respected. Likewise, instead of trying to eliminate feral or exotic
plants and animals, and restore environments to some imagined pristine state, ways
should be found—wherever possible—to promote synergies between the
newcomers and the older native populations in ways that maintain ecological flows
and promote the further unfolding and developing of ecological processes (Mathews
2004).
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Order and Disorder in the Environment

Traditional Ethical Theories

As an alternative to consequentialism and deontology both of which consider “thin”
concepts such as “goodness” and “rightness” as essential to morality, virtue
ethics proposes to understand morality—and assess the ethical quality of actions—
in terms of “thick” concepts such as “kindness”, “honesty”, “sincerity” and “justice”.
As virtue ethics speaks quite a different language from the other two kinds of ethical
theory, its theoretical focus is not so much on what kinds of things are good/bad, or
what makes an action right/wrong. Indeed, the richness of the language of virtues,
and the emphasis on moral character, is sometimes cited as a reason for exploring a
virtues-based approach to the complex and always-changing questions of
sustainability and environmental care (Hill 1983, Wensveen 2000, Sandler 2007).
One question central to virtue ethics is what the moral reasons are for acting one
way or another. For instance, from the perspective of virtue ethics, kindness and
loyalty would be moral reasons for helping a friend in hardship. These are quite
different from the deontologist’s reason (that the action is demanded by a moral
rule) or the consequentialist reason (that the action will lead to a better over-all
balance of good over evil in the world). From the perspective of virtue ethics, the
motivation and justification of actions are both inseparable from the character traits
of the acting agent.
Furthermore, unlike deontology or consequentialism the moral focus of which is
other people or states of the world, one central issue for virtue ethics is how to live a
flourishing human life, this being a central concern of the moral agent himself or
herself. “Living virtuously” is Aristotle’s recipe for flourishing. Versions of virtue
ethics advocating virtues such as “benevolence”, “piety”, “filiality”, and “courage”,
have also been held by thinkers in the Chinese Confucian tradition. The connection
between morality and psychology is another core subject of investigation for virtue
ethics.
It is sometimes suggested that human virtues, which constitute an important aspect
of a flourishing human life, must be compatible with human needs and desires, and
perhaps also sensitive to individual affection and temperaments. As its central focus
is human flourishing as such, virtue ethics may seem unavoidably anthropocentric
and unable to support a genuine moral concern for the non-human environment.
But just as Aristotle has argued that a flourishing human life requires friendships
and one can have genuine friendships only if one genuinely values, loves, respects,
and cares for one’s friends for their own sake, not merely for the benefits that they
may bring to oneself, some have argued that a flourishing human life requires the
moral capacities to value, love, respect, and care for the non-human natural world as
an end in itself (see O’Neill 1992, O’Neill 1993, Barry 1999).
Obligations concerning the natural environment
A. Human Beings

Many of the concerns we have regarding the environment appear to be concerns

precisely because of the way they affect human beings. For example, pollution

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 diminishes our health, resource depletion threatens our standards of living,
climate change puts our homes at risk, the reduction of biodiversity results in
the loss of potential medicines, and the eradication of wilderness means we lose
a source of awe and beauty. Quite simply then, an anthropocentric ethic claims
that we possess obligations to respect the environment for the sake of human
well-being and prosperity.

Some philosophers have founded their environmental ethics on obligations to

future generations. The granting of moral standing to future generations has
been considered necessary because of the fact that many environmental
problems, such as climate change and resource depletion, will affect future
humans much more than they affect present ones. Moreover, it is evident that
the actions and policies that we as contemporary humans undertake will have a
great impact on the well-being of future individuals. (Gewirth, 2001)

However, some philosophers have stated that these future people lie outside of
our moral community because they cannot act reciprocally (Golding, 1972). o,
while we can act so as to benefit them, they can give us nothing in return. This
lack of reciprocity, so the argument goes, denies future people moral status.
However, other philosophers have pointed to the fact that it is usually
considered uncontroversial that we have obligations to the dead, such as
executing their wills and so on, even though they cannot reciprocate (Kavka,
1978). While still others have conceded that although any future generation
cannot do anything for us, it can nevertheless act for the benefit of its own
subsequent generations, thus pointing to the existence of a broader
transgenerational reciprocity (Gewirth, 2001).

