Metaphysics for Responsibility to Nature

Excerpt

By ‘responsibility’ in this paper, I understand moral responsibility, so the issue under discussion here is moral responsibility to nature. In order to be responsible to nature, a substantial notion of responsibility is required. It should be just as substantial as the notion of responsibility in ethics in general. Such a conception of responsibility to nature is one of the basic assumptions of ‘anthropocentric’ environmental ethics, e.g. the one laid out in John Passmore’s classic Man’s Responsibility for Nature. It is also a basic assumption of ‘non-anthropocentric’ environmental ethics, the difference between the two being that the former denies that nature is suitable for standing in the relationship while the latter does not always do so. Passmore considers the environmental problems such as pollution and the depletion of natural resources all within the framework of traditional human-centred ethics. By contrast, ‘non-anthropocentric’ environmental ethics considers nature to be a bearer of intrinsic value and/or literally a bearer of certain moral rights. By the same token, it also (in some forms) sees nature as an entity human beings can and should be literally responsible to. In my view, all anthropocentric environmental ethics is flawed. It fails dramatically in taking into account the interests of animals and other non-human entities with morally relevant interests. Often, but not always, non-anthropocentric environmental ethics goes hand in hand with an explicit metaphysics of nature on which nature is such that we can indeed literally be responsible to it. In what follows, I first provide an account of what it means to stand in the relation of being ‘responsible to’. Next, I describe and reject two influential ‘realist’ views of the metaphysics of nature each of which fits in perfectly with the thesis that we literally can, and should, be responsible to nature. Finally, I appeal to extant fictionalism from other areas of philosophy – especially the philosophy of religion – and argue from its analogy to our subject matter. This enables me to propose a fictionalist view of the metaphysics of nature (as person-like) that allows for the required relationship. …