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Chapter One: GeneralIntroduction to Ethics

1.1 Definition of Ethics
The term “Ethics” derived from the Greek word ethos which means
character or personal disposition. Ethics is a branch of philosophy that
addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and
evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc. There are
many branches of ethics. The followings are some them.
Meta ethics: investigates where our ethical principles come from, and
what they mean. Are they merely social inventions? Meta ethics
provides justification for ethical statements or for applicability of moral
terms and principles. The aim is to better understand the logical,
semantic and pragmatic structures of ethical argumentation as such, their
origin and meaning. It also examines whether morality exists
independently of humans, and the underlying mental basis of human
judgments and conduct. Meta ethics deals with the questions such as
‘What is the meaning of moral terms or judgments?’, ‘What is the nature
of moral judgments?’, ‘How may moral judgments be supported or
defended?’ Where does morality come from? What does it mean good or
right? Generally, Meta ethics focuses on what morality itself is. Meta
ethics may be thought of as a highly abstract way of thinking
philosophically about morality.
 Normative ethics: takes on a more practical task, which is to
arrive at moral standards that regulate right and wrong conduct. It
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tells us how the world should be. Normative Ethics is also called as
prescriptive ethics. It is the study of ethical theories that prescribe
how people ought to act. It examines standards for the rightness
and wrongness of actions. Normative Ethics offer the moral
principles to use to resolve difficult moral decisions.
 Environmental ethics is a branch of environmental philosophy
concerning non human nature. Environmental Philosophy is the
study of the concepts and principles relating to human interactions
with nature and the natural environment. Moral philosophy from
Socrates to Sartre has always been anthropocentric. Environmental
ethics is revolutionary in departing from a bi-millennial tradition in
moral philosophy that has identified humans exclusively as the
subject matter of ethics.
Environmental ethics is concerned with the issue of responsible personal
conduct with respect to natural landscapes, resources, species and non-
human organisms. Conduct by persons is the direct concern of moral
philosophy. This analysis of moral responsibility explains why
environmental ethics has only recently attracted the attention and
concern of environmentalists and the general public. Until quite recently,
human effects on the environment were regarded as neutral since we
assumed nature was both impersonal and too vast to be injured by our
interventions. At the very least, we were quite unable to foresee the
harm resulting from our dealings with nature. Now of course we know
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better. We know that we can cause massive and permanent damage to

natural landscape, resources and ecosystems. Not only do we know that
we can cause these predicaments, we also know how we can cause them,
and how we can prevent or remedy them. Knowing this exacts a moral
obligation to act with care, foresight and at times, with forbearance and
constraint.
 The field of environmental ethics concerns human beings’
ethical relationship with the natural environment. While
numerous philosophers have written on this topic throughout
history, environmental ethics really is only developed into a
specific philosophical discipline in the 1970s. The reason for
this emergence was no doubt due to the increasing awareness
in the 1960s of the effects that technology, industry,
economic expansion and population growth were having on
the environment. The development of such awareness was
aided by the publication at this time of two important books.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, first published in 1962,
alerted readers to how the widespread use of chemical
pesticides was posing a serious threat to public health and
was also leading to the destruction of wildlife. Of similar
significance was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population
Bomb, which warned of the devastating effects on the
planet’s resources of a spiraling human population. Of
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course, pollution and the depletion of natural resources have

not been the only environmental concerns since that time:
dwindling plant and animal biodiversity, the loss of
wilderness, the degradation of ecosystems, and climate
change are all part of a raft of ‘green’ issues that have
implanted themselves into both public consciousness and
public policy over subsequent years. The job of
environmental ethics is to outline our moral obligations in the
face of such concerns.
 In nutshell, the two fundamental questions that
environmental ethics must address are: what duties do
humans have with respect to the environment, and why?
The latter question usually needs to be considered prior to the
former. In order to tackle just what our obligations are, it is
usually thought necessary to consider first why we have
them. For example, do we have environmental obligations for
the sake of human beings living in the world today, for
humans living in the future, or for the of entities within the
environment itself, irrespective of any human benefits? Why
care about nature for itself when only people matter? When
species or landscapes or wilderness areas are destroyed,
what, of value, is lost to mankind? Will future generations
miss what we have ‘taken from them’? Does land ownership
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make moral sense, or is it a morally absurd and repugnant

concept in Western culture meant to deprive Indigenous
peoples of their customary land? Do human beings have a
need for nature that implies an obligation to preserve it?
Different philosophers have given quite different answers to
these fundamental questions which have led to the emergence
of quite different environmental ethics.
 Applied Ethics is a branch of ethics that deals with difficult
moral questions and controversial moral issues that people
actually face in their lives.
Applied ethics is a branch of ethics which consists of the analysis of
specific, controversial moral issues such as abortion, animal right,
euthanasia, homosexuality/lesbianism, bestiality, fornication (sex
outside marriage), prostitution, polygamy versus monogamy,
contraceptive or family planning, affirmative action, capital
punishment, pornography, gun control etc. In recent years applied
ethical issues have been subdivided into convenient groups such as
medical ethics, business ethics, environmental ethics, development
ethics and sexual ethics.
 Generally speaking, two features are necessary for an issue to be
considered as an applied ethical issue. First, the issue needs to be
controversial in the sense that there are significant groups of
people both for and against the issue at hand.
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The second requirement for an issue to be an applied ethical issue is

that it must be a distinctly moral issue. On any given day, the media
presents us with an array of sensitive issues such as affirmative action
policies, gays in the military, involuntary commitment of the mentally
impaired, capitalistic versus socialistic business practices, public versus
private health care systems or energy conservation. Although all of these
issues are controversial and have an important impact on society, they
are not all moral issues. Some are only issues of social policy. The aim
of social policy is to help make a given society run efficiently by
devising conventions, such traffic laws, tax laws, zoning codes.
Moral issues, by contrast, concern more universally obligatory practices,
such as our duty to avoid lying, and are not confined to individual
societies. Frequently, issues of social policy and morality overlap, as
with murder which is socially prohibited and immoral. However, the two
groups of issues are distinct. For example, many people would argue that
sexual promiscuity is immoral, but may not feel that there should be
social policies regulating sexual conduct, laws punishing us for
promiscuity.
Biomedical ethics focuses on a range of issues which arise in clinical
settings. Health care workers are in an unusual position of continually
dealing with life and death situations. It is not surprising, then, that
medical issues are more extreme and diverse than other areas of applied
ethics. Prenatal issues arise about the morality of surrogate mothering,
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genetic manipulation of fetuses, the status of unused frozen embryos,

and abortion. Other issues arise about patient rights and physician’s
responsibilities, such as the confidentiality of the patient’s records and
the physician’s responsibility to tell the truth to dying person.
Additional issues concern medical experimentation on humans, the
morality of involuntary commitment, and the rights of the mentally
disabled. Finally, end of life issues arise about the morality of suicide,
the justifiably of suicide intervention, physician assisted suicide, and
euthanasia.
1.2 Normative principles in applied Ethics
“Applied ethics” has proved difficult to define, but the following is a
widely accepted account: Applied ethics is the application of general
ethical theories to moral problems with the objective of solving the
problems. However, this definition is so narrow that many will not
recognize is as reflecting their understanding of either the appropriate
method or content. “Applied ethics” is also used more broadly to refer to
any use of philosophical methods critically to examine practical moral
decisions and to treat moral problems, practices, and policies in the
professions, technology, government, and the like. This broader usage
permits a range of philosophical methods (including conceptual analysis,
reflective equilibrium, phenomenology, etc.) and does not insist on
problem solving as the objective.
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Arriving at a short list of representative normative principles is itself a

challenging task. The principles selected must not be too narrowly
focused, such as a version of act-egoism that might focus only on an
action’s short-term benefit. The principles must also be seen as having
merit by people on both sides of an applied ethical issue. For this reason,
principles that appeal to duty, to God are not usually cited since this
would have no impact on a non believer engaged in the debate. The
following principles are the most commonly appealed to in applied
ethical discussions.
In theory, resolving particular applied ethical issues should be easy.
With the issue of abortion, for example, we should determine simply its
morality by consulting our normative principle of choice, such as act-
utilitarianism. If a given abortion produces greater benefit than the dis
benefit, then, according to act-utilitarianism, it would be morally
acceptable to have the abortion. Unfortunately, there are perhaps
hundreds of rival normative principles from which to choose, many of
which yield opposite conclusions. Thus, the stalemate in normative
ethics between conflicting theories presents us from using a single
decisive procedure for determining the morality of a specific issue. The
usual solution today to this stalemate is to consult several representative
normative principles on a given issue and see where the weight of the
evidence lies.
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 Personal benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action

produces beneficial consequences for the individual in question.
 Social benefit: acknowledge the extent to which an action
produces beneficial consequences for society.
 Principle of benevolence: help those in need.
 Principle of paternalism: assist others in pursuing their best
interests when they cannot do so themselves.
 Principle of harm: do not harm others.
 Principle of honesty: do not deceive others.
 Principle of lawfulness: do not violate the law.
 Principle of autonomy: acknowledge a person’s freedom over
his/her actions or physical body.
 Principle of justice: acknowledge a person’s right to due process,
fair compensation for harm done, and fair distribution of benefits.
 Right: acknowledge a person’s rights to life, information, privacy,
free expression, and safety.
The above principles represent a spectrum of traditional normative
principles and are derived from both sensationalist and duty-based
approaches. The first two principles, personal benefit and social benefit,
are sensationalist since they appeal to the consequences of an action as it
affects the individual or society. The remaining principles are duty-
based. The principles of benevolence, paternalism, harm, honesty, and
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lawfulness are based on duties we have toward others. The principles of

autonomy, justice, and the various rights are based on moral rights.
 Development Ethics critically questions the very nature of
development and of its declared goals. Development ethics is
concerned with the justifying aims of development, specific issues
such as disputes on criteria of human well-being and its
improvement. It examines normative and value questions around
the analysis of competing models of the good life, the just society,
economic systems, theories of human need, strategies for social
change. Although the aforementioned branches of ethics are our
major concerns in this course, there other branches ethics such as
professional ethics, science ethics, legal ethics, Medical ethics etc.
 Business ethics examines moral controversies relating to the social
responsibilities of capitalist business practices, the moral status of
corporate entities, deceptive advertising, insider trading, basic
employee rights, job discrimination, affirmative action, drug
testing, and whistle blowing.
Issues in environmental ethics, often overlaps with business and medical
issues. These include the rights of animals, the morality of animal
experimentation, preserving endangered species, pollution control,
management of environmental resources, whether eco-systems are
entitled to direct moral consideration, and our obligation to future
generations.
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Chapter Two: Development Ethics

2.1 Definition of Development
Development theory is a collective vision of theories about how
desirable change in society is achieved. Previously development had
been universally understood as a process, a set of actions, and an
outcome; not as a concept. After the 2nd World War “development” has
become the most widely used term with a wide spread tendency to
associate something positive, desirable with the word development.
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Interest in development issues and conceptions is recent origin, dating

back not much earlier than the 1950s and early 1960s. Since the mid
1950’s the notion of development as something positive has been tied to
third world countries. Parallel to the decolonisation of Africa and Asia,
the social condition of these countries increasingly became the object of
international attention. Different scholars perceive that the existence of
mass poverty in the third world countries is the lack of development and
under development. Therefore, they tried to associate development with
the LDCs of Asia and Africa.
Generally, even though there is no consensus on what the subject of
development tries to cover different definitions was forwarded by
different scholars like.
1. Development refers to the social reproduction and transformation
process of the developing countries, in conjunction with the international
factors that influence these processes.
2. It refers to a set of discourse formulated in the process of efforts to
understand social, cultural and political characteristics of societies as
well as to explore how societies change over space and time.
3. Development refers to an attempt to answer the question “Why the
poor countries are poor?”
 Amartya Sen (1999) has argued for an even broader concept of
development from freedom perspective. He looks development as
an integrated process of expansion of substantive freedoms.
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Economic growth, technological advance and political change

are all to be judged in the light of their contributions to the
expansion of human freedoms. Among all, the most important,
freedom from famine & malnutrition, freedom from poverty,
access to health care and freedom from premature mortality are
mainly considered. Sen put empirical example that shows, Urban
African Americans have lower life expectancies than the average
Chinese person or inhabitants of the Indian state of Kerala, in spite
of much higher average per capita incomes in the USA. From this,
it is possible to say that Sen has noted development is unavoidably
a normative concept involving very basic choices and values.
Theorizing development has been started since the conceptions begun
during the 2nd half of the 19th C that laid down a fertile ground for
development studies. Though there are a number o fdifferent theories in
the field of development discourse we will focus on the following:
1. Modernization Theory (1950s, early 1960s)
2. Structuralism
3. Dependency Theories (late 1960's, early 1970's)
4. Sustainable Development Theory (Late 1980’s)
5. Human development
Development theories as a whole give emphasis on understanding the
gap between poor and rich and looks for explanation of under
development. They also address spatial variation of world development
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(rich in the north and poor in the south). However, different

development theories may have different definitions and approaches to
development processes, thus need to consider the following:
 the development concept is multi-faceted and it is difficult to talk
about one all-encompassing concept
 regional political changes
 qualitative and quantitative dimensions of environmental changes
 long term and short term societal changes related to development
2.1.1. Modernization theory
It was the 1st attempt to articulate the problem of development in terms
of the need to transform the backward or “traditional” nature of third
world economies into “modern” economies. Drawing from the historical
experience of the Western Europe after the 2 nd World War, it advocated
the need for accelerated economic growth through an import substitution
form of industrialisation, investment and foreign aid. According to
modernity, policies intended to raise the standard of living of the poor
often consist of disseminating knowledge and information about more
efficient techniques of production - Agriculture. The West desired to
change Africa’s development course in favour of theirs, and then tasked
themselves with the responsibility of developing Africa along a new
course. However, many agreed that economic development based on
modernisation theories failed to bring about the much hoped for rapid
growth, dynamic industrial sectors, the expansion of modern wage
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economy and the alleviation of the impoverished rural subsistence

sectors.
Modernization theorists, depending on their focus, reached various
conclusions. To some, the problem of the third world was a mere
shortage of capital; development required a rise in the savings rate. To
others, it was a question of values, such as the profit motive, that would
make them entrepreneurial. In this case development required
westernizing elites, or some kind of education in capitalist values. Yet
whether from a sociological, political, or economic standpoint,
modernization theorists generally concurred one important point:
underdevelopment was an initial state. The west had progressed beyond
it, but other countries lagged behind. However, the west could help
speed up the process of development in the third world for instance, by
sharing its capital and how to bring these countries into the modern age
of capitalism and liberal capitalism. Modernization is the opposite of
traditionalism, involves a conservative connotation and ‘modernism’ a
positive connotation. Here, ‘development’ means economic growth.
Underdevelopment is a result of endogenous factors. And
‘development has to be initiated from outside. This implies of social,
political-institutional, cultural and technological modernization.
Modernization theories try to transfer Western development experience,
which, they believe, would produce successful societies in the current
developing countries.
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Criticism of ModernizationTheory
According to Scott (1996), modernization theory was ethnocentric,
euro-centric, and deterministic, which failed to make a distinction
between countries, regions & structural conditions. Modernization
theory was unable to predict effects and outcomes, and simplification of
the social and political change that accompanies the development
process. It entirely ignores the socio-cultural variables & the major
targets (poor).It ignored external (exogenous) causes of poverty and
under development and it blames the victim themselves for their
poverty. Modernization theory puts industrial revolution as
preconditions for development.Industrial revolutions and economic
growth in turn can cause environmental degradation. It denigrates
traditional societies as ‘non-modern’ because of their misinterpretation
of ‘lower’ or ‘other’ form of development. It does not consider
exogenous factors of underdevelopment.
2.1.2.Structuralism
Structuralism is a development theory which focuses on structural
aspects which impede the economic growth of developing countries.
The unit of analysis is the transformation of a country’s economy
from, mainly, subsistence to a modern, urbanized manufacturing and
service economy. Policy prescriptions resulting from structuralism
thinking include major government intervention in the economy to fuel
the industrial sector, known as import substitution industrialization
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(ISI).This structural transformation of the developing country is pursued

in order to create an economy which in the end enjoys self-sustaining
growth. This can only be reached by ending the reliance of the
underdeveloped country on exports of primary goods (agricultural
and mining products), and pursuing inward-oriented development
by shielding the domestic economy from that of the developed
economies. Trade with advanced economies is minimized through the
erection of all kinds of trade barriers and an overvaluation of the
domestic exchange rate; in this way the production of domestic
substitutes of formerly imported industrial products is encouraged.
Proponents of Structuralism argue that the only way Third World
countries can develop is through action by the state. The government
must protect the infant industry from external competition. Third world
countries have to push industrialization and have to reduce their
dependency on trade with the First World, and trade among themselves.
The roots of structuralism lie inSouthAmerica, and particularly Chile. In
1950, Raul Prebisch went to Chile to become the first director of the
Economic Commission for Latin America. Patterns of development
theorists view increased savings and investment as necessary but not
sufficient for economic development. In addition to capital
accumulation, transformation of production, composition of demand,
and changes in socio-economic factors are all important. In nutshell, the
Prebisch-Singer thesis was that over time, Third world Countries would
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have to exportmore of their primary commodities just to maintain their

levels of imports from the first world. If they wanted to increase their
imports, they would have to increase their exports even more.
Criticism of structuralism Theory: The market incentives that
imposed discipline on firm managers and encouraged producers to
increase output were not always provided by the state.
Imperialism in most developing countries took place during the period
of feudalism, not capitalism, so it could not have been first-world
capitalism that underdeveloped this part of the world. Playing the blame
for third-world underdevelopment on the drain of resources to the
imperial countries probably overstates the role of the colonies played in
Europe’s development.
2.1.3. Dependency Theory
The theory of dependency and underdevelopment (Frank, 1966)
criticizes modernisation development practices and their effects. It
argues that the imperialist global economy continues to function and
international economic inequalities are persisting or being exacerbated,
despite the fact that this is a post-colonial era for most developing
countries. It is mainly concerned with the impact of imperialism and
neo-colonialism on the social and economic development of least
developed countries, focusing on two central ideas:
1. The problem of exploitation of the poor nations by rich ones (2) the
extraction of surplus from the backward regions. Proponents of
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dependency theory criticize the universalism inherent in the

modernisation model, which assumes what has worked for the
developed countries is the correct path for the undeveloped.
Underdevelopment, the exacerbation of poverty and international
economic disparities, is seen as a result of capitalist development.
The problem of increasing poverty is too much development rather
than too little. Both underdevelopment and development are aspects
of the same phenomenon, are historically simultaneous, linked
functionally and therefore, interact and condition each other
mutually. This result the division of world into industrial, advanced,
central, underdeveloped, backward, or peripheral countries (Samuel
and Arturo, 2006). During the 1970s, international-dependence
theory gained increasing support, especially among the developing
countries intellectuals as a result of growing disenchant with both the
stages and structural-change models. The IDR models reject the
exclusive emphasis on GNP growth rate as the principal index of
development. Instead they place emphasis on international power
balances and on fundamental reforms world-wide. International
dependency revolution (IDR) models view developing countries as
beset by institutional, political, and economic rigidities in both
domestic and international setup. The International dependency
revolution models argue that developing countries are up in a
dependence and dominance relationship with rich countries.
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There are three major streams of thought regarding dependency