However, perhaps we do not have obligations to future people because there is

no definitive group of individuals to whom such obligations are owed. This
argument is not based on the simple fact that future people do not exist yet, but
on the fact that we do not know who they will be. Derek Parfit has called this the
“non-identity problem” (Parfit, 1984, ch. 16). The heart of this problem lies in
the fact that the policies adopted by states directly affect the movement,
education, employment and so on of their citizens. Thus, such policies affect who
meets whom, and who has children with whom. So, one set of policies will lead
to one group of future people, while another set will lead to a different group.
Our actions impact who will exist in the future, making our knowledge of who
they will be incomprehensible.

B. Animals

Peter Singer and Tom Regan are the most famous proponents of the view that
we should extend moral standing to other species of animal. While both develop
quite different animal ethics, their reasons for according moral status to animals
are fairly similar. According to Singer, the criterion for moral standing is
sentience: the capacity to feel pleasure and pain (Singer, 1974). For Regan, on
the other hand, moral standing should be acknowledged in all “subjects-of-a-
life”: that is, those beings with beliefs, desires, perception, memory, emotions, a
sense of future and the ability to initiate action (Regan, 1983/2004, ch. 7). So,
while Regan and Singer give slightly different criteria for moral standing, both
place a premium on a form of consciousness.
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Order and Disorder in the Environment

For Singer, if an entity possesses the relevant type of consciousness, then that
entity should be given equal consideration when we formulate our moral
obligations. Note that the point is not that every sentient being should be
treated equally, but that it should be considered equally. In other words, the
differences between individuals, and thus their different interests, should be
taken into account. Thus, for Singer it would not be wrong to deny pigs the vote,
for obviously pigs have no interest in participating in a democratic society; but it
would be wrong to subordinate pigs’ interest in not suffering, for clearly pigs
have a strong interest in avoiding pain, just like us. Singer then feeds his
principle of equal consideration into a utilitarian ethical framework, whereby
the ultimate moral goal is to bring about the greatest possible satisfaction of
interests.

Tom Regan takes issue with Singer’s utilitarian ethical framework, and uses the
criterion of consciousness to build a “rights-based” theory. For Regan, all entities
who are “subjects-of-a-life” possess “inherent value”. This means that such
entities have a value of their own, irrespective of their good for other beings or
their contribution to some ultimate ethical norm. In effect then, Regan proposes
that there are moral limits to what one can do to a subject-of-a-life. This position
stands in contrast to Singer who feeds all interests into the utilitarian calculus
and bases our moral obligations on what satisfies the greatest number. Thus, in
Singer’s view it might be legitimate to sacrifice the interests of certain
individuals for the sake of the interest-satisfaction of others.

C. Individual Living Organisms

We cannot rely only on intuitions to decide who or what has moral standing. For
this reason, a number of philosophers have come up with arguments to justify
assigning moral standing to individual living organisms. One of the earliest
philosophers to put forward such an argument was Albert Schweitzer.
Schweitzer’s influential “Reverence for Life” ethic claims that all living things
have a “will to live”, and that humans should not interfere with or extinguish this
will (Schweitzer, 1923). But while it is clear that living organisms struggle for
survival, it is simply not true that they “will” to live. This, after all, would require
some kind of conscious experience, which many living things lack. However,
perhaps what Schweitzer was getting at was something like Paul W. Taylor’s
more recent claim that all living things are “teleological centers of life” (Taylor,
1986). For Taylor, this means that living things have a good of their own that
they strive towards, even if they lack awareness of this fact. This good, according
to Taylor, is the full development of an organism’s biological powers. In similar
arguments to Regan’s, Taylor claims that because living organisms have a good
of their own, they have inherent value; that is, value for their own sake,
irrespective of their value to other beings. It is this value that grants individual
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 living organisms moral status, and means that we must take the interests and
needs of such entities into account when formulating our moral obligations.

As several philosophers have pointed out, however, this ethic is still incredibly
demanding. For example, because my interest in having a pretty garden is
nonbasic, and a weed’s interest in survival is basic, I am forbidden from pulling it
out according to Taylor’s ethical framework. For some, this makes the ethic
unreasonably burdensome. No doubt because of these worries, other
philosophers who accord moral standing to all living organisms have taken a
rather different stance. Instead of adopting an egalitarian position on the
interests of living things, they propose a hierarchical framework (Attfield, 1983
and Varner, 1998). Such thinkers point out that moral standing is not the same
as moral significance. So while we could acknowledge that plants have moral
standing, we might nevertheless accord them a much lower significance than
human beings, thus making it easier to justify our use and destruction of them.
Nevertheless, several philosophers remain uneasy about the construction of
such hierarchies and wonder whether it negates the acknowledgement of moral
standing in the first place.

