5.1 Biocentric Perspectives on Climate Change
Biocentrism provides a very particular lens through which to look at the world: one that focuses on each living thing as a morally relevant individual. Suppose we look through this individual- focused lens into a future world— a world, let’s first imagine, uninfluenced by anthropogenic climate change. This future world would be packed with trillions of liv- ing things, though if we look far enough into the future, barely any of them would be the
Living Individuals: Biocentrism in Environmental Ethics 107 same living individuals that currently exist. Suppose we now look through this individual- focused lens at a future world with climate change. This world is still filled with trillions of living things, distinct from those currently alive. But many, or most, of the individuals in this future world with climate change are different individuals from those that would have existed in the alternative future world without climate change. Where the same species exists in both future worlds, particular genetic individuals almost certainly differ (as a changing climate, for instance, affects which individuals mate and produce offspring). And in the climate- changed world, there are likely to be fewer— or perhaps no— individuals of some species. But individuals of other species are predicted to be more numerous, flourishing, and found in new locations; evidence of this process already exists (e.g., Walther et al., 2002).
Some places in the climate- changed world may have fewer individuals of any species than would otherwise exist; other places, which would be sparsely populated in a climate like today’s, may be saturated with living things. Some living individuals will be struggling to survive against heat, drought, flooding, or thaws; others will flourish in the warm, the dry, or the ice- free environment.
Climate change, then, pushes the world along a particular, human- influenced trajec- tory. On many ethical views, this human influence matters. Nolt (2011), for instance, argues that anthropogenic climate change meets four key conditions of moral responsibility: we can cause or prevent it; we can recognize it as morally significant; we can anticipate it with some reliability; and we can act in different ways with respect to it. From this perspective, a human- influenced, climate- changed world of living things is morally charged, in a way that a “wild” future world would not have been; and for biocentric ethicists, this means that climate impacts on living things will therefore matter morally. Exactly what these impacts will be is empirically uncertain, but they may include changing the number of individuals, the existence of different individuals, harm or death to some individuals, and the bringing into being or benefiting of other individuals. Different biocentric views will evaluate these changes differently. I’ll briefly outline two possible, contrasting responses here: a consequen- tialist biocentric view, like Attfield’s; and a deontological biocentric view, like Taylor’s.
5.2 Consequentialist Biocentrism and Climate Change
The major ethical concern here for consequentialist biocentrists is that climate change will create a worse future world, in terms of the flourishing of living things, than would otherwise have existed.
This worry might focus on numbers: if a climate- changed world over time contained fewer living individuals than a world without climate change, this world would, for most biocentric consequentialists, be worse (leaving aside the quality and psychological sophis- tication of the lives concerned). But this outcome does not seem particularly likely— even if we restrict “over time” to a timespan meaningful to people; Nolt (2011) suggests a cou- ple of million years. While climate change will reduce or eliminate some species popula- tions, “an increase in weedy and opportunistic species is … expected” (Williams et al., 2008) Some ecosystems (for instance, marine ecosystems affected by ocean acidification) may contain fewer organisms over time. But others will likely contain more— studies sug- gest, for example, that warming soils in subarctic areas have increased density of bacteria, fungi, and nematodes (Ruess et al., 1999). While the species mix will change, there’s no
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compelling reason yet, at least, to be seriously concerned about reducing total future num- bers of organisms.
A second concern might be about complexity. Climate change will cause different indi- viduals to live, and one possible outcome would be that fewer complex organisms would live.
This would not be a particular concern for egalitarian consequentialist biocentrists, since on an egalitarian view, if there were roughly equal numbers of roughly equally flourishing organisms, the differing complexity of their capacities would not matter. But it would mat- ter to inegalitarian consequentialists if fewer psychologically complex individuals existed.
And climate change might have this effect. There’s some current evidence of a decline in populations of large apex consumers (Estes et al., 2011) though it is unclear whether this is attributable to climate change. Plausibly, there may be fewer individuals of some psychologi- cally sophisticated species, such as mountain gorillas, partly on account of climate change.
However, in other cases, diminishing complex species populations will be superseded by populations of equally complex individuals of other species— for instance, while the Arctic fox population declines, the red fox population expands. Substitutions between different species of equal complexity don’t seem to be of direct ethical concern to consequentialist biocentrism, which is, in this sense, “species- blind.” But even if a climate- changed world did have fewer psychologically sophisticated organisms, humans could breed some (including domesticates). After all, it is not required that consequentialist biocentrists regard the flour- ishing of an organism as less valuable because humans bred it.
