Many environmental thinkers are torn in two opposing directions at once. For good reasons we are appalled by the damage that has been done to the earth by the ethos of heedless anthropocentric individualism, which has achieved its colossal feats of exploitation, encouraged to selfishness by its worldview--of relation-free atoms--while chanting "reduction" as its mantra. But also for good reasons we are repelled, at the other extreme, by environmentally correct images of mindless biocentric collectivisms in which precious personal values are overridden for the good of some healthy beehive "whole."

My aim here will be to examine this tension between the imperatives of personalism and organicism. I shall argue that although contrasts are sharp, the quest to harmonize vital intuitions reflected by these imperatives is not futile. Their combination may be paradoxical, at first blush, but this paradox admits of coherent resolution. Still more, such a resolution, legitimating the logical possibility of a Personalistic Organicism,⁽²⁾ may provide a paradigm for resolving other intellectually (and environmentally) dangerous dualisms that sunder civilization from nature, mind from body, and intrinsic from instrumental values.

One side of us strongly affirms Aldo Leopold's classic dictum that the human species should live in its proper place, not as conqueror of the land-community, but as "plain member and citizen" within it.⁽³⁾ From this modest forester's moral intuition much has followed.

Arrogant anthropocentrism has been a favorite target of environmental thinking rooted in Leopold's land ethic: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."⁽⁴⁾ Human pride, human greed, even human convictions that God created the earth for our species' dominion,⁽⁵⁾ have laid waste to nature and deeply upset the stability of the biotic community from Alaska to the Amazon. The philosophical fight against such arrogance has seemed a clearly virtuous cause.

On one front, the epistemological, the battle was joined against the sort of analytic, reductionist thinking that allows human exploiters to tear at the delicate web of life without noticing how, in Barry Commoner's words, "everything is connected to everything else."⁽⁶⁾ In place of trying to understand nature primarily in terms of ever-smaller parts, this argument contends, we should attempt first to appreciate the natural wholes that give context and significance to their parts. This different way of thinking would put priority on understanding whole organisms, populations, habitats, and ecosystems, rather than on the cells and molecules so beloved by modern analyzers. The postmodern science of ecology, instead of hypermodern molecular biology, should lead the way in developing responsibly rigorous, holistic thought-patterns for an environmentally sensitive world.⁽⁷⁾

On another front, the ethical, organismic holism has been widely identified with egalitarianism across the biotic community. If we human beings are to play our proper democratic parts as "plain citizens" in nature, we must weed out from our policies those prejudices which automatically favor our own kind. As the pioneer of "deep ecology," Arne Naess, put it: "To the ecological field-worker, the equal right to live and blossom is an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom."⁽⁸⁾

Naess, even as he wrote this, acknowledged that "biospherical egalitarianism" could be affirmed only "in principle." "The 'in principle' clause is inserted," he noted, "because any realistic praxis necessitates some killing, exploitation, and suppression."⁽⁹⁾ Naess and his followers have taken this principle, nevertheless, as a necessary condition for "deep" ecological thinking. George Sessions, for example, excludes Alfred North Whitehead's organismic ecological ethics from "deep ecology" solely on the ground that it allows for gradations of value, depending on the quality of experience enjoyed by different forms of life. "The point," he writes, "is not whether humans in fact do have the greatest degree of sentience on this planet..., deep ecologists argue that the degree of sentience is irrelevant in terms of how humans relate to the rest of Nature. And so, contemporary Whiteheadian ecological ethics does not meet the deep ecology insistence on 'ecological egalitarianism in principle'."⁽¹⁰⁾

This insistence, affirmed not only as standard for "depth" but also as criterion for virtue, motivates the charge of "speciesism" against those who do not adopt it. Arguing from the analogy of racism, sexism, and other such groundless prejudices against victims of exploitation, some vigorously condemn any who cling to the view that the human species is special in any morally relevant way.⁽¹¹⁾ And from such condemnation of systematically pro-human outlooks it is a short step to systematic condemnation of the human as such. Our species has in truth done vast, irreparable damage. Humans have much to answer for. A misanthropic cast is frequently found in much organismic rhetoric. As Baird Callicott observes, "The extent of misanthropy in modern environmentalism ...may be taken as a measure of the degree to which it is biocentric."⁽¹²⁾

Starting from the need for newly holistic, ecological thinking and a modest alternative to overweening human attitudes toward nature, we have been moved, by degrees, to a doctrine of organicism which rejects all claims for a morally relevant special status for humanity. Indeed, such organicism may find itself ashamed for the human race, regretting as demonic our presence on the earth. If this is what organicism means, what place can remain for personalism? Must it not be cast out as an embarrassment by deep environmental thinkers?

