Lines into the future

Draws heavily on Chapter 7 of Vernon Pratt, Environment and Philosophy, London, Routledge, 2000; by permission.

Philosopher Paul Taylor argues that while we in the West at our best show respect for other human beings, any respect does not go further. Generally, we seem to behave as though human beings can do as they like as far as the rest of nature is concerned.

Sometimes we make an exception for suffering: we shouldn't hurt creatures unnecessarily, we sometimes agree. But apart from that, it seems widely agreed that we can do what we like. We need to consider the effects of our actions on other human beings, on our descendants as well as our contemporaries, and we mustn’t cause unnecessary suffering, but there is nothing further to weigh in the balance when we are deciding what we might do.

Take for example a proposal to cut down some rain forest and install grazing meadows for cows in its place. A developer might be forced to acknowledge the need to compensate the human beings who are to be displaced, and s/he might be got to avoid burning the animals alive, but no account whatever would be taken of how the destruction looks from the viewpoint of the trees - or, say, the waterholes It is true that a full consideration of human interests would bring in a wide range of different points. The interests of people in generations to come wanting to visit the place as it is would give us a reason for opposing the change, and human interests would dictate that we take account of the contribution the rain forest makes to the production of oxygen and so on. But all this would be to look at the proposal from the viewpoint of its impact on human beings. What of the 'point of view' of the trees, the epiphytes, the streams, the different ecosystems which woven together make the forest up? In the conventional thinking of our culture, these 'viewpoints' seem to be ignored. And it is said, this is what lies at the root of 'exploitation'. If we ignore a thing's 'point of view' then once we have consulted human interests we will feel free to do anything we like with it.

But we only 'ignore' the 'points of view' of plants and so on, it may be claimed, because there are no such things. Plants, streams and the rest simply do not have 'points of view'. We are not wrong to ignore the viewpoints of these things because they have none.

A great deal appears to hang therefore on 'points of view'. What are they? Is it just human beings who have them? Or is it sentience which creates them, so that animals, or some animals, have them too?

POINTS OF VIEW

When one speaks of a point of view, the picture is of somebody perhaps on a cliff-top looking along the coastline first in one direction, then the other, then out to sea, scanning the horizon. Such an observer occupies a single position, and from this single position, everything else is seen. The figure of the point of view suggests that this is what it is like for me as I go about the world, and go through life. I occupy a quasi-point from which I look out on everything that isn't me.

This I think is a very familiar way of thinking about ourselves. It is perhaps saying little more than that we are 'selves'. 'I' am one thing, separate from the other things in the world, upon which 'I' 'look out'. This, as we shall see, is one particular way among others in which the 'self' may be conceived, but it is a familiar, conventional one.

Is it possible to imagine an alternative? Supposing I looked left and saw the cornfields and right and saw the windmill and then out to sea and saw the ferry but didn't relate these experiences to each other. Is that conceivable? Maybe I wouldn't in those circumstances be entitled to describe the situation as me seeing first one thing, then another, and then another. There would be a series of experiences, but if there was no linking between them, the sense surely in which they were experiences of 'one person' would be lost. Would it still make sense to say that they were all experiences that belonged to one viewpoint? It wouldn't at any rate if we now imagined a person moving about instead of looking out from the a single position on the clifftop: and imagine in those circumstances, the links between successive experiences being dropped. We then have a sequence of experiences, but nothing to connect them together, and nothing upon which to base the idea even that they are related to a single viewpoint. You may think, on reflection, that there is no real possibility here, that what I have suggested is strictly inconceivable. You may think, for example, that the idea of an experience is tied to the idea of a single subject having that experience as one among others: my attempt to get you to imagine an experience that is not linked to others and not thought of as 'mine' is conceptual sleight of hand.

The point at the moment is only this: the conventional conception of the 'self' is of one thing, separate from other things in the world, upon which 'I' look out. This makes a very close connection between having a point of view and being a subject.

But there is another dimension to the notion of a point of view that I need to bring out. You have a point of view on something if it matters to you. Unless you prefer some outcomes to others I can't take your view into account as I decide what to do: can't because once again there is nothing to take into account. If you lack preferences, all my options are equally attractive, equally unattractive to you. So if it is to play any part in altering our behaviour with regard to natural things the notion of a point of view has to be something more than the idea of a 'subject': a single thing looking out on a world made up of other things separate from it. It has to be something that values some situations above others.

