This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction

4 TWO EXAMPLES OF AN ECOCENTRIC ETHIC: ALDO LEOPOLD, ARNE NAESS, AND THEIR CRITICS

4.1 Human-Centeredness, Human Chauvinism, and Ecocentrism

4.1.1 Ecocentrism and the Limits of Moral Extensionism

While moral extensionism seeks to expand well-established moral principles like utility or the Categorical Imperative to nonhuman animals and ecosystems, ecocentric thinkers like Aldo Leopold and Arne Naess take what they insist is a very different path toward realizing their vision of an environmentally defensible way of life worth living. Broadly, ecocentrism (ecological holism, biocentrism, or anti-anthropocentrism) is the view that the only ethic capable of taking nonhuman animals and ecosystems into adequate moral account is one that makes its point of departure the wholesale repudiation of human-centeredness and the embrace of an ecologically centered moral compass. For these thinkers, human-centeredness, anthropocentrism, just is fundamentally chauvinistic, and thus intractably bent to self-interest and material gain.¹ Moral principles crafted to solve human conflicts can offer little more than a model distorted by human objectives likely to preemptively devalue nonhuman beings and ecosystems.² The best approach to an environmental ethic is thus to consign these old moral ideas to the landfill of human history and begin anew squarely committed to putting, as Aldo Leopold puts it, the “biotic community” first, next, and last.

It’s hard to deny that ecocentrism has a point. How ...