seaborgs aff k updates - michigan7 2014 (2)

8/11/2019 Seaborgs Aff K Updates - Michigan7 2014 (2)

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AT: Baudrillard (in seaborgs neg)

The negs approach to cultural analysis is one of negativity- the understanding

of society and the remainder minimizes people to signs and simulation

Massumi 87-Political philosopher and social theorist, with a PhD in French literature from Yale (Brian,1987, The Simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guattari, 1987.

(http://www.anu.edu.a...orks/realer.htm.)//LC

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world,Jean

Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse.

The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around

an empty center. We breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any

reality whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of

the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model.

They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs. They are to some extent

distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary

distinctions.3But postmodernism stutters. In the absence ofany gravitational pullto ground

them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any termcan be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.4 Faced with this homogeneous surface

of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape in fascination.5 For the

secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded. There is no longer any

external model, but there is an immanent one. To the syntagmatic surface of slippage there

corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated

signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation.

Hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6Meaning is out

of reach and out of sight, but not because it has receded into the distance. It is because the code

has been miniaturized. Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and

information fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized

digitality of the computerized society.7 And so we gape. We cannot be said to be passiveexactly, because all polarity, including the active/passive dichotomy, has disappeared. We

have no earth to center us, but we ourselves function as a ground--in the electrical sense.8 We

do not act, but neither do we merely receive. We absorb through our open eyes and mouths.

We neutralize the play of energized images in the mass entropy of the silent majority. It makes

for a fun read. But do we really have no other choice than being a naive realist or being a

sponge? Deleuze and Guattari open a third way. Although it is never developed at length in any

one place, a theory of simulation can be extracted from their work that can give us a start in

analyzing our cultural condition under late capitalism without landing us back with the dinosaurs

or launching us into hypercynicism.

Even if power is arbitrary and operates within the hyperreal, challengingstructures breaks down hierarchiesGrace 2000(Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. Baudrillards Challenge: A

Feminist Reading. Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2000. Page(s) 67-76)//LC

For Baudrillard, the form of powerthat instantiated the grand oppositions of modernity, to be

played out in their dialectical struggles, was itself imaginary. Such a power performed its

pretence of irreversibility in a structural orderwhere this posturing could be contested,

overthrown, power could be seized, albeit at great cost. But even so, as Baudrillard writes,


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power wins every time even though it changes hands as revolutions come and go. Hyperreal

power is different; the logic of irreversibility is structurally integral to the premises of value

and signification. 16 The hyperreal forms a totalising logic with no dialectical opposition

structured into the equation; power relationsmerely simulate an imaginary form of power

from a previous era. The secret of power, Baudrillard writes, is that it doesnt exist(FF: 51).

Baudrillards view is that power can only be understood as challenge. It is reversible, and in

this sense none of the grand strategies of power will succeed in being power at the extreme of

irreversibility.Power is something that is exchanged, and if power is not exchanged it simply

disappears(FF: 43). At the limit, a challenge to the death in the face of power exerted and not

exchanged reverts that power. For example, the power of the dominant over the subordinate

vanishes when the subordinate challenges the dominator to death: if the master kills the slave,

there is no more slave and hence no more master (the logic of power is annulled, another slave

will not suffice). In a non-essentialist critique, the essence of the relation is as much to be

questioned as the essences of the subject and of the object. Baudrillard conveys a meaning of

power which is not predicated on the terms of antagonistic forces, but rather which can only

be understood as a reversible cycle of challenge and seduction. It now becomes clear how

Baudrillard analyses Foucaults rendering of power as an aspect of his work to be forgotten, in

the sense of not followed. Foucaults lucid exposition of the microphysics of power might beread as a resurrection of power in a form that is readily intelligible to those in an era when the

dialectics of power relations have disintegrated. Baudrillard cant help but notice that

Foucaults descriptions of the workings of power metaphorically overlay the dominant tropes

of contemporary discourses. For example, he claims that for Foucault power operates like the

genetic code with its ineluctable, immanent, positive generative inscription that yields only to

infinitesimal mutations (FF: 34).

Baudrillard investigates the similarity between power and psychoanalysis by

seeingGrace 2000(Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. Baudrillards Challenge: A

Feminist Reading. Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2000. Page(s) 67-76)//LCThis leads into a discussion of Baudrillards arguments on desire and his critical view on

psychoanalysis, as he points out that the same comment (as that cited just above) could be

made in relation to Deleuzes molecular topography of desire, claiming that the flows and

connections of such a desire will no doubt soon converge with genetic simulations,

microcellular drifts, and the random facilitations of code manipulators (FF: 35). He notes that

terms from microphysics and computer theory can be transferred today into discourses of

desire as well as power (for example, particles, random elements, clusters, and so on). In

fact, Baudrillards arguments that position Foucault in relation to Marx on the question of

power are paralleled in the position of Deleuze in relation to Freud on the question of desire.