One of the most obvious ways in which a situation might matter to you is if you are capable of suffering. Some situations may cause you suffering, and others may not. This amounts to saying that for beings capable of suffering, some situations are preferable to others.

So here we have a basis for recognising a constraint on our actions. A creature that is capable of feeling pain, and pleasure perhaps, has a point of view that it is possible for us to take into account. There is no argument yet that we have to take it into account - just that here at any rate is something we could take into account if we chose to. There is a point of view here other than our own. A being looking out on the world made up of other things separate from it, and one that prefers some states of affairs to others because some things are painful and some things are less so.

A second way in which a situation might matter to you is if you have plans for the future which might be frustrated. Somebody's putting paid to your plans may not cause you physical pain, but it would be a case of a situation coming to pass other than one you preferred. So here is another case of a point of view which I could take into account if I wished to.

If animals are capable of suffering, they have a point of view in virtue of that. Our actions matter to them, insofar as they might occasion or alleviate pain. But what of other natural things - things to which the attribution of consciousness, and so of the capacity for suffering, is more problematic? The argument is that such things may in certain cases be regarded as having point of view in virtue of the fact that in certain cases there is a good sense in which they may be said to 'prefer' some possible futures to others. To take a strong example, think of a young plant. There is a sense, it is argued, in which a seedling 'aims' to grow into maturity, and so has a 'preference' which it is possible to take into account.

I have said that to have a point of view is to be a single thing, separate from other things in the world upon which 'I' look out, and 'preferring' some things - some present states, some future prospects - to others.

I have had to leave 'preferring' in quotes however. What can be the basis for saying that a plant 'prefers' some possible futures to others, or a stream, or a mountain?

I need to explore this a bit further.

A THING'S 'NATURE'

One possible basis for saying that a thing like a plant might have a sort of 'preference' for some possible futures over others lies in the idea of a 'nature'.

Animals and plants, it is said, have natures. and their good lies in their being able to do what allows full expression to those natures - in being able to do what 'comes naturally' to them. A certain way of life comes naturally to a chicken, for example - ( a way of life that is thwarted when the creature is tightly caged up in a battery). It is their nature that gives them a 'preference' for some possible futures over others, and which represents something we could take into account in our own decisions if we wished to.

The recognition that animals and other living things have natures is a feature of many cultures - perhaps without exception - though there are different accounts of what a 'nature' is. In chapter 9 I say something about the account that was given by thinkers of the late medieval period, who, drawing on Aristotle, identified the nature of a thing with what they called its 'form'. Today however conventional thought locates the nature of an organism in its chromosomes.

The metaphor with which we often think about the chromosomes and their role gives us the point that some take to be the key to the question of organisms having a good of their own. We say that the chromosomes act as the blueprints. This suggests straightaway that from the earliest point there is in the organism a plan of the final outcome of its development, and thus also a kind of specification for its pattern of life. In the terms I used earlier, the blueprint gives the organism a 'preferred' future, both because it has a mature form to 'head for' and because its chromosomes equip it for a particular pattern of life which will be more suited to some possible futures than to others.

THE CHROMOSOMES GIVE AN ORGANISM GOALS

In setting for the organism a form of life the chromosomes must also be setting for the organism a series of goals, organised in a hierarchy. For example, the pattern of life of a tortoise involves it in sexual reproduction. But if sexual reproduction is a high level goal, the animal has to be equipped with a lower level goal of achieving intercourse with an appropriate mate at an appropriate season (i.e. when there are appropriate mates to be had.) But if intercourse is to be achieved, the animal must be equipped to pursue an even lower level goal of locating such a mate. And if that is to be achieved by an animal fenced into a garden, for example, it might have to switch first into pursuit of an even lower level goal of first finding a way out and into more promising territory.