theory: the Neo colonial dependence, the false paradigm model and
the dualistic development thesis.
Neo colonial Dependence Model
The first major stream which we call the neo colonial dependence model
is an indirect outgrowth of Marxist thinking. It attributes the existence
and continuance of underdevelopment primarily to the historical
evolution of a highly unequal international capitalist system of rich
country-poor country relationships. Whether because rich nations are
intentionally exploitative or unintentionally neglected, the coexistence of
rich and poor nations in an international system dominated by such
unequal power relationships between the center (the developed
countries) and Periphery (the LDCS) renders attempts by poor nations to
be self reliant and independent difficult and sometimes even impossible.
According to this model Dependence is a conditioning situation in which
the economies of one group of countries are conditioned by the
development and expansion of others.
The False-Paradigm Model
A second and less radical international dependence approach to
development is which we call the False-Paradigm model attributes under
development to the faulty and inappropriate advice provided by well-
meaning but biased and ethnocentric international “expert advisers”
from developed countries assistance agencies and multinational donor
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organizations. The policy prescriptions serve the vested interests of

existing power groups, both domestic and international.
The Dualistic- Development Thesis
Dualism represents the existence and persistence of increasing
divergences between rich and poor nations and rich and poor peoples at
all levels. The concept embraces four key arguments:
1. Superior and inferior conditions can coexist in a given space
at given time.
2. The coexistence is chronic and not transitional. It is not due
to a temporary phenomenon, in which case time could
eliminate the discrepancy between superior and inferior
elements. In other words, the international coexistence of
wealth and poverty is not simply a historical phenomenon
that will be rectifiedintime.
3. Not only do the degrees of superiority or inferiority fail to
show any signs of diminishing, they even have an inherent
tendency to increase. Or the degrees of the conditions have
an inherent tendency to increase.
4. Superior conditions serve to “develop under development.”
Criticism to Dependancy Theory
There are many theoretical problems of dependency theory. The
followings are some of them.
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1. Dependency analysis cannot give a fully fledged formal theory of

development and underdevelopment, because it doesn’t work
fortoday’sworld.
2. It fails tointerrogate the applicability of externally imposed top down
approach development     initiatives.
3. The theory gave too much emphasis on the problem of exchange
rather than on production problems.
4. The theory lacks internalconsistency because it deals both
development & under development
5. Dependency is not always bad for LDCs. It must be mutually
beneficial to both LDCs and DCs
6. The theory seems to be too descriptive, which was the back ground
for the emergence of Wold system theory.
7. The theory has not provided any viable solution to overcome
dependency.
8. Actual experience of developing countries that have pursued policy of
autarky/closed economy has been negative. Trade barriers could increase
the cost of living for citizens.
2.1.4. The Neoclassical Counterrevolution (Neo liberalist theory)
Before we discuss the new classical Counterrevolution, it is worth
discussing Classicaleconomics theory. The pursuit of economic growth
and development as a socially desirable goal is contemporaneous with
the rise of capitalism as an economic system (and with the emergence of
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the industrial revolution). Two objectives of classicalpolitical

economists in economic inquiry are: (1) to explain the reasons for rapid
economic expansion of total economic wealth that accompanied
industrialization. (2) To explaintheenigma (puzzle) of the extreme of
wealth and poverty that attended this process. The classical political
economists are Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and John
Stuart Mill. The classical theory assumed that capitalism represented the
highest achievement of human development and it was a “natural order.”
Adam Smith (1776) analyzes the newly emerging economic system:
capitalism or the market economy. He likens its operation to the
“invisiblehand”. Basic tenets of Capitalist production that fosters
Growth and Development according to Smith are competition ,division
of labor, technological progress, free trade and the law of capital
accumulation.
Having discussed classical economic political theory, it is time to
discuss the neoclassical counterrevolution or market fundamentalism
model or theory.
In the 1980s the political ascendancy of conservative in the United
States, Canada, Britain and West Germany brought a neoclassical
counterrevolution in economic theory and policy. In developed nations
this counterrevolution favored supply-side macroeconomic policies and
the privatization of public corporations. In developing countries it called
for freer markets and dismantlingpublicownership and government
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regulation of economic activities. Neo classicalists obtained controlling

votes on the World’s two most powerful international financial agencies-
the World Bank and the International Financial Monetary Fund. The
central argument of the neo classical counterrevolution is that
underdevelopmentresults from poorresourceallocation due to incorrect
pricing policies and too much state intervention by overly active
developing nation governments.
Generally, neoclassical counterrevolution promotes free markets,
privatizing public firms, free trade, liberalizing exchange, encourage
foreign direct investment (FDI), reward savings, reduce government
spending & monetary expansion, deregulation ,Property rights remove
price distortions & regulations.
Four component approaches of neo liberalism:
 Free-market analysis- markets alone are efficient.
 Public-choice theory- governments can do nothing right
 Market- friendly approach- governments have a key role to
play in facilitating operations of markets through
nonselective interventions
 New institutionalism- success or failure of developmental
efforts depend upon the nature, existence, and functioning of
a country’s fundamental institutions.
Criticism of neoclassicism
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Neoclassicism concerned with operation of markets, not with how

markets develop or with policies to induce development. Neo
classicalism theory benefits few at expense of many, rich relative to
poor.Its assumption of perfect competition, technological change
exogenous (outside model), same technology throughout world, does not
incorporate decisions by people, firms, & governments. Neoclassical
model is poor in predicting convergence doesn’t take place.
2.1.5. Sustainable Development (late 1980’s)
In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development
made the link between environment and development issues and
promoted the use of the term sustainable development, in its report, Our
Common Future byBrundtland. By the 1980s growing awareness of
global inequality and environmental degradation led to the setting up of
the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED)
sometimes called the Brundtland Commission; developed sustainable
development as an integrating concept.
Sustainable development is emerged as "the integration of population,
resources, environment and development in four aspects: stabilising
population; reducing migration; avoiding of core exploitation; &
supporting long term sustainable resource management.
Sustainable development is defined as “Development that meets the
needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of
future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987)
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It also defined as "Improving the quality of life while living within the
earth's carrying capacities” (WWF, 1991). The report also claimed that
"sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and
growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the
ecosystem."
More recently the interpretations of the term sustainable development
have been broadened to include issues such as poverty, health care, and
education.
The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development (2002,)
stated that: “poverty eradication, changing consumption and production
patterns, and protecting and managing the natural resource base for
economic and social development are overarching objectives of, and
essential requirements for sustainable development."
Why We need Sustainable Development?
There is a growing consensus that current forms of development are not
sustainable (World Resources Institute). Sustainable development looks
at issues of equality - 80% of the world's resources are used by 20% of
the world's population. Sustainable development is important as it takes
into account equity (social justice) and environment, as well as
economic factors, in order to ensure a more balanced form of
development.
Specific features of Sustainable Development
 27

As what works in one community may not work in another or may work
for different reasons, SD includes flexibility, diversity & stability
(ecologic, economic, socio- cultural), consideration of unintended
consequences (change is the norm, not the exception); and notions of
enoughness and reversibility.
Core Issues of Sustainable Development are the following:
• Environment-natural resources, thier threats driving forces /hot
spots/ & challenges
• Sustainable Livelihood Security& its factors
• Energy, sources and associated consequences
• Industry and its impact on economic, social development and the
environment

2.1.6. Human Development

Amartya Sen, an Indian philosopher and economist focusing on human
welfare, he has a Noble prize for his work on famine and poverty is one
of advocate of human development.
Development cannot be achieved through economic improvement alone.
Multiple dimensions (e.g. social, cultural, and political) need to be taken
into account. Development means individuals have freedom to make life
choices. For human development theorists, ‘development’ takes human
welfare into account. They assess development on an individual (not a
national) scale. Human development theorists/thinkers believe that
 28

everyone is equally entitled to a good life. According to Sen, all human

beings have livelihood assets, which they can use to make choices. For
Amartya Sen, Livelihood assets are not limited to things of financial
value, but also include things of human, physical, social and natural
value. To Sen financial capital includes: wages, savings, pensions and
remittances. Human capital includes: education, knowledge, skills and
health. Physical capital includes: transport, communications, technology
and energy. Social capital includes: representatives, friends, neighbors
and leaders and Natural capital includes: land, water, minerals and
wildlife.
In 1980, Sen gave in Stanford University the tanner lectures on human
values called “Equality of what?” He questioned the adequacy of
measuring equality in the space of marginal or utility, or primary goods.
And he outlined for the first time his conception of capabilities. The key
idea of the capability approach is that social arrangements should aim to
expand people’s capabilities –their freedom to promote or achieve
valuable beings and doings. An essential test of development is whether
people have greater freedoms today than they did in the past. Sen defines
freedom as the real opportunity that we have to accomplish what we
value. Freedom, he argues, has two aspects: opportunity and process.
The opportunity aspect pays attention to the ability of a person to
achieve those things that he/she has reason to value, and the process
aspects pays attention to the freedom involved in the process itself. The
 29

notion of capability refers to the opportunity aspect of freedom, while

the notion of agency, which is explained below, refers to the personal
process of freedom.
Agency: one of the core concepts of the capability approach is agency.
Agency refers to a person’s ability to pursue and realize goals that she
values and has reason to value. An agent is someone who acts and brings
about change. Agency is related to other approaches that stress self-
determination, authentic self-direction, autonomy, self-reliance, self-
determination, empowerment, voice and so on. The strong collective
desire for agency suggests that development processes should foster
participation, public debate and democratic practice.
Human development is a process of enlarging people’s choices. The
most critical ones are to lead a long and healthy life, to be educated and
to enjoy a decent standard of living.
The term humandevelopmenthere denotes both the processof widening
people’s choices and the levelof their achieved well-being. It also helps
to distinguish clearly between two sides of human development. One is
the formation of human capabilities, such as improved health or
knowledge. The other is the use that people make of their acquired
capabilities, for work or leisure.
Human development is, moreover, concerned not only with basic needs
satisfaction but also with human development as a participatory and
 30

dynamic process. It applies equally to less developed and highly

developed countries.
The 1991 human development report argued that the real objective of
development is to increase people’s choices. However it added two
interesting turns. First, in addressing growth, it argued that to advance
human development growth ought to be “participatory, distributed well
and sustainable. Second, it presented and developed the proposition that,
“It has to be development ofthe people, bythe people, forthe people.
The process of widening people’s choices and the level of well-being
they achieve are at the core of the notion of human development. Such
choices are neither finite nor static.
But regardless of the level of development, the three essential choices
for people are to lead along and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and
to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living.
Human development does not end there, however.
Human development…is about creating an environment in which people
can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in
accord with their needs and interests.
People are the real wealth of nations. Indeed, the basic purpose of
development is to enlarge human freedoms. The range of capabilities
that individuals can have, and the choices that can help to expand them,
are potentially infinite and vary by individual. However, public policy is
about setting priorities, and two criteria are helpful in identifying the
 31

most important capabilities for assessing meaningful global progress in

achieving human well-being. First, these capabilities must be
universallyvalued. Second, they must be basictolife, in the sense that
their absence would foreclose many other choices. This implies that
human development is about freedom. It is about building human
capabilities—the range of things that people can do, and what they can
be. Individual freedoms and rights matter a great deal, but people are
restricted in what they can do with that freedom if they are poor, ill,
illiterate, discriminated against, threatened by violent conflict or denied
a political voice.
AccordingtoMahbubulHaq, the basic purpose of development is to
enlarge people’s choices. In principle, these choices can be infinite and
can change over time. People often value achievements that do not show
up at all, or not immediately, in income or growth figures: greater
access to knowledge, better nutrition and health services, more secure
livelihoods, security against crime and physical violence, satisfying
leisure hours, political and cultural freedoms and a sense of participation
in community activities. To Haq, the objective of development is to
create an enabling environment for people to enjoy long, healthy and
creative lives.
On some aspects of the human development paradigm, there fairly broad
agreement:
 Development must put people at centre of its concern.
 32

 The purpose of development is to enlarge all human choices and

not just income.
 The human development paradigm is concerned both with building
human capabilities (through investment in people) and with using
those human capabilities more fully (through an enabling
framework for and employment). It regards economic growth as
essential, but emphasizes the need to pay attention to its quality
and distribution, analyses at length its link with human lives and
questions its long-term sustainability.
 The human development paradigm defines the ends of
development and analysis sensible options for achieving them.
Human development contains core principles that relate to various
dimensions of the development process. Four of these were mentioned
by Mahbubul Haq and have been used repeatedly in applying human
development. They are: equity, efficiency, participation and
sustainability. Of course other principles-like responsibility or respect
for human rights-also matter. But these four are considered central:
Equity refers to the concept of justice, impartiality and fairness and
incorporates the idea of distributive justice, particularly in terms of
access to opportunities and out comes to all human beings. It is related
to, but different from, the concept of equality, which implies equal
treatment of all people.
 33

Efficiency: The attention paid to distributive justice however is not at

the expense of efficiency in the system. Efficiency is conventionally
defined as the optimal use of existing resources. From a human
development perspective, efficiency is defined as the least cost method
of reaching goals through optimal use of human, material and
institutional resources to maximize opportunities for individuals and
communities.
Participation and empowerment: is about processes that lead people to
perceive themselves as being entitled to make life decisions. It is about
the freedom to make decisions in matters that affect their lives. Whether
at the level of policy-making or implementation, this principle implies
that people need to be involved at every stage, not merely as
beneficiaries but agents who are able to pursue and realize goals that
they value and have reason to value.
Sustainability: is often used when referring to the environment but is
not confined to this dimension alone. It refers to sustainability in all
spheres, social, political and financial. Environmental sustainability
implies achieving developmental results without jeopardizing the natural
resource base and biodiversity of the region and without affecting the
resource base for future generations. Financial sustainability refers to the
way in which development is financed without having to run into a
deficit. Specifically, development should not lead countries into debt
traps. Social sustainability refers to the way in which social groups and
 34

other institutions are involved in ensuring participation and involvement

by avoiding disruptive and destructive elements. Cultural liberty and
respect for diversity are also important values that can contribute to
socially-sustainable development.
Weakness of Human development theories are: (1) People can live
fulfilled lives without completely free choices. (2) People can have free
choices but still live in poverty. (3) Free choice can focus on individual
needs, not those of society or collective groups.
2.2 Definition and Origins of Development Ethics
For many years development has been perceived as a straightforward
economic issue. Orthodox economists, policy makers, governors,
interregional organizations and so on, confront the problem of
underdevelopment in an instrumental and administrational way. History
has shown that this functional approach cannot provide answers to the
issue of development. Development ethics aspires to show the road
towards a new development paradigm that investigates development in
light of fundamental ancient ethical queries on the meaning of the good
life, the foundation of justice in society and the human stance towards
nature. The study of development ethics attempts to discuss and codify
the aforementioned ethical queries borrowing scientific instruments from
economists, political studies, anthropologists, environmental scientists
and others. Thus it can be characterized as an interdisciplinary area. To
this effort, the contribution of Denis Goulet is distinctive. He offers the
 35

conceptual frame and gives the dimensions of a relatively new field of

study.
During the 20th century, for many economists development was viewed
as a conventional problem of economic growth in terms of the increase
of material goods. The technological expansion, the boost of the
production, the sense that people could overcome nature, led many
economists, government officials and planners to an engineering
approach to the concept of development. Development was perceived as
an absolutely measureable matter, as a synonymous of economic
growth- the variation of GDP for instance. Ethical inquiries on the
concept of development were viewed mostly as an affair for
philosophers and humanists than economists. Regarding the debate
within ethics and economics, Robbins (1945, p.148) asserts that
unfortunately it does not seem logically possible to associate the two
studies in any form but mere juxtaposition. Economics deal with
ascertainable facts; ethics with valuations and obligations. The two
fields of enquiry are not on the same plane of discourse. Robbins
expresses the vein in economic study that perceives economics as a
science which takes place after the elucidation of moral and ethical
propositions.
On the other hand, there are those that advocate the coexistence of
ethical justifications and humanistic ideas with rational economic
methodology. This includes the discussion between means and ends in
 36

human development. Hardison and Myers underline that “there need be

no conflict between the economists and the humanists…The
development of man for himself may still be considered the ultimate end
but economic progress can also be one of the principal means of
attaining.”
The contribution of Amartya Sen is crucial to the introduction of ethical
justifications and humanistic approach to social sciences, economics as
well as development studies. Sen is one of the central figures having an
influence to the equity issue within theories of justice. He also
contributes to the ethical affairs by perceiving the expansion of freedom
as both the primary end and the principal means of development.
It would be unfair not to underline that in contemporary economic
thought, development is broadly defined as economic growth plus social
change. A strong supporter of this approach to development is the
United Nations which speaks for economic and social development.
Developmental ethics comes to fill the gap in the ethical study of
development byaholistic, defined in a macro level, normative and
practical way. According to Nigel Dower, former president of
International Development Ethics Association (IDEA), “international
development ethics is the ethical reflection on the ends and means of
local, national and global development. From the perspective, Crocker
defines development ethics as an ethical deliberation on the ends and
means of socioeconomic changes in poor countries and regions and
 37

mainly focuses on the element of poverty and the division between rich
and poor countries- North and South- under moral issues. Gasper states
as an “interdisciplinary” meeting place.”Goulet describes it as a kind of
‘disciplined eclecticism’, as he argues “eclectic in its choice of subject
matter but disciplined in its study of it”.
Regarding its origins, development ethics can be characterized as a
relatively new field of study. Even though the ethical question of
whatisgoodlife and the term ‘eudemonia’- a synonymous of happiness-
trace back to ancient Greek philosophers and particularly to Aristotle’s
‘Nicomachean Ethics, the cultivation of moralandethical issues
regarding development studies and the formulation of development
ethics such as came to the front with the rise of an economic and
humanistic movement in 1950s. This humanistic approach of the
economy and society is theoretically represented by the French
economist Louis Joseph Lebret and his student American Denis Goulet
and defines development as the basic question of values and the creation
of a new civilization.
Generally, ethical judgments regarding the good life, the good society,
and the quality of relations among people always serve, directly or
indirectly, as operational criteria for development planners and as
guidelines for researchers. Development ethics borrows freely from the
work of economists, political scientists, agronomists, and specialists of
other disciplines. Ethics places each discipline’s concept of development
 38

in abroad evaluative framework where development ultimately means

the quality of life and the progress of societies toward values expressed
in various cultures. How development is pursued is no less important
that what benefits are gained. Although development can be fruitfully
studied as an economic, political, technological, or social phenomenon,
its ultimate goals are those of existence itself: to provide all humans with
the opportunity to live full humans lives. Thus understood, development
is the ascent of all persons and societies in their total humanity.
2.2.1. Development Ethics: A New Discipline
In new and ever-changing settings development poses ancient
philosophical questions: what is the good life (the relation between
having goods and being good), what are the foundations of life in
society, and what stance should human groups adopt toward nature?
Development provides one particular answer to these questions. Merely
to engage in applied ethics, however, is tantamount to harnessing ethics
in instrumental fashion to the uncritical pursuit of development. Yet it is
the very goals of modern development and the peculiar answer it offers
to the ancient philosophical questions that are themselves at issue.
In formulating the new discipline of development ethics, its practitioners
have traveled two separate roads. The first road runs from engagement
as a planners or change agents in development practice to the systematic
articulation of formal ethical strategies. The second path originates in an
internal philosophical critique of conventional ethical theory as a
 39