One striking answer in defense of personalism is to cast the question on its head. Who or what, except for persons, can aspire to be thinkers at all, shallow or deep? Who or what, besides persons, can suffer embarrassment at the disparity between ideals and sordid reality? Who or what, besides persons, can experience moral shame from remembering past acts of unrestrained exploitation? And who or what, besides persons, can resolve purposefully to put deliberate limitations on selfish urges in order to plan a better long-range future?

Richard Watson develops these lines with fine irony. Unless we appeal to the uniquely personal capacities of the human species, we have no leverage for self-restraint, no basis for an ecological ethics. Taking a purely organismic view of nature, including the human as literally no more than one more "plain citizen," our species should be allowed to live out its "destiny" without any more moral censure than is applied to other species that trample and consume.

Human beings do alter things. They cause the extinction of many species, and they change the Earth's ecology. This is what humans do. This is their destiny. If they destroy many other species and themselves in the process, they do no more than has been done by many another species. The human species should be allowed--if any species can be said to have a right--to live out its evolutionary potential, to its own destruction if that is the end result. It is nature's way.⁽¹³⁾

The opposite conviction, that more should be expected of the human race, is a form of anthropocentrism, Watson points out. Thus if "the posing of man against nature in any way is anthropocentric,"⁽¹⁴⁾ then "deep" ecological thinking, which seeks deliberate moral controls on organic human urges to multiply and consume, has not escaped.

If man is a part of nature, if he is a "plain citizen," if he is just one nonprivileged member of a "biospherical egalitarianism," then the human species should be treated in no way different from any other species. However, the entire tone of [deep ecological thinking] is to set man apart from nature and above all other living species. Naess says that nonhuman animals should be "cared for in part for their own good." Sessions says that humans should curb their technological enthusiasms to preserve ecological equilibrium. Rodman says flatly that man should let nature be.⁽¹⁵⁾

Thus, the deep ecologist is a personalist malgré lui. Personalism may be scorned in the rhetoric of organicism and biocentric egalitarianism, but it cannot be avoided. Deep ecologists, like it or not, think, write, deliberate, plan, and preach as personal women and men. Thus, as Watson concludes: "Man is privileged--or cursed--at least by having a moral sensibility that as far as we can tell no other entities have."⁽¹⁶⁾

To heighten our paradox one final notch, we should note that some personalists argue forcefully that this privilege (or curse) of personal existence makes the application of organic categories to human beings wholly inappropriate. Of course it is granted that our bodies are living and organic; but we fail to understand human individuals or human societies by subsuming them under the principles of biology. As John Macmurray proclaimed in his distinguished Gifford Lectures,

We are not organisms, but persons. The nexus of relations which unites us in a human society is not organic but personal. Human behaviour cannot be understood, but only caricatured, if it is represented as an adaptation to environment; and there is no such process as social evolution but, instead, a history which reveals a precarious development and possibilities both of progress and of retrogression.⁽¹⁷⁾

Macmurray points out that organic categories are applied to human affairs only by analogy and that they do not function empirically (as often assumed) but a priori, being imposed as an explanatory model drawn from another field of data. And since the uniquely personal traits, like freedom and deliberate action, are absent from that other field, these traits are overlooked or explained away when the theory is applied in the human domain.

