Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 15, Issue 7/8, 2005

Fourth European Congress of Dialogue and Universalism Warsaw University, July 23–30, 2005

Ecofascism and the Animal Heritage of Moral Experience

Part One of this paper defends biocentricism, the view that all life has intrinsic value, against the charge of ecofascism. I argue that theocentric and anthropocentric worldviews are structured by a logic of domination that the radical egalitarianism of the biocentric world does not generate. In Part Two I sketch the foundations of a philosophical anthropology that unites a phenomenological understanding of human existence with a Darwinian view of human nature. The understanding of moral experience generated by this philosophical anthropology moves away from a metaphysical interpretation of intrinsic value toward an experiential account of moral phenomena.