Biocentrism

Biocentrism (“life centered”) is an ethical perspective holding that all life deserves equal moral consideration or has equal moral standing. While elements of biocentrism can be found in several religious traditions, it was not until the late decades of the 20th century that philosophical ethics in the Western tradition addressed this topic in a systematic manner.

Much of the history of environmental ethics can be understood in terms of an expanding range of moral standing. Traditional Western ethics has always been anthropocentric, meaning that only presently living human beings deserve moral consideration. As environmental issues such as nuclear waste disposal, population growth, and resource depletion came to the fore, many ethicists argued that moral standing should be extended to include future generations of human beings. The animal welfare and animal rights movement argued for an extension of moral standing to, at least some, animals. Arguments followed to extend moral standing to plants and then to such ecological wholes as ecosystems, wilderness areas, species, and populations.

The philosophical challenge throughout this process was to articulate and defend a nonarbitrary criterion by which the question of moral standing could be decided. On what grounds do we decide that objects deserve to be considered in moral deliberation? Supporters of extending moral standing to future generations argued that temporal location, like geographical location, was an arbitrary ground for denying equal moral status to humans not yet living. Defenders of animal rights cited characteristics such as having interests, sentience, being conscious, and being the subject of a life as the most appropriate criteria for moral standing.

Biocentric ethics argues that the only nonarbitrary ground for assigning moral standing is life itself. Biocentric ethics extends the boundary of moral standing about as far as it can go. All living beings, simply by virtue of being alive, have moral standing and deserve moral consideration.

Roots of biocentric ethics can be found in a number of traditions and historical figures. The first of the five basic precepts of Buddhist ethics is to avoid killing or harming any living thing. The Christian saint Francis of Assisi preached to animals and proclaimed a biocentric theology that explicitly included animals and plants. Some Native American traditions also held that all living things are sacred. The romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries defended the intrinsic value of the natural world against the tendency of the technological age to treat all nature as having mere instrumental value.

In the 20th century, preservationists such as John Muir held that the intrinsic value of natural areas, and in particular of wilderness areas, created responsibilities on our part. Preservationists argued that the intrinsic value of nature imposes duties on us to respect and preserve natural objects.

But the preservationist ethic can go beyond biocentrism in that it is not life itself that always carries moral value. Wilderness areas and ecosystems, after all, are not alive. Similarly, Christopher Stone's famous argument that trees should have legal standing would not strictly be biocentric in that Stone also advocated standing for mountains and rivers. This observation suggests that biocentrism is essentially an individualistic ethic. Life would seem an attribute of individual living things. Many environmentalists argue that holistic entities such as ecosystems, wilderness areas, and species all deserve moral consideration. To the extent that such entities are not alive, strictly speaking, environmental holism differs from biocentrism.

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