The Acropolis of Athens is considered by many to be the greatest architectural achievement of Western culture. This value is placed on the Acropolis because these buildings on the heights of Athens are built perfectly to the human scale. The Parthenon’s columns and floors are even curved to present the illusion of perfection to the visiting Athenian citizen or British tourist. (1) In the Parthenon, beauty is defined in terms of human scale.
Much of the debate about the value of ecosystems and animals can be viewed in a manner analogous to this description of beauty. We see animals as valuable if they carry with them certain qualities, such as consciousness, the ability to feel pain, or the ability to suffer. (2) Those animals that are most similar to us (the higher mammals such as chimpanzees and dolphins) are those that we view has having the most value. I cannot really feel compassion for bumblebees as they search a field of clover for pollen or for a virgin temperate rainforest growing on the cliffs of the Pacific. But I can understand my dog when it barks at a deer running through the yard. Our compassion for higher mammals is similar to our appreciation for art: we value what is most accessible to us, what is at the human scale.
Consider, however, that we also find cities beautiful. Cities are anything but on the human scale. When in San Francisco, I am forced to ride a train or streetcar to get from one end of town to the other—I am only ever able to see fragments of the entire city. When I walk into the TransAmerica Pyramid building in downtown San Francisco, I must take an elevator to specific floors because the stairs are too many to climb all at once. Yet I am able to understand both the TransAmerica building and the city of San Francisco as entities in themselves, though I only have discrete and fragmented interactions with them. I am not confined to a fragmented view of buildings and cities Similarly, we must not be confined to an environmental ethic that only allows us to respect organisms that are most similar to us. If we are able to understand buildings and cities as wholes, surely we can understand ecosystems in a similar manner.
What this understanding requires is an active imagination. In recent anthropological studies, Professor Benedict Anderson (from Cornell University) suggests that nation-states developed as people were able to imagine themselves in that larger whole. This came about due to developments in communication, such as the printing press and the transference of the vernacular into written languages (so that Latin was not the only language being written). (3) Just as nations, cities, and skyscrapers can be imagined, so can ecosystems. But all of these are more than imagined abstractions of our daily experiences: they actually exist as networks of interacting individuals.
When considering how ecosystems exist, we might begin with the most basic of biologic function: the cell. The cell is the result of millions of molecules connecting and interacting in just the right ways. Cells themselves also connect and interact to form the organs of plants and animals. Those plants and animals in turn act in just the right way to make ecosystems. Ecosystems in turn make up the Earth. We might even think of this series of increasing complexity as a big line with a lot of little dashes on it that indicate levels of complexity of various entities—molecules on one end and ecosystems on the other. With this model, humans are no different than blood cells, birds, or desert ecosystems. This also means that blood cells, birds, and desert ecosystems are no different than humans. If humans are intrinsically valuable (that is, valuable in and of themselves, and not valuable only for the sake of something else), then so are blood cells, birds, and desert ecosystems. I think it is obvious to our moral intuition that we must respect the intrinsic value in humans. We must therefore also respect that value in complex systems of cells and organisms.
An argument advanced against this position says that this analogy falls apart when it suggests that human cells are just like animals in an ecosystem. The argument suggests that cells act for the good of the body in which they reside, while animals have independent interests, and it just so happens that those interests coincide to form some sort of ecology. Harley Cahen suggests that “natural selection selects bodies, not cells. If the cells do not cooperate for the body’s sake, the body dies and the cells die, too.” (4)
I suggest instead that cells do not act purely for the sake of the body. Consider cancerous cells. Cancer occurs in an organism when cells have mutated beyond traditional limits. Often this involves a mutation in the “guardian angel” genes that are supposed to regulate other mutations. Cancerous cells then have no check on reproducing, nor can they sense when they encounter the boundaries of other cells, nor do they age. At the level of the cell, there is nothing inherently right or wrong about the slight genetic alterations that cause cancer. I conclude that cells do not act for “the body’s sake”—they only act because that is what they do.
So it is in ecosystems, where small mutations within individuals can make species “cancerous.” Consider the woolly mammoth. The slow evolutionary process that brought about the existence of this species is different only in a matter of scale from the evolution of cells into cancerous ones. The woolly mammoth destroyed many of the forests of Asia, smashing saplings with its huge feet or otherwise eating and trimming the vegetation. Those forests became grasslands. There was no “guardian angel” to halt the development of this species—only much later did humans hunt the woolly mammoth to extinction. Thus I think it correct to draw an analogy between cells and animals.
We can look at the existence of ecosystems in another way. Computer scientist and philosopher Alan Turing claims in a 1950 paper entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" that if an observer cannot distinguish between a human and a computer programmed to act in a human fashion, then the human and computer must be considered of equal intelligence. We can rework this Turing Test to say that if an entity appears to an observer to be identical to a living organism in terms of such things as self-regulation and self-interest, then it must be considered equal to that organism in these instances. Suppose an alien from Alpha Centauri comes to look at our planet, and sees a temperate rainforest regulating itself and watching out for its own interests (balancing its production and consumption of oxygen and carbon dioxide, repairing itself after fierce storms and fires, etc.). This alien sees these things and thinks to itself, “By the Holy Green Stars, this temperate rainforest appears to be a living creature!” Certainly the rainforest must be considered to exist as an independent organism, just as the alien exists.
So ecosystems do exist, and they can be considered separate from their constituent species if seen from far enough away. Does this mean that ecosystems have intrinsic value? I think they do.
If we consider anything to have intrinsic value, that thing would have to be a human. Humans are no more than conglomerates of cells acting together. This means that ecosystems, which are no more than conglomerates of organisms acting together, should also have intrinsic value. If we say, on the other hand, that humans lack intrinsic value, then we must also say that ecosystems lack intrinsic value. Some argue that humans should submit to the needs of the entire ecologic community, but we must be careful of this because this devalues humans and other animals who are themselves valuable systems. (5) The complexity of the system involved can, however, determine its relative value to other systems and things. We are able to see organisms as valuable for themselves, but also valuable because they represent networks of complex cells and furthermore valuable because they relate to a larger whole.
It is possible to suggest that this view devalues human beings as individuals, for I am asserting that we are no more than mere systems of cells. I think this is good. We will know exactly how we relate to other species, to ecosystems, to the world, and to the universe (or whatever else astronomers and theoretical physicists may tell us exists). Of course, we are always limited to our own perspective and scale, but we certainly can imagine the other complex entities that exist outside of our own selves and that these indeed are valuable.
(1) See further the observations of early 20th century French architect Le Corbusier in his book Towards a New Architecture. (USA: Dover Publications, Inc., 1986. 175-223)
(2) Peter Singer argues that an action is morally better if it causes less suffering in the world than another action. For example, the killing of a human being is worse than the killing of a stray dog because the human has many relations and friends who will feel a large amount of pain if that human is killed, whereas the dog does not. “The Place of Nonhumans in Environmental Issues.” Environmental Ethics: An Anthology. Ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers: 2003. 55-64.
(3) Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition. New York: Verso, 1991. 4 Cahen, Harley. “Against the Moral Considerability of Ecosystems.” Environmental Ethics: An Anthology. Ed. Andrew Light and Holmes Rolston III. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers: 2003. 114-128.
(5) The deep ecologists are so adamant about the good of the whole that they declare the necessity to trim theh human population. Matthews, Freya. “Deep Ecology.” A Companion to Environmental Philosophy. Ed. Dale Jamieson. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing: 2003. 218-232.