historical and far removed from reality, as ethnocentric. These critical

philosophers move outward to the elaboration of a distinctive ethics of
development as normative praxis. Their preferred methodology is
analytical, subjecting language and concepts to rigorous tests on criteria
of justice, efficiency and solidarity. Both modes of doing development
ethics go beyond instrumental application to a reformulation of ethical
theory itself, this in accord with the inner exigencies of the development
problematic leads, not only to new applications, but to new theoretical
formulations as well.
The discipline of development is, in Lebret’s words, the study of how to
achieve a more human economy. The expressions ‘more human’ and
‘less human’ must be understood in the light of vital distinction between
to have more and to be more. Societies are more human or more
developed, not when men and women have more but they are enabled to
be more. The true indicator of development is not increased production
or material well-being but qualitative human enrichment. Quantitative
increases in goods and services are doubtless needed, but not any kind of
increase nor growth obtained at any price.
2.2.2. Denis Goulet’s Contribution to Development Ethics
Denis Goulet could be considered the father of development ethics a self
conscious area of study. His contribution to the interdisciplinary area of
development ethics has been significant by presenting a long distance
tribute. Goulet poses a conceptual frame of an ethical conflict in the
 40

process of development and his contribution to the study of development

is not only normative but also practical. He offers a comprehensive
analysis of development, from an ethical view, by formulating general
principles in almost all relevant aspects of development: technology for
development, ecology and ethics, culture and tradition, the ethic of aid,
etc. From this angle, development is perceived as many aspects
conjointly, “Simultaneously and inextricably an economic and political
matter, a social and cultural one, a question of civilization”.
More precisely, according to Goulet, three ancient ethical questions
should be incorporated in the ethical concept of development: 1) “what
is the good life?” concerning the discussion around the relation of
having goods and being good. 2) “What are the foundations of justice in
society?” 3) “What stance should human groups adopt towards nature?”
In his leading book entitle The Crude Choice: A new Concept in Theory
of Development Goulet identifies three development goals, namely, life
sustenance, esteem, and freedom, and demonstrates three ethical
strategies across the development effort, those of, a) universal solidarity,
b) abundance of goods as a perquisite to people’s humanness, and
populace representation to the matters of public interest and people’s
control over their destiny.
According to Gasper “ well before Sen , Haq and Nussbaum, Goulet
advocated that authentic development aims toward the realization of
human capabilities in all spheres and economic growth and
 41

technological modernity must be treated as, at best, potential means

towards considered human values , not vice versa.” In Goulet work, the
meaning of development is given by the phrase ‘ human ascent’ which
encompasses “ the ascent of all men in their integral humanity including
the economic, biological, psychological, social, cultural, ideological,
spiritual, mystical, and transcendental dimensions”.
A second influential precursor of development ethics was L.J. Lebret,
founder in 1941 of the Economy and Humanism movement created to
study economic problems as human problems. Underdevelopment, in his
view, is not primarily an economic problem, nor simply the inability of
social structures to meet new demands issuing from hitherto passive
populations. Above all else, underdevelopment is a symptom of a
worldwide crisis in human values; accordingly, development’s task is to
create, in a world of chronic inequality and disequilibrium, new
civilizations of solidarity. Lebret designated such creation the human
ascent, ascent in all spheres of life-economic, political, personal, and
spiritual. It requires new patterns of solidarity that respect differences
and do not posit easy shortcuts to the elimination of privilege and
domination. For Lebret underdevelopment bears witness to the
bankruptcy of the world’s economic, social, political, and educational
systems. Although rational resource planning, judicious investment, new
institutions, and the mobilization of the populace are necessary to
achieve development, such measure can never be sufficient. To Lebret, it
 42

seemed evident that underdevelopment is a byproduct of the distorted

achievements of those societies that incorrectly label themselves
developed. He argued that satisfying an abundance of false needs at the
expense of keeping multitudes in misery can never constitute authentic
development. Lebret distinguished three categories of needs:
 Essential subsistence needs (food, clothing, housing, health care,
and the like
 Needs related to comfort and amenities that make life
easier( transportation , leisure, labor-saving devices, pleasant
surroundings, and so on);
 Needs related to human fulfillment or transcendence, whose
satisfaction confers heightened value on human lives
(cultural improvement, deeper spiritual life, enriching
friendships, loving relationships, rewarding social
intercourse, and so on). These may also be called
enhancement goods; they enhance human societies
qualitatively and find their expression in cultural or spiritual
achievement.
2.2.3. Ethical Goals of Development
For development ethicists, development is perceived as a relative good
which is subordinated to the meaning of life. Each society gives answers
to the fundamental inquire of what is good life? And what is the good
society? In a distinct and unique way which is chiefly determined by the
 43

value system wherein any society has adopted. Goulet stresses the
importance of the dynamic of value change in determining what is to be
defined as the ‘good life’ and the ‘good society’. In his words,
“development is above all a question of values”. Despite the fact that
development is a relative good in terms of value issues, Goulet argues
that there are three common acceptable universal values, namely 1) life-
sustenance 2) esteem 3) freedom that societies and individuals ought to
investigate within a value based context of the “the good life”. These
universal accepted values compose the ethical goals of development.
1. Life-sustenance refers to the nature of. Goulet points out that one
of development’s most important goals is to prolong men’s lives
and render those men less stunted by disease, extreme exposure to
nature’s elements, and defenselessness against enemies. The
importance of life sustaining goods (e.g. food, shelter, healing or
medicine) is generally acknowledged by all societies. Because of
life sustenance as a value of universal significance, life-sustaining
indices are also used as a measurement of development.
2. Esteem: all human beings in all societies feel the necessity for
respect, dignity, honor, and recognition. The discussion involves
esteem values and material propensity, and, particularly, how
esteem contends with development (in a sense of high rate of
welling- being, economical and technological advance).
 44

3. Freedom is valuated both from developed and non developed

societies as one of the components of the “good life”.
Development ought to free humans from all servitudes. Even
though there is a vast philosophical discussion on the term and the
claim that freedom is enhanced by development is not self evident,
freedom is widely accepted as something beneficial and desirable.
The debate lies again between and material well-being. In a
consumer society it can be accepted that the degree of freedom
rises by material expansion, and thus constitutes an increase of
well-being. On the other hand, in traditional societies, the value
system may adopt completely different confrontation over needs
and wants. In any case, the point is that the matter of opinion is
freedom. Furthermore, in the discussion over freedom, a
significant distinction should be made between freedom from
wants and freedom for wants. The former refers to the situation
where human needs are adequately met, while the latter to the case
where gestations of new wants are controlled and individuals
possess multiplied wants.
2.2.5. Ethical Strategies of Development
In development ethics, strategic principles are normative judgments
which provide both the notional and practical framework under within
which development goals should be discussed and policy
 45

recommendations over those goals ought to be formulated. Accordingly,

three ethical strategic are targeted.
1. The abundance of goods in a sense that people need to have enough in
order to be more. In order to understand the notion of this principle, it
becomes necessary to take into account the ontological nature of human
beings. In an ontological sense, almost all organisms must go outside of
them in order to be perfect. Only fully perfect beings would have no
needs at all. Humans are imperfect to such a degree that “men have
needs because their existence is rich enough to be capable of
development, but poor to realize all potentialities at one time or with
their resources…at any given time man is less than he can become and
what he can become depends largely on what he can have. Hence, men
need ‘to have enough’ goods in order to be human. This must be
investigated under the notion of a humanistic approach on how much is
‘enough’ for people in order to have a ‘good life’. With regard to the
strategic principle of the abundance of goods, three distinctive points are
noteworthy. First, all individuals need to have ‘enough’ goods in order
to realize themselves as human beings. Second, enough is not an
absolutely relative measure but it can be defined in an objective basis.
Third, both underdevelopment situations and superfluous wealth lead to
dehumanization of life.
2. Universal solidarity: concerns an ontological and philosophical issue.
It can be distinctive in three points. First, all people be in agreement that
 46

beyond difference (in nationality, race, culture, status etc.) a common

humanness is present. Second, the earth as a cosmic body is governed by
identical laws (physical roles) and all men dwell on this planet. Humans
share a common occupation of the planet. In spite of differences in
geography or climate, all humans are linked directly or indirectly with
other people due to the fact of cohabitation into this cosmic body. The
third component of the universal solidarity is derived by the all humans’
unity to destiny.
3. Participation: theories of participation possess an important issue in
the study of development. In general, the elite theory ( e.g. Burnham
1960; Putnan 1977; Bottomore1993) claims that decision making into a
society concerns a job for specialists in each particular field of life. Elite
theory is made in a basis of competence that leads an alleged efficiency
within a society. For development ethics, participation is a matter for
discussion. In Goulet’s words, participation is best conceptualized as a
kind of moral incentive enabling hitherto excluded non-elites to
negotiate new packages of material incentives benefiting them. Even
though development ethicists espouse that different kinds of
development require different forms of participation, they argue that
non-elite participation in decision-making enables people to mobilize
and gives them control over their social destiny.
2.2.6. The Concept of Authentic Development
 47

This puts forth the concept of authentic development and distinguishes it

from the conventional notion of development or otherwise to the way
that for many years the developed nations deal with the problem of
underdevelopment. The adjective ‘authentic’ is used by Goulet to endow
the term ‘development’ with all those traits that development should
entail in order to be sustainable and human.
Authentic development refers to the means and ends of human action, or
in other words, to the vision of a better life and the way that this life can
be accessed. As it is previously mentioned, development ought to
respond to long-standing philosophical inquires concerning the meaning
of the good life, the foundation of justice in society and within societies
towards nature. According to Goulet providing satisfactory conceptual
and institutional answers to these three questions is what constitutes
authentic development.
For all people and any society in the world, authentic development ought
to cover at least three objective aims that correspond to the
aforementioned goals of development a) to pursue more and better life-
sustaining goods for all human beings, b) to create and improve the
conditions that nurture the sense of esteem of individuals and societies,
and c) to release humans from all forms of servitude (to nature, to others
people, to institutions, to beliefs.
Any concept of human fulfillment is highly relative and as Goulet points
out, development can be examined as a dialectical process. Development
 48

goals are usually interactive and no range exists among life protection,
esteem and freedom. The essential point is that authentic development
should not judge the aforementioned goals (as is conventionally the
case) but these goals must become the criteria which authentic
development itself must be judged. In this mode, grading a nation high
economic growth does not mean that it has followed an authentic
development pattern. No authentic development can be achieved if
massive consumption leads societies to an entirely material way of
living emphasizing the notion of ‘have’ instead of ‘be’; if structural
relations between nations and within them (among classes and
individuals) are competitive and there is not equal distribution of
development proceeds; if the exploitation of material resources leads to
the destruction of ecological balance, if technological advantages are
used to abolish freedom.
Authentic development, namely sustainability and human development
is at the center of discussion for the last decades. In an effort to define it,
during the progress of a seminar entitled “Ethical issues in development”
that took place at the city of Colombo in Sri Lanka in 1986 it is agreed
that any definition of development should take into account at least the
following six conceptual propositions:
1. Economic component, related with wealth, material life conditions
(amenities), and their equal distribution of them.
 49

2. Social ingredient, connected with social goods as health, housing,

education, employment etc.
3. Political dimensions, in a sense of protection of human rights and
political freedom.
4. Cultural elements, with accord to the cultures cultivate people’s
indemnity and self-esteem.
5. Ecological soundness, to promote a type of development that respects
natural resources and forces for the restoration of the environment.
6. System of meaning which, which refers to the way that a society
perceives beliefs, symbols and values concerning the historical
process and the meaning of life.
The aforementioned conceptual elements might reflect a consensus on
what Goulet calls authentic development. Important element not fully
described within the above analysis relate to issues of ethical value
relatively and popular participation where overlap the notion of
development. With respect to the first issue, societal value systems are
threatened by changes and social change is one the main components of
development. If we accept that development affects values of society
and vice versa, the concept of existence rationality should investigated.
However, what does this strange phrase mean? According to Goulet,
existence rationality defined as the process by which a society devices a
conscious strategy for obtaining its goals, given its ability to process
information and the constrain weighting upon it. In other words,
 50

existence rationality is considered to be the value system that exists in

any society and determines the course of action undertaken to serve
societal aims. The core value of existence rationality is to be concerned
of the provision of those ingredients that ensure what any society defines
as the good life. Thus, any change should be integrated in the principle
of existence rationality determined by each society.

Chapter Three: Anthropocentrism

 51

3.1. Definition of Anthropocentrism

Different philosophers have given quite different answers to these
fundamental questions which have led to the emergence of quite
different environmental ethics. As noted in chapter two, perhaps the
most fundamental question that must be asked when regarding a
particular environmental ethic is simply, what obligations we have
concerning the natural environment? If the answer is simply what we as
human beings will perish if we do not constrain our actions towards
nature, then that ethic is considered to be anthropocentric.
Anthropocentrism literally means human-centeredness. After all, as far
as we know, only human beings can reason about and reflect upon
ethical matters, thus giving all moral debate a definite human-
centeredness. However, within environmental ethics anthropocentrism
usually means something more than this. It is usually refers to an ethical
framework that grants moral standing solely to human beings. Thus, an
anthropocentric ethic claims that only human beings are morally
considerable in their own right, meaning that all the direct moral
obligations we possess, including those we have with regard to the
environment, are owed to our fellow human beings.
While the history of western philosophy is dominated by this
anthropocentrism, it has come under considerable attack from many
environmental ethicists. Such thinkers have claimed that ethics must be
extended beyond humanity, and that moral standing should be accorded
 52

to the non-human natural world. Some have claimed that this extension
should run to sentient animals, others to individual living organisms, and
still others to holistic entities such as rivers, species and ecosystems.
Under these ethics, we have obligations in respect of the environment
because we actually owe things to the creatures or entities within the
environment themselves. Determining whether our environmental
obligations are founded on anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric
reasoning will lead to different accounts of what those obligations are.
The critique of anthropocentric assumptions and moral judgments and
their supplementation with non anthropocentric (i.e., biocentric or
ecocentric) commitments have driven much environmental ethical
theorizing since the academic founding of the field in the 1970s. The
critique of anthropocentrism, however, is not seen as a purely
intellectual task by environmental philosophers. Most theorists identify
the militantly and exclusively anthropocentric world view as the root
cause of environmental problems such as species extinction, the loss of
natural areas and wilderness, and the general decline of environmental
quality. As a consequence, the rejection of anthropocentrism has become
the hallmark of environmental ethics since the 1980s, although not all
environmental philosophers believe that an exclusively anthropocentric
orientation necessarily leads to the destruction of wild species and
ecosystems. For these dissenting voices in the field, a sufficiently
reformed and enlightened anthropocentrism not only is capable of
 53

motivating a strong, effective environmental ethic, it is defensible as a

superior approach to moral, ontological, and policy questions. With
global climate change eclipsing all other environmental concerns,
anthropocentrism became ascendant in environmental ethics early in the
twenty-first century. Philosophically, anthropocentrism may be
understood in ethical, ontological, and epistemological terms. As an
ethical view anthropocentrism refers to the explicitly stated or implied
claim that only human beings have intrinsic value; all other natural
beings and things have only instrumental value, and human interests thus
always trump the interests of nonhumans and the environment. This is
an evaluative and priority judgment that many non anthropocentric
philosophers believe reflects an arbitrary bias. As an ontological view,
anthropocentrism refers to the position, sometimes identified as
Aristotelian or Thomistic, in which humans are seen as the center of the
universe or the ends of creation. Typically, environmental philosophers
conflate the ontological and ethical positions in their critiques as well as
in their positive non anthropocentric proposals even though, as Tim
Hayward (1998) pointed out, ethical anthropocentrism does not
necessarily entail ontological anthropocentrism and vice versa. Indeed,
most secular anthropocentric environmental philosophers, such as Bryan
Norton and Andrew Light, are not ontological anthropocentrists,
publicly accepting an evolutionary account of human origins in which
Homo sapiens is not regarded as an ontologically privileged species.
 54

However, many self-identifying Christian, Jewish, and Islamic

anthropocentric environmental philosophers are both ontological and
ethical anthropocentrists, grounding the latter type of anthropocentrism
in the former. As an epistemological view, anthropocentrism is
tautological: All human values are human values, including the intrinsic
value that ethical non anthropocentrists ascribe to nature. Thus, no
ethical non anthropocentrist can be a self-consistent non
anthropocentrist, although this truism often is overlooked or denied in
the heat of the anthropocentrism non-anthropocentrism debate.
Terminologically, anthropocentrism sometimes is confused with related
words that crop up in discussions about the human-nature relationship,
especially the terms anthropomorphism and anthropogenic. The first
term refers to the practice of ascribing uniquely human attributes to
nonhuman beings or entities (e.g., the human traits given to the animal
characters in the Disney film Bambi and in Kenneth Grahame’s book
The Wind in the Willows). The second term simply means ‘‘human
caused’’ rather than produced by natural forces, as in anthropogenic
climate change.
Anthropocentrism as it is commonly understood in environmental ethics
and philosophy refers to the view in which nonhuman nature is valued
primarily for its satisfaction of human preferences and/or contribution to
broader human values and interests. Another way to put this is that in the
anthropocentric worldview, individual plants and animals, populations,
 55

biotic communities, and ecosystems are accorded only instrumental, not

intrinsic, value.
3.2 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AS
ANTIANTHROPOCENTRISM
One of the most significant influences on the rise of the anti-
anthropocentric agenda in environmental ethics has been the 1967 essay
‘‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’’ by the historian Lynn
White, Jr., in the magazine Science. White’s article proved controversial
mostly because of its harsh assessment of the environmental ethic
embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. According to White, the
creation account in Genesis placed humans in a superior ontological
position: Man was created separately from the rest of Creation, and heal
one was given ‘‘dominion’’ over the creatures of the earth and
commanded to ‘‘subdue’’ them and the earth. White’s ‘‘despotic’’
reading of Genesis therefore emphasized the divine sanction of human
control and mastery over nature. Furthermore, his provocative remark
that except for Zoroastrianism , Christianity is ‘‘the most
anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen’’ drove home the point
that the human centered outlook of the dominant Western religion was
ultimately responsible for overpopulation, species loss, air and water
pollution, and other environmental ills. Such dilemmas were ultimately
the product of deep cultural and religious beliefs about the proper place
of humans on the earth, White concluded, and only a rethinking of the
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‘‘axioms’’ of Western culture (i.e., an interrogation and rejection of