The practical consequences are in the end disastrous; but they do reveal the erroneous character of the assumption. To affirm the organic conception in the personal field is implicitly to deny the possibility of action; yet the meaning of the conception [of the personal] lies in its reference to action.... We say, in effect, "Society is organic; therefore let us make it organic, as it ought to be." The contradiction here is glaring. If society is organic, then it is meaningless to say that it ought to be. For if it ought to be, then it is not. The organic conception of the human, as a practical ideal, is what we now call the totalitarian state. It rests on the practical contradiction which corresponds to this theoretical one. "Man is not free," it runs, "therefore he ought not to be free." If organic theory overlooks human freedom, organic practice must suppress it.⁽¹⁸⁾

Here is the paradox. Just as one side of us resonates favorably to Aldo Leopold's call for human modesty among other organisms, so another side responds to Macmurray's warning not to lose sight of the uniquely personal among organic metaphors. It is true, he admits,

that the personal necessarily includes an organic aspect. But it cannot be defined in terms of its own negative; and this organic aspect is continuously qualified by its inclusion, so that it cannot even be properly abstracted except through a prior understanding of the personal structure in which it is an essential, though subordinate component. A descent from the personal is possible, in theory and indeed in practice; but there is no way for thought to ascend from the organic to the personal. The organic conception of man excludes, by its very nature, all the characteristics in virtue of which we are human beings. To include them we must change our categories and start afresh from the beginning.⁽¹⁹⁾

Start afresh we must. But not quite from the beginning. Rather, we need to look again at this familiar terrain with an eye more guarded against "either/or" thinking, or against seduction by what we might call the "Fallacy of All or Nothing." A great part of the apparent opposition between organicism and personalism (and therefore most of the force behind the seeming paradox of Personalistic Organicism) is generated by taking for granted two major types of dichotomies. First, we have been dealing with a binary ethics on which either all organisms have equal intrinsic value or only human persons have value and everything else has none. Second, we have been assuming a binary ontology recognizing either persons or nonpersons, either organic or inorganic entities. I recommend, instead, a value-theory capable of recognizing degrees of intrinsic (as well as instrumental) value, and an ontology in which fundamental organic unities are recognized both "downward" indefinitely toward predictable, stable simplicities and "upward" indefinitely toward increasingly free, originative complexities.

An encouraging model for such both/and thinking can be found in the epistemology of holism as disciplined in rigorous ecological science. Here, in what I think of as the bellwether postmodern science,⁽²⁰⁾ major advances have been made in the fight for understanding in accordance with Commoner's earlier cited dictum that "everything is related to everything else,"⁽²¹⁾ but without refusing aid from analytical weapons forged by modern biochemistry, microbiology, or from the panoply of all the other modern sciences. It is not necessary to think either wholes or parts; both are important levels for understanding. The whole, seen as a system, gives context and significance to its parts. The parts, in turn, show the fine structure of the whole. Moreover, the parts, looked at closely, are themselves each systems with fine structures of their own and therefore become wholes relative to their sub-parts. Equally, the larger, context-conferring system, seen in its own context, is itself part of a still more inclusive system. What we should find objectionable about analytical thinking is not that it engages in close examination of parts, or that it conceptually divides its subject matter for rigorous study, but rather that analytical thinkers have too often lost sight of (or interest in) the very contexts that give point to the analytical process itself. They have lost themselves in fascination with the parts. But it is not necessary to choose sides. Epistemological holism can (and in ecological science effectively does) embrace analytical thinking, enriching detailed knowledge with wider understanding even as analysis provides rigor in the appreciation of detailed relations.

On this both/and model, if we can reasonably extend it to ethics and ontology, we should be able to get beyond the seeming impasse between personalism versus organicism. With this in mind, let us first consider the principal features of personhood and ask whether we do not find continuities with most of them in organic life; then let us reflect on the main traits of healthy organic existence and ask whether these do not lend themselves to characteristic personal expressions.

I propose that we take full personal existence, at the height of its expression in mature, healthy human beings, as characterized by six major capacities. These are the powers of (1) enjoying consciously (including the ability to receive and appreciate experiences of senses or imagination), (2) thinking logically, (3) remembering, (4) planning, (5) preferring or judging, and (6) acting with moral responsibility. These powers constitute the basis for the best and the worst--for the heights of aesthetic achievement and religious ecstasy, the depths of philosophic reflection and scientific penetration, the tenderness of regret, the eagerness of hope, the seriousness of choice, and the nobility (or baseness) of responsibility. These capacities have been refined in human civilization over the millennia, while beauty has been created and profaned, opportunities grasped and missed, good achieved and destroyed. They constitute the humanist's pride and (all too frequently) the environmentalist's despair.

