Anthropocentrism

Sara E. Boslaugh

By Sara E. Boslaugh

Encyclopedia Britannica

Anthropocentrism, philosophical viewpoint arguing that human beings are the central or most significant entities in the world. This is a basic belief embedded in many Western religions and philosophies. Anthropocentrism regards humans as separate from and superior to nature and holds that human life has intrinsic value while other entities (including animals, plants, mineral resources, and so on) are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind.

Many ethicists find the roots of anthropocentrism in the Creation story told in the book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian Bible, in which humans are created in the image of God and are instructed to “subdue” Earth and to “have dominion” over all other living creatures. This passage has been interpreted as an indication of humanity’s superiority to nature and as condoning an instrumental view of nature, where the natural world has value only as it benefits humankind. This line of thought is not limited to Jewish and Christian theology and can be found in Aristotle’s Politics and in Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy.

Some anthropocentric philosophers support a so-called cornucopian point of view, which rejects claims that Earth’s resources are limited or that unchecked human population growth will exceed the carrying capacity of Earth and result in wars and famines as resources become scarce. Cornucopian philosophers argue that either the projections of resource limitations and population growth are exaggerated or that technology will be developed as necessary to solve future problems of scarcity. In either case, they see no moral or practical need for legal controls to protect the natural environment or limit its exploitation.

Other environmental ethicists have suggested that it is possible to value the environment without discarding anthropocentrism. Sometimes called prudential or enlightened anthropocentrism, this view holds that humans do have ethical obligations toward the environment, but they can be justified in terms of obligations toward other humans. For instance, environmental pollution can be seen as immoral because it negatively affects the lives of other people, such as those sickened by the air pollution from a factory. Similarly, the wasteful use of natural resources is viewed as immoral because it deprives future generations of those resources. In the 1970s, theologian and philosopher Holmes Rolston III added a religious clause to this viewpoint and argued that humans have a moral duty to protect biodiversity because failure to do so would show disrespect to God’s creation.

Prior to the emergence of environmental ethics as an academic field, conservationists such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold argued that the natural world has an intrinsic value, an approach informed by aesthetic appreciation of nature’s beauty, as well as an ethical rejection of a purely exploitative valuation of the natural world. In the 1970s, scholars working in the emerging academic field of environmental ethics issued two fundamental challenges to anthropocentrism: they questioned whether humans should be considered superior to other living creatures, and they also suggested that the natural environment might possess intrinsic value independent of its usefulness to humankind. The resulting philosophy of biocentrism regards humans as one species among many in a given ecosystem and holds that the natural environment is intrinsically valuable independent of its ability to be exploited by humans.

Although the anthro in anthropocentrism refers to all humans rather than exclusively to men, some feminist philosophers argue that the anthropocentric worldview is in fact a male, or patriarchal, point of view. They claim that to view nature as inferior to humanity is analogous to viewing other people (women, colonial subjects, nonwhite populations) as inferior to white Western men and, as with nature, provides moral justification for their exploitation. The term ecofeminism (coined in 1974 by the French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne) refers to a philosophy that looks not only at the relationship between environmental degradation and human oppression but may also posit that women have a particularly close relationship with the natural world because of their history of oppression.