ontological anthropocentrism) would enable humans to adopt a more
harmonious relationship with the natural world. White’s argument,
especially his identification of anthropocentrism as the cause of the
ecological crisis, had a strong influence on the work of environmental
ethicists in the subsequent decades. Indeed, non anthropocentric
environmental philosophers have focused most of their attention since
the appearance of White’s paper on discrediting both ontological and
ethical anthropocentrism as a philosophical attitude toward nature and
constructing an alternative worldview and ethical system that would
recognize the intrinsic as well as the instrumental value of nature. Many
in the field presumably would agree with the non anthropocentric
philosopher J. Baird Callicott, who observed that White’s essay is the
‘‘seminal paper in environmental ethics’’ and that after its publication in
the late 1960s the ‘‘agenda for a future environmental philosophy thus
was set’’. The anti-anthropocentric (and pro-non anthropocentric)
movement in academic environmental ethics received an early boost in
1973 when Richard Routley (later Sylvan) published the first essay on
environmental ethics by an academic philosopher, ‘‘Is There a Need for
a New, an Environmental Ethic?’’ in 1973. Just as White attacked
primarily ontological anthropocentrism, Routley attacked primarily
ethical anthropocentrism. Routley presented his well-known ‘‘last man’’
thought experiment, which became a kind of ethical litmus test
 57

separating ethical anthropocentrists from non anthropcentrists. It was

also an exercise that, at least in Routley’s and many non
anthropocentrists’ view, exposed the failure of conventional
anthropocentric ethical systems (e.g., utilitarianism, deontological
ethics) to account for environmental harm, especially harm to non
sentient parts of the environment.
Routley claimed that according to the traditional moral principles of the
European and North American philosophical tradition, the last man
surviving the collapse of the world system would be committing no
wrong if he set about destroying every species of animal and plant on the
earth that he could. Because only humans (or the satisfaction of human
preferences or the fulfillment of human interests) have intrinsic value in
traditional Western ethics and no other human is left to be harmed (or
have his or her preferences frustrated or interests adversely affected) by
the actions of the last man, that man’s destructive actions would not run
afoul of conventional ethical codes. In other words, if the last man goes
about destroying all nonhuman life on the planet, Western moral
philosophy provides no good reason why such wanton destruction could
be deemed wrong. To Routley’s mind, and similar to White’s arguments
about the Judeo-Christian tradition, standard Western ethical theory
reflects a clear ‘‘human chauvinism.’’ Routley was thus able to answer
the question posed in his essay’s title: A new ethics is needed if people
want to be able to condemn individuals and communities morally for
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driving species to extinction and despoiling natural areas. In addition to

a thorough rejection of ontological anthropocentrism, a critique of
ethical anthropocentrism—with its exclusive emphasis on human
preferences and well-being—is called for, along with the mounting of a
non anthropocentric complement. Although a strong strain of both
ontological and ethical non anthropocentrism took hold in environmental
ethics after the early essays of White and Routley and became the
dominant approach in the field in the last quarter of the twentieth
century, not all environmental philosophers were convinced that a new
‘‘nature-centered’’ ethic was necessary. John Passmore’s Man’s
Responsibility for Nature (1974), published a year after Routley’s paper,
was the first book-length treatment of environmental ethics and is
significant in part for its rejection of the emerging view that traditional
Western philosophical thought is adequate for the resolution of
environmental problems. The established (anthropocentric) ethical
tradition, Passmore claimed, with its sensitivity to the consequences of
human actions and its array of moral principles directing the promotion
of genuine and enduring human interests (i.e., those beyond immediate
physical and material enjoyment), had far more ethical resources at its
disposal than the new environmental ‘‘mystics’’ and ‘‘primitivists’’
understood or appreciated. Among other things, Passmore’s early work
in the field suggested that environmental ethics might not be
synonymous with non anthropocentrism.
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3.3 WEAK ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL

PRAGMATISM
Passmore’s denial of the need to inject non anthropocentric principles
into the ethical discussion of human nature relations would gain further
play in the field over the ensuing decades. In the 1980s the philosopher
Bryan Norton introduced to the discussion what he termed weak
anthropocentrism, a broadly humanistic project that distinguished
between strong anthropocentrism and a weaker (i.e., less consumptive)
variant of instrumentalism. In Norton’s project human contact with
nature (e.g., outdoor recreation, environmental education, and
ecotourism) could prompt individuals to question their own and others’
ecologically irrational commitments and shape normative ideals
affirming human harmony with the environment. Although a strong
anthropocentrist would regard the biological richness of a forest as little
more than a store house of raw materials to be harvested and measured
only in commercial terms, in Norton’s view a weak anthropocentrist
would value that landscape differently, recognizing its present and future
beauty, cultural expressiveness, therapeutic and recreational value, and
ability to inspire individuals and communities to care for and protect
nature. The philosopher Eugene Hargrove (1992) also proposed a
version of weak anthropocentrism, though it differed from Norton’s in a
 60

critical respect. Like Norton, Hargrove acknowledged that

environmental value necessarily originates from a human valuer. In
effect, Hargrove brought attention to epistemological anthropocentrism
and to its logical necessity. Unlike Norton’s weak anthropocentrism,
however, Hargrove’s version included recognition of the intrinsic value
of natural objects. Grounding his approach in the naturalistic traditions
of nineteenth century landscape painting and field naturalism, Hargrove
wrote that people may ascribe intrinsic value to the elements of nature
they judge to be beautiful or scientifically interesting—just as one might
ascribe intrinsic value to a priceless work of art such as the Mona Lisa—
even though that ascription is made from a distinctly human point of
view and is intimately related to a complex suite of human values
(Hargrove 1989).The anthropocentric approach in environmental ethics
received a boost with the emergence of environmental pragmatism in the
mid-1990s, a philosophical movement drawing from both the substance
and the spirit of classical American philosophy, particularly the work of
Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John
Dewey, who adamantly opposed the notion of intrinsic value whether
ascribed to nature or to anything else. Ben Minteer (2001), however, has
argued that Dewey did recognize a form of non instrumental value (if
not exactly intrinsic or final value) in his overall logic of moral inquiry.
Pragmatists in environmental ethics for the most part retain the
anthropocentric orientation of the historical American pragmatists and
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endorse a broad instrumentalism in which non human nature is valued

for its contribution to a wide range of human interests, such as those
described above in Norton’s work. Many environmental pragmatists
argue that this reformed or liberal anthropocentrism not only is a more
philosophically sound approach to environmental ethics but has greater
political and policy appeal inasmuch as most people are unreflectively
anthropocentric—indeed, many are unreflectively egocentric and
ethnocentric—regarding the value of nature and its direct and indirect
uses, including non consumptive ones, exclusively in terms of human
interests.
3.4 Human Beings and Anthropocentric Ethic
Quite simply then, an anthropocentric ethic claims that we possess
obligations to respect the environment for the sake of human well-being
and prosperity. Despite their human-centeredness, anthropocentric
environmental ethics have nevertheless played a part in the extension of
moral standing. This extension has not been to the non-human natural
world though, but instead to human beings who do not yet exist. 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 weas contemporary humans undertake will have
a great impact on the well-being of future individuals. In light of these
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facts, some philosophers have founded their environmental ethics on

obligations to these future generations.
Of course, it is one thing to saythat human beings in the future have
moral standing, it is quite another to justifythe position. Indeed, some
philosophers have denied such standing to future people, claiming that
they lie outside of our moral community because they cannot act
reciprocally. So, 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. 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 broader transgenerational reciprocity.
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’. 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.
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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. Since there is no definitive set of future people to
receive the benefits or costs of our actions, to whom do we grant moral
standing? Secondly, and of particular importance for environmental
ethics, how could any future people legitimately complain that they have
been wronged by our environmentally destructive policies? For if we
had not conducted such policies, they would not even exist.
In response to the non-identity problem, it has been argued that while we
do not know exactly who will exist in the future, we do know that some
group of people will exist and that they will have interests. In light of
this, perhaps our obligations lie with these interests, rather than the
future individuals themselves. As for the second aspect of the problem,
we might claim that although future generations will benefit from our
environmentally destructive policies by their very existence, they will
nevertheless have been harmed. After all, cannot one be harmed by a
particular action even if one benefits overall? To illustrate this point,
James Woodward gives the example of a racist airline refusing to allow
a black man on a flight that subsequently crashes. Isn’t this man harmed
by the airline, even though he benefits overall?
Even if we do decide to grant moral standing to future human beings,
however, that still leaves the problem of deciding just what obligations
 64

we have to them. One set of difficulties relates to our ignorance of who

they are. For not only do we lack information about the identity of future
people, but we neither have knowledge of their conceptions of a good
life, nor what technological advances they may have made. For example,
why bother preserving rare species of animal or oil reserves if humans in
the future receive no satisfaction from the diversity of life and have
developed some alternative fuel source? Our ignorance of such matters
makes it very difficult to flesh out the content of our obligations.
By way of reply to such problems, some philosophers have argued that
while we do not know everything about future people, we can make
some reasonable assumptions. For example, Brian Barry has argued that
in order to pursue their idea of the good life - whatever that happens to
be - future people will have need of some basic resources, such as food,
water, minimum health and so on. Barry thus argues that our obligations
lie with ensuring that we do not prevent future generations from meeting
their basic needs. This, in turn, forces us to consider and appropriately
revise our levels of pollution, resource depletion, and climate change
and population growth. While this might seem a rather conservative
ethic to some, it is worth pointing out that at no time in humanity’s
history have the needs of contemporariesbeen met, let alone those of
future people. This unfortunate fact points to a further problem that all
future-oriented anthropocentric environmental ethics must face. Just
how are the needs and interests of the currentgeneration to be weighed
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against the needs and interests of those human beings in the future? Can
we justifiably let present people go without for the sake of future
humans?
Clearly then, the problems posed by just a minimal extension of moral
standing are real and difficult. Despite this, however, most
environmental philosophers feel that such anthropocentric ethics do not
go far enough, and want to extend moral standing beyond humanity.
Only by doing this, such thinkers argue, can we get the beyond narrow
and selfish interests of humans, and treat the environment and its
inhabitants with the respect they deserve.
3.5 Anthropocentrism and Animal rights
3.5.1 Extending Moral Standing
An anthropocentric ethic claims that only human beings are morally
considerable in their own right, meaning that all the direct moral
obligations we possess, including those we have with regard to the
environment, are owed to our fellow human beings. While the history of
western philosophy is dominated by this kind anthropocentrism, it has
come under considerable attack from many environmental ethicists.
Such thinkers have claimed that ethics must be extended beyond
humanity, and that moral standing should be accorded to the non-human
natural world. Some have claimed that this extension should run to
sentient animals, others to individual living organisms, and still others to
holistic entities such as rivers, species and ecosystems. This section
 66

examines the prominent accounts of moral standing within

environmental ethics, together with the implications of each.
3.5.2 Indirect Theories
On indirect theories, animals do not warrant our moral concern on their
own, but may warrant concern only in so far as they are appropriately
related to human beings. The various kinds of indirect theories to be
discussed are Worldview/Religious Theories, Kantian Theories,
Cartesian Theories, and Contractualist Theories. The implications these
sorts of theories have for the proper treatment of animals will be
explored after that. Finally, two common methods of arguing against
indirect theories will be discussed.
a. Worldview/Religious Theories
Some philosophers deny that animals warrant direct moral concern due
to religious or philosophical theories of the nature of the world and the
proper place of its inhabitants. One of the earliest and clearest
expressions of this kind of view comes to us from Aristotle (384-322
B.C.E.). According to Aristotle, there is a natural hierarchy of living
beings. The different levels are determined by the abilities present in the
beings due to their natures. While plants, animals, and human beings are
all capable of taking in nutrition and growing, only animals and human
beings are capable of conscious experience. This means that plants,
being inferior to animals and human beings, have the function of serving
the needs of animals and human beings. Likewise, human beings are
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superior to animals because human beings have the capacity for using
reason to guide their conduct, while animals lack this ability and must
instead rely on instinct. It follows, therefore, that the function of animals
is to serve the needs of human beings.
Following Aristotle, the Christian philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274) argues that since only beings that are rational are capable of
determining their actions, they are the only beings towards which we
should extend concern "for their own sakes" (Regan and Singer, 1989: 6-
12). Aquinas believes that if a being cannot direct its own actions then
others must do so; these sorts of beings are merely instruments.
Instruments exist for the sake of people that use them, not for their own
sake. Since animals cannot direct their own actions, they are merely
instruments and exist for the sake of the human beings that direct their
actions. Aquinas believes that his view follows from the fact that God is
the last end of the universe, and that it is only by using the human
intellect that one can gain knowledge and understanding of God. Since
only human beings are capable of achieving this final end, all other
beings exist for the sake of human beings and their achievement of this
final end of the universe.
Remnants of these sorts of views remain in justifications for discounting
the interests of animals on the basis of the food chain. On this line of
thought, if one kind of being regularly eats another kind of being, then
the first is said to be higher on the food chain. If one being is higher than
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another on the food chain, then it is natural for that being to use the other
in the furtherance of its interests. Since this sort of behavior is natural, it
does not require any further moral justification.
b. Kantian Theories
Closely related to Worldview/Religious theories are theories such as
Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804). Kant developed a highly influential
moral theory according to which autonomy is a necessary property to be
the kind of being whose interests are to count directly in the moral
assessment of actions (Kant, 1983, 1956). According to Kant, morally
permissible actions are those actions that could be willed by all rational
individuals in the circumstances. The important part of his conception
for the moral status of animals is his reliance on the notion of willing.
While both animals and human beings have desires that can compel
them to action, only human beings are capable of standing back from
their desires and choosing which course of action to take. This ability is
manifested by our wills. Since animals lack this ability, they lack a will,
and therefore are not autonomous. According to Kant, the only thing
with any intrinsic value is a good will. Since animals have no wills at all,
they cannot have good wills; they therefore do not have any intrinsic
value.
Kant's theory goes beyond the Worldview/Religious theories by relying
on more general philosophical arguments about the nature of morality.
Rather than simply relying on the fact that it is "natural" for rational and
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autonomous beings to use non-rational beings as they see fit, Kant

instead provides an argument for the relevance of rationality and
autonomy. A theory is a Kantian theory, then, if it provides an account
of the properties that human beings have and animals’ lack that warrants
our according human beings a very strong moral status while denying
animals any kind of moral status at all. Kant's own theory focused on the
value of autonomy; other Kantian theories focus on such properties as
being a moral agent, being able to exist in a reciprocal relation with
other human beings, being able to speak, or being self-aware.
c. Cartesian Theories
Another reason to deny that animals deserve direct concern arises from
the belief that animals are not conscious, and therefore have no interests
or well-being to take into consideration when considering the effects of
our actions. Someone that holds this position might agree that if animals
were conscious then we would be required to consider their interests to
be directly relevant to the assessment of actions that affect them.
However, since they lack welfare, there is nothing to take directly into
account when acting.
One of the clearest and most forceful denials of animal consciousness is
developed by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who argues that animals are
automata that might act as if they are conscious, but really are not so.
Writing during the time when a mechanistic view of the natural world
was replacing the Aristotelian conception, Descartes believed that all of
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animal behavior could be explained in purely mechanistic terms, and

that no reference to conscious episodes was required for such an
explanation. Relying on the principle of parsimony in scientific
explanation (commonly referred to as Occam's Razor) Descartes
preferred to explain animal behavior by relying on the simplest possible
explanation of their behavior. Since it is possible to explain animal
behavior without reference to inner episodes of awareness, doing so is
simpler than relying on the assumption that animals are conscious, and is
therefore the preferred explanation.
Descartes anticipates the response that his reasoning, if applicable to
animal behavior, should apply equally well to human behavior. The
mechanistic explanation of behavior does not apply to human beings,
according to Descartes, for two reasons. First, human beings are capable
of complex and novel behavior. This behavior is not the result of simple
responses to stimuli, but is instead the result of our reasoning about the
world as we perceive it. Second, human beings are capable of the kind of
speech that expresses thoughts. Descartes was aware that some animals
make sounds that might be thought to constitute speech, such as a
parrot's "request" for food, but argued that these utterances are mere
mechanically induced behaviors. Only human beings can engage in the
kind of speech that is spontaneous and expresses thoughts.
Descartes' position on these matters was largely influenced by his
philosophy of mind and ontology. According to Descartes, there are two
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mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive kinds of entities or properties:

material or physical entities on the one hand, and mental entities on the
other. Although all people are closely associated with physical bodies,
they are not identical with their bodies. Rather, they are identical with
their souls, or the immaterial, mental substance that constitutes their
consciousness. Descartes believed that both the complexity of human
behavior and human speech requires the positing of such an immaterial
substance in order to be explained. However, animal behavior does not
require this kind of assumption; besides, Descartes argued, it is more
probable that worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically than
that they all have immortal souls.
More recently, arguments against animal consciousness have been
resurfacing. One method of arguing against the claim that animals are
conscious is to point to the flaws of arguments purporting to claim that
animals are conscious. For example, Peter Harrison has recently argued
that the Argument from Analogy, one of the most common arguments
for the claim that animals are conscious, is hopelessly flawed. The
Argument from Analogy relies on the similarities between animals and
human beings in order to support the claim that animals are conscious.
The similarities usually cited by proponents of this argument are
similarities in behavior, similarities in physical structures, and
similarities in relative positions on the evolutionary scale. In other
words, both human beings and animals respond in the same way when
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confronted with "pain stimuli"; both animals and human beings have
brains, nerves, neurons, endorphins, and other structures; and both
human beings and animals are relatively close to each other on the
evolutionary scale. Since they are similar to each other in these ways, we
have good reason to believe that animals are conscious, just as are
human beings.
Harrison attacks these points one by one. He points out that so-called
pain-behavior is neither necessary nor sufficient for the experience of
pain. It is not necessary because the best policy in some instances might
be to not show that you are in pain. It is not sufficient since amoebas
engage in pain behavior, but we do not believe that they can feel pain.
Likewise, we could easily program robots to engage in pain-behavior,
but we would not conclude that they feel pain. The similarity of animal
and human physical structures is inconclusive because we have no idea
how, or even if, the physical structure of human beings gives rise to
experiences in the first place. Evolutionary considerations are not
conclusive either, because it is only pain behavior, and not the
experience of pain itself, that would be advantageous in the struggle for
survival. Harrison concludes that since the strongest argument for the
claim that animals are conscious fails, we should not believe that they
are conscious.
Problems with Indirect Duties to Animals
 73

