Challenges

As a normative theory, biocentrism has practical implications for human behaviour. The good of all living beings creates responsibilities on the part of human beings, summarized in the four basic duties of biocentric ethics: non-maleficence, noninterference, fidelity, and restitutive justice. The duty of non-maleficence requires that no harm be done to living beings, although it does not commit human beings to the positive duties of preventing harm from happening or of aiding in attaining the good. The duty of noninterference requires not interfering with an organism’s pursuit of its own goals. The duty of fidelity requires not manipulating, deceiving, or otherwise using living beings as mere means to human ends. The duty of restitutive justice requires that humans make restitution to living beings when they have been harmed by human activity.

Numerous challenges suggest that biocentrism is too demanding an ethics to be practical. The duties to do no harm to living beings and to refrain from interfering with the lives of other beings ask a great deal of humans. It is difficult to understand how any living being, and especially humans, could survive without doing harm to and interfering with other living beings. Not only would abstaining from eating meat seem to be required, but even vegetables would seem to be protected from harm and interference. This presents a dilemma because a biocentrist has ethical duties to beings with equal moral standing and yet must eat those beings to survive. As a solution to this problem, some argue that strict equality can be abandoned in certain situations and that a distinction between basic and nonbasic interests can provide guidance in cases where the interest of living beings conflict. In such a case, one would conclude that basic interest should trump nonbasic interest. For example, the interest in remaining alive should override the interest in being entertained. Thus, it is unethical to hunt animals but ethically justified to kill an animal in self-defense. But the second alternative quickly threatens the consistency of biocentric equality.

Consider the interest in remaining alive that might be attributed to a bacterium, a mold, or an insect and compare that with any of a number of relatively trivial human interests and actions that would result in the deaths of countless bacteria, molds, or insects. There it seems that if the basic-nonbasic interest distinction is applied equally across species, then biocentrism requires a level of ethical care that is unreasonably demanding. However, if human interests are given priority, then biocentrists abandon equality.

In response to such concerns, defenders of biocentric ethics often argue for the principle of restitutive justice. When inevitable harms do occur in the conflicts between living beings, a duty to make restitution for the harms is created. Thus, the harms inflicted in harvesting trees or crops can be compensated for by restoring the forest or planting more crops. But that response raises the second major challenge to biocentric ethics.

Critics highlight that a strictly biocentric ethics will conflict with a more ecologically influenced environmentalism. Protecting individual lives may actually harm rather than protect the integrity of ecosystems and species, as is evidenced by the need to remove invasive species for ecosystem health. It is, of course, always open for the biocentric approach to accept that conflict by simply denying the value of ecological wholes, thus shifting the focus of biocentrism to have only incidentally overlapping concerns with environmental ethics. However, as Taylor’s reliance on restitutive justice suggests, biocentric ethics may need the value of ecological wholes to solve its serious practical problems and compensate for harmed individuals.

An important environmentalist perspective, identified as “ecocentrism” to distinguish it from biocentrism, holds that ecological collections such as ecosystems, habitats, species, and populations are the central objects for environmental concern. That more holistic approach typically concludes that preserving the integrity of ecosystems and the survival of species and populations is environmentally more crucial than protecting the lives of individual elements of an ecosystem or members of a species. In fact, ecocentric environmental ethics often would condone destroying the lives of individuals as a legitimate means of preserving the ecological whole. Thus, culling members of an overpopulated herd or killing an invasive nonnative plant or animal species can be justified.

Finally, challenges remain to the fundamental claim that life itself is the nonarbitrary criterion of moral standing. The biocentric perspective relies on a problematic teleological hypothesis. Living beings are said to have an intrinsic moral value because each has a good of its own, derived from the fact that living things are goal-directed (teleological) beings. However, the teleological assumption that being goal-directed entails having a good may be unwarranted. The biological sciences do commonly refer to an object’s purpose, goals, or function, and in that sense they seem to adopt a teleological framework. The question is whether all goal-directed activity implies that the goal must be understood as a “good.” Such an inference was made in the Aristotelian and natural law traditions, but it is not obviously valid. The fundamental philosophical challenge to biocentric ethics thus involves two questions. Is the activity of living really goal-directed in itself, even when non-intentional? Even if it is goal-directed, why assume that a living thing serves its own good rather than the good of something else?

Perhaps one way to revive biocentrism is to think of biocentric ethics as a virtue-based ethics rather than a rule- and principle-based ethics. Biocentric ethics will always face difficult challenges when it seeks to provide a decision-making rule or principle by which one can resolve conflict and make unequivocal decisions, but, as Aristotle warned, ethics is not mathematics. Biocentrism may best be viewed as an attitude with which to approach life and not as a set of rules to follow. Approaching any and each living being with awe and humility can help make human life more meaningful, and it is in this way that biocentric ethics can help to develop a set of habits and attitudes with which humans interact with other living beings.