Some biocentrists may resist this suggestion by defending additional values— such as wildness— not tied to life or individual capacities; or by arguing that even if the lost organ- isms’ own flourishing could be substituted for by domesticates, the lost organisms’ ecosys- temic role is so critical that other wild organisms in the ecosystem will flourish less well (see Carter, 2001, Attfield, 2003b). Some evidence for the latter argument exists; for instance, Estes et al. (2011) maintain that where large apex consumers decline, there is “trophic down- grading” in ecosystems. But while from other ethical perspectives trophic downgrading is problematic, it isn’t obviously so for biocentric ethicists; it does not necessarily imply fewer organisms flourishing, but rather different types of flourishing organisms (grasses instead of trees, for instance).
Biocentric consequentialists may also worry that climate change will reduce the flourish- ing of individual organisms; biocentrists, primarily inegalitarian biocentrists, might addi- tionally worry about increased animal suffering (as would other kinds of consequentialists for whom animal suffering matters). It’s very difficult to predict how, over time, climate change will affect flourishing and suffering. Humans are physiologically rather similar; so we can judge whether particular climatic conditions will cause human suffering and whether such suffering can be averted or alleviated. But biocentrists are concerned with millions of species, with different climate sensitivities and different adaptive capacities. Climate change will certainly cause some suffering and some loss of individual flourishing in the short term.
But over time, species composition will change; successful species are likely to be those that are highly adaptive. As adaptive species increase, climate- originating suffering and lack of flourishing should decrease; it may be that that climate change, over time, does not cause a significant uptick in total wild suffering or lack of flourishing.
So: from the perspective of many forms of biocentric consequentialism, climate change is fairly unproblematic: numbers of living things are unlikely to decline; members of struggling species will be replaced by members of more adaptive species, and humans can breed complex
Living Individuals: Biocentrism in Environmental Ethics 109 animals. However, some forms of biocentric consequentialism may come to different conclu- sions. An inegalitarian consequentialism in which human beings are highly significant— for instance Varner’s (1998) account— would be likely to find climate change more troubling.
Humans are relatively physiologically similar, won’t be replaced by “better adapted” people, and are relatively long lived; in addition their freedom to migrate is politically restricted; some of their adaptive measures (such as air conditioning) contribute to the problem; and they are dependent on a small variety of crops. The effects on humans may be more problematic in terms of total suffering, or loss of flourishing, than the effects on nonhumans over time; while this may seem a strange view for biocentrism to adopt, it’s conceivable that this could be the strongest biocentric consequentialist objection to anthropogenic climate change.
5.3 Deontological Biocentrism and Climate Change
The primary ethical concern for deontological forms of biocentrism is harm to, and kill- ing of, individual living things. Will climate change have this effect? In the short term, the answer is “yes.” Take an animal example: polar bears. Recent evidence suggests that in parts of the Arctic, where sea ice is declining, adult polar bears weigh less than a decade ago and survival is more difficult (Derocher et al., 2004) The climate is changing around the bears;
without climate change, these bears’ lives would have gone better. It’s plausible, then, to say that polar bears have been harmed by climate change and (given human moral responsibil- ity) that they have therefore been wronged. For biocentrists, of course, the scope of potential morally relevant harms is much wider than sentient animals; any organism that lives long enough for climate to change around it could be harmed by the change. It’s currently diffi- cult to identify many cases like this, not least because it’s difficult to pick out how far climate change is a causal factor in climate- related harms to living individuals. Nonetheless, accord- ing to a deontological view, where such wrongs can be identified, they matter; and (unlike a consequentialist view) they can’t be compensated for by greater benefits to other organisms.
In Taylor’s view, we would need to consider what would count as appropriate restitution.
However, while climate will continue to change around organisms, as already noted, it will also change which organisms actually come into existence. This may mean that as spe- cies of more adaptive organisms expand, and less adaptive species contract, there will be fewer harms and deaths from climate change. In addition, over time, climate change will become a necessary condition of existence for an increasing number of organisms. Yet these same organisms might also subsequently be killed by some manifestation of climate change. This raises the question of whether an organism can be made worse- off in a morally relevant way by a process that’s necessary for its very existence. Suppose a conifer species moves its range north as temperatures warm, but then particular individual conifers— which would not have existed had this northward expansion not occurred— are killed by a climate change– influenced drought. It might be argued that these particular conifers have not, after all, been harmed— in the sense of “made worse off”— by climate change. If the climate had not changed, those particular conifers would not be better off— they would not have existed at all. This is a case of Parfit’s (1984) “non- identity problem.” If the non- identity problem is taken seriously here, as time goes by, the harms of climate change appear to diminish, since climate change would become a necessary condition of existence for more and more liv- ing individuals. Yet this conclusion seems counterintuitive. Many ways of dealing with the
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non- identity problem have been proposed, some of which reinterpret how harm is under- stood; unfortunately there isn’t space to discuss them here (but see Harman, 2009; Hartzell- Nichols, 2012). A deontological biocentric ethic, however (like non- biocentric deontological ethical perspectives) will need at least to consider the non- identity problem when develop- ing a thorough- going response to climate change.