Another argument against indirect theories begins with the intuition that
there are some things that simply cannot be done to animals. For
example, I am not permitted to torture my own cat for fun, even if no
one else finds out about it. This intuition is one that any acceptable
moral theory must be able to accommodate. The argument against
indirect theories is that they cannot accommodate this intuition in a
satisfying way. Both Kant and Carruthers agree that my torturing my
own cat for fun would be wrong. However, they believe it is wrong not
because of the harm to the cat, but rather because of the effect this act
will have on me. Many people have found this to be a very unsatisfying
account of the duty. In other words, unless it is wrong in itself to harm
the animal, it is hard to see why such an act would lead people to do
other acts that are likewise wrong. If the indirect theorist does not have a
better explanation for why it is wrong to torture a cat for fun, and as long
as we firmly believe such actions are wrong, then we will be forced to
admit that indirect theories are not acceptable.
Indirect theorists can, and have, responded to this line of argument in
three ways. First, they could reject the claim that the indirect theorist's
explanation of the duty is unsatisfactory. Second, they could offer an
alternative explanation for why such actions as torturing a cat are wrong.
Third, they could reject the claim that those sorts of acts are necessarily
wrong.
3.5.3. Direct but Unequal Theories
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Most people accept an account of the proper moral status of animals

according to which the interests of animals count directly in the
assessment of actions that affect them, but do not count for as much as
the interests of human beings. Their defense requires two parts: a
defense of the claim that the interests of animals count directly in the
assessment of actions that affect them, and a defense of the claim that
the interests of animals do not count for as much as the interests of
human beings.
a. Why Animals have Direct Moral Status
The argument in support of the claim that animals have direct moral
status is rather simple. It goes as follows:
1. If a being is sentient then it has direct moral status.
2. (Most) animals are sentient
3. Therefore (most) animals have direct moral status.
"Sentience" refers to the capacity to experience episodes of positively or
negatively valenced awareness.
In support of premise (1), many argue that pain and pleasure are directly
morally relevant, and that there is no reason to discount completely the
pleasure or pain of any being. The argument from analogy is often used
in support of premise. The argument from analogy is also used in
answering the difficult question of exactly which animals are sentient.
The general idea is that the justification for attributing sentience to a
being grows stronger the more analogous it is to human beings.
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People also commonly use the flaws of indirect theories as a reason to

support the claim that animals have direct moral status. Those that
believe both that the marginal cases have direct moral status and that
indirect theories cannot answer the challenge of the Argument from
Marginal Cases are led to support direct theories; those that believe both
that such actions as the torture of one's own cat for fun are wrong and
that indirect theories cannot explain why they are wrong are also led to
direct theories.
b. Why Animals are not equal to Human Beings
The usual manner of justifying the claim that animals are not equal to
human beings is to point out that only humans have some property, and
then argue that that property is what confers a full and equal moral status
to human beings. Some philosophers have used the following claims on
this strategy: (1) only human beings have rights; (2) only human beings
are rational, autonomous, and self-conscious; (3) only human beings are
able to act morally; and (4) only human beings are part of the moral
community.
C. Only Human Beings Have Rights
On one common understanding of rights, only human beings have rights.
On this conception of rights, if a being has a right then others have a
duty to refrain from infringing that right; rights entail duties. An
individual that has a right to something must be able to claim that thing
for himself, where this entails being able to represent himself in his
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pursuit of the thing as a being that is legitimately pursuing the

furtherance of his interests. Since animals are not capable of
representing themselves in this way, they cannot have rights.
However, lacking rights does not entail lacking direct moral status;
although rights entail duties it does not follow that duties entail rights.
So although animals may have no rights, we may still have duties to
them. The significance of having a right, however, is that rights act as
"trumps" against the pursuit of utility. In other words, if an individual
has a right to something, we are not permitted to infringe on that right
simply because doing so will have better overall results. Our duties to
those without rights can be trumped by considerations of the overall
good. Although I have a duty to refrain from destroying your property,
that duty can be trumped if I must destroy the property in order to save a
life. Likewise, I am not permitted to harm animals without good reason;
however, if greater overall results will come about from such harm, then
it is justified to harm animals. This sort of reasoning has been used to
justify such practices as experimentation that uses animals, raising
animals for food, and using animals for our entertainment in such places
as rodeos and zoos.
There are two points of contention with the above account of rights.
First, it has been claimed that if human beings have rights, then animals
will likewise have rights. For example, Joel Feinberg has argued that all
is required in order for a being to have a right is that the being be
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capable of being represented as legitimately pursuing the furtherance of

its interests. The claim that the being must be able to represent itself is
too strong, thinks Feinberg, for such a requirement will exclude infants,
the senile, and other marginal cases from the class of beings with rights.
In other words, Feinberg invokes yet another instance of the Argument
from Marginal Cases in order to support his position.
Second, it has been claimed that the very idea of rights needs to be
jettisoned. There are two reasons for this. First, philosophers such as R.
G. Frey have questioned the legitimacy of the very idea of rights,
echoing Bentham's famous claim that rights are "nonsense on stilts".
Second, philosophers have argued that whether or not a being will have
rights will depend essentially on whether or not it has some other lower-
order property. For example, on the above conception of rights, whether
a being will have a right or not will depend on whether it is able to
represent itself as a being that is legitimately pursuing the furtherance of
its interests. If that is what grounds rights, then what is needed is a
discussion of the moral importance of that ability, along with a defense
of the claim that it is an ability that animals lack. More generally, it has
been argued that if we wish to deny animals’ rights and claim that only
human beings have them, then we must focus not so much on rights, but
rather on what grounds them. For this reason, much of the recent
literature concerning animals and ethics focuses not so much on rights,
but rather on whether or not animals have certain other properties, and
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whether the possession of those properties is a necessary condition for

equal consideration.
d. Only Human Beings are Rational, Autonomous, and Self-
Conscious
Some people argue that only rational, autonomous, and self-conscious
beings deserve full and equal moral status; since only human beings are
rational, autonomous, and self-conscious, it follows that only human
beings deserve full and equal moral status. Once again, it is not claimed
that we can do whatever we like to animals; rather, the fact that animals
are sentient gives us reason to avoid causing them unnecessary pain and
suffering. However, when the interests of animals and human beings
conflict we are required to give greater weight to the interests of human
beings. This also has been used to justify such practices as
experimentation on animals, raising animals for food, and using animals
in such places as zoos and rodeos.
The attributes of rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness confer a
full and equal moral status to those that possess them because these
beings are the only ones capable of attaining certain values and goods;
these values and goods are of kinds that outweigh the kinds of values
and goods that non-rational, non-autonomous, and non-self-conscious
beings are capable of attaining. For example, in order to achieve the kind
of dignity and self-respect that human beings have, a being must be able
to conceive of itself as one among many, and must be able to choose his
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actions rather than be led by blind instinct. Furthermore, the values of

appreciating art, literature, and the goods that come with deep personal
relationships all require one to be rational, autonomous, and self-
conscious. These values, and others like them, are the highest values to
us; they are what make our lives worth living. As John Stuart Mill wrote,
"Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the
lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's
pleasures" (Mill, 1979). We find the lives of beings that can experience
these goods to be more valuable, and hence deserving of more
protection, than the lives of beings that cannot.
e. Only Human Beings Can Act Morally
Another reason for giving stronger preference to the interests of human
beings is that only human beings can act morally. This is considered to
be important because beings that can act morally are required to sacrifice
their interests for the sake of others. It follows that those that do sacrifice
their good for the sake of others are owed greater concern from those
that benefit from such sacrifices. Since animals cannot act morally, they
will not sacrifice their own good for the sake of others, but will rather
pursue their good even at the expense of others. That is why human
beings should give the interests of other human beings greater weight
than they do the interests of animals.
f. Only Human Beings are Part of the Moral Community
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Finally, some claim that membership in the moral community is

necessary for full and equal moral status. The moral community is not
defined in terms of the intrinsic properties that beings have, but is
defined rather in terms of the important social relations that exist
between beings. For example, human beings can communicate with each
other in meaningful ways, can engage in economic, political, and
familial relationships with each other, and can also develop deep
personal relationships with each other. These kinds of relationships
require the members of such relationships to extend greater concern to
other members of these relationships than they do to others in order for
the relationships to continue. Since these relationships are what
constitute our lives and the value contained in them, we are required to
give greater weight to the interests of human beings than we do to
animals.
3.2.4. Moral Equality Theories
The final theories to discuss are the moral equality theories. On these
theories, not only do animals have direct moral status, but they also have
the same moral status as human beings. According to theorists of this
kind, there can be no legitimate reason to place human beings and
animals in different moral categories, and so whatever grounds our
duties to human beings will likewise ground duties to animals.
Chapter Four: Non-anthropocentrism
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4.1 Non-anthropocentrism is a philosophical view which extends

moral standing to non human things and discards anthropocentric view.
It is the view that claims non-human beings should have moral standing
without considering their benefits to humans. Non-anthropocentric
ethics stresses that things apart from human beings should be the proper
subjects of moral concern as well as human welfare. It challenges the
existing value categories and moral analysis. Some environmental
ethicists contend that some nonhuman animals, at least those with the
neurophysiologic capacity for experiencing well-being and its opposite,
must be the subjects of moral concern. They do not consider species
membership a criterion of difference between individuals; in other
words, they ignore the usual basis for moral concern. They recognize
that environmental modification can affect the well-being of both
humans and nonhuman animals. As has been stated in the foregoing
discussion, Tom Regan (1983) is the defender of animal rights. Peter
Singer (1993) also emphasizes the well-being of individual sentient
animals.
4.2 Animals and Ethics
What place should non-human animals have in an acceptable moral
system? These animals exist on the borderline of our moral concepts; the
result is that we sometimes find ourselves according them a strong moral
status, while at other times denying them any kind of moral status at all.
For example, public outrage is strong when knowledge of "puppy mills"
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is made available; the thought here is that dogs deserve much more
consideration than the operators of such places give them. However,
when it is pointed out that the conditions in a factory farm are as bad as,
if not much worse than, the conditions in a puppy mill, the usual
response is that those affected are “just animals” after all, and do not
merit our concern.  Philosophical thinking on the moral standing of
animals is diverse and can be generally grouped into three general
categories: Indirect theories, direct but unequal theories, and moral
equality theories. Indirect theories deny animals’ moral status or equal
consideration with humans due to a lack of consciousness, reason, or
autonomy. Ultimately denying moral status to animals, these theories
may still require not harming animals, but only because doing so causes
harm to a human being's morality.  Arguments in this category have
been formulated by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, René
Descartes, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Carruthers, and various religious
theories. Direct but unequal theories accord some moral consideration to
animals, but deny them a fuller moral status due to their inability to
respect another agent's rights or display moral reciprocity within a
community of equal agents. Arguments in this category consider the
sentience of the animal as sufficient reason not to cause direct harm to
animals.  However, where the interests of animals and humans conflict,
the special properties of being human such as rationality, autonomy, and
self-consciousness accord higher consideration to the interests of human
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beings. Moral equality theories extend equal consideration and moral

status to animals by refuting the supposed moral relevance of the
aforementioned special properties of human beings.  Arguing by
analogy, moral equality theories often extend the concept of rights to
animals on the grounds that they have similar physiological and mental
capacities as infants or disabled human beings.  Arguments in this
category have been formulated by philosophers such as Peter Singer and
Tom Regan.
b. Regan and Animal Rights
Tom Regan's seminal work, The Case for Animal Rights, is one of the
most influential works on the topic of animals and ethics. Regan argues
for the claim that animals have rights in just the same way that human
beings do. Regan believes it is a mistake to claim that animals have an
indirect moral status or an unequal status, and to then infer that animals
cannot have any rights. He also thinks it is a mistake to ground an equal
moral status on Utilitarian grounds, as Singer attempts to do. According
to Regan, we must conclude that animals have the same moral status as
human beings; furthermore, that moral status is grounded on rights, not
on Utilitarian principles.
Regan argues for his case by relying on the concept of inherent value.
According to Regan, any being that is a subject-of-a-life is a being that
has inherent value. A being that has inherent value is a being towards
which we must show respect; in order to show respect to such a being,
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we cannot use it merely as a means to our ends. Instead, each such being
must be treated as an end in itself. In other words, a being with inherent
value has rights, and these rights act as trumps against the promotion of
the overall good. Regan relies on a version of the Argument from
Marginal Cases in arguing for this conclusion. He begins by asking what
grounds human rights. He rejects robust views that claim that a being
must be capable of representing itself as legitimately pursuing the
furtherance of its interests on the grounds that this conception of rights
implies that the marginal cases of humanity do not have rights.
However, since we think that these beings do have moral rights there
must be some other property that grounds these rights. According to
Regan, the only property that is common to both normal adult human
beings and the marginal cases is the property of being a subject-of-a-life.
A being that is a subject-of-a-life will: have beliefs and desires;
perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own
future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain;
preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit
of their desires and goals; a psychological identity over time; and an
individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill
for them, logically independently of their utility for others, and logically
independently of their being the object of anyone else's interests. This
property is one that all of the human beings that we think deserve rights
have; however, it is a property that many animals (especially mammals)
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have as well. So if these marginal cases of humanity deserve rights, then

so do these animals.
Although this position may seem quite similar to Singer's position,
Regan is careful to point to what he perceives to be the flaws of Singer's
Utilitarian theory. According to Singer, we are required to count every
similar interest equally in our deliberation. However, by doing this we
are focusing on the wrong thing, Regan claims. What matters is the
individual that has the interest, not the interest itself. By focusing on
interests themselves, Utilitarianism will license the most horrendous
actions. For example, if it were possible to satisfy more interests by
performing experiments on human beings, then that is what we should
do on Utilitarian grounds. However, Regan believes this is clearly
unacceptable: any being with inherent value cannot be used merely as a
means.
This does not mean that Regan takes rights to be absolute. When the
rights of different individuals conflict, then someone's rights must be
overridden. Regan argues that in these sorts of cases we must try to
minimize the rights that are overridden. However, we are not permitted
to override someone's rights just because doing so will make everyone
better off; in this kind of case we are sacrificing rights for utility, which
is never permissible on Regan's view. Given these considerations, Regan
concludes that we must radically alter the ways in which we treat
animals. When we raise animals for food, regardless of how they are
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treated and how they are killed, we are using them as a means to our
ends and not treating them as ends in themselves. Thus, we may not
raise animals for food. Likewise, when we experiment on animals in
order to advance human science, we are using animals merely as a
means to our ends. Similar thoughts apply to the use of animals in
rodeos and the hunting of animals.
a. Singer and the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests
Peter Singer has been very influential in the debate concerning animals
and ethics. The publication of his Animal Liberation marked the
beginning of a growing and increasingly powerful movement in both the
United States and Europe.
Singer attacks the views of those who wish to give the interests of
animals less weight than the interests of human beings. He argues that if
we attempt to extend such unequal consideration to the interests of
animals, we will be forced to give unequal consideration to the interests
of different human beings. However, doing this goes against the
intuitively plausible and commonly accepted claim that all human beings
are equal. Singer concludes that we must instead extend a principle of
equal consideration of interests to animals as well.
However, there are some properties which only human beings have
which have seemed to many to be able to ground a full and equal moral
status; for example, being rational, autonomous, or able to act morally
have all been used to justify giving a stronger status to human beings
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than we do to animals. The problem with such a suggestion is that not all
human beings have these properties. So if this is what grounds a full and
equal moral status, it follows that not all human beings are equal after
all.
If we try to ensure that we choose a property that all human beings do
have that will be sufficient to ground a full and equal moral status, we
seemed to be pushed towards choosing something such as being sentient,
or being capable of experiencing pleasure and pain. Since the marginal
cases have this property, they would be granted a full and equal moral
status on this suggestion. However, if we choose a property of this kind,
animals will likewise have a full and equal moral status since they too
are sentient.
The attempt to grant all and only human beings a full and equal moral
status does not work according to Singer. We must either conclude that
not all human beings are equal, or we must conclude that not only
human beings are equal. Singer suggests that the first option is too
counter-intuitive to be acceptable; so we are forced to conclude that all
animals are equal, human or otherwise.
Another argument Singer employs to refute the claim that all and only
human beings deserve a full and equal moral status focuses on the
supposed moral relevance of such properties as rationality, autonomy,
the ability to act morally, etc. Singer argues that if we were to rely on
these sorts of properties as the basis of determining moral status, then we
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would justify a kind of discrimination against certain human beings that

is structurally analogous to such practices as racism and sexism.
For example, the racist believes that all members of his race are more
intelligent and rational than all of the members of other races, and thus
assigns a greater moral status to the members of his race than he does do
the members of other races. However, the racist is wrong in this factual
judgment; it is not true that all members of any one race are smarter than
all members of any other. Notice, however, that the mistake the racist is
making is merely a factual mistake. His moral principle that assigns
moral status on the basis of intelligence or rationality is not what has led
him astray. Rather, it is simply his assessment of how intelligence or
rationality is distributed among human beings that is mistaken.
If that were all that is wrong with racism and sexism, then a moral
theory according to which we give extra consideration to the very smart
and rational would be justified. In other words, we would be justified in
becoming, not racists, but sophisticated inegalitarians. However, the
sophisticated inegalitarian is just as morally suspect as the racist is.
Therefore, it follows that the racist is not morally objectionable merely
because of his views on how rationality and intelligence are distributed
among human beings; rather he is morally objectionable because of the
basis he uses to weigh the interests of different individuals. How
intelligent, rational, etc., a being is cannot be the basis of his moral
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status; if it were, then the sophisticated inegalitarian would be on secure