Personal capacities are not, however, without their analogues and continuities in the nonhuman world. We hardly need to attribute full self-consciousness to experience to acknowledge that it is experience. Our own lives abound with examples in which we find fluctuating degrees of less and more self-consciousness. At times of greater awareness we may realize that we were certainly experiencing--perhaps a discomfort or a pleasure--but were not sharply aware at the time of our personal selves as enjoying these experiences. It is possible for me to be a subject, that is, without full awareness that it is "I" who am aware. If these grades of subjectivity are present in human life, there should be no paradox in holding that significant subjectivity is present in the nonhuman world, though very probably not at the level of full personal self-consciousness. Mammals are certainly aware. They are undoubtedly capable of enjoyments, appreciations, and pains. They need not be capable of the full personal heights and depths of such subjectivity in order to be, as Tom Regan puts it, genuine "subjects of a life."⁽²²⁾ But if mammals can, and do, manifest significant subjectivity, is it not arbitrary to draw lines against the possibility of some degree of subjectivity in other living organisms? Such acknowledgment of course does not imply that the subjectivity of a butterfly is equivalent to that of a bird, or the bird to that of a human gardener; but there seems no reason in principle to deny any one of them a degree of appreciation of the flowers they all attend.

The Cartesian prejudice against granting even the possibility of an inner life for nonhumans was based on the a priori application of mechanistic models of understanding to all res extensa, not on empirical appreciation of nature. More empirical, and more adequate, would be inductive generalization from the evidence of our own subjective interiority to the acknowledgment of interiority, of some grade or other, everywhere around us.

Not only interiority, the capacity to be a subjective center for aversion or appreciation, but also mentality or thinking is one of the primary capacities of which personalists tend understandably to be proud. It would be hazardous (and probably quite wrong) to suggest that thinking is as widespread in nature as subjectivity, but it would seem sheer dogma to insist that human beings are the only subjects who also manifest logical thought at some level. H. H. Price was right to declare that logical thought functions long before language. Thought itself is the capacity to take relevant account of the absent. Thought thereby extends the environment beyond the immediately given in space and time. Thought under methodological discipline, whether expressed in symbols or in bodily alertness, qualifies as logical. Price reminds us:

It is usually supposed that the logical notions of not, or, if, etc., play no part whatever in pre-verbal thinking, and this is one of the grounds for the opinion that such thinking cannot 'really' be thinking at all. Logic, it is supposed, is the study of talk, or even of print; or rather, it is one way of studying them, concerned with the formal factors which are detectable in spoken or written sentences, or perhaps only in written ones. I believe that these opinions are mistaken. These formal factors, though they are more obvious and explicit in verbalized thought, are already present in pre-verbal thought, and even in that 'enacted thought' or 'thinking in actions' which is mistakenly supposed to be nothing but bodily movement.⁽²³⁾

The cat, crouched before the mouse, is in its organic alertness manifesting the logical disjunction: "Either the mouse runs this way or it runs that way"; and tabby is taking account of the conditional: "If the mouse runs in that direction, then leap just so far," etc.⁽²⁴⁾ For Price, as for any philosophically unprejudiced observer of animal intelligence in action, there is no good warrant for denying some degree of logical thought in nonhuman species.