There remain two crucial challenges facing philosophers who attribute moral
standing to individual living organisms that have not yet been addressed. One
challenge comes from the anthropocentric thinkers and animal liberationists.
They deny that “being alive” is a sufficient condition for the possession of moral
standing. For example, while plants may have a biological good, is it really good
of their own? Indeed, there seems to be no sense in which something can be said
to be good or bad from the point of view of the plant itself. And if the plant
doesn’t care about its fate, why should we (Warren, 2000, p. 48)? In response to
this challenge, environmental ethicists have pointed out that conscious volition
of an object or state is not necessary for that object or state to be a good. For
example, consider a cat that needs worming. It is very unlikely that the cat has
any understanding of what worming is, or that he needs worming in order to
remain healthy and fit. However, it makes perfect sense to say that worming is
good for the cat, because it contributes to the cat’s functioning and flourishing.
Similarly, plants and tress may not consciously desire sunlight, water or
nutrition, but each, according to some ethicists, can be said to be good for them
in that they contribute to their biological flourishing.

The second challenge comes from philosophers who question the individualistic
nature of these particular ethics. As mentioned above, these critics do not
believe that an environmental ethic should place such a high premium on
individuals. For many, this individualistic stance negates important ecological
commitments to the interdependence of living things, and the harmony to be
found in natural processes. Moreover, it is alleged that these individualistic
ethics suffer from the same faults as anthropocentric and animal-centered
ethics: they simply cannot account for our real and demanding obligations to
holistic entities such as species and ecosystems.

D. Holistic Entities

While Albert Schweitzer can be regarded as the most prominent philosophical

influence for thinkers who grant moral standing to all individual living things,
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Aldo Leopold is undoubtedly the main influence on those who propose “holistic”
ethics. Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” demands that we stop treating the land as a
mere object or resource. For Leopold, land is not merely soil. Instead, land is a
fountain of energy, flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals. While
food chains conduct the energy upwards from the soil, death and decay returns
the energy back to the soil. Thus, the flow of energy relies on a complex structure
of relations between living things. While evolution gradually changes these
relations, Leopold argues that man’s interventions have been much more violent
and destructive. In order to preserve the relations within the land, Leopold
claims that we must move towards a “land ethic”, thereby granting moral
standing to the land community itself, not just its individual members. This
culminates in Leopold’s famous ethical injunction: “A thing is right when it tends
to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is
wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Marshall’s Categories
Alan Marshall and Michael Smith has categorized the various ways the natural
environment is valued. These are the following:
Libertarian extension
Marshall’s Libertarian extension echoes a civil liberty approach (i.e. a commitment to
extend equal rights to all members of a community). In environmentalism, though,
the community is generally thought to consist of non-humans as well as humans.
Andrew Brennan was an advocate of ecologic humanism (eco-humanism), the
argument that all ontological entities, animate and in-animate, can be given ethical
worth purely on the basis that they exist. The work of Arne Næss and his collaborator
Sessions also falls under the libertarian extension, although they preferred the term
"deep ecology". Deep ecology is the argument for the intrinsic value or inherent
worth of the environment – the view that it is valuable in itself. Their argument,
incidentally, falls under both the libertarian extension and the ecologic extension.
Peter Singer's work can be categorized under Marshall's 'libertarian extension'. He
reasoned that the "expanding circle of moral worth" should be redrawn to include
the rights of non-human animals, and to not do so would be guilty of speciesism.
Singer found it difficult to accept the argument from intrinsic worth of a-biotic or
"non-sentient" (non-conscious) entities, and concluded in his first edition of
"Practical Ethics" that they should not be included in the expanding circle of moral
worth. This approach is essentially then, bio-centric. However, in a later edition of
"Practical Ethics" after the work of Næss and Sessions, Singer admits that, although
unconvinced by deep ecology, the argument from intrinsic value of non-sentient
entities is plausible, but at best problematic. Singer advocated a humanist ethics.
Ecologic extension
Alan Marshall's category of ecologic extension places emphasis not on human rights
but on the recognition of the fundamental interdependence of all biological (and
some abiological) entities and their essential diversity. Whereas Libertarian