Gilbert White wrote about the animals in his 18th Century Hampshire parish without knowledge of chromosomes, but his account of the adventures of Timothy records the goal-seeking behaviour that could be observed in him:

'...there is a season of the year (usually the beginning of June) when his exertions are remarkable. He then walks on tiptoe, and is stirring by five in the morning; and, traversing the garden, examines every wicket and interstice in the fences, through which he will escape if possible; and often has eluded the care of the gardener, and wandered to some distant field. the motives that impel him to undertake these rambles seem to be of the amorous kind; his fancy then becomes intent on sexual attachments, which transport him beyond his usual gravity, and induce him to forget for a time his ordinary solemn deportment.'

In giving an organism a blueprint for its development the chromosomes give it one important goal, and in giving it a distinctive pattern of life they give it a whole series of others - an elaborate hierarchy of goals in fact, the goals that the creature will be observed to pursue in its behaviour.

GOAL-DIRECTED BEHAVIOUR AND CONSCIOUSNESS

On the view of the organism I am sketching here, there is an assumption that a creature can perfectly well pursue goals without being conscious of them - without indeed being capable of consciousness at all. The view is that the workings of evolution can equip an organism with a control device - the brain - which on its own - without any intervention of consciousness - generates behaviour that is directed at goals.

But is this possible? If we think of the brain as a control device governing behaviour can we think of the behaviour it produces as 'purposive' or 'goal-directed' at all? Isn't there a crucial difference between action that is engaged in because the agent considers alternatives, chooses one of them and pursues it, and behaviour that is produced by the essentially mechanical or quasi-mechanical - neurophysiological - processes in the brain?

This is a topical question in the field of artificial intelligence, where one aim is to get machines - electronic machines - to simulate different aspects of human intelligence. We can get machines to appear to engage in goal-directed behaviour in some settings. For example, an early wheeled robot was programmed to roll towards a light bulb placed in the centre of the room, and to do so even when obstacles of various sizes and shapes were placed in its path. More recently, the exploratory vehicle (the 'rover') that was so successful on the Mars mission of 1997 had been programmed so as to be able to negotiate the details of the terrain on its own while pursuing the overall destinations given to it - e.g. to move to such and such a place on the Martian surface.

Are robots such as these truly pursuing goals? Or are they merely simulating goal-directed behaviour? To get machines really to pursue goals, do we have somehow to equip them with consciousness?

Another type of example to consider is provided by plants. Plants sometimes behave as though they have goals, If you move a pot plant about, for example, it will often repeatedly reorient its leaves in an apparent attempt to keep them exposed to the light. How are we to understand these movements? They seem to be purposeful - they seem to be carried out by the plant to maintain its exposure to light - but can we think of them as purposeful without thinking of the plant as conscious?

'GOAL-DIRECTED' BEHAVIOUR

We ought to pause to think through what it is about the behaviour of the clever robot, and the plant, that makes us think of it as apparently purposeful. In both cases, we notice in the first place, there is an end point which the behaviour gets the system to - a geographical destination in the case of the rover, and an optimal exposure of the leaves to light in the case of the plant. But the second point is: the two systems are 'resourceful' in getting to that end-point. When a first tactic fails, they have the capacity to try something else; and if that should fail, then something else again. What they show, it has been said, is 'persistence towards some end state, under varying conditions'.

This isn't a complete account of what is special about this kind of behaviour, though, because it seems to cover such things as water flowing downhill. In a reservoir full of water up in the mountains you have something that persists towards an end point - sea-level - and something that has a good deal of capacity to find its way round obstacles. Let the water out of the reservoir and it will be tremendously resourceful -you could say - in finding a way down - a resourcefulness measured by the difficulty you would have in stopping it. It might be possible to do so, but the water would find a way round many of the steps you might at first think of taking. Would we want to say that water flowing down hill is apparently 'purposeful'? Would we want to say it appeared to be purposeful in the same way that the phototaxic plant appears to be purposeful?

Those who think that water flowing downhill and robots like the rover are not alike in the kind of behaviour of which they are capable propose adding a further condition to the formula proposed just now.

ENDS

They suggest that the crucial difference between robot and water flow is this. In the robot there is a representation of the end-state which has been given the robot as its goal. But there is no such representation in the case of the water.