Likewise, memory and anticipation are present to some degree in all organic entities. Every organic process, however primitive, involves a flow from some influential past condition toward some guiding future condition. What the process is depends on what was the case in its immediate--and sometimes in its significantly removed--past; but also what a process is can only be understood in terms of where it is headed. Organisms, in other words, have an irreducible capacity for what even Jacques Monod, fierce opponent of mind or purpose in nature, calls "teleonomic" behavior:

...[S]cience as we understand it today...required the unbending stricture implicit in the postulate of objectivity--ironclad, pure, forever undemonstrable.... Objectivity nevertheless obliges us to recognize the teleonomic character of living organisms, to admit that in their structure and performance they act projectively--realize and pursue a purpose.⁽²⁵⁾

Judging, or preference, is also found everywhere within organic nature. Preference (e.g. for one sort of food or another, for avoidance of one sort of aversive stimulus or another) is exactly what steers organic teleonomic processes. For personalists to deny that human judgment is on a continuum with analogous activities in organic nature is an odd exercise in selective seeing.

My argument against the extremes of personalism, then, is that if human persons rightly can claim intrinsic value by manifesting subjective interiority, logical thought, memory, anticipation, and judgment, then humans should not fail to honor the same capacities when found elsewhere in the organic world. These capacities are not expressed in the same way or to the same degree as is granted creatures equipped with symbolic speech. Claims for "equivalency" or "equality" are not supported by my observations. But the organic must not be taken as the simple "negative" of personhood. There are still important matters of degree to consider. Still, the "All or None" attitudes that give rise to the apparent paradox of Personalistic Organicism should now be firmly set aside. They are as unhelpful in attaining cognitive clarity as they are in finding ethical balance.⁽²⁶⁾

Ethics itself, however, may be the one place where there may be some justification for drawing an empirically legitimate line between paradigmatic human persons and all other known organisms. I have argued that most of the key marks of personhood can be found, in germ, within the nonhuman order; but moral responsibility, vulnerability to the claims of ethical obligation, seems not to apply outside fully developed human persons. Even many human beings--babies, growing children (to an indeterminate point), and a disturbingly large number of human adults--seem to have nonexistent or weakly developed intuitions of moral responsibility. Perhaps one could argue that some domesticated species (especially dogs) manifest what looks like guilt after an infraction of learned behavioral norms. Admittedly this behavior could simply be fear of anticipated punishment--but so it may be with many human transgressors as well. This is a difficult issue to resolve. Still, it is not a matter on which all humans fall on one side of a great divide and only nonhumans fall on the other. It may be that in the matter of moral responsibility we encounter the flickering of an emerging property, uniquely human even if far from perfectly distributed among humans, through which we may justifiably distinguish our species as a necessary condition for its appearance. But if so, it is a distinction which, the more deeply we attend to it, the less prideful (on its own showing) we are permitted to be.

It is, after all, this fault of human pride--arrogant disregard for the other--that grounds what is legitimate in the complaints of the organicists. Denunciations of "hierarchy" from deep ecologists gain their proper force not from our recognizing the obvious facts of superior human capacities--that human beings are capable of remembering more effectively and planning more remote outcomes, or are more capable than other animals of redirecting natural processes by taking thought and making tools--but from the morally blameworthy arrogance with which many humans have used these capacities to ride roughshod over the feelings, endeavors, and values of differently endowed other creatures. To our shame, we see around us all too clearly the same unfeeling arrogance, the same failures of empathy, and the same heartlessness in the treatment by some humans of other less powerful fellow-humans. Arrogance and exploitation are, indeed, indivisible evils in our suffering world, both natural and social.

The problem then is not so much "speciesism," at bottom, as egoism.⁽²⁷⁾ For this, the remedy is not some theoretically inconsistent and practically unsustainable⁽²⁸⁾ doctrine of "biocentric egalitarianism," but clearer understanding, widened sympathies, and trained habits of self-limitation based on due respect for all types and degrees of value, wherever found.

Values should be respected, whether they are intrinsic, based on the capacity of oganisms to be the "subject of a life," thus having interests and preferences of importance to themselves, or whether they are instrumental for the satisfaction of those interests and preferences--and thus helpful for the enhancement of the quality of subjectivity in organisms. It is quite possible for an entity to have both sorts of value at once. In my view, even the unexpressive oyster has some intrinsic value for itself, at least in the slow satisfactions of metabolism and perhaps in other forms of appreciation of which we are ignorant. But the oyster also contributes instrumental value to the food-chain of which it is a part. Whether devoured by starfish, sea birds, or sailors, oysters count as instrumental values to those who find nourishment and delight through them.