ground.
Notice that in order for this argument to succeed, it must target
properties that admit of degrees. If someone argued that the basis of
human equality rested on the possession of a property that did not admit
of degrees, it would not follow that some human beings have that
property to a stronger degree than others, and the sophisticated
inegalitarian would not be justified. However, most of the properties that
are used in order to support the claim that all and only human beings
deserve a full and equal moral status are properties that do admit of
degrees. Such properties as being human or having human DNA do not
admit of degrees, but, as already mentioned, these properties do not
seem to be capable of supporting such a moral status.
Singer concludes that animals can experience pain and suffering by
relying on the argument from analogy (see the discussion of Cartesian
Theories above). Since animals can experience pain and suffering, they
have an interest in avoiding pain.
These facts require the immediate end to many of our practices
according to Singer. For example, animals that are raised for food in
factory farms live lives that are full of unimaginable pain and suffering
(Singer devotes an entire chapter of his book to documenting these facts.
He relies mainly on magazines published by the factory farm business
for these facts). Although human beings do satisfy their interests by
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eating meat, Singer argues that the interests the animals have in avoiding
this unimaginable pain and suffering is greater than the interests we have
in eating food that tastes good.
Singer does not unequivocally claim that we must not eat animals if we
are to correctly apply the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests.
Whether we are required to refrain from painlessly killing animals will
depend on whether animals have an interest in continuing to exist in the
future. In order to have this interest, Singer believes that a being must be
able to conceive of itself as existing into the future, and this requires a
being to be self-conscious. Non-self-conscious beings are not harmed by
their deaths, according to Singer, for they do not have an interest in
continuing to exist into the future.
Singer argues that we might be able to justify killing these sorts of
beings with The Replaceability Argument. On this line of thought, if we
kill a non-self-conscious being that was living a good life, then we have
lessened the overall amount of good in the world. This can be made up,
however, by bringing another being into existence that can experience
similar goods. In other words, non-self-conscious beings are replaceable:
killing one can be justified if doing so is necessary to bring about the
existence of another. Since the animals we rear for food would not exist
if we did not eat them, it follows that killing these animals can be
justified if the animals we rear for food live good lives. However, in
order for this line of argumentation to justify killing animals, the animals
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must not only be non-self-conscious, but they must also live lives that
are worth living, and their deaths must be painless. Singer expresses
doubts that all of these conditions could be met, and unequivocally
claims that they are not met by such places as factory farms.
Singer also condemns most experimentation in which animals are used.
He first points out that many of the experiments performed using animal
subjects do not have benefits for human beings that would outweigh the
pain caused to the animals. For example, experiments used to test
cosmetics or other non-necessary products for human beings cannot be
justified if we use the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests.
Singer also condemns experiments that are aimed at preventing or curing
human diseases. If we are prepared to use animal subjects for such
experiments, then it would actually be better from a scientific point of
view to use human subjects instead, for there would be no question of
cross-species comparisons when interpreting the data. If we believe the
benefits outweigh the harms, then instead of using animals we should
instead use orphaned infants that are severely cognitively disabled. If we
believe that such a suggestion is morally repugnant when human beings
are to be used, but morally innocuous when animals are to be used, then
we are guilty of speciesism. Likewise, hunting for sport, using animals
in rodeos, keeping animals confined in zoos wherein they are not able to
engage in their natural activities are all condemned by the use of the
Principle of the Equal Consideration of Interests.
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4.2.2 Animals
If only human beings have moral standing, then it follows that if I come
across a bear while out camping and shoot it dead on a whim, I do no
wrong to that bear. Of course, an anthropocentric ethic might claim that
I do somewrong by shooting the bear dead – perhaps, for example,
shooting bears is not the action of a virtuous individual, or perhaps I am
depleting a source of beauty for most other humans – but because
anthropocentrism states that only humans have moral standing, then I
can do no wrong tothe bear itself. However, many of us have the
intuition that this claim is wrong. Many of us feel that it is possible to do
wrong to animals, whether that be by shooting innocent bears or by
torturing cats. Of course, a feeling or intuition does not get us very far in
proving that animals have moral standing. For one thing, some people
(hunters and cat-torturers, for example!) no doubt have quite different
intuitions, leading to quite different conclusions. However, several
philosophers have offered sophisticated arguments to support the view
that moral standing should be extended to include 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. For Regan, on the other hand, moral standing should be
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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. So, while Regan and Singer give slightly
different criteria for moral standing, both place a premium on a form of
consciousness.
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 that 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. For
example, imagine that it is proven that a particular set of painful
experiments on half a dozen pigs will lead to the discovery of some new
medicine that will itself alleviate the pain of a few dozen human beings
(or other sentient animals). If one’s ultimate norm is to satisfy the
maximum number of interests, then such experiments should take place.
However, for Regan there are moral limits to what one can do to an
entity with inherent value, irrespective of these overall consequences.
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These moral limits are ‘rights’, and are possessed by all creatures who
are subjects-of-a-life.
But what does all this have to do with environmental ethics? Well, in
one obvious sense animal welfare is relevant to environmental ethics
because animals exist within the natural environment and thus form part
of environmentalists’ concerns. However, extending moral standing to
animals also leads to the formulation of particular types of
environmental obligations. Essentially, these ethics claim that when we
consider how our actions impact on the environment, we should not just
evaluate how these affect humans (present and/or future), but also how
they affect the interests and rights of animals. For example, even if
clearing an area of forest were proven to be of benefit to humans both in
the short and long-term that would not be the end of the matter as far as
animal ethics are concerned; the welfare of the animals residing within
and around the forest must also be considered.
However, many environmental philosophers have been dissatisfied with
these kinds of animal-centered environmental ethics. Indeed, some have
claimed that animal liberation cannot even be considered a legitimate
environmental ethic. For these thinkers, all animal-centered ethics suffer
from two fundamental and devastating problems: first of all, they are too
narrowly individualistic; and secondly, the logic of animal ethics implies
unjustifiable interference with natural processes. As for the first point, it
is pointed out that our concerns for the environment extend beyond
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merely worrying about individual creatures. Rather, for

environmentalists, ‘holistic’ entities matter, such as species and
ecosystems. Moreover, sometimes the needs of a ‘whole’ clash with the
interests of the individuals that comprises it. Indeed, the over-abundance
of individuals of a particular species of animal can pose a serious threat
to the normal functioning of an ecosystem. For example, many of us will
be familiar with the problems rabbits have caused to ecosystems in
Australia. Thus, for many environmentalists, we have an obligation to
kill these damaging animals. Clearly, this stands opposed to the
conclusions of an ethic that gives such weight to the interests and rights
of individual animals. The individualistic nature of an animal-centered
ethic also means that it faces difficulty in explaining our concern for the
plight of endangered species. After all, if individual conscious entities
are all that matter morally, then the last surviving panda must be owed
just the same as my pet cat. For many environmental philosophers this is
simply wrong, and priority must be given to the endangered species
(Rolston III, 1985).
Animal-centered ethics also face attack for some of the implications of
their arguments. For example, if we have obligations to alleviate the
suffering of animals, as these authors suggest, does that mean we must
stop predator animals from killing their prey, or partition off prey
animals so that they are protected from such attacks (Sagoff, 1984)?
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Such conclusions not only seem absurd, but also inimical to the
environmentalist goal of preserving natural habitats and processes.
Having said all of this, I should not over-emphasize the opposition
between animal ethics and environmental ethics. Just because animal
ethicists grant moral standing only to conscious individuals that does not
mean that they hold everything else in contempt (Jamieson, 1998).
Holistic entities may not have independent moral standing, according to
these thinkers, but that does not equate to ignoring them; after all, the
welfare and interests of individual entities are often bound up with the
healthy functioning of the ‘wholes’ that they make up. Moreover, the
idea that animal ethics imply large-scale interferences in the
environment can be questioned when one considers how much harm this
would inflict upon predator and scavenger animals. Nevertheless,
clashes of interest between individual animals and other natural entities
are inevitable, and when push comes to shove animal ethicists will
invariably grant priority to individual conscious animals. Many
environmental ethicists disagree, and are convinced that the boundaries
of our ethical concern need to be pushed back further.
1.2.3 Individual Living Organisms
As noted above, numerous philosophers have questioned the notion that
only conscious beings have moral standing. Some have done this by
proposing a thought experiment based on a ‘last-human scenario. The
thought experiment asks us to consider a situation, say after a nuclear
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holocaust, in which there is only one surviving human being who, in

turn, is faced with the last surviving tree of its species. If the individual
chops down the tree, no human would be harmed by its destruction. For
our purposes we should alter the example and say that all animals have
also perished in the holocaust. If this amendment is made, we can go
further and say that no conscious being would be harmed by the tree’s
destruction. Would this individual be wrong to destroy the tree?
According to a human or animal-centered ethic, it is hard to see why
such destruction would be wrong. And yet, many of us have the strong
intuition that the individual would act wrongly by chopping down the
tree. For some environmental philosophers, this intuition suggests that
moral standing should be extended beyond conscious life to include
individual living organisms, such as trees.
Of course, and as I have mentioned before, 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 those humans should not
interfere with or extinguish this will. 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,
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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’. 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 living organisms moral status, and means that we must
take the interests and needs of such entities into account when
formulating our moral obligations.
But if we recognize moral standing in every living thing, how are we
then to formulate any meaningful moral obligations? After all, don’t we
as humans require the destruction of many living organisms simply in
order to live? For example we need to walk, eat, shelter and clothe
ourselves, all of which will usually involve harming living things.
Schweitzer’s answer is that we can only harm or end the life of a living
entity when absolutely necessary. Of course, this simply begs the
question: when is absolutely necessary? Taylor attempts to answer this
question by advocating a position of general equality between the
interests of living things, together with a series of principles in the event
of clashes of interest. First off, the principles state that humans are
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allowed to act in self-defense to prevent harm being inflicted by other

living organisms. Second, the basic interests of nonhuman living entities
should take priority over the or trivial interests of humans. Third, when
basic interests clash, humans are not required to sacrifice themselves for
the sake of others.
As several philosophers have pointed out, however, this ethic is still
incredibly demanding. For example, because my interest in having a
pretty garden is non basic, and a weed’s interest in survival is basic,
according to Taylor’s ethical framework I am forbidden from pulling it
out. This, for some, 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. After
all, if we accept such a hierarchy, just how low is the moral significance
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of plants? If it is low enough so that I can eat them, weed them and walk
on them, what is the point of granting them any moral standing at all?
There remain two crucial challenges facing philosophers who attribute
moral standing to individual living organisms that I have not yet
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? 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 trees 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,
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these critics do not believe that an environmental ethic should place such
a high premium on individuals. Indeed, 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. Once again, however, a word of caution
is warranted here. It is not the case that philosophers who ascribe moral
standing to individual living things simply ignore the importance of such
‘wholes’. Often the equilibrium of these entities is taken extremely
seriously. However, it must be remembered that such concern is
extended only insofar as such equilibrium is necessary in order for
individual living organisms to flourish; the wholes themselves have no
independent moral standing.
4.2.4 Holistic Entities
Although the centrality of holism in both ecology and environmental
ethics is indisputable, the meaning of the concept within each field is
difficult to define with precision.
Holism might be understood best in contrast to reductionism.
Reductionism is arguably the central approach to Western science,
traceable back to the ancient Greek Milesian school of thought (c. sixth
century B.C.E.), which attempted to discern the fundamental stuff out of
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which all else emanates. Reductionistic science assumes that the

experienced world is understandable only through an examination of its
component parts, and that through such an examination we discern the
reality of the whole. For an environmental reductionist, for example, a
species is nothing but a placeholder for a collection of specimens. The
popular expression of reductionism is that the whole is merely the sum
of its component parts. In Nature’s Economy (1994) the environmental
historian Donald Worster portrays holism as a reaction to the influence
of reductionism, from Gilbert White’s ‘‘Cult of Selborne’’ reacting
against the perceived evils of Linneaen fragmentation to John Ray and
Henry More rejecting the reductionism of a Newtonian-Baconian
mechanistic view of nature. He observes that ‘‘the idea of holism . . . has
ebbed and flowed with extraordinary persistence throughout the modern
period.”
In contrast to reductionism, holism asserts that the whole is greater than
the sum of the parts: Holists believe that certain properties or qualities
that emerge at the level of the collective do not exist in the parts and also
are not predictable from knowledge of the properties or qualities of the
parts before their integration into wholes. For example, a holist might
point to the quality of life as a property of a living organism that does
not exist in the atoms or in the molecules of which living organisms are
composed.
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Although it sometimes is assumed that both the science of ecology and

environmental ethics are inherently holistic, both contain theories that
range from the manifestly holistic to the strictly reductionistic. Among
classic examples in ecology, Frederic E. Clements’s ‘‘super
organismic’’ conception of the biota (the idea that what now are called
ecosystems are themselves living organisms) is manifestly holistic,
whereas Henry A. Gleason’s ‘‘individualistic concept’’ of the biota (the
idea that certain plants and animals often are found together because
they are adapted individually to similar environmental conditions) is
strictly reductive. Among classic examples in environmental ethics,
Aldo Leopold’s land ethic (which makes the ‘‘integrity, stability and
beauty’’ of ‘‘the biotic community’’ the measure of right and wrong) is
clearly holistic, whereas Paul W. Taylor’s biocentrism (which provides
equal intrinsic value for all living beings individually) is strictly
reductive. It is therefore a mistake to assume that holism is a defining
characteristic of ecology or that all environmental ethics are holistic.
While Albert Schweitzer can be regarded as the most prominent
philosophical influence for thinkers who grant moral standing to all
individual living things, 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
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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.”
Several philosophers, however, have questioned Leopold’s justification
of the land ethic. For one thing, it seems that Leopold jumps too quickly
from a descriptive account of how the land is, to a prescriptive account
of what we ought to do. In other words, even if Leopold’s accounts of
the land and its energy flows are correct, why should we preserve it?
What precisely is it about the biotic community that makes it deserving
of moral standing? Unfortunately, Leopold seems to offer no answers to
these important questions, and thus no reason to build our environmental
obligations around his land ethic. However, J. Baird Callicott has argued
that such criticisms of Leopold are unfair and misplaced. According to
Callicott, Leopold lies outside of mainstream moral theory. Rather than
assign moral standing on the identification of some particular
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characteristic, such as consciousness or a biological good of one’s own,

Leopold is claimed to accord moral standing on the basis of moral
sentiment and affection. Thus, the question is not, what quality does the
land possess that makes it worthy of moral standing? But rather, how do
we feel about the land (Callicott, 1998)? In this light, the land ethic can
be seen as an injunction to broaden our moral sentiments beyond self-
interest, and beyond humanity to include the whole biotic community.
This, so the argument goes, bridges the gap between the descriptive and
the prescriptive in Leopold’s thought.
Of course, some have questioned whether sentiment and feelings are
suitable foundations for an environmental ethic. After all, there seem to
be plenty of people out there who have no affection for the biotic
community whatsoever. If Leopold’s injunction is ignored by such
people, must we simply give up hope of formulating any environmental
obligations? In the search for more concrete foundations, Lawrence E.
Johnson has built an alternative case for according moral standing to
holistic entities. Johnson claims that once we recognize that interests are
not always tied to conscious experience, the door is opened to the
possibility of non conscious entities having interests and thus moral
standing. So, just as breathing oxygen is in the interests of a child, even
though the child has neither a conscious desire for oxygen, nor any
understanding of what oxygen is, so do species have an interest in
fulfilling their nature. This is because both have a good of their own,
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based on the integrated functioning of their life processes. Children can

flourish as living things, and so too can species and ecosystems; so,
according to Johnson, both have interests that must be taken into account
in our ethical deliberations.
But even if we accept that moral standing should be extended to holistic
entities on this basis, we still need to consider how we are then to flesh
out our moral obligations concerning the environment. For some, this is
where holistic ethics fail to convince. In particular, it has been claimed
that holistic ethics condone sacrificing individuals for the sake of the
whole. Now while many holistic philosophers do explicitly condone
sacrificing individuals in some situations, for example by shooting
rabbits to preserve plant species, they are reluctant to sacrifice human
interests in similar situations. But isn’t the most abundant species
destroying biotic communities Homo sapiens? And if human individuals
are just another element within the larger and more important biotic
community, is it not necessary under holistic ethics to kill some of these
‘human pests’ for the sake of the larger whole? Such considerations have
led Tom Regan to label the implications of holistic ethics as
‘environmental fascism’. In response, proponents of such ethics have
claimed that acknowledging moral standing in holistic entities does not
mean that one must deny the interests and rights of human beings. They
claim that granting moral standing to ‘wholes’ is not the same thing as
taking it away from individuals. While this is obviously true, that still
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leaves the question of what to do when the interests of wholes clash with
the interests of individuals. If humans cannot be sacrificed for the good
of the whole, why can rabbits?
The answer that has been put forward by Callicott claims that while the
biotic community matters morally, it is not the only community that
matters. Rather, we are part of various ‘nested’ communities all of which
have claims upon us. Thus, our obligations to the biotic community may
require the culling of rabbits, but may not require the culling of humans.
This is because we are part of a tight-knit human community, but only a
very loose human-rabbit community. In this way, we can adjudicate
clashes of interest, based on our community commitments. This
communitarian proposal certainly seems a way out of the dilemma.
Unfortunately, it faces two key problems: first, just who decides the
content and strength of our various community commitments; and
second, if human relationships are the closest, does all this lead back to
anthropocentrism? As for the first point, if deciding on our community
attachments is left up to individuals themselves, this will lead to quite
diverse and even repugnant moral obligations. For example, if an
individual believes that he has a much stronger attachment to white
males than to black women, does this mean that he can legitimately
favor the interests of the former over the latter? If not, and an objective
standard is to be imposed, we are left with the enormous problem of
discovering this standard and reaching consensus on it. Secondly, if our
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moral commitments to the biotic community are trumped by our

obligations to the human community, doesn’t this lead us back down the
path to anthropocentrism – the very thing the holist wants to avoid?
Without doubt, extending moral standing to the degree that holistic
ethics do, requires some extremely careful argumentation when it comes
to working out the precise content of our environmental obligations
4.4.3 BIOCENTRISM
Biocentrism is a life-centered outlook that rejects the view that humanity
alone matters in ethics and accepts the moral standing of (at least) all
living creatures. It has played a formative role in the development of
environmental ethics since the study of this subject became a self
conscious discipline in the 1970s; it was also influential among some
key earlier thinkers, including Albert Schweitzer (with his belief in
‘‘reverence for life’’) and Mohandas Gandhi, who regarded even ‘‘the
destruction of vegetable life as violence”. Not all bio centrists condemn
all destruction of life, however, although they all regard the good of
living creatures as a morally relevant element in decisions affecting their
treatment.
KEY TENETS OF BIOCENTRISM
The common and crucial tenets of biocentrism are the following: (a) all
living creatures have a good of their own and, accordingly, have moral
standing (that is, they warrant moral attention or consideration for their
own sake); and (b) their flourishing or attaining their good is
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intrinsically valuable. In representing the Deep Ecology movement as

‘‘bio centric,’’ Arne Naess probably wanted to go further and include
living systems (such as habitats and ecosystems) within the scope of
biocentrism , but the view that such systems have moral standing and a
good of their own is nowadays more accurately classified as eco
centrism. Characteristically, bio centrists locate moral standing in
individual creatures rather than in systems, as holists do; bio centrists
respect systems not in themselves but only insofar as they protect or
make possible the lives (or the flourishing lives) within them; they view
such systems in much the same way that most people regard lifeboats.
Peter Singer, who adheres to the ‘‘principle of equal consideration,’’
according to which equal interests should be given equal consideration;
this principle is compatible with according different treatment to
creatures with different interests, whether of the same species or not,
thus privileging some creatures over others. Singer is not a bio centrist,
because he sets the limits of moral standing at the boundaries of
sentience. But there is nothing to prevent bio centrists, whose allocation
of moral standing is much less constrained, from endorsing his equal
consideration principle across the broader range of creatures whose
standing they recognize. Such biocentrism is not ‘‘inegalitarian,’’ as
Alan Carter has suggested but it does diverge from Schweitzer’s radical
egalitarianism and possibly Naess’s and certainly in such a way as to
make biocentrism both egalitarian and more obviously defensible.
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Biocentrism was given a much clearer rationale in Kenneth Good

paster’s article ‘‘On Being Morally Considerable’’). To the question,
which entities have moral considerability or standing? Good paster
replies that it is those with a good of their own and that this criterion
extends to all living creatures, given the centrality of the concept of
beneficence in morality. Here Good paster diverges from Feinberg, who
partly locates interests in ‘‘unconscious drives, aims, goals, latent
tendencies, directions of growth and natural fulfillments’’ or, in
summary, in ‘‘conations’’ yet he inconsistently restricts the bearers of
interests and thus moral standing to sentient creatures. Goodpaster
rejects this restriction while incorporating Feinberg’s understanding of
interests into his biocentrism. But Goodpaster carefully distinguishes his
position from belief in the sentience of all life (for he rejects both this
belief and the view that sentience is necessary for moral standing) and
equally from the view that all holders of moral standing, sentient or non
sentient, have the same moral significance. On that basis, he suggests,
life would be unlivable.
Donald Scherer (1982) furnished crucial support for biocentrism through
a thought experiment about the presence or absence of value on the
imaginary planets
Lifeless, Flora (which has vegetation), and Fauna (which has animals,
too); he argues that it makes sense to value the states of Flora and Fauna
but not of Lifeless. He also seeks to demonstrate that an ethic can be
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individualistic without being either egoistic or anthropocentric and can

