Biocentrism

Abstract

Chapter 1 articulates the commitments of biocentrism vis-à-vis explaining the form of moral status that advocates of the view take living things to have, moral considerability, as well as the strategies these advocates employ both for arguing that all living things are morally considerable, and for excluding certain things, such as artifacts and ecosystems, from being morally considerable. The foundation of biocentrism is a commitment to the importance of welfare in grounding moral status and delineating the boundaries of moral status. For the biocentrist, welfare or well-being is necessary for having moral status; anything that lacks a welfare or that can’t be benefitted or harmed, can only matter from the moral point of view in some indirect or derivative way. And, biocentrists argue, it is because nonsentient organisms have a welfare and because artifacts and ecosystems do not that the boundaries of moral status can be neatly drawn.