Critiquing Paul Taylor’s Biocentric Individualism

Paul Taylor’s version of the argument that all individual wild living things have equal inherent worth promotes a morally unjustifiable ethic that would disastrously govern humanity’s relationship with other nature. Taylor’s arguments in “Biocentric Egalitarianism” that individual non-conscious wild living beings have inherent value are nonsensical because conscious living beings exclusively have value-creating consciousness. He incorrectly asserts that the Kantian privileging of universal human capacity for rationality (86) is baseless. Taylor and Peter Singer question human superiority; Taylor unsuccessfully parallels Singer because he fails to prove equal value among non-conscious and conscious beings. Taylor’s ideas troublingly justify population control and forced displacement, as Ramachandra Guha explains, and disincentivize essential actions against pandemics and non-conscious invasive species. Mary Anne Warren argues convincingly for rationality’s differentiation of humanity. Jason Kawall argues convincingly for Taylorian reverence for life, as one virtue among many, and some moral consideration for all life.

Biocentric individualism, Taylor’s environmental philosophy, is influenced by the ultimate moral attitude of “respect for nature” that polymath Albert Schweizer described in Civilization and Ethics. This attitude includes dispositions to aim for, as final, disinterested ends, protection of organisms and the environment, to consider actions leading to these ends as prima facie obligatory, and to consider states of the world as favorable or unfavorable depending on the good of organisms (Taylor 177, 180-181). It is not a holistic ethic, in which collections of individual living things, like species, or collections of living and nonliving things, like ecosystems, have inherent worth. Instead, it is an individualist ethic in which “the good...of individual organisms, considered as entities having inherent worth...determines our moral relations with Earth’s wild communities of life” (Taylor 177). In his article’s introduction, Taylor contrasts this transformative life-centered ethic, in which environmental protection is pursued on behalf of all individual wild living things and humans, with all versions of anthropocentric ethics (Taylor 177-178).

Taylor bases all individual wild living beings’ inherent worth on each having “a good of its own”, the fact that “without reference to any other [Taylor’s emphasis] entity, it can be benefited or harmed.” To Taylor, humans can deliberately enhance or degrade this good (178). Individual wild living beings which have this good need not be conscious, in Taylor’s view, to have their good enhanced or degraded (179). Taylor divides the idea of individual wild living things’ inherent worth, based on their goods, into the principles of moral consideration and intrinsic value. The principle of moral consideration states that every individual wild living being should be considered for their own sake. The principle of intrinsic value states that all members of Earth’s life community are worthy of being held up as ends in themselves and not as instruments for humanity (179-180, 183).

Taylor’s connection between individual wild living things having their own good and each of these beings having inherent worth is doubtful. He states that inherent worth is not objective and cannot be found empirically, so his claims cannot be proven. He also concedes that humans only do the valuing of this inherent worth, but holds that the valuing of inherent worth in individual wild living things is not a human value (182). This does not make sense. Non-conscious living things cannot value; any value given to them is from conscious beings. Many humans view individual non-conscious living beings reaching for a “good” that can be enhanced or degraded, but only conscious animals can be aware of this good and assign it value. Perhaps nonhuman animals could assign themselves or other living beings inherent worth; from the emotional and altruistic behavior observed in great ape kin groups, this may be plausible. However, it is highly doubtful that nonhuman animals assign inherent worth to non-conscious living things; only rational humans assign inherent worth to them.

Conscious beings assigning value does not mean value would exist in their absence, except if consciousness is a basic substance in the Universe. But if the latter proposition is true, then consciousness would remain when living things die and the stringent morality Taylor calls for would not be needed. An objector could argue that if consciousness remains when humans and other animals die, it follows that their deaths could not be viewed as morally wrong; this is absurd. This objection does not hold when examined. Consciousness as a basic building-block of the Universe is distinct from consciousness arranged in a certain way in the brains of animals, including humans, to create awareness of the physical world. When animals, including humans, die, they can no longer sense material existence; whether their consciousness ceases to exist or transfers into an immaterial plane, they lose something in death that living beings unaware of their existence do not.

Within Taylor’s “biocentric outlook on nature”, two of the four main points have to do with the relationship between humans and other members of Earth’s life community.

Point one is that humans hold the same degree of membership in Earth’s life community as all other individual wild living things. In defending this point, Taylor makes several valid claims: we are different from other species, natural selection and adaptation occurs among us as it does among other living things, and we are relative newcomers to Earth’s life community. His argument that every person “could disappear from the face of the Earth without any significant detrimental consequence for the good of wild animals and plants'' (Taylor 183-185) is doubtful in the case of many species, however. Humans have unfortunately more often used our rationality to harm other living beings, but we alone have the rational capacity to help species which would go extinct without us. Our efforts at species preservation have intensified and should not be discounted, even though the rate of human-caused environmental destruction has also accelerated.

Point four is that, regarding both merit and inherent worth, claims of human superiority over other individual wild living things are baseless and stem from irrational, self-interested human biases. Taylor states that claims of human superiority are based on us having unique capacities; he argues that all of these capacities do not warrant human superiority. He presses readers to consider that humans themselves are valuing these capacities. He compares anthropocentric claims to superiority based on merit to the example that a cheetah could claim superiority based on its speed, surely an absurd claim. He criticizes circular arguments using human superiority as a basis for human superiority. He also criticizes arguments for human superiority based on the supposed superior inherent worth of humans, stating that they are relics of highly hierarchical and classist past societies. In today’s democratic, egalitarian societies, he argues, we have correctly granted all humans equal inherent worth and deemed classism unjust. He then states that this ideal should be extended so all individual wild living things are assigned equal inherent worth. (Taylor 187-189).

