Environmental Ethics - Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism simply places humans at the centre of the universe; the human race must always be its own primary concern. It has become customary in the Western tradition to consider only our species when considering the environmental ethics of a situation. Therefore, everything else in existence should be evaluated in terms of its utility for us, thus committing speciesism. All environmental studies should include an assessment of the intrinsic value of non-human beings. In fact, based on this very assumption, a philosophical article has explored recently the possibility of humans' willing extinction as a gesture toward other beings. The authors refer to the idea as a thought experiment that should not be understood as a call for action.

What Anthropocentric theories do not allow for is the fact that a system of ethics formulated from a human perspective may not be entirely accurate; humans are not necessarily the centre of reality. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that we tend to assess things wrongly in terms of their usefulness to us. Spinoza reasoned that if we were to look at things objectively we would discover that everything in the universe has a unique value. Likewise, it is possible that a human-centred or anthropocentric/androcentric ethic is not an accurate depiction of reality, and there is a bigger picture that we may or may not be able to understand from a human perspective.

Peter Vardy distinguished between two types of anthropocentrism. A strong thesis anthropocentric ethic argues that humans are at the center of reality and it is right for them to be so. Weak anthropocentrism, however, argues that reality can only be interpreted from a human point of view, thus humans have to be at the centre of reality as they see it.

Another point of view has been developed by Bryan Norton, who has become one of the essential actors of environmental ethics through his launching of what has become one of its dominant trends: environmental pragmatism. Environmental pragmatism refuses to take a stance in the dispute between the defenders of anthropocentrist ethics and the supporters of nonanthropocentrist ethics. Instead, Norton prefers to distinguish between strong anthropocentrism and weak-or extended-anthropocentrism and develops the idea that only the latter is capable of not underestimating the diversity of instrumental values that humans may derive from the natural world.