Abstract

Biocentrism, a prominent view in environmental ethics, is the notion that all and only individual biological organisms have moral status, which is to say that their good ought to be considered for its own sake by moral agents. I argue that biocentrism suffers two serious problems: the Origin Problem and the Normativity Problem. Biocentrism seeks to avoid the absurdity that artifacts have moral status on the basis that organisms have naturalistic origins whereas artifacts do not. The Origin Problem contends that, contra biocentrism, an entity’s origin is not relevant to whether that entity has moral status. The Normativity Problem is that biocentrists are preoccupied with accounting for the goods or interests of nonsentient organisms yet fail to establish why interests so construed confer moral status; biocentrism fails to bridge the good-ought gap. It is shown how these problems emerge in three prominent book-length works representative of the biocentrists’ positions over three decades: Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature, Gary Varner’s In Nature’s Interests?, and Nicholas Agar’s Life’s Intrinsic Value. At minimum, these criticisms suggest that biocentrism is crucially incomplete as a moral framework at present and, optimistically, where more work remains to be done. If biocentrism really is dead, then moral status should be restricted to a more plausible locus such as sentience or rationality, the value of organisms needs a different expression, and environmental ethics needs an axiological foundation different than bare life.