A World Not Made for Us

Topics in Critical Environmental Philosophy

Keith R. Peterson

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438479613
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

In A World Not Made for Us, Keith R. Peterson provides a broad reassessment of the field of environmental philosophy, taking a fresh and critical look at three classical problems of environmentalism: the intrinsic value of nature, the need for an ecological worldview, and a new conception of the place of humankind in nature. He makes the case that a genuinely critical environmental philosophy must adopt an ecological materialist conception of the human, a pluralistic value theory that emphasizes the need for value prioritization, and a stratified categorial ontology that affirms the basic principle of human asymmetrical dependence on more-than-human nature. Integrating environmental ethics with the latest work in political ecology, Peterson argues it is important to understand that the world is not made for us, and that coming to terms with this fact is a condition for survival in future human and more-than-human communities of liberation and solidarity.

PART I

Anthropocentrism and Philosophical Anthropology

CHAPTER ONE

Anthropocentrism, Dualism, and Models of the Human

THE MEANINGS OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM

The introduction described the problem of anthropocentrism as conceived by many environmentalists and located its roots in dualist logic. Many environmental theorists have been aware of the need to expose the limits of traditional conceptions of human nature for decades. Environmental process philosopher Arran Gare argues that “philosophical anthropology is central to ethics and politics” and that an adequate philosophical anthropology “can orient people in their struggle for the liberty to avert a global ecological catastrophe.”1 The ecosocialist Joel Kovel argued that “the notion of human nature is necessary for any in-depth appreciation of the ecological crisis,” and ecoliteracy educator David Orr stated that “whatever a sustainable society may be, it must be built on the most realistic view of the human condition possible.”2 In The Great Work, ecotheologian Thomas Berry argued that the principle challenge of our time is “to reinvent the human—at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context.”3 Radical ecophilosophers as diverse as Arne Naess, Murray Bookchin, and Val Plumwood have also claimed that new conceptions of human being are vital to contesting traditional anthropocentric views and to reinforcing the ecologically informed conception, perception, and evaluation of nature that is called for in environmentalism.4 This is only a small selection of the many authors who suggest that renewed critical reflection on humankind—or philosophical anthropology—is called for to motivate an effective environmentalist project.

Before engaging more fully with such anthropological conceptions, I want to spend a bit more time disentangling the different connotations often associated with anthropocentrism but underappreciated in the literature, including its broader intellectual-historical context and the argumentative strategies associated with anthropocentrism, in order to show that common responses remain framed by the very dualism they hope to transcend. Doing so makes it easier to see why Plumwood articulates the best critical response to anthropocentrism, and how the anthropology developed in the next chapter builds on her critique with a positive position.

We may identify at least three persistent motifs in discussions of the concept of anthropocentrism. Different definitions of anthropocentrism emphasize the cosmic, axiological, and epistemic nature of the concept. Fox informally defines anthropocentrism as “the arrogant assumption that we humans are central to the cosmic drama; that, essentially, the world is made for us.”5 He approvingly cites the deep ecologist John Seed’s claim that “the idea that humans are the crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness.” These foreground the cosmological or ontological dimension of anthropocentrism, and both remarks also invoke a value claim. Other writers better emphasize this evaluative aspect. American deep ecologist Frederic Bender defines human chauvinism as “the deeply ingrained assumption that humans have the right to draw down ecospheric integrity—without concern for limits—to satisfy even the most peripheral human desires.”6 This definition locates the problem in axiological, evaluative tendencies or errors. Finally, some have claimed that human finitude makes it impossible for humans to relate to the world of nonhumans in anything but a human-centered way, taking anthropocentrism to be “natural and inevitable.”7 These arguments foreground epistemic anthropocentrism, the notion that human thinking and experience ineluctably gives a human form to everything thought and experienced. Although we may analytically distinguish the cosmic, axiological, and epistemic themes in these discussions, they are usually entangled in many ways. Take the discourse of the Anthropocene as a current example: it highlights the centrality of humans in a new geological epoch (cosmic), foregrounds the way that humans have prioritized their own interests in development at the expense of the Earth and its creatures (axiological), and usually assumes the apparent inevitability of this species-centeredness (epistemic).8