In the robot - the more straightforward ones, anyway - the goal is achieved schematically like this: there is a in the programme a stretch of code which represents the 'goal-state' to which the programmer wishes the robot to get to. At the same time, if and when the robot changes position, it is made to keep a note of its actual state. What the system is then programmed to do is to maintain a continual comparison of these two representations - the representation of the goal-state on the one hand and the representation of the system's momentary state. The outcome of this constantly updated comparison feeds into its choice of behaviour. Any behaviour that narrows the gap between actual state and goal-state will be persisted with. But when a behaviour begins to have the opposite effect, it is discarded in favour of something else. In other words, we assume a system which has at its disposal a repertoire of behaviours. What we have to imagine, in other words, is a system which has at its disposal a repertoire of behaviours. It might start things off by choosing one of these behaviours at random. But in its constant monitoring of its own position, and comparing where it is with the representation it carries of where it 'aims' to be, it can tell whether that behaviour is narrowing the gap between actual state and goal. If it is bringing the two representations closer together, as it were, that behaviour will be persisted with. But if it isn't, the system will switch to something else in its behavioural repertoire. And so on.

FEEDBACK

The special feature present here is called 'feedback'. The result of an action has an impact on what action is engaged in next. I have spoken of a robot doing x, and then checking whether x has got it any nearer its goal and then either repeating x or switching to y depending on the answer. In this way its mechanism incorporates a 'feedback loop'. I am incorporating a feedback loop in the control of my own behaviour if I check what my students have learnt at the end of a seminar and repeat my approach next time, or alter it, depending on the results.

It is suggested then that a distinct sort of behaviour can be distinguished, which I shall call goal-directed behaviour, and which possesses the following features: there is persistence towards an end state under varying conditions, and this is achieved through a mechanism which incorporates feedback loops. It would be different from the behaviour of the billiard-ball, just sitting there until bumped into, and moving off 'blindly' in a calculable direction and pace. And it would be different from the behaviour of a body of water, cascading downhill under the under the influence of gravity. For with 'goal-directed' behaviour you have feedback loops, relying on there being some kind of representation of the end state - a stretch of programming, say, which 'codes' for the destination the programmer is designing the machine to move towards.

PURPOSIVE V. GOAL-DIRECTED BEHAVIOUR

Programmable computers have made us familiar with the idea that a mere machine may be got to display the type of behaviour I am calling 'goal-directed'. But to say this of course is not to say that mere machines can be got to be conscious. When we get them to pursue goals, we are not relying on them having thoughts or plans. We assume they are not conscious at all, and that nevertheless through the programming of behaviour-control mechanisms which incorporate feedback they (or the robots they control) can be got to engage in goal-directed behaviour.

To try and keep our discussion clear, let us restrict the term 'purposive behaviour' to refer to the direct involvement of consciousness. 'Purposive behaviour', I will say, is behaviour that does flow from conscious thought on the part of the system doing the behaving. In those terms, (assuming we don't think of the machinery as conscious), we shall have to say that computer-controlled robots can be got to display behaviour which appears to be purposive, but which isn't really. It is 'goal-directed' but not 'purposive'.

If we think back to Timothy (the tortoise, above), it may be true that as the creature appears to work its way round the garden fence we may be tempted to say it is searching for a way out. But, in the terms just set out, unless we are prepared to say that finding a way out is what Timothy has in mind we cannot regard its behaviour as truly purposeful. It may be like behaviour that flows from a purpose, but unless the creature is consciously considering plans and choosing between them its behaviour is goal-directed but not purposeful. (There is a semi-jargon word 'teleology'. Roughly, any explanation which simply invokes the goal to which a particular bit of behaviour is directed, or the purpose for which it is engaged in, is a teleological explanation. )

I have been developing the idea that to have a point of view is (a) to be a single thing, separate from other things in the world (b) to look out on that world of other things and (c) to have a kind of 'concern' over what happens, to have what I called in quotes 'preferences' for some future prospects over others. As I have explained, whether a thing might be said to have a point of view is thought significant because acting morally involves taking into account all relevant points of view, and if a thing doesn't have a point of view it cannot figure in my ethical deliberations - I can't take account of something which is completely indifferent to all and any eventualities.