Peter Singer, in “A Utilitarian Defense of Animal Liberation”, defends animal rights through a similar argument to Taylor’s about historical human prejudice, but his view is more plausible because he promotes moral consideration for conscious beings. Singer, similarly to Taylor, compares humanity’s present exploitation of animals to human-on-human prejudice. He also similarly dismisses claims of merit such as intelligence and moral capacity as reasons for a claim towards equality (Singer 96-99). However, unlike Taylor and like Jeremy Bentham, Singer points to sentience, or “the capacity to suffer or experience enjoyment or happiness” as what gives nonhuman animals moral considerability (Singer 99-100). Singer is mistaken that moral capacity should not influence claims of equality in interspecies relations, as will be explained later, and his descriptions of people with mental handicaps border on problematic ableism (103). However, he insightfully argues that conscious animals have the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, and therefore deserve moral considerability and have inherent worth. Singer includes domesticated animals in his sphere of moral concern (100); Taylor excludes them from his account while acknowledging that they have a good of their own (179). This is puzzling when domesticated pigs are much more capable of experiencing pleasure and pain than molds and bacteria; it seems as though protecting pigs from harm should be much more important.

Mary Anne Warren, in “A Critique of Regan’s Animal Rights Theory”, argues convincingly that the moral capacity or rationality of humans sets us apart. She claims that because humans alone are “sometimes capable of being moved by action or inaction by the force of reasoned argument” through language, we alone can settle disputes through understanding. To her, this ability does not make us superior to other life, but allows us to recognize each other as moral equals and often live together in harmony. Mentioning Aristotle and echoing Kant, she states that this type of relationship, however, cannot be sought with nonhuman living beings because they lack understanding of our language and therefore we cannot reason with them. She points out that if we find animals we can reason to, then we should regard them as our moral equals. Warren counters Singer’s tone regarding people with mental handicaps. To her, because all humans will likely experience some form of mental handicap, there are strong practical and moral reasons to treat all members of the human community with equal moral rights (119). Taylor criticizes a view like Warren’s regarding the human ability for moral reasoning. He states that morality does not make us superior because we are the only species with moral values and capacities (188). However, Warren does not state that humans are superior or that we should morally judge other life; she states that humans cannot be in moral community with other living things, and it therefore would be impractical to give them equal moral consideration (118).

Taylor ends his essay by stating that limits on human population and legal protection for nonhuman wild living things can be justified through an ethic of respect for nature; Ramachandra Guha’s “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique” shows how these assertions are problematic. Guha argues that “overconsumption by the industrialized world and by urban elites in the Third World”, as well as militarization, are the most pressing causes of ecological crises (309). Arguing for cutting human population is problematic when a minority of the population is causing the majority of ecological problems. Everyone reaching a current affluent standard of living would be disastrous for the environment. However, a reduction in consumption and technological developments in energy generation should be sought over coercive population controls that are fueled by and fuel ethnic hatred. Guha also describes how efforts done in the name of species preservation can, alongside racism, cause the displacement of indigenous peoples living relatively sustainably with nature (310). Although granting legal rights to conscious animals as well as to endangered, native, beneficial, and/or beautiful wildlife is justified if justice in human communities is upheld, uniformly granting legal rights to all wildlife would be disastrous. This policy would hamper efforts to control disease outbreaks caused by bacteria and other wildlife, as well as efforts to protect people and other wildlife from invasive species.

Paul Taylor’s version of biocentric egalitarianism fails to give reason why non-conscious individual wild living things should be granted the same inherent worth as humans and fails to adequately consider the morally dubious and practically dangerous consequences of this philosophy. So should we abandon the value of respect for nature that Taylor and Schweizer call for? Jason Kawall, in his article “Reverence for Life as a Viable Environmental Virtue” convincingly argues that we should not. In his less strict biocentric individualism, we should think of respect for nonhuman nature as one of many virtues (202-203), and we should assign value to living things in degrees (205). Mary Anne Warren also adopts the second portion of this view (119). This position will uphold human justice and equality while also encouraging us to solve environmental problems for the sake of all of Earth’s living community, not just ourselves.

Works Cited

Guha, Ramachandra. “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World

Critique.” Pojman, Pojman, and McShane, pp. 307-314.

Kant, Immanuel. “Rational Beings Alone Have Moral Worth.” Pojman, Pojman, and McShane,

pp. 85-87.

Kawall, Jason. “Reverence for Life as a Viable Environmental Virtue.” Pojman, Pojman, and

McShane, pp. 202-215.

Pojman, Louis P, Paul Pojman, and Katie McShane. Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory

and Application, Cengage Learning, 2017.

Singer, Peter. “A Utilitarian Defense of Animal Liberation.” Pojman, Pojman, and McShane, pp.

96-105.

Taylor, Paul. “Biocentric Egalitarianism.” Pojman, Pojman, and McShane, pp. 177-193.

Warren, Mary Anne. “A Critique of Regan’s Animal Rights Theory.” Pojman, Pojman, and

McShane, pp. 114-121.