We must not confuse intrinsic with instrumental values; the latter are always and only for the sake of the former. Were there no intrinsic values, there could be no instrumental ones. But we must equally avoid the common error of supposing that only intrinsic values are real or important. Grass may have some modicum of intrinsic value, on my view, but not very much. Still, the instrumental value of grasses may far outweigh the higher, more intense intrinsic values of particular mammals which graze upon it. If there are any wholly inorganic aspects of habitat, by the same token, these may deserve great respect (and morally motivated protection) for what they contribute in instrumental value, though ex hypothesi they may be entirely devoid of significant subjectivity and therefore empty of intrinsic value.

Still, it is reconciling the organic and the personal, both domains of intrinsic value, that principally concerns us here. We have seen how key traits that personalists admire can be recognized in nonhuman organisms; is there a reciprocal move from what organicists see as the "wisdom of healthy life" to the personal? I believe so. All healthy organic life shares three great characteristics, worthy of admiration in their interactive tension: creativity, homeostasis, and holism. (1) Creativity: healthy life grows, innovates, spreads, devours, evolves. (2) Homeostasis: healthy life defends itself from overgrowth and collapse by many mechanisms, both at the individual and population levels. (3) Holism: healthy life makes both creativity and homeostasis possible by intricate networks of information feedback in which diversified elements are relevantly linked for the benefit of the whole system.⁽²⁹⁾

Personal existence transforms the ways in which these great organic achievements are expressed, but in principle they can still be found underlying normative personalism. The thrust to create, to innovate in the arts as well as in the homely circumstances of daily life, is part of the quest for increased quality of intrinsic subjective satisfaction. Controls, however, are also needed against what Whitehead called "mere anarchic appetition."⁽³⁰⁾ These controls (homologous to the salutary mechanisms that guard organisms against self-destructive growth) are those of logic and ethics: i.e., these serve, if utilized, as internal homeostatic limitations on the sheer freedoms of thought and action that come with the emergence of personhood. And, finally, the prime condition of successful working for logic and ethics within the realm of the personal is holistic intelligence, the developed capacity for giving and receiving complex symbolic information, the readiness to enter sympathetically into and to empathize with initially alien diversity, the melding of respect for otherness--including proper respect for the intrinsic value of one's own uniqueness--with mutuality in cooperative social functioning. All this we can learn as persons, without minimizing the immense respect due to the uniquely valuable achievements of personhood, if we will observe and take voluntarily to heart the basic wisdom of healthy organic life.

If the apparent paradoxicality of Personalistic Organicism gives way to resolution, in principle, along the lines I have now briefly sketched, we should grant ourselves a few final reflections on what this approach could mean for epistemology, ontology, and ethics. Far from posing a paradox, Personalistic Organicism may well offer a paradigm for the avoidance of dualisms and dichotomies that have too long plagued environmental philosophy and philosophy in general.

First, on methods of thought, the approach through Personalistic Organicism recommends distinguishing what is different, but not separating it without necessity. The dominant tendency in modern philosophy, encouraged both by René Descartes among the rationalists and by David Hume among the empiricists, has been to tear apart what seems distinctly conceivable alone. Such abstraction from the real connectedness of things encourages cognitive simplicity and has its place, as we have seen, as a subordinate tool in the quest for understanding. But in excess it is a serious mistake. Holistic thinking warns that a subject matter shorn of its relations is not the same subject matter with which we began. Things are not so conceivable alone as may appear. Organism without its proto-personal traits is not fully organism, just as personality without its organic context is not fully personality.

"Writ large," the moral is to avoid as far as possible our temptations toward either/or thinking. Categorizing in "off or on," "in or out," terms comes easily to our modern minds after centuries of custom now reinforced by our environment of electric switches and binary computer circuitry. But the lessons of Personalistic Organicism teach us--for the sake of fuller understanding--to resist this comfortable habit. Allied to sciences such as ecology and systems theory, our paradigm leads us to prefer both/and approaches. Culture and creation, human and animal, even artificial and natural⁽³¹⁾ need to be seen together, questions of degrees, not conceptual contraries. The Fallacy of All or None has too long imposed its abstract frameworks on our attempts to see the world. Our paradigm teaches us to see differences clearly, but to look wherever possible at these differences not as mere contrasts but as polarities in tension within complex fields of relations.