Anthropocentrism critique must be seen as part of the western tradition of self-awareness and self-critique that began long ago in the tradition of Modern philosophy, although it emerges under a new guise in new historical and cultural conditions of environmental crisis. Although many environmental philosophers are critical of human exceptionalism, few acknowledge that the critique of human exceptionalism is not new to the Modern tradition. For over a millennium, classical European philosophies affirmed the centrality of human beings, in the literal sense that the Earth, and humanity on the Earth, was at the center of the cosmos. The cosmic and axiological conceptions of anthropocentrism are often linked in it. Given this privileged position, in the Modern period it was often seen to be humanity’s place to master creation in the fulfillment of its divinely or fatefully ordained role.9 The rationale of some environmentalist critics was then to show that if cosmic anthropocentrism is false—if human beings are not really at the cosmological center of things—then it follows that human chauvinism in ethics is completely unwarranted. If human beings are not factually at the center of the universe, and if in scientific terms they are not the “pinnacle of creation,” then “cosmic anthropocentrism” cannot be used to justify axiological anthropocentrism either. As William Grey put it,

The intellectual history of the past few centuries can be characterized as pedestal bashing: a succession of successful demolitions of comforting myths through which we have sought to locate ourselves in the world. … First, Copernicus effectively displaced humanity from the physical center of the universe. A few centuries later Darwin pointed out that humanity occupied no biologically privileged position. Then Freud claimed that one of our fondly cherished distinctive characteristics—rationality—was mostly a sham.10

Environmentalist critics of anthropocentrism often imply that a further blow to this western self-conception was dealt by the science of ecology, which (following Darwin) treats humans as one organism among others embedded within webs of ecosystemic relations, a treatment that both reveals the harms humans have caused to these systems as well as their complete and utter dependence upon them. Forester and writer Aldo Leopold is one of the best known advocates of this critique, and could be added to Grey’s list: the ecology-informed “land ethic changes the role of homo sapiens from conquerer of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it,” and takes humans to be “only a member of a biotic team.”11 Unfortunately, simply considering new ways of classifying humankind is not enough to motivate environmental social change without a complementary consideration of the moral relevance of the new descriptions.12 In other words, even when the cosmic centrality of humankind is undermined, anthropocentrists can still identify humanity as a privileged locus of value in different ways. The axiological sense of human centrality usually depends on the evaluation of a few key traits, and is never a matter of simple redescription.

Fortunately, philosophers like Paul Taylor quite clearly revealed the weaknesses in such human exceptionalist accounts early on.13 Taylor asked why, if humans are rational and nonhumans nonrational on the traditional western view, this lack of rationality should be taken to justify ill treatment of nonhumans. This would appear to be legitimate only if we have already invested rationality with moral relevance and value, and consider nonrationality a disvalue. Taylor asks what reason we could possibly supply to justify singling out rationality as that human feature that indicates humankind’s greater moral worth, and he answers that we are implicitly acknowledging its importance for human life in human societies. “It is intrinsically valuable to humans alone, who value it as an end in itself, and it is instrumentally valuable to those who benefit from it, namely humans.”14 Thus, for Taylor, relative to humans and specific human interests, rationality is an important feature; but taken as one feature of creatures among others in the universe, it has no particular absolute value or disvalue, just as the kangaroo rat can go without water for five years, or the periodic freezing and thawing of the north American wood frog are capacities unique to them and their mode of making a living. In the end, Taylor concludes that claims to human superiority rest on “nothing more than a deep-seated prejudice” and lack justification as morally relevant traits.15 Thus, Taylor and other writers show that appeals to “cosmic” reclassification alone cannot resolve the problem of anthropocentrism. In other words, along with the question whether such-and-such traits belong to the beings in question, we need to ask just how and why certain traits are valued in the first place. As Plumwood has shown, this is usually accomplished through the work of an a priori dualist logic that has already allotted value to some traits rather than others. Articulating a nonhierarchical conception of difference becomes a major task in response to dualizing thought and practice.

