Environmental Ethics and Non-Human Rights
In my opinion, one of the most urgent tasks of post-modernity-arguably the most urgent-is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics.
Nowhere are the difficulties of the "Eco camp" more obvious than in its attempts to develop an environmental ethics, which is embarrassing in that this should be, one would think, their strong suit. But with a few notable exceptions (such as Birch and Cobb's wonderful book The Liberation of Life), most approaches center exclusively on the principle of "bioequality," a reworking of the very old tenets of the Descending path of Plenitude (divorced and dissociated from any true Ascent).
The point, or so it is argued, is that all holons, or certainly all life forms, have equal value and equal worth, another qualitative distinction that denies all qualitative distinctions. (Editor's note: holon, a term coined by Arthur Koestler, means that which is whole in one context and simultaneously a part in another. An atom is whole, yet also part of a cell, which again is whole, yet part of a physical organ, which is part of a human being's body, and so on. Reality is thus a series of whole/parts, or nests within nests.) This environmental ethics-noble enough in itself, and often driven by a profound intuition of the World Soul-is nonetheless completely crippled by operating within the flatland paradigm. (Editor's note: "flatland" is Wilber's term for worldviews that do not include a full spectrum view of reality: the physical, mental, and spiritual. Wilber's "integral vision" is his antidote to "flatland").
Let us briefly examine each of those approaches, and then present a holarchical alternative, which may be summarized as follows:
- All things and events, of whatever nature, are perfect manifestations of Spirit. No holon, whether conventionally considered high or low, sacred or profane, simple or complex, primitive or advanced, is closer or farther from Ground, and thus all holons have equal ultimate value or equal Ground-value. All forms are equally pure Emptiness, primordial Purity.
- But in addition to Ground-value, all holons are also both particular wholes and particular parts. As wholeness, any holon has "whole-value." It has value in itself, and not merely for something other. It has autonomous value, and not merely instrumental value. This is usually referred to as "intrinsic value," which I accept. All holons, as wholes, have intrinsic value.
From which it follows, the greater the wholeness, the greater the intrinsic value. Wholeness-value, in other words, is the same as depth-value. The greater the depth, the greater the value (and the greater the potential depth, the greater the potential value).
This also means that there are levels of significance: the greater the depth, or the greater the wholeness, then the more significant that wholeness is for the Kosmos, because more of the Kosmos is embraced in that wholeness, embraced in that depth. Likewise, as a wholeness, all holons have rights that express the conditions that are necessary for that holon to remain whole. The greater the wholeness, the more rights necessary to maintain it (i.e. the more significant the wholeness, the greater the network of rights required to sustain the significance). These rights are not something added to the holon; these rights are a simple statement of the conditions (objective, inter-objective, subjective, and inter-subjective) that are necessary to sustain the wholeness of that particular holon. If those rights are not met, the wholeness dissolves or disintegrates.
- All holons are also parts, and as a part, all holons have instrumental value (also called extrinsic value). That is, all holons have value for others. All holons have part-value, or partness-value (as part of a larger whole, and that whole and its members depend upon each part: each part is thus instrumental to the existence of the whole, each part has extrinsic value, value not just in and for itself but for others). And the more partness-value a holon has-that is, the greater the number of wholes of which that holon is a part-the more fundamental that holon is for the Kosmos, because the more of the Kosmos there is containing that part as a necessary constituent. (From which it follows, as we put it earlier, the more fundamental, the less significant, and vice versa.)
Likewise, as a part (in communion), each holon exists in a network of care and responsibility. Like rights, responsibilities are not something added to holons. Networks of responsibility simply define the conditions necessary to support the whole of which the part is indeed a part. The greater the depth of a holon, then the more networks of communion it is involved in, and thus the greater the responsibilities in communion.
Thus, each and every holon in the Kosmos has equal Ground-value as a pure manifestation of Spirit or Emptiness. Further, as a particular wholeness, each holon possesses intrinsic value, depth value, which is valuable precisely because it internally embraces aspects of the Kosmos as part of its own being (and the more aspects it embraces, then the greater its depth and the greater its intrinsic value, the greater its significance). And finally, as a part, each holon possesses extrinsic or instrumental value, because other holons external to it nonetheless depend upon it in various ways for their own existence and survival (and the more networks and wholes of which the holon is a part, then the greater the extrinsic value, the greater its fundamentalness: its existence is instrumental to the existence of so many other holons).
My point in mentioning this example is simply that this type of multidimensional environmental ethics is completely subverted by the flatland holism so prevalent in the Gaia-centric approaches. The fact that all holons have equal Ground-value is confused with the notion that they must therefore all have equal intrinsic value ("bioequality"), and this completely paralyzes any sort of pragmatic action at all.
It is much better to kill a carrot than a cow, even though they are both perfect manifestations of Spirit. They both have equal Ground-value, but one has more intrinsic value because one has more depth (and therefore more consciousness). And the Eco camp's general attempt to "save the biosphere" by privileging it and leveling any distinctions in it (bioequality) paralyzes any actual pragmatic steps that might be taken to reform our anthropocentric stance.
It gets worse: in a flatland world, intrinsic value is given only to the web-of-life or the system as a whole (the great interlocking order)-and thus we are all fundamentally, basically, profoundly, nothing but strands in the wonderful web. This attempt to introduce "wholeness" actually instrumentalizes all of us, instrumentalizes each and every individual living being, because now living beings only have part value, extrinsic value, instrumental value. Holism always instrumentalizes everything!
In short: this approach confuses equal Ground-value with equal intrinsic value ("bioequality"), which leaves only the biosphere as a whole with intrinsic value, and this converts every individual living being into merely a part, a strand, an instrumental means to the glorious web: it leaves, that is, ecofascism.
As I said, I believe in many cases the original intuition is true and good, namely all holons have equal Ground-value (I believe that is the primary intuition behind the noble attempts to de-anthropocentrize ethics). But in unpacking this noble intuition merely in terms of flatland holism, we end up instrumentalizing everything: precisely the fundamental Enlightenment paradigm most responsible for despoiling Gaia is still claiming, in its new guise, to save that which it is inexorably destroying.
Thus, a correct and often noble intuition of the World Soul, and Eco-Noetic Self is misinterpreted in terms of a flatland holism that, in leveling qualitative distinctions, paralyzes actions that would further the descent of that World Soul. And in this case it is still true: that which is not part of the solution is most definitely part of the problem.
Ken Wilber is one of the most widely read philosophers of our time. He is the author of nearly two dozen books on spirituality, psychology, and science. His latest book is A Theory of Everything (Shambhala). For more information about his work, visit
www.shambhala.com
This article was printed in New Renaissance, Vol. 10, No. 3, issue 34, Autumn 2001
Copyright © 2002 by Renaissance Universal, all rights reserved.
Posted on the web on July 31, 2002.
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