recognize independent value while remaining teleological (or
consequentialist). Scherer does not entirely reject ethical holism (any
more than Goodpaster does) and may actually come close to such holism
when he makes values dependent on ecosystems and their value because
the relevant creatures are physically dependent on ecosystems.(To this it
could be replied that the dependence of the human passengers in a
lifeboat on their vessel does not make their value dependent on either the
lifeboat or its value.) Yet Scherer’s stance shows how a largely
individual-centered ethic can avoid the assumption that human concerns
must be confined to human interests. An environmental ethic can value
the good of all living creatures (present and future) without either
making them all of equal significance or privileging the common good
over the value of individuals, as eco centrists are
A corresponding kind of biocentrism to Goodpaster’s was upheld in two
works by Robin Attfield: ‘‘The Good of Trees’’ (1981) and the Ethics of
Environmental Concern (1983). In the former work, Attfield contests
the prevailing theories that interests (human, sentient, or non sentient)
are a function of desires and preferences (Feinberg’s eventual position)
or of prescriptions (as in Hare), and develops arguments such as the last-
person thought experiment in support of the good of trees having
intrinsic value, thus supplying a reason independent of their instrumental
value for their promotion or protection. In the latter work Attfield
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integrates biocentrism with a form of rule Consequentialism and

supplements it with a non anthropocentric theory about which interests
should be given priority in interspecies conflicts. Attfield further
developed these views into a theory of interspecies priorities harnessed
to practice Consequentialism in Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics.
Earlier, in the second edition of The Ethics of Environmental Concern
(1991), Attfield replied to Janna Thompson’s sentience-based argument
that bio centrists have no consistent basis for denying intrinsic value to
artifacts. Attfield responded that living creatures are capable of health
and can be injured or harmed but that artifacts cannot be injured or
harmed but merely damaged.
A different kind of biocentrism was presented in 1981 by the veteran
ethicist Paul Taylor. Taylor disowns both anthropocentric and holistic
positions and advocates instead a life-centered ethic of respect for nature
in which agents recognize that each living thing has a good of its own,
the realization of which is intrinsically valuable (or worthy of being
preserved or promoted) and is to be pursued for its own sake. Respect
for nature is comparable with and supplements a Kantian respect for
persons. In Taylor’s version of biocentrism, however, not only is human
superiority denied, but each living thing is also held to be equally worthy
of respect, irrespective of differences of interests, and to have the same
moral significance. Accordingly, ‘‘biospherical egalitarianism’’ (the
principle propounded, albeit with qualifications, by Naess) here
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reemerges. Taylor tackles the implications of such egalitarianism in his

book Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (1986). In
that work he presents defensible practical principles that recognize that
human needs have to be satisfied. But these principles are difficult to
reconcile with—or to derive from—his interspecies egalitarianism. A
consistent and operational
Bio centric ethical system probably has to recognize, as Goodpaster
does, differences of moral significance among the bearers of moral
standing, something that is unattainable in Taylor’s radical
egalitarianism. Gerald Paske (1989) later responded to Taylor’s views,
arguing (cogently) that non sentient beings lack a point of view and (less
cogently) that inanimate objects such as stalactites also have a good of
their own, but he conceded that this is metaphorical talk, not to be taken
literally in such cases. Thus Paske’s claim that talk of the good of plants
and of that of inanimate objects having comparable senses is
unconvincing, and fails to undermine Taylor’s biocentrism.
Some of the bio centrist conclusions of Attfield’s ‘‘The Good of Trees’’
were endorsed by Gary E. Varner
(1990). Varner added criticisms of Routley’s thought experiment but
seemed unaware that the version of this argument presented in Attfield’s
1983 book was immune to several of these criticisms and that his
criticisms of appeals to thought experiments had also been answered in
Attfield’s article ‘‘Methods of Ecological Ethics’’
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(1983). In a later essay (2002) Varner returned to an ingenious defense

of the intrinsic value of non sentient creatures, citing further thought
experiments and ably distancing his biocentrism from the versions
advocated by Schweitzer, Gandhi, and Taylor. Although Varner has
acknowledged problems for these thought experiments they are arguably
defensible ones.
OBJECTIONS TO BIOCENTRISM
Among objections to biocentrism, Paske’s observation that non sentient
creatures lack a point of view was developed by Singer (1993) into the
claim that they therefore do not matter in themselves (lack moral
standing); Bernard Williams has denied that their interests amount to
morally relevant claims. Williams’s assertion is hardly an argument,
however, and Singer’s view accords undue importance to subjectivity as
a requirement of moral standing and conflicts with the arguments of
Goodpaster, with most people’s responses to Goodpaster, and to the
thought experiments of Routley, Scherer, and Varner.
Bryan Norton (1991) has argued that non anthropocentric stances such
as biocentrism are redundant because sophisticated anthropocentrism
supports the same policies. Bio centrists counter that the recognition of
nonhuman interests provides not only stronger reasons for policies of
humaneness, compassion, and preservation, but also provides reasons for
preserving those species that are of no current concern to humans (for
example, those that have not yet been discovered). The most common
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objection to objectivist biocentrism (as well as to other forms of

objectivist non anthropocentrism) is the suggestion that all judgments of
value, however non anthropocentric in content, are still anthropogenic
(Callicott 1992) because they depend on human valuation, and there can
be no value in the absence of valuers; this kind of biocentrism might be
labeled ‘‘weak biocentrism.’’ Even if argument were granted, it would
not affect biocentrism at the normative level but only on the level of
human judgments. But there is reason to doubt that things have value
only because people decide that they do valuable does not mean
‘‘valued’’ but applies to what there is reason to value, whether or not
anyone values it; and it is implausible that nothing had value (or, in the
case of pain, the opposite of value) until humanity (or possibly until
intelligent vertebrates) first appeared and began making judgments.
(Could birds have lacked value in the days of archaeopteryx and
acquired it only when first appreciated by primates?) Normative
biocentrism claims that the good of living creatures supplies
interpersonal reasons for action (some of them non derivative); such a
claim would make it reasonable to treat ethical judgments not as mere
expressions of human valuing but as having truth values of the kind
widely recognized as belonging both to moral and to value discourse;
indeed, there is as much reason to be a realist about intrinsic value as
there is for moral matters in general. Hence bio centrists can consistently
and reasonably be resolute Meta ethical realists, even though their
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normative stance (biocentrism) does not hang upon this affiliation to

realism.
4.4 Ecocentrism
Ecocentrism or environmental-centered views our relationship to nature,
to emphasize the value of conserving her integrity and beauty.
The question of how to value nature became a political issue in the
United States at the beginning of beginning of the 20 th century, as a war
of words, values and ideals emerged over the water needs of the city of
San Francisco and the sanctity of one of the country’s most beautiful
national parks, Yosemite. John Muir’s ideas represented the ecocentric,
or nature-centered, view that non-human nature has intrinsic value apart
from its contributions to human development. On this view, man is not
separate or superior to nature, but takes his place in nature’s system. On
this view, man’s development should be sought only in so far as it does
not infringe on the integrity of natural ecosystems. Historian Paul
Kennedy makes an important distinction between the environmental
dangers of today compared to those of Leopold’s, Carson’s, Merton’s,
Passmore’s and White’s time. Paul warned that the environmental crisis
we confront today is quantitatively and qualitatively different from
anything before, simply because so many people have been inflicting
damage on the world’s ecosystem during the past century that the system
as a whole-not simply its various parts-may be in danger.
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According Aldo Leopold, a well known ecocentrist, said that 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. Ecocentrism
emphasizes stability, integrity, beauty and biotic community.
Ecocentrism is based on evolutionary theory. It urges harmony with, not
domination of, nature. Ecocentrism allows for species and ecosystem.
The metaphysical position of ecocentrists is as follows:
In the image of Ecocentrism, nature is figure and man is ground. In other
words, nature is the object that dominates man the subject. In the image
of anthropocentrism, man is the figure and nature ground. Man the
subject dominates nature the object.
Anthropocentrism culminates in existentialism-a philosophy of
subjectivity that takes man to be everything. Existence is what man
makes it to be. Man himself has no pre-existing essence, but comes into
being by the choices he makes. Existentialism, in other words, defines
man by his free will and finds that man exists as he exercises his
freedom in the world and over nature. In contrast, Ecocentrism
culminates in naturalism – a philosophy of objectivity that makes nature
to be everything. Naturalism defines man as one of the numberless facts
of nature-as one flower upon one stem upon one branch one limb of the
great tree of existence. Between these ideologies, between the
subjectivity of existentialism and the objectivity of naturalism, there is
no middle ground and thus no place to stand for compromise. This two-
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term metaphysic of subject and object is also fatal because it denies man
the meaning that he needs to live.
4.5 Radical Ecology
Not all philosophers writing on our obligations concerning the
environment see the problem simply in terms of extending moral
standing. Instead, many thinkers regard environmental concerns to have
warranted an entirely new ideological perspective that has been termed,
after its biological counterpart, ‘ecology’. While the ideas and beliefs
within this ‘radical ecology’ movement are diverse, they possess two
common elements that separate them from the ethical extensionism
outlined above. First of all, none see extending moral standing as
sufficient to resolve the environmental crisis. They argue that a broader
philosophical perspective is needed, requiring fundamental changes in
both our attitude to and understanding of reality. This involves
reexamining who we are as human beings and our place within the
natural world. For radical ecologists, ethical extensionism is inadequate
because it is stuck in the traditional ways of thinking that led to these
environmental problems in the first place. In short, it is argued that
ethical extensionism remains too human-centered, because it takes
human beings as the paradigm examples of entities with moral standing
and then extends outwards to those things considered sufficiently
similar. Secondly, none of these radical ecologies confine themselves
solely to the arena of ethics. Instead, radical ecologies also demand
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fundamental changes in society and its institutions. In other words, these

ideologies have a distinctively political element, requiring us to confront
the environmental crisis by changing the very way we live and function,
both as a society and as individuals.
4.5.1 Deep Ecology
Arne Naess invented the term deep ecology in a famous 1973 English-
language article, ‘‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology
Movement: A Summary.’’ By ‘‘ecology movement’’ Naess means a
cosmology or worldview. Naess faults European and North American
civilization for the arrogance of its human-centered instrumentalization
of nonhuman nature. He contrasts his new ‘‘deep’’ (or radical)
ecological worldview with the dominant ‘‘shallow’’ (or reform)
paradigm. The shallow worldview, which he finds to be typical of
mainstream environmentalism, is merely an extension of European and
North American anthropocentrism—its reasons for conserving
wilderness and preserving biodiversity are invariably tied to human
welfare, and it prizes nonhuman nature mainly for its use-value. The
deep ecological worldview, in contrast, questions the fundamental
assumptions of European and North American anthropocentrism— that
is, it digs conceptually deeper. In doing so, deep ecological thinking ‘‘is
not a slight reform of our present society, but a substantial reorientation
of our whole civilization. This radicalism has inspired environmental
activists of many stripes to hoist up Deep Ecology as their banner in
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calling for nothing less than the redirection of human history. Naess, like
Socrates, makes no claims to certainty. In word and deed, Naess instead
has inspired others to engage in deep philosophical questioning through
example.
Adherents of the deep ecology movement share a dislike of the human-
centered value system at the core of European and North American
industrial culture. Deep ecologists argue that environmental philosophy
must recognize the values that inhere objectively in nature independently
of human wants, needs or desires. The popularity of deep ecology spans
from headline grabbing environmental activists dressed in coyote
costumes to scholars of an astonishing assortment of backgrounds and
interests. Authors have made connections between deep ecology and
ecological science (Golley 1987), religions from around the world New
Age spirituality direct action/ecological sabotage (Foreman 1991), the
poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Sessions 1977), the land ethic of Aldo
Leopold (Devall and Sessions 1985), the monism of Baruch Spinoza
(Sessions 1977, 1979, 1985; Naess 2005), and the phenomenology of
Martin Heidegger (Zimmerman 1986). Such variety is invigorating, but
it makes it difficult to find the common thread in all these diverse
manifestations of deep ecology. As one commentator has observed,
anyone who attempts to reconcile Heidegger’s with Leopold’s
contributions to deep ecology finds the going rugged. (To differentiate
between the broad popular and narrow academic usages of deep ecology,
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the term Deep Ecology will be used to denote the latter.) Much more
narrowly, deep ecology represents the psychologization of
environmental philosophy. Deep ecology in this sense refers to an
egalitarian and holistic environmental philosophy founded on
phenomenological methodology. By way of direct experience of
nonhuman nature, one recognizes the equal intrinsic worth of all biota as
well as one’s own ecological interconnectedness with the life world in
all its plenitude.
Understanding Deep Ecology in its academic sense demands reading the
work of four environmental philosophers: philosophers: the Norwegian
Arne Naess, the Americans George Sessions and David Rothenberg, and
the Australian Warwick Fox. Deep Ecology is inextricably associated
with Naess and owes its prominence to him. Naess’s many strengths—
strong will, humble demeanor, playful personality, estimable academic
reputation, aversion to judgment, predilection for inclusivity, and an odd
mix of interests—have stimulated many others to spend considerable
amounts of time, talent, and energy teasing out the nuances of his
creative insights.
Deep ecology is perhaps most easily understood when considered in
opposition to its ‘shallow’ counterpart. According to deep ecologists,
shallow ecology is anthropocentric and concerned with pollution and
resource depletion. Shallow ecology might thus be regarded as very
much the mainstream wing of environmentalism. Deep ecology, in
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contrast, rejects anthropocentrism and takes a ‘total-field’ perspective. In

other words, deep ecologists are not aiming to formulate moral
principles concerning the environment to supplement our existing ethical
framework. Instead, they demand an entirely new worldview and
philosophical perspective. According to Arne Naess, the Norwegian
philosopher who first outlined this shallow-deep split in
environmentalism, deep ecologists advocate the development of a new
eco-philosophy or ‘ecosophy’ to replace the destructive philosophy of
modern industrial society (Naess, 1973). While the various eco-
philosophies that have developed within deep ecology are diverse, Naess
and George Sessions have compiled a list of eight principles or
statements that are basic to deep ecology:
1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on
Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value,
inherent worth). These values are independent of the usefulness of
the non-human world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of
these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except
to satisfy vital needs.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a
substantially smaller population. The flourishing of non-human life
requires a smaller human population.
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5. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive,

and the situation is rapidly worsening.
6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic
economic, technological and ideological structures. The resulting
state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

7. The ideological change will be mainly that of appreciating life

quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than
adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be
a profound awareness of the difference between bigness and
greatness.
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation
directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.
But while Naess regards those who subscribe to these statements as
supporters of deep ecology, he does not believe it to follow that all such
supporters will have the same worldview or ‘Ecosophy’. In other words
deep ecologists do not offer one unified ultimate perspective, but possess
various and divergent philosophical and religious allegiances.
Naess’s own ecosophy involves just one fundamental ethical norm:
“Self-realization!”. For Naess this norm involves giving up a narrow
egoistic conception of the self in favor of a wider more comprehensive
Self (hence the deliberate capital ‘S’). Moving to this wider Self
involves recognizing that as human beings we are not removed from
nature, but are interconnected with it. Recognizing our wider Self thus
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involves identifying ourselves with all other life forms on the planet.
The Australian philosopher Warwick Fox has taken up this theme of
self-realization in his own eco-philosophy, ‘transpersonal ecology’. Fox
does not regard environmental ethics to be predominantly about
formulating our moral obligations usual ethical concern of formulating
principles and obligations thus becomes unnecessary, according to Fox,
for once the appropriate consciousness is established, one will naturally
protect the environment and allow it to flourish, for that will be part and
parcel of the protection and flourishing of oneself.
Critics of deep ecology argue that it is just too vague to address real
environmental concerns. For one thing, in its refusal to reject so many
worldviews and philosophical perspectives, many have claimed that it is
difficult to uncover just what deep ecology advocates. For example, on
the one hand, Naess offers us eight principles that deep ecologists should
accept, and on the other he claims that deep ecology is not about
drawing up codes of conduct, but adopting a global comprehensive
attitude. Now, if establishing principles is important, as so many
ethicists believe, perhaps deep ecology requires more precision than can
be found in Naess and Sessions’s platform. In particular, just how are we
to deal with clashes of interests? According to the third principle, for
example, humans have no right to reduce the richness and diversity of
the natural world unless to meet vital needs. But does that mean we are
under an obligation to protect the richness and diversity of the natural
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world? If so, perhaps we could cull non-native species such as rabbits

when they damage ecosystems. But then, the first principle states that
non-human beings such as rabbits have inherent value, and the fifth
principle states that human interference in nature is already excessive.
So just what should we do? Clearly, the principles as stated by Naess
and Sessions are too vague to offer any real guide for action. However,
perhaps principles are not important, as both Naess and Fox have
claimed. Instead, they claim that we must rely on the fostering of the
appropriate states of consciousness. Unfortunately, two problems
remain. First of all, it is not at all clear that all conflicts of interest will
be resolved by the adoption of the appropriate state of consciousness.
For even if I identify myself with all living things, some of those things,
such as bacteria and viruses, may still threaten me as a discrete living
organism. And if conflicts of interest remain, don’t we need principles to
resolve them? Secondly, and as we saw with Leopold’s land ethic, just
what are we to do about those who remain unconvinced about adopting
this new state of consciousness? If we don’t have rational arguments,
principles or obligations to point to, what chance do we have of
persuading such people to take the environmental crisis seriously?
At this point deep ecologists would object that such criticisms remain
rooted in the ideology that has caused so much of the crisis we now face.
For example, take the point about persuading others. Deep ecologists
claim that argument and debate are not the only means we must use to
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help people realize their ecological consciousness; we must also use

such things as poetry, music and art. This relates back to the point I
made at the beginning of the section: deep ecologists do not call for
supplementary moral principles concerning the environment, but an
entirely new worldview. Whether such a radical shift in the way we
think about ourselves and the environment is possible, remains to be
seen.
4.5.2 Social Ecology
It is difficult to separate Social Ecology from the work of the social
theorist Murray Bookchin. Having elaborated its philosophical
foundations in a dozen books and many essays, he is considered by
many to be the founder of the field. Bookchin drew on history,
anthropology, philosophy, political theory, and ecology to formulate a
comprehensive analysis of the relationship between humanity and
nature, the causes of the ecological crisis, and the pathways humanity
could reinstate to create an ecologically sustainable and just world.
Social ecology shares with deep ecology the view that the foundations of
the environmental crisis lie in the dominant ideology of modern western
societies. Thus, just as with deep ecology, social ecology claims that in
order to resolve the crisis, a radical overhaul of this ideology is
necessary. However, the new ideology that social ecology proposes is
not concerned with the ‘self-realization’ of deep ecology, but instead the
absence of domination. Indeed, domination is the key theme in the
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writings of Murray Bookchin, the most prominent social ecologist. For

