Anthropocentrism
Literally defined as "human-centeredness," anthropocentrism is for many environmental philosophers the ethical attitude the field was created to overcome. The critique of anthropocentric assumptions and moral judgments and their supplementation with nonanthropocentric (i.e., biocentric or ecocentric) commitments have driven much environmental ethical theorizing since the academic founding of the field in the 1970s. The critique of anthropocentrism, however, is not seen as a purely intellectual task by environmental philosophers. Most theorists identify the militantly and exclusively anthro-pocentric worldview as the root cause of environmental problems such as species extinction, the loss of natural areas and wilderness, and the general decline of environmental quality. As a consequence, the rejection of anthro-pocentrism has become the hallmark of environmental ethics since the 1980s, although not all environmental philosophers believe that an exclusively anthropocentric orientation necessarily leads to the destruction of wild species and ecosystems. For these dissenting voices in the field, a sufficiently reformed and enlightened anthropocentrism not only is capable of motivating a strong, effective environmental ethic, it is defensible as a superior approach to moral, ontological, and policy questions. With global climate change eclipsing all other environmental concerns, anthropocentrism became ascendant in environmental ethics early in the twenty-first century.
Philosophically, anthropocentrism may be understood in ethical, ontological, and epistemological terms. As an ethical view anthropocentrism refers to the explicitly stated or implied claim that only human beings have intrinsic value; all other natural beings and things have only instrumental value, and human interests thus always trump the interests of nonhumans and the environment. This is an evaluative and priority judgment that many nonanthropo-centric philosophers believe reflects an arbitrary bias. As an ontological view, anthropocentrism refers to the position, sometimes identified as Aristotelian or Thomistic, in which humans are seen as the center of the universe or the ends of creation. Typically, environmental philosophers conflate the ontological and ethical positions in their critiques as well as in their positive nonanthropocentric proposals even though, as Tim Hayward (1998) pointed out, ethical anthropocentrism does not necessarily entail ontological anthropocentrism and vice versa. Indeed, most secular anthropocentric environmental philosophers, such as Bryan Norton and Andrew Light, are not ontological anthropocentrists, publicly accepting an evolutionary account of human origins in which Homo sapiens is not regarded as an ontologically privileged species. However, many self-identifying Christian, Jewish, and Islamic anthropocentric environmental philosophers are both ontological and ethical anthropocentists, grounding the latter type of anthropocentrism in the former. As an epistemological view, anthropocentrism is tautological: All human values are human values, including the intrinsic value that ethical nonanthropocentrists ascribe to nature. Thus, no ethical nonanthropocentrist can be a self-consistent nonanthropocentrist, although this truism often is overlooked or denied in the heat of the anthropocentrism -nonanthropocentrism debate.
Terminologically, anthropocentrism sometimes is confused with related words that crop up in discussions about the human-nature relationship, especially the terms anthropomorphism and anthropogenic. The first term refers to the practice of ascribing uniquely human attributes to nonhuman beings or entities (e.g., the human traits given to the animal characters in the Disney film Bambi and in Kenneth Grahame's book The Wind in the Willows). The second term simply means ''human-caused'' rather than produced by natural forces, as in anthropogenic climate change.
Anthropocentrism as it is commonly understood in environmental ethics and philosophy refers to the view in which nonhuman nature is valued primarily for its satisfaction of human preferences and/or contribution to broader human values and interests. Another way to put this is that in the anthropocentric worldview, individual plants and animals, populations, biotic communities, and ecosystems are accorded only instrumental, not intrinsic, value; Eugene Hargrove (1992) and Ben Minteer (2001) have given alternative readings.
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