Plant Ethics

Concepts and Applications

Angela Kallhoff, Marcello Di Paola, Maria Schörgenhumer, Angela Kallhoff, Marcello Di Paola, Maria Schörgenhumer, Angela Kallhoff, Marcello Di Paola, Maria Schörgenhumer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351627573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Large parts of our world are filled with plants, and human life depends on, interacts with, affects and is affected by plant life in various ways. Yet plants have not received nearly as much attention from philosophers and ethicists as they deserve. In environmental philosophy, plants are often swiftly subsumed under the categories of "all living things" and rarely considered thematically. There is a need for developing a more sophisticated theoretical understanding of plants and their practical role in human experience.

Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications aims at opening a philosophical discussion that may begin to fill that gap. The book investigates issues in plants ontology, ethics and the role of plants and their cultivation in various fields of application. It explores and develops important concepts to shape and frame plants-related philosophical questions accurately, including new ideas of how to address moral questions when confronted with plants in concrete scenarios.

This edited volume brings together for the first time, and in an interdisciplinary spirit, contemporary approaches to plant ethics by international scholars of established reputation. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Philosophy and Ethics.

Part I
Concepts and approaches

Setting the stage for plant ethics

1 The value of plants

On the axiologies of plants

Gianfranco Pellegrino

Introduction

Plant ethics is the latest attempt at extending the scope of moral considerability. Ethics began with the nearest and dearest, came to include members of the same tribe, then co-nationals, then human beings at large, then animals, and now finally plants (see Kallhoff 2002; Pouteau 2014). Here, I focus on various ways to include plants in the realm of morally valuable things – that is, on various axiologies of plants.

For some authors, moral value can be grounded in aesthetic value.¹ Here, I do not pursue this path, because I explore the idea that plants have value independently of valuers – whereas aesthetic value is very often construed as a function of aesthetic appreciation.² In what follows, I assume that value grounds pro tanto reasons to bring about or protect the existence of valuable things.

First, I illustrate some relevant intuitions and background distinctions. In the following section, I present some plant axiologies – emphasizing how one strategy is common to all of them: they all extend to plants the grounds of the value of non-plants.³ I then list three challenges to this strategy before I finally propose an alternative strategy in the last section of the chapter.

Intuitions and distinctions

This section articulates intuitions about the value of plants, as well as some relevant distinctions framed in the language of value theory.

Intuitions

Mary Midgley imagines Robinson Crusoe wondering whether he should “devastate” his island after his leave, by “settling sparks and powder craftily among certain dry spinneys” chosen for that purpose. Midgley suggests that Crusoe would feel “an invincible objection to this senseless destruction”. So do the rest of us, she claims. Unfortunately, Midgley contends, the actual content of this objection is difficult to state, at least within “the language of our moral tradition” (Midgley 1983, 36). This tradition, whose main representative for Midgley is contractarianism broadly understood, is blind to many potential bearers of value (cf. also Nussbaum 2006).⁴

Crusoe’s island hosted animals, plants, and other inanimate natural items (putting aside Crusoe himself, Friday, and his people). Midgley’s question may be stated as follows: Are non-human beings – such as non-human animals, plants, inanimate elements of nature, and eco-systems – valuable?⁵ If so, are they valuable merely as means for human purposes and objects of human concerns? Or do they have independent value, that is, are they valuable independently of human ends, stances, and considerations? Midgley’s contention is that most of us think that many non-human beings have independent value. Call this the Independent Value Intuition, or Independent Value, for short (cf. Agar 2001, 83; Varner 1998, 80, 95). In this chapter, I focus on a narrower version of Midgley’s question, to be put as follows: Are plants valuable?⁶ If so, is their value dependent on human or animal ends and concerns, or is it independent of them, or both?

