It is not difficult to present life in an appealing light. It is much more difficult, however, to come up with a philosophically rigorous defense of biocentric value. – Nicholas Agar [1].
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Notes
An important caveat must be made about a similar view in the broader ethical theory literature, namely the neo-Aristotelianism of Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson, and Richard Kraut, who’s views presuppose biocentrism rather than argue for it [5, 14, 15, 25]. To keep this paper’s scope manageable, discussion will be restricted to Taylor, Varner, and Agar because these authors give arguments for biocentrism rather than assume it. That said, much of what is discussed herein may also apply to the neo-Aristotelians but determining whether that is the case is best left for another occasion.
For a discussion of this issue with biocentrism and many other arguments in environmental ethics that argue from goodness to obligation, see John Nolt’s “The Move from Good to Ought” [16].
Christine Korsgaard makes the same distinctions in a widely cited paper “Two Distinctions in Goodness”: intrinsic-extrinsic goodness and instrumental-final goodness [13]. However, note that Taylor made the above distinctions in his earlier paper “Ethics of Respect for Nature” [23], so it’s unlikely that Korsgaard influenced Taylor here.
This apparent problem is also present in the Kantian tradition whose proponents, including Alan Wood among others, aim to extend moral considerability to animals because they have some of the infrastructure of rationality, such as preference autonomy [29]. Garthoff’s target with the above analogy is actually this kind of contemporary Kantian ethicists views such as Wood.
It might be objected that such a representer has no biofunction. However, Agar never defines “biofunction.” So, to say that biological organisms have biofunctions and motion-sensing light switches do not have biofunctions presupposes some other conception of life, which means that Agar’s conception of life as representation is incomplete insofar as it smuggles in another conception of life in the form of biofunctions.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Leonard Kahn, Drew Chastain, and John Nolt for comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank two anonymous referees for this journal for their comments, which I found very constructive and helpful.
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MacClellan, J. Is Biocentrism Dead? Two Live Problems for Life-Centered Ethics. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09954-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09954-5