Environmental Ethics: Biocentrism and Homocentrism

There are opposing views regarding the value of the environment and whether or not this value exists independently of humans. These views can be broadly grouped into two approaches: homocentrism and biocentrism.

Homocentrism holds that only humans have intrinsic value. For homocentrists, the environment only has value insofar as it is useful to us. The environment has no value of its own, only that which is derived from its value to humans. In a less extreme version of the idea, a homocentrist may concede that non-human things do have value in and of themselves, but human interests take priority. What brings together ideas of the homocentric camp is the belief that humans and human interests have a privileged moral status and value higher than the environment.

Biocentrism, on the other hand, holds that all natural things have intrinsic value. The environment is seen as an end in itself, and not valued only as a means to human ends. In the biocentric view, we have a moral duty to protect the environment and living things even when they do not affect our welfare or benefit our interests. What sets the biocentrist apart from the homocentrist is the belief that humans are not inherently superior to other living things, and that human interests do not take precedence over the natural world.

Take a short while to think about your thoughts on the environment. Does it have value only insofar as it serves the needs on mankind? Or does it have intrinsic value and is an end in an of itself? Then consider the following questions:

• Which one do you agree with more? What's your gut feeling?
  
• What are the flaws of either approach? What's problematic about them? What are the strengths of either approach?
  
• If you had to convince someone to protect the environment, would you use a homocentric approach or a biocentric approach? What if this someone is a friend or family member? A business? A politician?
  
• Ultimately: which one do you think is right? Prepare to defend your answer. Not from me, specifically, heh, but from people who might disagree with you.

I would take the homocentrism stance because quite frankly I don't give two (edited) about the environment if it has nothing to do with human beings. If that part of nature has no interest to us then I don't care about it. But if it directly affects human beings positively or negatively, than I'll take an interest. The only time you'll ever see me trying to protect the enviorment is if me or any other human beings rely on the enviorment. But than again all human beings rely on the enviorment in some way or the other, so I'll basically protect it either way.

Limerent said:

I think my view is somewhat homocentric but only to the point of necessity, I don't believe human interests are inherently more important but I have no compunction about taking what I need from an ecosystem to survive, all species do this. As such you won't see complaining about cattle production being cow slavery as PETA would have you believe, however I do take issue with excessive lifestyles at the expense of animals and the environment. If I had the decision between clearing a forest to make room for a music concert or just listening to a song on the radio I would choose the latter.

In my opinion past indigenous populations have shown it is possible to balance human survival needs with the wellbeing of other species, whether that is still possible with our insatiable thirst for modern comforts and technologies I don't know.

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Surprisingly I agree with you on an issue, though I'll elaborate more on my feelings.

Perhaps I am selfish, but ultimately humans are the ones who are best suited to use Earth's natural resources. We're the most physically and intellectually capable of harnessing them to their full potential. At least, their full potential as necessary to us. We're currently the dominant species due to our ability to harness nature, even if the extent of our usage is resulting in a) the destruction of the current 'incarnation' of nature and b) suffering for many millions of humans. Homocentrism isn't inherently bad, but it's the unrestrained practice of homocentrism that has lead us to our current predicament. I suppose a summary of my point is that I'm a homocentrist because it's beneficial for myself and humanity, but we need to take in biocentrism if we wish to survive.

As for the questions laid out in the original post:

- What are the flaws of either approach? What's problematic about them? What are the strengths of either approach?

As I touched upon in my previous paragraph, it's the fact that homocentrism is often coupled with arrogance and greed. This mostly applies to those who really have the power to affect the environment, such as heads of governments and CEOS of corporations and what not. Take any story about extinction of rhinos, or the chopping down of entire jungles for the sake of real estate, or worse, a music festival, and you'll see my point. Homocentrism can be practiced safely, but it's long since been corrupted for the detriment for humanity.

- If you had to convince someone to protect the environment, would you use a homocentric approach or a biocentric approach? What if this someone is a friend or family member? A business? A politician?

I'd use an ultimately homocentric approach, but preach that in order for the true protection of the environment, a compromise must be reached between the camps. It is wishful thinking to believe that we'll just pack up camp and regress somewhat in order to allow the environment to heal, as nice as that does sound to my conscience. Homocentrism will be the dominant way of life until something inconceivably catastrophic to nature happens, so any argument put forward to try protect the environment will have to work around that. I'm unfortunately lost as to what I'd actually say in the argument though, lol

Anyone who's heard me talk about it before probably already knows where I stand. As a humanist and someone who values humanity above all else, it's not particularly surprising that I completely agree with what you termed "homocentrism."

I should say that if there are other species out there that demonstrate the same level of awareness, empathy, and intelligence as we do, I think they should be in a similar ethical class to us. Other than that, though, nature just is and it is ours to command as we see fit, if you ask me. We got to where we are today by mastery of our surroundings, it would be asinine to stop now.

From my point of view, both approaches are woefully incomplete. Their strength, I suppose, would be that they assign value at all, rather than saying that everything is basically dust and gas so nothing matters anyway. To explain my value system (which was Ken Wilber's idea, not mine), I'll have to define some terms. As I see it, there are three types of value: intrinsic, extrinsic, and ground.

Every thing or event can be seen both as an independent entity (a whole), and a component of some other entity (a part). Intrinsic value is a measure of how much of reality is enfolded within a whole. Extrinsic value is a measure of how many wholes an entity is part of.

With this, we don't have to decide whether people are more valuable or the environment is more valuable. They are both valuable in specific, and different, ways. An example, just to illustrate how this works.