I have then tried to establish one sense in which a things 'nature' gives it a preference for some futures rather than others. If the nature of a thing is in part a system of goals, then there is a sense in which a future which sees those goals achieved will be 'preferred' by such a system to one in which they are thwarted. So having goals creates a sort of 'interest' in the future. I have tried to argue that this is independent of questions of consciousness. A system can have goals (though in the terms I used, not purposes ) even though it does not enjoy consciousness. And so we reach the suggestion that the moral universe - the universe of things that have points of view, of things which are capable of being taken account of in ethical deliberation - is not restricted to conscious beings. Wherever you have something with a goal you have a citizen of the moral universe, an entity with an 'interest' in the future, a 'point of view' that a moral agent may take into account.

Though I have introduced this notion of 'having a goal' via work with computer systems and robots (because it helps separate off the issue of consciousness), this feature of displaying goal-directed behaviour has often been to taken to be characteristic of things that are alive.

LIVING THINGS

Paul Taylor, the thinker who has been most powerful in developing this account of why we should show 'respect for nature', is amongst these. It is living things above all that are 'unified systems of goal-oriented activities'. It is living things, above all, that have 'points of view' in virtue of these activities - points of view that it possible to recognise, and even to 'take'. With the right kind of extended and sympathetic study of an organism there comes a point when 'one is able to look at the world from its perspective'.

Taylor's way of putting the point that a goal gives a thing a 'preference' for some possible futures over others is to say that such a thing has a 'good' - 'a good of its own.' In looking at the world from the point of view of another living thing 'we recognise objects and events occurring in its life as being beneficent, malevolent, or indifferent. The first are occurrences which increase its powers to preserve its existence and realise its good. The second decrease or destroy those powers. The third have neither of these effects on the entity'. Where a living thing is concerned therefore it is at least possible in our decision-making to take into account 'what promotes or protects the being's own good' as well as what is good for ourselves.

Box
A good of one's own

"Every organism, species population, and community of life has a good of its own which moral agents can intentionally further or damage by their actions. To say that an entity has a good of its own is simply to say that, without reference to any other entity, it can be benefited or harmed. . . We can think of the good of an individual non-human organism as consisting in the full development of its biological powers. Its good is realised to the extent that it is strong and healthy. It possesses whatever capacities it needs for successfully coping with its environment and so preserving its existence throughout the various stages of the normal life-cycle of its species."

Paul Taylor, 'The Ethics of Respect for Nature’, Environmental Ethics, Vol. 3, p199.

MORAL STANDING

Taylor is careful to say that none of the foregoing establishes that we ought to be considerate where living things are concerned. All it shows is that we could take viewpoints other than our own into account if we wanted to. Put it another way: it shows that there are viewpoints other than our own. There are things other than ourselves, and other than sentient creatures, which have what I have called 'preferences' as far as the future is concerned. These preferences derive not from the capacity of a creature to feel - pain or delight - but from the 'goal-oriented activities' which are characteristic of a living thing, sentient or not.

However he goes on to argue that when we take into full account the fact that the human being is a product of evolution, and discard every consideration that is strictly irrelevant, we shall reach the positive view that living things of all kinds call on our respect.

HUMAN BRINGS BELONG TO NATURE

To arrive at the conclusion that all living things demand our respect, Taylor develops three further claims, besides the one we have been considering, that living things have goods of their own. The first of the three is that all creatures are of equal intrinsic worth. I return to this in a moment.

His second is that human beings belong to nature on the same basis as other species. Living things, he observes, belong in general to a single large and complex network of interdependencies which comprises the earth's 'community of life'. The natural world, says Taylor, has to be seen as a unitary organic system. It is a system which maintains itself in dynamic equilibrium. Made up of many subsystems, each capable of change, it maintains a reasonably steady state by introducing compensatory changes as necessary. The sub-systems are systems of the same kind - themselves made up of sub-systems, and maintaining a steady state by introducing adjustments in some systems when changes in others would otherwise threaten it. What we have here is the contemporary picture of the living thing, applied to the biosphere as a whole (it is the Gaia hypothesis, under one interpretation). The part it plays in Taylor's ethical position is its claim that human beings are dependent on other species for their survival, and thus for everything.

