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.The second tradition, centering on the Cartesian dualism of soul and body,also fails to justify the claim to human superiority.That superiority is supposedto derive from the fact that we have souls while animals do not.Animals arewww.umweltethik.at216 ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Vol.3mere automata and lack the divine element that makes us spiritual beings.Iwon t go into the now familiar criticisms of this two-substance view.I only addthe point that, even if humans are composed of an immaterial, unextended souland a material, extended body, this in itself is not a reason to deem them ofgreater worth than entities that are only bodies.Why is a soul substance a thingthat adds value to its possessor? Unless some theological reasoning is offeredhere (which many, including myself, would find unacceptable on epistemologi-cal grounds), no logical connection is evident.An immaterial something whichthinks is better than a material something which does not think only if thinkingitself has value, either intrinsically or instrumentally.Now it is intrinsicallyvaluable to humans alone, who value it as an end in itself, and it is instrumen-tally valuable to those who benefit from it, namely humans.For animals that neither enjoy thinking for its own sake nor need it for livingthe kind of life for which they are best adapted, it has no value.Even if thinking is broadened to include all forms of consciousness, there are stillmany living things that can do without it and yet live what is for their speciesa good life.The anthropocentricity underlying the claim to human superiorityruns throughout Cartesian dualism.A third major source of the idea of human superiority is the Judeo-Christianconcept of the Great Chain of Being.Humans are superior to animals andplants because their Creator has given them a higher place on the chain.Itbegins with God at the top, and then moves to the angels, who are lower thanGod but higher than humans, then to humans, positioned between the angelsand the beasts (partaking of the nature of both), and then on down to the lowerlevels occupied by nonhuman animals, plants, and finally inanimate objects.Humans, being  made in God s image, are inherently superior to animals andplants by virtue of their being closer (in their essential nature) to God.The metaphysical and epistemological difficulties with this conception of ahierarchy of entities are, in my mind, insuperable.Without entering into thismatter here, I only point out that if we are unwilling to accept the metaphysicsof traditional Judaism and Christianity, we are again left without good reasonsfor holding to the claim of inherent human superiority.The foregoing considerations (and others like them) leave us with but oneground for the assertion that a human being, regardless of merit, is a higherkind of entity than any other living thing.This is the mere fact of the geneticmakeup of the species Homo sapiens.But this is surely irrational and arbitrary.Why should the arrangement of genes of a certain type be a mark of superiorvalue, especially when this fact about an organism is taken by itself, unrelatedto any other aspect of its life? We might just as well refer to any other geneticmakeup as a ground of superior value.Clearly we are confronted here witha wholly arbitrary claim that can only be explained as an irrational bias in ourown favor.That the claim is nothing more than a deep-seated prejudice is brought hometo us when we look at our relation to other species in the light of the first threewww.umweltethik.atFall 1981 R E S P E C T F OR N A T U R E 217elements of the biocentric outlook.Those elements taken conjointly give us acertain overall view of the natural world and of the place of humans in it.Whenwe take this view we come to understand other living things, their environmen-tal conditions, and their ecological relationships in such a way as to awake inus a deep sense of our kinship with them as fellow members of the Earth scommunity of life.Humans and nonhumans alike are viewed together asintegral parts of one unified whole in which all living things are functionallyinterrelated.Finally, when our awareness focuses on the individual lives ofplants and animals, each is seen to share with us the characteristic of beinga teleological center of life striving to realize its own good in its own uniqueway [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]