To this narrower question, one may answer in the affirmative. Compare a planet without life, “Lifeless”, with a planet with no animal and human life but replete with plant life, “Flora”. Assume that both planets are too distant to be reached by any human, super-human or animal being. This excludes the possibility that the two planets be in any way useful or otherwise of concern to humans. Nonetheless, if asked to choose a planet to destroy, most of us would likely have Lifeless destroyed and save Flora. This judgment may show that Flora has value, at least as compared to Lifeless, and that this value is independent from its usefulness or observers’ concerns (see Scherer 1983).⁷ This judgment expresses the intuition that plants have Independent Value.⁸ The main objective of the following sections is to present various philosophical accounts of this intuition, that is various plant axiologies.

Distinctions⁹

Any discussion of value may refer to the following topics:

1. The source of value, namely what or who establishes that things are valuable. On subjective views, valuers are the source of value – things are good or bad because they are regarded as such by beings able to entertain, and often to express, value judgments. Often, such beings are identified with human beings. Accordingly, nothing can have value if there are no humans, or if human presence and concerns are not assumed to be at play. In a subjective plant axiology, plants have value because human beings regard them as having value. Plants cannot have value if there are no human beings around, or if human judgments are not assumed to be at play. On these views, the value of plants depends on human valuing.
On objective views, things have value independently of valuers and their judgments. In an objective plant axiology, plants can have value even in a world without human beings. Independent Value amounts here to the idea that plants’ value is objective: independent of human valuers and valuing.¹⁰

2. The attitude to value. Suppose I claim that kindness is good. If asked: “Why is kindness good?” I can mention a further valuable thing to which kindness conduces – “Kindness yields pleasure, and pleasure is good”. Of course, the same question can then be raised concerning pleasure. To this, I can answer: “Well, it is obvious that pleasure is good – it is good in itself, as an end”. These two answers distinguish between means to pleasure and the pleasure that is obtained by these means – that is, pleasure regarded as an end. Both things may be valued – but the former are valued as means, and the latter are valued as ends, for their own sake, or in themselves. Independent Value in this sense is the idea that plants are not merely, and not always, instruments for human ends.¹¹ They can be given value independently of human concerns and aims – as ends in themselves, for their own sake: they can be given final value. The independent value of plants is a value independent of human aims.

3. The grounds of value – i.e. the features of a thing that make it valuable, its value-making features. Kindness is valuable as a means because it leads to pleasure. Its conduciveness to pleasure is a value-making feature of kindness. Pleasure is valuable as an end because of some of its features – for instance the fact that pleasant experiences are evolutionarily adaptive. The value-making features can belong to the intrinsic nature of the valuable thing – they can be intrinsic properties of it – or they can be extrinsic features – i.e. properties that the valuable thing has as a relatum, or a part and so on. When something has value because of its intrinsic properties, then it has intrinsic value. By contrast, when the value of something depends on its extrinsic or relational properties, then that something has extrinsic value.¹²
In this case, Independent Value means intrinsic value. The independent value of plants is the value that plants have independently of any relation they do or can entertain with other (valuable and not valuable) things.

In what follows, I explore strategies employed to identify the value-making features of plants.

Plant axiologies: The extensionist strategy

Intrinsic value is grounded in the intrinsic properties of valuable things. Accordingly, any substantive axiology amounts to a view regarding which intrinsic properties ground intrinsic value. As a consequence, any plant axiology should single out features of plants able to ground value: any plant axiology depends on philosophical views of the nature of plants – on a philosophical botany (see Hall 2011, 4; Pouteau 2014, 23).

A plant axiology can be obtained by extension. An extensionist strategy rests on the following reasoning: Human beings and/or non-human animals have value because they have sentience, or because they have autonomy, or agency, or any other feature generally assumed to ground intrinsic value. As plants can share sentience, or autonomy, or agency, or some of the other grounds of intrinsic value, then they have intrinsic value as well.¹³

The main extensionist plant axiologies, ranging from ecocentric and biocentric approaches to concepts of plant intelligence, are the following:

1. Constitutive value of plants: plants as parts of ecosystems (ecocentrism). According to some authors, ecosystems have value as such. Assuming that the presence of plants is necessary to the proper constitution and workings of ecosystems, the value that plants contribute to the whole is a form of intrinsic value – it is constitutive of the value of the whole (see Attfield 1981; Johnson 1991, chaps. 3 and 4; Leopold 1949; Rolston 1988, chap. 5, 2002).