Bookchin, environmental problems are directly related to social
problems. In particular, Bookchin claims that the hierarchies of power
prevalent within modern societies have fostered a hierarchical
relationship between humans and the natural world. Indeed, it is the
ideology of the free market that has facilitated such hierarchies, reducing
both human beings and the natural world to mere commodities.
Bookchin argues that the liberation of both humans and nature are
actually dependent on one another. Thus his argument is quite different
from Marxist thought, in which man’s freedom is dependent on the
complete domination of the natural world through technology. For
Bookchin and other social ecologists, this Marxist thinking involves the
same fragmentation of humans from nature that is prevalent in capitalist
ideology. Instead, it is argued that humans must recognize that they are
part of nature, not distinct or separate from it. In turn then, human
societies and human relations with nature can be informed by the non-
hierarchical relations found within the natural world. For example,
Bookchin points out that within an ecosystem, there is no species more
important than another, instead relationships are mutualistic and
interrelated. This interdependence and lack of hierarchy in nature, it is
claimed, provides a blueprint for a non-hierarchical human
society.Without doubt, the transformation that Bookchin calls for is
radical. But just what will this new non-hierarchical, interrelated and
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mutualistic human society look like? For Bookchin, an all powerful

centralized state is just another agent for domination. Thus in order to
truly be rid of hierarchy, the transformation must take place within
smaller local communities. Such communities will be based on
sustainable agriculture, participation through democracy, and of course
freedom through non-domination. Not only then does nature help
cement richer and more equal human communities, but transformed
societies also foster a more benign relationship with nature. This latter
point illustrates Bookchin’s optimistic view of humanity’s potential.
After all, Bookchin does not think that we should condemn all of
humanity for causing the ecological crisis, for instead it is the
relationships within societies that are to blame. Because of this,
Bookchin is extremely critical of the anti-humanism and misanthropy he
perceives to be prevalent in much deep ecology.
Clark’s description of Social Ecology as ‘‘the awakening earth
community reflecting on itself, uncovering its history, exploring its
present predicament, and contemplating its future’’ highlights its general
threads and calls attention to its predilection for theorizing nature and
society as a unity. More specifically, key themes and arguments of
Social Ecology include the following:
• Viewing nature and society as emerging through an evolutionary
unfolding toward increasing diversity, complexity, freedom, and
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consciousness by means of processes that foundationally involve

interconnection, complementarity, and cooperation;
• Understanding the relationship between nature and society as a holistic
unity in diversity and seeking to discover why this relationship has gone
awry; regarding social conditions and structures as the causes of the
detrimental impact of humanity on nature;
• Critiquing institutionalized forms of dominance, both hierarchical and
class-based, not only from a social-justice perspective but also for being
causally implicated in ecological destruction;
• Privileging social-structural explanations of ecological disruptions over
biological and/or psycho spiritual explanatory frameworks such as
human population growth and human chauvinism;
• Assessing the capitalist market economy as the major force behind
intensifying ecological problems;
• Identifying capitalism as an economy, way of life, and thought style
that has colonized every aspect of human life and the natural world;
• Agitating for the revolutionary abolition of all forms of domination
rather than seeking reformist solutions to social and ecological problems
or encouraging individual spiritual transformation;
• Urging the realization of freedom for both people and nature;
• Providing a vision of the ecological society to counter the dominance
of the economism (the hegemony of the market economy) that is
destroying the biosphere.
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According to Social Ecologists, the human-nature relationship is formed

through the structural and conceptual relations that predominate in any
society. The drive to dominate nature originated in and is perpetuated by
the human domination of humans. Social domination is organized along
lines of hierarchy and class stratification: Hierarchy involves the
valorization and institutionalization of human differences (gender, race,
ethnicity, etc.), and class divisions are based on unequal ownership or
control of material wealth and means of production. Both forms of
domination underlie the destruction of nature, for it is only when
differential status, master servant relationships, and economic
exploitation emerge in the social world that human beings direct related
ideas and actions to the world of landscapes, animals, and plants.
Ecological problems never have been separate from social inequity and
economic exploitation, and the ecological crisis cannot be resolved
without a revolutionary restructuring of society on the economic,
political, cultural, and value levels.
In making the case for the causal primacy of social structure in the way
nature is treated, Social Ecologists echo a long-standing sociological
predilection for viewing social patterns as being projected onto
nonsocial domains, especially the realms of gods and nature. Within any
society all its dimensions are aligned through the structural and
ideological mappings that the sociologist Max Weber characterized as
manifesting ‘‘elective affinity.’’ Thus, societies stratified through
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systems of domination project a blueprint of stratification onto the

natural world, representing it as a domain inferior to humanity. That
projection makes nature available for many forms of physical
domination: destruction of habitats, conversion of ecosystems,
ownership of land, exploitation of life forms, and experimentation on
animals as well as the overarching constitution of the nonhuman world
as a realm for instrumental use. The upshot of this analysis is that ending
ecological destruction hinges on abolishing domination in society. This
analysis may explain why the contemporary environmental movement,
along with the earlier work of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, has
been unable to turn things around. From a social-ecological standpoint,
the creation of an ecological society requires nothing less than the
emergence of an emancipated humanity that abandons hierarchical
valuations and economic inequalities, charting instead a new historical
course for both humans and nature into realms of creativity and freedom.
Although the destruction of nature did not originate with industrialism
but has roots in the earliest forms of hierarchy (especially patriarchy),
Social Ecologists indict the market economy as the major force behind
the ecological crisis. Steven Best stated that for Social Ecology
‘‘environmental problems emerge from a long history of hierarchical
social relations that culminate in a class ridden, profit-driven,
accumulation-oriented capitalist society. In its addiction to limitless
growth the market economy, especially the horror of economistic-
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technocratic globalism that it has turned into, is jeopardizing the

integrity of the biosphere as a whole. From the point of view of Social
Ecology, economic expansionism is leading to the colonization of all
worlds: natural, social, cultural, and personal. Economism homogenizes
and impoverishes the natural world while degrading human relations and
experiences into commodities. Economism also has co-opted the
Enlightenment concept of progress as social development that unfolds
through competition and expansionism rather than through cooperation
and balance. Social Ecologists do not regard the negative impact of
industrialism as stemming from either technological development or
cultural-ideological contrivances such as commodity fetishism that
sustain overproduction but instead from an economic system founded on
the ‘‘the universal reign of limitless buying and selling, indeed, of
limitless growth and expansion. This imperative renders capitalism
nearly impervious to ethical considerations and unmasks the idea of
‘‘greening capitalism’’ as an oxymoron if not an Orwellian smoke
screen (Bookchin 1993). Diagnosing socioeconomic forms of
domination as the source of ecological destruction presents Social
Ecology with the task of envisioning an alternative way of life: the
ecological society. The future ecological society is portrayed as
organized in eco communities that will be egalitarian, democratic and
participatory, and semiautonomous but interconnected. Such networked
communities will live in balance—both knowledge-based and heartfelt
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— with their ecological regions. In the ecological society people will

integrate ethical considerations into their energy choices, forms of land
use, and treatment of animals. Economies will be human-scaled. In the
creation and exchange of objects craft will be valued over mass
production, durability over constant turnover, and simple lifestyles over
consumption. The ethos of the ecological society is envisioned as
cooperative with respect to people, animals, and the land. Because
cooperative relationships are ontologically primary in evolutionary,
ecological, and social processes, the ecological society is conceived as a
realizable and actionable vision rather than a utopian will-o’-the-wisp.
The creation of a social world rooted in the praxis and ethic of
mutualism is theorized as restoring the primal and ever present, even
when repressed and marginalized, ground of being.
Criticisms of Social Ecology
The social-ecological preoccupation with human uniqueness has been
criticized, especially by Deep Ecologists, as an expression of human
chauvinism or anthropocentrism. Passages in Bookchin’s work in which
he draws sharp lines between human nature and all other animals invite
that critique. To get a theoretically tidy distinction between first nature
and second nature, Bookchin tended to oversimplify animal life as one
of fixed instincts and genetic programs while exulting humanity as
epitomizing the achievements of reasoning, self consciousness,
intentional planning, and behavioral plasticity. However, a dualistic
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frame of this type is empirically problematic because it ignores advances

in behavioral ecology and cognitive ethology that reveal the
complexities of animal life and ethically problematic because it
underwrites a human supremacist argument.
The motive behind such dualistic maneuvers is to avoid naturalizing the
ecological crisis by anchoring it in biological programs or regarding it as
a consequence of Darwinian processes. After hypostatizing the
distinction between human beings and animals, Bookchin and other
Social Ecologists exorcise terms such as hierarchy, domination,
competition, and slavery from animal relations.
When that terminology is applied to the natural world, domination of
people and nature (and ultimately human colonization of the biosphere)
can appear legitimated as an extension of biological basics. Thus,
Bookchin’s attempt to distinguish humanity from the rest of the animal
kingdom allowed him to pathologize domination as a pure sociocultural
phenomenon and at the same time exonerate first nature from the vices
of inequity, exploitation, oppression, and subservience. Although
Bookchin’s critics often deplore the sharp line he drew between humans
and animals, they rarely give him and other Social Ecologists credit for
defending the natural world against its historical and recent
constructions as blind, mute, cruel, selfish, competitive, and stingy.
Countering the ideological fiction of nature as ‘‘demonic and hostile’’,
Bookchin insisted on an understanding of the natural world as creative,
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pregnant, fecund, participatory, relational, and wondrous. Social

Ecology propounds a philosophy of all phenomena as interrelated,
jointly enhancing, and mutually forming through symbiotic and
cooperative processes. Within that framework the destructiveness of
domination is conceived of as fortuitous, a possible historical trajectory
but not an essential or necessary characteristic of the world. The
cosmology of Social Ecology is thus openly spiritual in offering a vision
of the good and goodness as primary forces and in affirming
evolutionary emergence in the universe and the biosphere as a creative,
awe-inspiring process, though not one conceived as either supernaturally
designed or with a predetermined telos. As Clark noted about the
implications of this cosmology for a possible future, the ecological
society that is the goal of Social Ecology is found to be rooted in the
most basic levels of being. For Social Ecologists, in a just and
ecologically harmonious world, humanity will return to a primordial
condition, but this will involve the restoration of the original essence and
potential of humankind, not the reinstatement of the Stone Age or the
Pleistocene.
One problem that has been identified with Bookchin’s social ecology is
his extrapolation from the natural world to human society. Bookchin
argues that the interdependence and lack of hierarchy within nature
provides grounding for non-hierarchical human societies. However, as
we saw when discussing Aldo Leopold, it is one thing to say how nature
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is, but quite another to say how society ought to be. Even if we accept
that there are no natural hierarchies within nature (which for many is
dubious), there are plenty of other aspects of it that most of us would not
want to foster in our human society. For example, weak individuals and
weak species are often killed, eaten and out-competed in an ecosystem.
This, of course, is perfectly natural and even fits in with ecology’s
characterization of nature as interconnected. However, should this
ground human societies in which the weak are killed, eaten and out-
competed? Most of us find such a suggestion repugnant. Following this
type of reasoning, many thinkers have warned of the dangers of drawing
inferences about how society should be organized from certain facts
about how nature is.
Some environmental philosophers have also pointed to a second problem
with Bookchin’s theory. For many, his social ecology is anthropocentric,
thus failing to grant the environment the standing it deserves. Critics cite
evidence of anthropocentrism in the way Bookchin accounts for the
liberation of both humans and nature. This unfolding process will not
just occur of its own accord, according to Bookchin; rather, human
beings must facilitate it. Of course, many philosophers are extremely
skeptical of the very idea that history is inevitably ‘unfolding’ towards
some particular direction. However, some environmental philosophers
are more wary of the prominent place that Bookchin gives to human
beings in facilitating this unfolding. Of course, to what extent this is a
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problem depends on one’s point of view. After all, if humans cannot

ameliorate the environmental problems we face, is there much point
doing environmental ethics in the first place? Indeed, Bookchin himself
has been rather nonplussed by this charge, and explicitly denies that
humans are just another community in nature. But he also denies that
nature exists solely for the purposes of humans. However, the critics
remain unconvinced, and believe it to be extremely arrogant to think that
humans know what the unfolding of nature will look like, let alone to
think that they can bring it about.
4.5.3 Ecofeminism
Ecological feminism is the confluence of feminist and environmentalist
strains of thought. Its main claim is that ‘nature’ (or the natural
environment) is a feminist issue. Something is a feminist issue when
understanding it helps one understand something about the social and
economic status of women. Equal rights, comparable pay for comparable
work, and day-care centers are feminist issues because understanding
them sheds light on the subordination of (many) women. Sexism,
racism, classism, heterosexism, ethnocentrism, and colonialism are also
feminist issues because understanding them helps one understand the
subordination of (many) women. Likewise, deforestation,
desertification, and water pollution are feminist issues because
understanding them helps one understand both the subordination of
(many) women. Defining ecological feminism more precisely in the
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context of environmental ethics and environmental philosophy is not that

easy. There are five contributing factors that make defining ecological
feminism (or ‘‘ecofeminism’’ as it is often called) difficult. The first is
that just as there is not one feminism, there is not one ecological
feminism. Historically, the variety of different feminisms (e.g., liberal,
Marist, radical/cultural, social/ socialist feminisms) gave rise to a variety
of different ecological feminisms. A second factor is that the varieties of
ecological feminism that emerged in the 1980s and continued through
the 1990s often were a response to two competing environmental ethics:
deep ecology and social ecology. Separating off the basic claims of
ecological feminism from the positions they criticized poses its own
challenges. A third factor is that some ecological feminisms emerged as
differing accounts of how the separation of the human from the
nonhuman world happened and ways the separation disproportionately
and adversely effected women and children.
Mindful of all its diversity, what is a minimal condition characterization
of ecological feminism? First, all ecological feminisms are explicitly
both feminist and environmentalist, despite very real differences among
them regarding their understandings of feminism and environmentalism,
women and nature, oppression and liberation. Second, ecological
feminism posits a variety of connections between the domination of
women (and other others) and the domination of ‘‘nature.’’ Beyond that,
self-identified ecological feminists seem to share three additional
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convictions: (1) ecological feminist insights concerning women-other

Others-nature connections should be a part of any adequate
environmental ethic or environmental philosophy; (2) ecological
feminism’s critique of the gender-exclusive nature of leading positions
in environmental ethics and environmental philosophy comes with the
responsibility of engaging in practices intended to help dismantle the
unjustified systems of human domination; (3) a commitment to
ecological feminism involves creative problem solving in developing
life-affirming, environmentally and socially sustainable, biologically and
culturally diverse practices, policies, lifestyles, and communities of
choice.
Like social ecology, ecofeminism also points to a link between social
domination and the domination of the natural world. And like both deep
ecology and social ecology, ecofeminism calls for a radical overhaul of
the prevailing philosophical perspective and ideology of western society.
However, ecofeminism is a broad church, and there are actually a
number of different positions that feminist writers on the environment
have taken. In this section three of the most prominent will be discussed.
Val Plumwood offers a critique of the rationalism inherent in traditional
ethics and blames this rationalism for the oppression of both women and
nature. The fundamental problem with rationalism, so Plumwood claims,
is its fostering of dualisms. For example, reason itself is usually
presented in stark opposition to emotion. Traditional ethics, Plumwood
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argues, promote reason as capable of providing a stable foundation for

moral argument, because of its impartiality and universalizability.
Emotion, on the other hand, lacks these characteristics, and because it is
based on sentiment and affection makes for shaky ethical frameworks.
Plumwood claims that this dualism between reason and emotion grounds
other dualisms in rationalist thought: in particular, mind/body,
human/nature and man/woman. In each case, the former is held to be
superior to the latter (Plumwood, 1991). So, for Plumwood, the
inferiority of both women and nature have a common source: namely,
rationalism. Once this is recognized, so the argument goes, it becomes
clear that simple ethical extensionism as outlined above is insufficient to
resolve the domination of women and nature. After all, such
extensionism is stuck in the same mainstream rationalist thought that is
the very source of the problem. What is needed instead, according to
Plumwood, is a challenge to rationalism itself, and thus a challenge to
the dualisms it perpetuates.
However, while it is perfectly possible to acknowledge the rationalism
present in much mainstream ethical thinking, one can nevertheless query
Plumwood’s characterization of it. After all, does rationalism
necessarily promote dualisms that are responsible for the subjugation of
women and nature? Such a claim would seem odd given the many
rationalist arguments that have been put forward to promote the rights
and interests of both women and the natural world. In addition, many
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thinkers would argue that rationalist thought is not the enemy, but
instead the best hope for securing proper concern for the environment
and for women. For as we have seen above, such thinkers believe that
relying on the sentiments and feelings of individuals is too unstable a
foundation upon which to ground a meaningful ethical framework.
Karen J. Warren has argued that the dualisms of rationalist thought, as
outlined by Plumwood, are not in themselves problematic. Rather,
Warren claims that they become problematic when they are used in
conjunction with an ‘oppressive conceptual framework’ to justify
subordination. Warren argues that one feature inherent within an
oppressive conceptual framework is the ‘logic of domination’. Thus, a
list of the differences between humans and nature, and between men and
women is not in itself harmful. But once assumptions are added, such as
these differences leading to the moral superiority of humans and of men,
then we move closer to the claim that we are justified in subordinating
women and nature on the basis of their inferiority. According to Warren,
just such logic of domination has been prevalent within western society.
Men have been identified with the realm of the ‘mental’ and ‘human’,
while women have been identified with the‘physical’ and the ‘natural’.
Once it is claimed that the ‘natural’ and the ‘physical’ are morally
inferior to the ‘human’ and ‘mental’, men become justified in
subordinating women and nature. For Warren then, feminists and
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environmentalists share the same goal: namely, to abolish this

oppressive conceptual framework.
Other ecofeminists take a quite different approach to Plumwood and
Warren. Rather than outlining the connections between the domination
of women and of nature, they instead emphasize those things that link
women and the natural world. Women, so the argument goes, stand in a
much closer relationship to the natural world due to their capacity for
child-bearing. For some ecofeminists, this gives women a unique
perspective on how to build harmonious relationships with the natural
world. Indeed, many such thinkers advocate a spiritualist approach in
which nature and the land are given a sacred value, harking back to
ancient religions in which the Earth is considered female.
For writers such as Plumwood, however, emphasizing women’s
‘naturalness’ in this way simply reinforces the dualism that led to
women’s oppression in the first place. Placing women as closer to
nature, according to Plumwood, simply places them closer to
oppression. Other critics argue that the adoption of a spiritualist
approach leads feminists to turn their attention inwards to themselves
and their souls and away from those individuals and entities they should
be trying to liberate. However, in response, these ecofeminists may
make the same point as the deep ecologists: to resolve the environmental
problems we face, and the systems of domination in place, it is the
consciousness and philosophical outlook of individuals that must
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change. In general, ecofeminism which originated in the 1970s is a

diverse movement. It represents a wide range of perspectives from
within the feminist movement and the environmental movement. The
core shared idea of ecofeminism is that there is a link between the
domination of nature and the domination of women and that both kinds
of domination must be removed. According to some ecofeminists, the
oppression of women and the natural world have the same cause. The
two most important variants of ecofeminism are cultural ecofeminism
and socialist ecofeminism. Cultural ecofeminism maintains that women
are essentially different from men that they have a ‘nature’ which
involves particular traits, e.g. nurturing, and that this nature makes
women close to nature (in another sense of nature, i.e. the living world).
Socialist ecofeminism does not accept such essentialist claims. It holds
that, although, it may be widely thought that women are closer to nature,
this is a social construction. Some women do not have such
characteristics, some men do, and everyone is capable of learning them.
Ecofeminists have offered several criticisms of the mainstream
approaches to environmental ethics. Their main points of criticism
concern (1) the emphasis on rationality, (2) the emphasis on
universalizability, and (3) the emphasis on criteria for moral
considerability.
1. Ecofeminists point out that many of the main approaches to
environmental ethics stress rationality and denigrate feeling.
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2. Many mainstream approaches to environmental ethics are based on

abstract principles of justice which are taken to apply to all people
everywhere, i.e. which are universalizable and thus impersonal.
3. Ecofeminists also criticize the fact that many environmental
ethicists search for necessary and sufficient conditions for moral
considerability.