From: Alan McGowen <alanm@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Date: 15 Oct 92 14:30 PDT
Subject: Re: Nature's Rights and Muddled Dietz
Nf-ID: #R:cdp:1466601799:cdp:1466601813:000:5469
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!alanm    Oct 15 14:30:00 1992


Dietz:

>I find plenty of
>reason for agreeing that damage to ecosystems is bad if this (in some
>way) harms people.  But assigning moral standing to ecosystems
>themselves, apart from human interests (broadly defined)?  There's no
>way to convince me of that -- because any such argument will
>inevitably depend on assumptions with which I, as an anthropocentric,
>cannot agree.
>
>Operationally, I'm not sure there is all that much difference between
>these positions anyway.  

The anthropocentric position does approach the ecocentric one as the
ethical time horizon is increased. The essential breaking point comes
at the evolutionary time horizon: to an ecocentric, humanity has no
right to shut down the processes of evolution itself, not even if we could
be sure of our own safety in the process. To an anthropocentic,
it seems that there can be nothing wrong with an "after me the deluge"
view of that matter, provided we don't ourselves drown (or impoverish 
ourselves too much) in the flood. In the anthropocentric view, we may 
have responsibilities to future generations of humans -- even very distant
generations -- but we have absolutely no responsibilities as citizens
of the biosphere nor to the future of life itself. This is a deep ethical
difference. 

I would argue that ecocentrism is for that reason the only workable "stable 
limit" of anthropocentrism as the time horizon is increased even within a 
plausible human tenure: only by acknowledging worth external to all human 
interests (and beyond our current ability to assess) can we moor the 
anthropocentric value system in something which can prevent it from drifting 
back towards a dangerous focus on measurable, short-term advantage.
Ecocentrism is *practically* more workable, I think, than very long
time scale pure anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism also tends to undervalue
ecosystems because it has no way to compensate for ignorance about value
to humans -- ecocentrism, by attaching a value to ecosystems independent of
anything we can assess today, is protected against this pitfall.

>I, as an anthropocentric, might feel the
>value you assign to an ecosystem to be eccentric, but I would have to
>admit that you *do* assign that value, even if I do not share it, and
>that your feelings have weight.  And, if we were to agree that
>there is risk of harm to people in damaging an ecosystem, would we not
>agree that this is bad?

Of course, but these are not the issues I've been discussing: I don't deny
that ecosystems have utilitarian values to humans, nor aesthetic
value. I just deny that this is the whole of their value, or even very
much of it. Most of their value is invisible to us in our present state
of extreme ignorance. It is notable that anthropocentrics often seem
devoid of any appreciation of how little is known about the earth's diversity
of life or how it works, and many exhibit a brash certainty of human
independence of it which seems somewhat reminiscent of the adolescent's 
sense of personal immortality. 

>One things that annoys me is the confusion of factual and ethical
>claims.  To me, "damaging an ecosystem will harm the health or
>prosperity of people" is a factual claim that is subject to objective
>study.  Elevating this claim to the status of dogma and attacking its
>critics on ethical grounds is disturbing.

That isn't what I have been doing, though it may have been interpreted
in that way by some. The entire thrust of my argument has been to go
beyond the discussion of what will obviously "harm the health or prosperity
of people". Believe it or not, that is *not* the end of objectivity, any
more than it is the end of ethics: to determine how much area a metapopulation
needs to have a stong chance of maintaining its adaptedness far into the 
future -- or to have a reasonable chance of speciation -- are also objective
questions. However, I strongly question whether the "factual" and the 
"ethical" form the sharp dichotomy which Dietz believes they do. This idea
-- that ethics is an autonomous little world of its own, unconstrained
by any facts -- is one of the assumptions of anthropocentrism which I reject.
At bottom, values are adaptations which can aid in survival and fitness or 
detract from it: which a given value is likely to do is a potentially 
objective question. Choices of value system are not just matters of taste:
they are potentially matters of long-term life and death, or at least 
well-being and impovershment.

I have been arguing that ecocentrism is more likely to aid human welfare than
anthropocentrism is. There is nothing logically untoward about this, any more
than to argue that a particular set is not equal to its own closure. The 
"ethical closure" of anthropocentrism is ecocentrism, because at bottom humans
can only be expected to flourish in the biosphere in which we evolved.
Destroy that, or change it beyond recognition, and we will diminish and
possibly imperil ourselves. But to avoid destroying it, we have to value it
for what it is -- even in the aspects of what it is which we know nothing 
about today. To value something whose value to oneself is unknown and will 
not be known in the time frame in which decisions based on values have to be
made is to assign it an intrinsic value. Assign an intrinsic value to the
biosphere and you are an ecocentric even if you do so only as a strategy to
secure the success of enlightened anthropocentrism.

------------
Alan McGowen




Newsgroups: sci.environment