Relation to others· Morals
Ecocentrism
Axis: Moral circle — To whom do we owe moral consideration?
Moral worth attaches to ecological wholes themselves: species, ecosystems, the biotic community as a whole. An action is right when it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of these wholes, of which individuals, humans included, are but members.
Movements 1
Environmental Ethicsexplicit
The founding gesture of the current is to widen the beyond humans alone, against the tradition's . Where to draw the new boundary divides the family: to every being capable of suffering for , to every being for , to themselves for and . All reject the idea that the human alone counts.
Singer, Animal Liberation (1975) · Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
Philosophers 1
Show inferred positions (1)
Zhuangziinferable
To set the human at the summit of a ladder of beings is for Zhuangzi an illusion of perspective: from the standpoint of the , the pillar and the stalk, the ugly and the beautiful, the human and the worm are equally modes of transformation, and none holds a privilege. This anthropological decentering strips the human of being the measure of all things and inscribes him as one being among myriads, brother to the butterfly he may have dreamed he was. The leaning is decidedly ecocentric, even though Zhuangzi does not formulate, as a modern ecologist would, a duty to protect a whole.
Zhuangzi, ch. 2 (On the Equality of Things) · Zhuangzi, ch. 17 (Autumn Floods)
Argument
- No living thing exists alone: each is what it is only through the whole, soils, waters, plants, animals, on which it depends and which it in turn helps hold together, a biotic community.
- An ethics centered on individuals alone misses this level: it can judge an act toward this animal, not toward a species, a river, an ecosystem, which can flourish or collapse without being sentient individuals.
- Now it is these wholes that carry all individual life: their integrity is the condition of every particular good, and on that ground holds a worth that the sum of individuals does not capture.
Therefore So the human is not the master of nature but a : the ultimate good is the health of that whole, of which every being, humans included, is but a part.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- Ecocentrism places worth in the whole, the integrity of the biotic community, of which individuals are but members.
- But then an individual may be sacrificed whenever it harms the balance: culling en masse the animals of an overabundant species, or even, if the logic holds, treating an overlarge human population as an excess for the 'health' of the whole.
- Yet we hold that the sentient individual, its suffering, its life, counts for itself, and not merely as a cog in a system: treating beings as mere means in the service of the whole offends what is firmest in morality.
Therefore So worth cannot reside in the whole alone: an acceptable ethics must first protect sentient individuals, even if that makes ecological integrity only one major good among others, not the supreme good.
See the page- PrescriptiveMoralThe suffering of wild animals
If the suffering of animals binds us, does the suffering they inflict on one another bind us too? Should we intervene against predation and the ills of nature that we did not cause, or is that to presume it falls to us to correct them?
predation in nature - PrescriptiveMoralThe individual or the whole
Ecology values the integrity of the biotic community, even to culling the animals of an invasive species to preserve the whole: does worth lie in the whole, or in each sentient individual that such management sacrifices?
the biotic community