SERIOUSLY, THEY ARE ANIMALS

The third of the further points Taylor puts in place is that human beings are seriously to be seen as animals, part of nature in the same sense in which other animals and plants are part of nature. Of course, almost everybody would take the view that the human being is an animal - whatever else s/he is. But what Taylor thinks we ought to accept is that 'our being an animal species' is 'a fundamental feature of existence.'

These three further points, and the main one, together add up to what Taylor calls 'the biocentric outlook: living things are have goods of their own, there is no sense in which human beings are superior to other species, human beings depend for their survival on the rest of nature, and human beings belong to nature on the same basis as other species. And these four points together provide the basis for respecting nature, and thus altering our comprehensively exploitative attitude towards it.

They do not, Taylor acknowledges, prove that nature ought to be respected. they do not represent premises from which the conclusion that nature ought to be respected follows by strict deduction. His claim is rather that if you come to share the biocentric outlook showing respect for nature will be entirely reasonable.

THE BIOCENTRIC OUTLOOK AND RESPECT FOR NATURE

This strategy of argument involves more subtlety than one would simple-mindedly wish (!), but it is not unfamiliar. If we takes one particular element of Taylor's quartet, the claim that belonging to a biological species 'is an essential aspect of “the human condition”’, we see facts adduced - the ecological dependence of human beings on other species, for example - but the role of the facts put forward is to do something other than prove a thesis. In fact, it might be said, it is wrong to think of the claim in question as a thesis at all. It is better regarded as a 'perspective' The facts rehearsed in support have the role not of proving it as a conclusion but getting someone who reads them to shift their viewpoint.

In pursuing his strategy, Taylor sails close, but with skill, to what is called 'the naturalistic fallacy'. Facts, this observation has it, can never yield values: you can never deduce merely from how things are to how they ought to be. In the present case, the claim would be that no matter what the facts of biology might be, of human beings' dependence on other living things, for example, or of their common evolutionary origin, or of their common subjection to evolutionary mechanisms, nothing whatever follows about how human beings ought to behave. This observation is widely felt to be correct, and potentially devastating for the kind of argument Taylor appears to be making, with its apparent appeal to the scientific facts revealed by the scientific study of human beings and animals and the ecological communities they form. Taylor is perfectly aware of this philosophical nuclear device, as it were, and he tries to evade it. He accepts that the facts he adduces do not prove that living things deserve respect - only that it would be only reasonable in the light of them to treat living things as possessing inherent value, and therefore, in the light of the other considerations adduced, as deserving respect.

He explains that the key step in the move from the scientific facts to the conclusion that we ought to respect nature is the denial of human superiority. He says that it is the scientific facts that 'result in' this denial: and once we have made it, we are 'ready' to adopt the attitude of respect for nature.

This is a subtle, tricky, movement of thought. We has better present it in Taylor's own words (see box).

BOX

The biocentric outlook grounds respect

Here, then, is the key to understanding how the attitude of respect is rooted in the biocentric outlook on nature. The basic connection is made through the denial of human superiority. Once we reject the claim that humans are superior either in merit or in worth to other living things, we are ready to adopt the attitude of respect. The denial of human superiority is itself the result of taking the perspective on nature built into the first three elements of the biocentric outlook.

Now the first three elements of the biocentric outlook, it seems clear, would be found acceptable to any rational and scientifically informed thinker who is fully 'open' to the reality of the lives of nonhuman organisms. Without denying our distinctively human characteristics, such a thinker can acknowledge the fundamental respects in which we are members of the Earth's community of life and in which the biological conditions necessary for realisation of our human values are inextricably linked with the whole system of nature. In addition, the conception of individual living things as teleological centres of life simply articulates how a scientifically informed thinker comes to understand them as the result of increasingly careful and detailed observations. Thus, the biocentric outlook recommends itself as an acceptable system of concepts and beliefs to anyone who is clear-minded, unbiased, and factually enlightened, and who has a developed capacity of reality awareness with regard to the lives of individual organisms. This, I submit, is as good a reason for making the moral commitment involved in adopting the attitude of respect for nature as any theory of environmental ethics could possibly have.

Paul Taylor, 'The Ethics of Respect for Nature', Environmental Ethics, 3, 1981, p. 217,8.

