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The antibiotic

To live is to destroy lives beyond counting: if every life deserves respect, that respect no longer guides any act.

Objects to Biocentrism

1. Biocentrism grants a value of its own to every living thing, sentient or not: the plant, the insect, the bacterium.
2. Yet every day we destroy them by the million: to cure an infection, an antibiotic kills billions of bacteria; walking, farming, building, we crush, uproot, displace. Even a plant-based diet feeds on lives. Schweitzer, a doctor, knew he had to sacrifice some lives to save others.
3. A principle that condemns our every gesture no longer tells anything apart: either it forbids living, or we break it constantly and it becomes a mere formula.

Therefore So respect for all life, taken seriously, is either paralysing or empty: a narrower criterion, such as sentience, is needed for respect to really guide our choices.