Just as in every epistemological paradigm, such a heuristic is linked, of course, to a corresponding ontology. Personalistic organicism suggests a world of real relatedness. Just as we see organisms and persons as essentially what they are because of their reciprocal connections, so, more broadly, we are offered a metaphysical paradigm that is neither materialist nor idealist, nor (certainly) dualist. Since on this paradigm body and mind begin by being joined, as functional polarities within a common field of energy-with-interiority, as intimately related networks of events that are past-inheriting and future-regarding, we never fall into the insoluble puzzles of modern philosophy. No need to speculate how mind-stuff can influence or be influenced by body-stuff. Those theoretically incompatible "stuffs" are abstract fictions, products of either/or thinking. No need to question how ideas can be efficacious in a theoretical physical world made up only of matter in motion.⁽³²⁾ The actual physical world is far richer. It contains subjectivity, life, preference, projects, freedom, and value.

Mention of value leads to a third major area, ethics, in which Personalistic Organicism may provide a paradigm for breaking out of old dilemmas. Ethical theory is hindered when one assumes, on either/or thinking, that an entity can have only one type of value, either intrinsic or instrumental. Likewise ethical penetration is crippled by the All or None Fallacy when one insists that intrinsic value does not come in degrees of greater or less, but that something either has, as it were, "all" value or none. Such gratuitous disjunctions lie behind most of those rhetorically glib but ill-considered proposals of "biocentric egalitarianism" that have gained the status of dogma in some environmental circles.

Personalistic Organicism, as we have seen, acknowledges types as well as grades of value. The universe is full of intrinsic values, importantly including human persons but extending far beyond, perhaps even beyond what we normally recognize as the living world. These all deserve ethical respect to the degrees appropriate to the intensity of the values concerned. The world is likewise full of instrumental values with all ranges of importance. Both sorts are difficult to measure and even more difficult to weigh against one another, but on this paradigm they are openly recognized and held together in dynamic tensions that--given hard work, patience, and good will (or what William Frankena calls "the moral point of view"⁽³³⁾)--can energize personal ethics and transform social policy. No one ever promised that clarifying and applying ethical theory should be easy. But it is morally obligatory on moral agents to try.

So far as we know, the only moral agents on earth are human beings. Does this make Personalistic Organicism "anthropocentric" in any objectionable way? I think not. We have no choice but to think as humans, to take a human point of view even while we try to transcend egoism by cultivating sympathy and concern for other centers of intrinsic value. Fate forces at birth what, in a harmless sense, we might call "perspectival anthropocentrism." But this carries no moral penalty, since ought implies can, and we literally can do no other than see from our own point of view. In another harmless sense, we are obliged to measure values (and all else) as humans. This might be called our unavoidable "anthropometric" condition, as Alan Wittbecker suggests.⁽³⁴⁾ Some have mocked anthropometric efforts to define and measure values as inevitably self-serving, since quality of experience is the only thing that human beings can know as intrinsically valuable, and our species starts with a large advantage (so we usually conclude, on neurological and behavioral grounds) in the explicitness, complexity, refinement, and power of our experience, as compared to oysters, tadpoles, birds, and even other mammals. To this Personalistic Organicism offers a two-part reply: (1) The mocker is challenged to come up with a coherent alternative account of intrinsic value, one not resting, finally, on quality of some subjectivity; this will not be easy, since intrinsic value that is not valuable for any experiencing valuer is a vacuous concept. (2) On any measure of intrinsic value, including quality of experience, if the moral point of view is assumed, self-serving egoism is ex hypothesi ruled out. "Due respect for value wherever found" is not an automatic pass for human interests when they are dispassionately found to conflict with significant nonhuman intrinsic values or crucial instrumental values leading to a wider good. It seems then that such mockery is only a thin disguise for cynicism about the very possibility of genuinely moral thought and action by human beings. The distribution of moral responsibility among persons may be thin and uneven, as we noted above; but to doubt its very possibility, since humans (inevitably) must do the defining and be the agents, slides too far toward nihilism and misanthropy.