The obligation to respect living things - to show respect for 'nature' - is what Taylor thinks is revealed by his analysis, 'respect' that consists in commitment to a way of life in which one seeks to promote and protect the good of all living things - for their own good, irrespective of any human interest. One will observe appropriate rules of conduct, and will seek to develop appropriate virtues. Broadly speaking, rules that give proper expression to an attitude of respect for nature will require us to harm living things as little as possible, allowing them to pursue their own lives, and to do what we can to repair such damage as is done to them, whether by ourselves or others.

VALUE EGALITARIANISM

Most striking of Taylor's four claims is that all living things are of equal 'intrinsic' worth, and I find it impossible to move on without raising an eyebrow.

Taylor acknowledges that from my viewpoint some living things have more value than others. My pet dog, for example, means more to me than a beetle on the other side of the world. But put my viewpoint on one side. And put everybody else's viewpoint on one side. What about the value of the dog, and the value of the beetle independently of anybody's viewpoint? What about what one might call the 'objective' value of these creatures? Taylor thinks he has shown where the objective value of a living thing comes from. He thinks he has shown that it is there in virtue of its goal-oriented activities. This is the basis, we have seen him argue, for saying that the living thing has a 'good'.

But then it would follow that a thing either has objective value, or it doesn't - since either it exhibits goal-oriented behaviour or it doesn't. Objective value would then not admit of degrees, and comparisons between the beetle and my dog in respect of objective value would not make sense. The goods of different animals and plants would differ according to species, but there is nothing by which they may be ranked in order of priority. As living things they both pursue goals, and that confers the status of possessing objective value on both.

What is more, human beings are in the same boat. They are goal-pursuing creatures, and they would therefore be deemed to possess objective value: but no more than the dog, and no more than the beetle. Every living thing would have objective ('intrinsic') value, but none more than others.

These are conclusions that Taylor in fact embraces, though they have by no means always and everywhere been believed, he admits. The idea that inherent worth varies lies at the foundation of societies structured by class, where people of different 'rank' were certainly regarded as possessing different worth. But it is a baseless belief, as, in the socio-political sphere, Taylor thinks, we have generally come to acknowledge. The idea that all people are equal - not equally good at everything, but equal in inherent worth - has become, he says, an unquestionable nostrum of the modern democracy.

Such egalitarianism however stops short at the human/non-human border. While all human beings are 'in modern democracies' considered to be of equal worth, the general sentiment is that human beings are worth more than other animals - indeed that other animals have no worth in themselves whatsoever. Taylor cites three sources of nourishment for this powerful belief. One is the contribution to Western culture of ancient Greek thought, which defined the human being as the rational animal. Human beings have part of their nature in common with other animals - but it is the other part, the reason, which 'enables us to live on a higher plane and endows us with nobility and worth that other creatures lack'.

Cartesian dualism is a second source, the idea that only human beings have souls: it is their possession of souls which makes human beings uniquely valuable. Taylor's comment is that even were some kind of dualism to be correct, there would still be no independent reason for thinking that having the power of thought makes one thing more valuable than another.

And the third is the Judeo-Christian notion of creation as a 'Great Chain of Being'. God created the world as a hierarchy, with angels and human beings towards the top and towards the bottom, beyond the lower animals and plants, inanimate nature. Taylor sees no good reason for accepting the metaphysical framework that supports this picture. The Judeo-Christian tradition, he concludes, no more than either of the others, fails to leave us with any reason for discriminating against non-human living things.

SUMMARY

Taylor is drawing here on the modern scientific perspective on the nature of a living thing, and the nature of the human being. The living thing, a goal-directed system, has a line into the future which it is possible for human beings, in pursuing lines of their own, may cut across. There is something there for the human agent to respect, if he or she chooses to. And because of our place in nature alongside all other living things, we ought so to choose: that is, living things have a call on our respect.

In the next chapter I turn to a line of thought which has much in common with Taylor's, though it comes from a different angle; and it aims to cast the net of obligatory concern wider. Where Taylor uses the biological notion of a living thing to locate the individual firmly within nature and firmly alongside other living things, the arguments we are to consider from ecology use the notion of a goal-directed system to argue that we belong to natural 'communities' within which we owe the obligations of membership.

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