Another type of argument links the cosmic and epistemic dimensions of anthropocentrism. It has often been claimed by nonenvironmentalists (and even some environmentalists) that anthropocentrism is inevitable. This is a peculiarly Modern claim in that it is also rooted in a distinctively Modern metaphysics. The practical challenge this claim raises is that if humans are constitutionally species-centric, then the struggles of environmentalists against the practical effects of anthropocentrism are bound to be fruitless. If humans habitually see, feel, conceptualize, or otherwise experience the world as humans—and are prevented by this from giving the interests of nonhumans or even future generations of humans their due—the conclusion is drawn that human-centered seeing, feeling, experiencing, and by extension, valuing, is inevitable. If we are inevitably anthropocentric, then we cannot help but place human interests front and center and nonhumans outside the moral club. Another variation on the argument holds that values on the whole are subject-relative and human-generated expressions of self-interest or desire. No matter which values are preferred, they are all my values, or at least human values, and are, therefore, always relative to me or humanity. The result of this argument is that whatever is valued by humans is valuable to and for humans alone. Thus, here too anthropocentrism seems inevitable.

The argument for the inevitability of anthropocentrism has both empirical and conceptual versions.16 The conceptual arguments are popular and even more tenacious than their empirical cousins since they involve many unexamined epistemological assumptions. It is important to dwell on this argument right at the start since various forms of it are so widespread in contemporary thinking. These arguments contend that if humans can only experience the world as a human world, we cannot know what the world is like “in itself,” or from a nonhuman perspective. (It should be obvious that this argument also counts on the validity of the Modern dualism between humans and nature, where human knowledge is grounded either on the human or on nature, but not both.) They argue that we are trapped in a prison of human perspective from which there is no escape, whether the walls of this prison are made of limited perceptual faculties, languages, or conceptual schemes. Hence, on this argument, if we can know or value the world at all only through our human categories, this makes it a distinctively human world. If this argument were widely accepted it would be devastating to the environmentalist cause, since in the final analysis it would be impossible to say whether the nature independent of us is sick or healthy. Fox called this the “perspectival fallacy,” and Bender the “anthropocentric predicament.”17 A closely related variant in nonenvironmentalist circles calls it correlationism.18 In the environmentalist context, the argument says that if humans cannot experience or think except in a distinctively human way, and if this distinctive way results in nature exploitation, then exploitation or domination of nonhuman nature is unavoidable. Fortunately, the conclusion of this argument simply does not follow because it depends on an equivocation. The first is evident in the use of the term experience. The first claim is a tautology, expressing only the form of experience. Whatever I think or experience is trivially my thought, my experience, or my value—say, my experience of climate change. But this experience also includes the content of experience or thought as well, which is less clearly my own product—did I produce the planet’s carbon cycle as such, as well as the disturbance in this cycle that the phrase climate change refers to? What is thought, experienced, or valued by me is not determined in its substantive features by me, since if this were true, we would never have a mistaken thought and the world would never resist our actions—changing our ideas about climate change would change the climate. Thus, we must maintain a distinction between the image, concept, model, or interpretation of a thing and the thing itself, even if we are not always quite sure where to draw the line between them. The reality of perspective should not be confused with metaphysical idealism. We can create whatever categories we like and try to capture reality with them, but they always model it only partially. Even if “we can’t know what the reality of the object in itself is because we can’t distinguish between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the subjective access to the object,” it does not at all follow from this that there is no mind-independent reality.19 Therefore, it is a mistake to infer that we can only know our own concepts when we know the world, or to make the even stronger claim that the world is constructed by our categories. Because we often cannot immediately and with certainty distinguish between our contribution and the object’s to knowledge, this does not mean that there are no objects existing independently of the mind. This would be to convert an epistemological limitation into an ontological postulate.20 (I’ll discuss this error further in section 3 below.) It should be noted that this common epistemic fallacy also contradicts the principle of asymmetrical dependence outlined in the introduction—the principle of a world not made for us.

On a strongly anthropocentric view, humankind occupies a central place in the cosmic drama, it possesses unique and valuable traits (such as rational...