Homo sapiens is the most destructive species on Earth. Our emissions have destabilized global climate. Our disruption of Earth’s biological systems has caused populations of many species to plummet and some to vanish. Anthropogenic tragedies of wind, fire, drought, and flood are becoming common. More are inevitable. But the inevitability of great tragedies does not justify acquiescence to still greater ones. With hope and effort, we might yet prevent runaway climate change—or the sixth mass extinction that many biologists now fear.
How? In thousands of ways, each by itself insufficient, but maybe in total just enough. One is to cultivate and disseminate an extraordinarily broad and objective ethic. The Sierra Club, which has from its inception fostered breadth of vision, is well-placed to do this. We see the world from mountain peaks—though what we now see are just remnants of the wildness that once was there. And we value these remnants. Their sublimity awes us. They are an ancient library written in molecular languages that we have just begun to read. They acquaint us with freedom beyond culture; yet they have shaped our history and our cultures. Immersion in them challenges us and builds character. And always again they uplift and renew our spirits. Elevated though our Club’s values are, they are also, as the previous paragraph suggests, directed primarily toward our well-being. They are, in a word, mostly anthropocentric. They therefore do not fully address today’s primary challenge: to become less destructive. For this, the Sierra Club’s traditional ethic, though a decent start, is insufficient. We must take seriously not only our own well-being, but the well-being of all life on Earth. Our ethic must progress toward biocentrism.
Like us, each living thing has a good of its own—a kind and degree of well-being that is objective and independent of human judgment or evaluation. For the simplest and by far the most populous of living things, from microbes to mushrooms, well-being may amount to nothing more than integrity of bodily function: in a word, health. Health is not a precise idea and the indicators of it vary from species to species. Nevertheless, it is a matter of objective fact. It is a fact, for example, when a tree, or a herd, or a species is heathy and a fact when it has suffered harm. The state of my health or yours is factual, too, but our welfare is more complex: it includes integrity of bodily function, but also the qualities of our conscious experience and social relations. Many of our fellow creatures enjoy these complex forms of welfare too. The welfare of life on Earth includes all of these components of welfare in whatever creatures they are found.
Welfare is not, moreover, limited to the present moment, but extends as far into the future as life remains. That matters, because the harm we are now doing also extends far into the future. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, global average temperatures would remain significantly elevated for thousands of years. If we keep emitting, that figure could rise to hundreds of thousands. Much of our CO2 now dissolves in the oceans, acidifying them with dire consequences for oceanic life. Ocean acidification is irreversible on timescales of at least tens of thousands of years. Species extinction has even more far-reaching consequences. While novel species do eventually evolve in place of those that vanish, the process is slow. Recovery time for biodiversity loss following a mass extinction is on the order of millions of years. Thus, to understand and curtail our destructiveness we need an ethic whose vision is not only biocentric but long-term.
Fundamental to long-term ethics is the principle that moral consideration should not vary with distance from us in space or time. Given that individual people are equally morally considerable, this implies that acting now in a way that unjustifiably harms a person a thousand years from now is just as wrong as inflicting the same unjustified harm on someone today. More generally, beings of the same type are in principle equally morally considerable regardless of when or where they live.
This is not to deny that our greatest responsibilities are usually to individuals close to us in space and time: family, co-workers, friends, companion animals. But that is not because they are objectively more worthy than distant others but because we have special relationships with them. So even though the moral considerability of distant future people equals ours, our responsibilities to those distant people are less than our responsibilities to some of our contemporaries. But this is true only for those contemporaries with whom we have special relationships, not for strangers. For both contemporary and future strangers our responsibilities are the same.
Nearly all forms of ethics agree that our most fundamental responsibility to strangers is non-harm. We may not kill them, injure them, make them ill, render them homeless, etc., without justification. Biocentrism adds only that the strangers in question may be either human or non-human. As members of Homo sapiens and as individuals, we (especially we who are affluent) now violate that moral principle on a scale we can scarcely imagine. Extending moral consideration to more of our fellow creatures now and into the distant future is one way to become something better than we are.
Fostering Breadth of Vision: A Long-Term Biocentric Ethic
December 26, 2021