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 Extension can be thought of as flowing from a political reflection of the natural world,
ecologic extension is best thought of as a scientific reflection of the natural world.
Ecological Extension is roughly the same classification of Smith's eco-holism, and it
argues for the intrinsic value inherent in collective ecological entities like ecosystems
or the global environment as a whole entity. Holmes Rolston, among others, has
taken this approach.
This category might include James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis; the theory that the
planet earth alters its geo-physiological structure over time in order to ensure the
continuation of an equilibrium of evolving organic and inorganic matter. The planet
is characterized as a unified, holistic entity with ethical worth of which the human
race is of no particular significance in the long run.
Conservation ethics
Marshall's category of 'conservation ethics' is an extension of use-value into the non-
human biological world. It focuses only on the worth of the environment in terms of
its utility or usefulness to humans. It contrasts the intrinsic value ideas of 'deep
ecology', hence is often referred to as 'shallow ecology', and generally argues for the
preservation of the environment on the basis that it has extrinsic value –
instrumental to the welfare of human beings. Conservation is therefore a means to an
end and purely concerned with mankind and inter-generational considerations. It
could be argued that it is this ethic that formed the underlying arguments proposed
by Governments at the Kyoto summit in 1997 and three agreements reached in Rio in
1992.

Anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism is the position that humans are the most important or critical element in
any given situation; that the human race must always be its own primary concern.
Detractors of anthropocentrism argue that the Western tradition biases homo sapiens
when considering the environmental ethics of a situation and that humans evaluate their
environment or other organisms in terms of the utility for them. Many argue that all
environmental studies should include an assessment of the intrinsic value of non-human
beings. In fact, based on this very assumption, a philosophical article has explored recently
the possibility of humans' willing extinction as a gesture toward other beings. The authors
refer to the idea as a thought experiment that should not be understood as a call for action.
What anthropocentric theories do not allow for is the fact that a system of ethics
formulated from a human perspective may not be entirely accurate; humans are not
necessarily the center of reality. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that humans tend
to assess things wrongly in terms of their usefulness to us. Spinoza reasoned that if humans
were to look at things objectively, they would discover that everything in the universe has a
unique value. Likewise, it is possible that a human-centered or
anthropocentric/androcentric ethic is not an accurate depiction of reality, and there is a
bigger picture that humans may or may not be able to understand from a human
perspective.
Peter Vardy distinguished between two types of anthropocentrism. A strong
anthropocentric ethic argues that humans are at the center of reality and it is right for them
to be so. Weak anthropocentrism, however, argues that reality can only be interpreted
from a human point of view, thus humans have to be at the center of reality as they see it.
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Another point of view has been developed by Bryan Norton, who has become one of the
essential actors of environmental ethics by launching environmental pragmatism, now one
of its leading trends. Environmental pragmatism refuses to take a stance in disputes
between defenders of anthropocentrist and non-anthropocentrist ethics. Instead, Norton
distinguishes between strong anthropocentrism and weak-or-extended-
anthropocentrism and argues that the former must underestimate the diversity of
instrumental values humans may derive from the natural world.
A recent view relates anthropocentrism to the future of life. Biotic ethics are based on the
human identity as part of gene/protein organic life whose effective purpose is self-
propagation. This implies a human purpose to secure and propagate life. Humans are
central because only they can secure life beyond the duration of the Sun, possibly for
trillions of eons. Biotic ethics values life itself, as embodied in biological structures and
processes. Humans are special because they can secure the future of life on cosmological
scales. In particular, humans can continue sentient life that enjoys its existence, adding
further motivation to propagate life. Humans can secure the future of life, and this future
can give human existence a cosmic purpose.

References and Supplementary Materials

Online Supplementary Reading Materials
1. The Human Person in their Environment; https://prezi.com/4hz943agtdfz/the-
human-person-in-their-environment/; June 1, 2017
2. Environmental Ethics; https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/environmental-
ethics.php>; June 1, 2017
3. Environmental Ethics; https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-
environmental/#FemEnv; June 1, 2017
4. Environmental Ethics; http://www.iep.utm.edu/envi-eth/; June 1, 2017

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