2. Plants as living beings (biocentrism). Being alive is a value-making feature – as life itself is a valuable thing. Plants are individual living things (in virtue of their tendency to growth and resilience). If so, they have value, like many other living beings.¹⁴

3. Sentience, or plants as animals (zoocentrism). Some authors view the capacity of feeling, and in particular of feeling pleasures and pains, as grounds for value.¹⁵ Since Darwin, the study of plant signalling has emphasized plants’ capacity to move purposefully and to feel. Plants, then, are to be seen as active sentient beings, capable of complex interactions with their environments. In virtue of their sentience, plants have intrinsic value (see Hall 2011, 38–43, 156; Pouteau 2014, 7–8).

4. Flourishing, interests, integrity, dignity, and legal rights (perfectionism). For some authors, plants are organisms with a typical life-cycle and a typical growth process, consisting of a lifetime development that includes the realization of typical characteristics. Accordingly, plants have a good of their own – they can flourish. Even though plants can lack mentality – or can have a merely non-subjective form of intelligence – the life of plants can go well or badly, and their going well is valuable – as it is valuable that human lives go well.¹⁶
Some other writers claim that plants have value in so far as they have interests, and that they can have interests in so far as they are subjects of a life, and have a good of their kind (see Nussbaum 2006; Rolston 1988, 108).
According to others yet, plants have the necessary standing to be granted legal rights – that is to have legal suits pursued in their own name (and not of some humans that have a stake in them), where damages are calculated in terms of loss to plants and judgment is applied to their benefit.¹⁷ One typical way of pressing this idea is by assimilating plants – understood as inanimate objects – to legal persons such as trusts, corporations, joint ventures, nation states, and so on, or to legal incompetents – for instance humans in vegetative states – for whom a guardian can be appointed. This view may rest on the idea that a right-holder is also a valuable thing – a controversial idea, which I do not discuss here (see Kantor 1980; Norton 1982; Wellman 1998, 122–4).
Finally, some authors have claimed that plants are autonomous and self-ordering wholes, with a capacity to reach certain natural aims. This feature has been called the integrity of plants, and it has been taken as grounds of their value (see Bueren and Struik 2005).

5. Intelligence and personhood. Plants are “other-than-human persons”, sharing with human beings “many capacities and capabilities” (Hall 2011, 161, 155). Plants have a form of active intelligence, consisting in their capacity to adapt to their environments by growing in certain ways and not others, processing information, engage in basic decision making, problem solving and communication, as well as some form of autonomous choice (see Baluska et al. 2006; Brenner et al. 2006; Hall 2011, 158, 160; Ryan 2012; Trewavas 2003, 2005). In virtue of their being intelligent, autonomous, and subjects of a personal life, like animals and human beings plants can be ascribed with dignity or worth.¹⁸ As a consequence, they have value, and this value is independent from human attitudes and concerns (see also Hallé 2002, 302; Marder 2013).

All the positions described above are instances of the extensionist strategy. However, the extensionist strategy is not free of problems.

Three challenges to the extensionist strategy

The extensionist strategy faces the following three objections:

A. The descriptive objection. In most cases the extension looks strained. Descriptions of plants as living beings, sentient creatures, or intelligent non-human persons may be vague as well as inaccurate, as plants’ life, sentience or intelligence are utterly different from animal or human life, sentience or intelligence. (Not to mention the difficulty of giving uncontroversial definitions of life, sentience, or intelligence even in non-human animals or humans.) Consider, for example, individuality. Plants’ life is not the typical life of distinct individuals, as is the case with humans or non-human animals. Rather, it is mostly the life of aggregates. Take fruit trees: qua individuals, do they include their fruits? And what about these fruits when detached from the trees? In a sense, life continues in the fruits – they change their shapes in various ways in virtue of various chemical reactions, and these changes follow a sort of life-cycle – and then, arguably, the fruits “die” when they become rotten. Was this all one individual, or an aggregation of m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Concepts and approaches – Setting the stage for plant ethics
• Part II Appreciations and applications
• Index