The semiotic foundation of an ecological ethic

Jonathan Beever, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation explores approaches to inherent value in the natural environment. Contemporary theories of inherent moral value that ground environmental ethics are inadequate for at least one of two reasons: either they fail to offer a sufficient scope, or they fail to offer justification sufficient for application in policy and practice. I respond to a gap between the broad holistic but counterintuitive proposals of environmental ethics and the intuitive individualistic but narrow proposals of animal ethics with a novel relational theory of inherent moral worth based in semiotics, the study of signification. Native American, Judeo-Christian, and contemporary spiritual perspectives on inherent value like that of Holmes Rolston III are based on spiritual and transcendent cosmologies that are difficult if not impossible to justify. Other approaches are grounded in moral intuitions developed out of growing scientific knowledge of the natural world, including those of Arne Naess, James Lovelock, and Aldo Leopold. Such approaches propose wide scopes of inherent value, proposing ways we might account for the moral worth of all things in the natural world, yet they too stand on unsteady foundations. Similarly, approaches based on consciousness, social contract, rationality, and sentience face their own problems with justification. Approaches like these, strong in the contemporary literature concerning human and nonhuman moral value, have stronger justification, supported by scientific knowledge and our best understanding of the natural world, but ultimately find support in an abstract analogical extensionism. Further, they support narrower scopes of value that restrict their suitability as approaches to environmental value that are sufficient to describe the full range of moral value in the natural world. Approaches that have strong scientific justification as well as broad scope remain in nascent stages of development. Adding to that development, I ultimately develop a novel approach to environmental value based in biosemiotics, the study of signification and representation in living systems. Biosemiotics presents an empirically-based theory of meaning-making by living things. This approach argues that meaning is morally-relevant, linking the science of biosemiotics to a descriptive ethical account. While significant problems remain with this approach, it reinvigorates the discussion of the scope and scientific justification of inherent worth in the natural world. My dissertation evaluates ways of understanding the inherent moral worth of all living things, an essential step toward an environmental ethic. Furthermore, it enables us to better understand the implications of ecology, suggesting an essential albeit instrumental tie between the value of the living individual and the value of the nonliving world of which it is a part. The biosemiotic approach I explore here is a relational theory of ecological ethics, one piece of the wider picture of bioethics.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Bernstein, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Environmental philosophy|Ethics

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