If we humans are both persons and organisms, as on this paradigm we are found to be, then we are not forced to choose between "biocentrism" and "anthropocentrism," as though these were in opposition. We are organisms; we are persons. We are in nature; we are in culture. The point is not to choose some other ethical perspective, as though embarrassed to be human. The point, rather, is to enlarge, deepen, and refine the one we have from birth. To this end it would be no mistake to continue exploring a relational view that is in itself healthily "polycentric,"⁽³⁵⁾ Personalistic Organicism.

1. Prepared for "Philosophy and the Natural Environment," the Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference, Cardiff, Wales, July 20-22, 1993. Not for quotation without prior written permission from the author.

2. I first proposed this paradox-prone term in my "Obstacles on the Path to Organismic Ethics: Some Second Thoughts," Environmental Ethics, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Fall, 1989), pp. 231-241; see especially pp. 238 ff.

3. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River, (New York: Ballentine Books, 1966), p. 240.

4. Ibid. p. 262.

5. Lynn White, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science, 155 (10 March 1967), pp. 1203-1207.

6. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (N.Y.: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 29-35.

7. See my Hellfire and Lightning Rods: Liberating Science, Technology, and Religion (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis Books, 1993), especially Chapters 2, 3, 6, 7, and 16.

8. Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary," Inquiry 16 (1) 1973, p. 96. Emphasis in the original.

9. Ibid., p. 95.

10. George Sessions, "Spinoza, Perennial Philosophy & Deep Ecology," (unpublished, September, 1979), p. 18. Emphasis in the original.

11. See, for example, Tom Regan in Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches to Ecological Theology. Edited by Charles Birch, William Eakin, and Jay B. McDaniel. (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis Books, 1990), p. 78. But see also Mary Midgley's characteristically sensible antidote in Animals and Why They Matter (New York: Penguin Books, 1983; and Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984), Chapter 9, "The Significance of Species."

12. Baird Callicott, "Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair," Environmental Ethics, Volume 2, No. 4, Winter, 1980 p. 326.

13. Richard A. Watson, "A Critique of Anti-Anthropocentric Biocentrism," Environmental Ethics Vol. 5, No. 3, Fall 1983, p. 253.

14. Ibid., p. 252.

15. Ibid., pp. 251-252.

16. Ibid., p. 256.

17. John Macmurray, Persons in Relation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961, Vol. 2 of The Form of the Personal), p. 46.

18. Ibid., p. 46. (Emphasis in the original)

19. Ibid. pp. 46-47.

20. See my "Religious World Modelling and Postmodern Science," Journal of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 3 (July 1982), pp. 261-271.

21. See above, note 6.

22. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 245.

23. H. H. Price, Thinking and Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 123.

24. Ibid., p. 129.

25. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 21-22.

26. For further support of the present both/and argument, see Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, N.Y.: 1978), especially Chapter 10, "Speech and Other Excellences," and Chapter 11, "On Being Animal as Well as Rational," pp. 203-283.

27. On this, and other related issues, see Carolyn Merchant's thoughtful exploration of "egoistic," "homocentric," and "ecocentric" ethics in "Environmental Ethics and Political Conflict: A View from California," Environmental Ethics, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 45-68.

28. See above, notes 14 and 15.

29. For fuller development of these themes, see my Shaping the Future: Resources for the Postmodern World (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), Chapter 6 and following.

30. Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1929), p.34.

31. See my Philosophy of Technology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), pp. 27-29.

32. See my "Making Waves: On the Social Power of Ideas," to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Tenth International Social Philosophy Conference, University of Helsinki, Finland, August 17-20, 1993. Unpublished.

33. William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 68-70.

34. Alan E. Wittbecker, "Deep Anthropology: Ecology and Human Order," Environmental Ethics, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall 1986, p. 261. Further acknowledgement is here given to Edward Harrison, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

35. Ibid., pp. 261, 268.