Anthropocentric And Nonanthropocentric Perspectives
This mandate to combat unbridled anthropocentrism in environmental ethics always has harbored a serious policy ambition. By raising the flag of nonanthropocentrism, philosophers were hoping to advance a persuasive moral
justification for a robust environmental policy agenda and a general rationalization of proenvironmental practices. If an ethical defense could be mounted successfully, public policies directing the protection of endangered species, wetlands, wilderness, natural areas, and so on, would appear to rest on solid and perhaps unassailable foundations.
The judgment that a nonanthropocentric program is necessary to combat moral humanism and underwrite stringent environmental policies and practices did not go unchallenged. One of the more visible and historically important dissents was voiced in the mid-1980s by Norton, who argued that the adoption of a nonanthropocentric worldview was neither philosophically viable nor politically necessary (Norton 1984). Norton disputed the prevailing view in environmental ethics that humanism was the enemy of environmental protection by advancing a less aggressive, pluralistic version of anthropocentrism. Calling the new approach "weak" anthropocentrism, Norton proffered a kinder and gentler vision of humanist environmen-talism that marked a departure from the generally hostile reception of the anthropocentric worldview within environmental ethics.
Norton's alternative anthropocentric project was articulated most fully in his influential 1991 book Toward Unity among Environmentalists. He made the provocative claim that what had been presented as the foundational rupture in the moral bedrock of environmental concern— the deep rift between anthropocentrism and nonanthropo-centrism—was vastly overestimated. Norton wrote that nonanthropocentric claims and his own formulation of weak anthropocentrism should, in practice, "converge" on the same set of environmental policy goals. He named this argument the convergence hypothesis and stressed that it was both an "article of environmentalists' faith'' and an empirical hypothesis that could be falsified by subjecting it to experimental text (Norton 1991, p. 240). Logically, the convergence thesis was a hypothetical conditional: It predicted that if individual A is a consistent weak anthropo-centrist (embracing the full range of human values in the environment—aesthetic, spiritual, recreational, educational values—over time) and individual B is a nonanthropocen-trist who endorses a consistent notion of the intrinsic value of the environment, both A and B will end up supporting the same environmental policy positions.
Norton predicted this convergence because he believed that despite their different philosophical starting points, weak anthropocentrists and nonanthropocentrists embraced values that were ultimately dependent on the long-term ecological sustainability of natural systems. The maintenance of multigenerational ecological processes, he argued, was the only way to preserve ecological health, integrity, and biological diversity over the long run whether this was done for the good of present and future generations of humans (the weak anthropocentrist position) or for the value that such ecological health, integrity and biological diversity possesses in or for itself (the non-anthropocentrist position). In Toward Unity, Norton illustrated the hypothesis by referring to environmentalists' efforts to protect wetlands, a policy goal that united advocates of a variety of value and ethical orientations, including hunters and traditional conservation organizations such as Ducks Unlimited and the National Wildlife Federation as well as nature/wildlife appreciation societies such as Audubon and Defenders Of Wildlife (Norton 1991).
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