Homo sapiens enfolds many structures, not only within our bodies, but also within our society and culture. Since we must maintain all of that for our own survival, we have great intrinsic value. Protons, on the other hand, have virtually no intrinsic value. But if you take them away, you take away all forms which enfold them. Thus protons have great extrinsic value.

Ground value is a bit different. While entities can have different amounts of intrinsic or extrinsic value, every entity has equal ground value. This is because all manifestation is an equal expression of creative activity, springing forth moment-to-moment from Emptiness (the formless source of all forms, called the void and the unmanifest). That may be a bit unintelligible to those unfamiliar with Eastern conceptions of reality, but I tried to make it coherent.

I am a biocentrist and I think that all living things have a part to play in our world. Humans can play the role of maintaining the environment, but not as the sole proprietors of the planet. Even then nature will always find a way to progress, and we cannot stop it, as life is meant to constantly continue. Humans are not above all other lifeforms, even as highly evolved as we are, but that's something many people fail to understand,

I am biocentric. I don't think humans should be considered the only living things with worth. All animals have emotions and an intelligence. It's ridiculous to think emotions evolved only in humans. To add, many humans are foul, destructive creatures and I would happily trade their existence for an animal.

Generally, most of the world is homocentric. Homocentrism may have worked for us in the past, but if we continue with this attitude we're not going to have much of an environment to work with. We've already caused mass extinction, and we're continuing to cause extinction of more animals (say goodbye to the rhino, kids) for pointless reasons. There needs to be a balance, and currently there isn't. Instead we have a smaller pocket of people who are trying to stop the destruction, but money and greed are always undoing this work.

I like to hope that continuing progress of humankind will eventually lead to less damage to the environment as we find better ways to do things. Unfortunately, this will be too slow to prevent serious damage.

I would say I lean towards being Homo Sapien Sapien-centric. At the same time though I beleive it's important to guard the environment for it's beauty, it's economic value (if we cut, burn, and destroy the world then we'll just crash our economic system to the ground alongside with our livelihoods and our lives),and for our fellow creatures that inhabit this world. In the end I guess one could say it all ties back to humanity, but I think that's the point to this, the world isn't binary, it is a cycle that is acted upon and acts upon those acting upon it. If one pushes the environment too much it'll bite back. Thus if we take care of the system it should act less hostile, or so my philosophy goes.

I'm not really on either side. Biocentrist in the fact that yes I believe we should protect nature even if it's not to our benefit; homocentrist because I believe a human life or need is of higher value. The environment needs to be protected, but I don't think it's true that we need to make heavy sacrifices in order to achieve that. Humanity and nature can co-exist. The excessive consumption we are taking part in is detrimental to our well-being as well as the environment's. The destruction of the planet is purely from greed and not from necessity.

As far as I'm concerned, you can't be one without the other.

Without a stable environment and ecosystem, humanity can't survive. So really, it's somewhat homocentrist to be biocentrist.

CarcharOdin said:

As far as I'm concerned, you can't be one without the other.

Without a stable environment and ecosystem, humanity can't survive. So really, it's somewhat homocentrist to be biocentrist.

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I think he already outlined that in how he described the terms initially. He described homocentrism as believing that nature serves humanity and that we should protect it insofar as it serves our interests.

twocows said:

I think he already outlined that in how he described the terms initially. He described homocentrism as believing that nature serves humanity and that we should protect it insofar as it serves our interests.

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And a biocentrist would want to protect nature for its own sake. That's correct.

Which one do you agree with more? What's your gut feeling?
I am definitely a biocentrist! Humans fall into an evolutionary tree/cladogram and we cannot pretend we are special. Sure, we evolved to do some fairly unique things but so have all other organisms as well. Parts of ourselves that we consider beyond other animals are also parts that bring us a lot of devastation. I would go out on a limb and say that most other animals do not deal with the degree of mental health issues that we do. Yes, animals can be depressed, etc, but I am unsure if all of our disorders are document in other animals at the frequency we have them.

What are the flaws of either approach? What's problematic about them? What are the strengths of either approach? Centring your views around humans, and us being higher organisms makes you close minded to what adaptation truly is. Having a bio centric mind might fail you if you're trying to be reductionist. I love all animals but I truly think they are, and we are, machines of a sort. We may be carbon based but we still function in a deeply complex mechanical way.

If you had to convince someone to protect the environment, would you use a homocentric approach or a biocentric approach? What if this someone is a friend or family member? A business? A politician? You would have to use both. In a logical fallacies manner you need to appeal to their emotions as a human to "save all the poor animals" (unfortunately) and also to remind them that we need these animals to survive.

Ultimately: which one do you think is right? Prepare to defend your answer. Not from me, specifically, heh, but from people who might disagree with you. I truly believe that a biocentric approach is the only approach. It's good to allow yourself to think in a "human" centric way when dealing with other people in order to keep them content/happy but it's wrong to apply actions with legitimate and large scale consequences based on the fact that you think you're superior to other organisms. We are close relatives to apes, that is all we are. We are the naked mole rat of rodents - if you will.

Well, after taking the definitions into considerations, I'm actually not sure which I'd fit into.

I believe all living things hold some intrinsic value (except mosquitoes, fuck mosquitoes), but being a human and all, I think humans have more intrinsic value than most. But like I said, we can't survive unless we preserve a healthy ecosystem, so it's good to value all living things in some degree. I think that's what most people do, too. For example, pets. Not all animals on the planet are used as pets and lots of people value their pets more than other animals.