Baudrillard claims that the similarities between Foucaults new version of power and Deleuzes

desire are not accidental. They can be readily understood within the social, historical milieu in

which they took, or are taking, shape. According to Baudrillard, desire, in Deleuzes terms, is

not to be understood through lack or interdiction, but through the positive deployment of

flows and intensities; a positive dissemination, purged of all negativity. Desire is a network,

a rhizome, a contiguity diffracted ad infinitum (FF: 1718). Desire is productive, as power is

productive, and in Baudrillards analysis, the same concerns must be raised. Earlier, in the

discussion of Braidottis engagement with Deleuzes concept of desire, I raised a question about

the nomadic desiring subject embraced by Braidotti as potentially emancipatory, asking whether

this might rather be a concept of desire and subjectivity that is in fact complicit with the


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contemporary construct of value and consumerism. Baudrillard is very clear about it: This

compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual,

or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital

must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and

reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction. Rather

than discovering the truth of the body through this productive, positive liberation of libidinal

energy expressed and advocated in Deleuzes writing, it is, inBaudrillards analysis, simply

unearthing the psychic metaphor of capital. Deleuze, through his critique of psychoanalysis,

instantiates the axiomatic of desire in a parallel form to Foucaults instantiation of the

inevitability of power in his critical distance from Marx. In Forget Foucault, Baudrillards

attention isunderstandably drawn to what he calls the convergence of the purified axioms of

Marxism and psychoanalysisin the catchword of the productivity of desire. Desire annexed to

production neatly eradicates seduction, meaning, again in a parallel form to power, that

sexuality is everywhere at precisely the moment it is nowhere. Desirein its positive, productive

formulation functions differently from desire manifested through loss, or lack. It becomes

negotiable in terms of signs which are exchanged in terms of phallic values, indexed on a

general phallic equivalent where each party operates in accordance with a contract and

converts its own enjoyment into cash in terms of a phallic accumulation: a perfect situation for apolitical economy of desire (SE&D: 103). The implications of Baudrillards arguments regarding

the positioning of the feminine in relation to contemporary discourses on sexuality and

desire, as these are explored in Symbolic Exchange and Death,will be discussed in Chapter 5 in

conjunction with his book Seduction. My main purpose here is to foreground the critique of the

productivity of desire in Deleuze, with its implications for feminist engagement with this

theoretical notion. Further to this purpose, it is useful at this point to outline Baudrillards

related thoughts on psychoanalysis, and the subject of psychoanalytic theory. Baudrillard

refers to the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary theory in three interviews in Mike Ganes

collection (1993), conducted around 19835. Another mention in a 1991 interview shows how

his view shows no signs of weakening, and given the analysis of desire discussed above, this is

not surprising. Psychoanalysis has become useless, a burden was Baudrillards claimin 1984,and he goes on to saythat in its more recent, Lacanian-inspired renditions, psychoanalysis has

spun itself into a delirium of conceptual production satisfying a sort of dizziness for

explanations (Gane 1993: 45); and later he refers to an escalating technical sophistication of

the unconscious resulting in a kind of ecstasy of psychoanalysis (Gane 1993: 83). His

observations lead him to express the view that for all this, psychoanalysis in France has lost its

glamour and fascination: the word psychoanalysis hasvery rapidly and strikingly lost its

impact. It no longer has at all that authority and omnipotence that it once had(1993: 59);

indeed, there has been an extraordinary winding-down, it has fallen flat, it doesnt interest

us anymore . . . *t+hats for sure (p. 83). Baudrillard acknowledges that the theoretical schools

continue to produce their analyses and that the practitioners continue to practise, but his

view is that, although the subtlety increases, the dubiousness of the point of it all increases at

a parallel rate.As Sylvere Lotringer observed (Gane 1993: 101), Baudrillard could have written a

parallel to his Mirror of Production, as a Mirror of Desire. He didnt develop his critique of

Freudian psychoanalysis in a text devoted to such a project, because he felt it would be useless

to engage in such a frontal attack. The ideology of desire has to fall into its own trap; its demise

has to run its own course. The view expressed in these interviews needs to be understood

through his critical analysis of the discourse on the unconscious and the lost object as this

critique appears in a number of references in Symbolic Exchange and Death, and to a lesser

extent in Forget Foucault. I have referred a number of times to the strategy of the real, a


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phrase that Baudrillard himself uses, postulating an historical social process whereby reality

is produced through a dichotomous separation of subject and object, and of the

subject/object (referent) and its representation. An identity of the subject and of the object is

made meaningful through a series of exclusions. Thus reality cannot be divorced from its

excluded imaginary, which is attached to it like a shadow; hence the conscious subject is real

with its inevitable unconscious, its fascination with the imaginary. Baudrillard argues that the

strategy of the real produces the positivity of the object and the conscious subject, but it

equally produces the phantasm of the irreversible unconscious cast in terms of repression, and

the forever missing lost object. This is the dual structure of this strategy, of reality, a strategy

which is itself the phantasm of psychoanalysis. Although a social order of economic exchange

structurally excludes or bars symbolic exchange as an organising principle, the assumption of

an irreversible logic of the economic, as pure positivity, is ceaselessly haunted by symbolic

reversion. Psychoanalysis, in complete contrast to empiricist forms of psychology, gravitates

towards this haunting. But although psychoanalysis, in its nascent form, was attracted to the

shadow side of a metaphysics of presence, or substance, Baudrillard argues that it has ended

up by repelling the symbolic. It fends it off. It is not, however, just a matter of excluding the

symbolic. At the same time as the symbolic is repelled, psychoanalysis seeks to contain it by

circumscribing it within an individual unconscious, and by doing so reduces it to theobsessional fear of castration, under the Law of the Father (SE&D: 1). Baudrillard portrays a

view of the entire movement of western history being compulsively drawn to a realism, a

fascination with the real, that is predicated on this rather pitiful figure of castration. 17 A

preoccupation with castration in psychoanalytic theory ostensibly concerns itself with restoring

the reality of castration (and with it the grounds of the real) through a consciousrecognition

of the imaginary, of unconscious processes. But in Baudrillards analysis this eyeing up the

void does not actually result in a recognition of castration, does not lead to a de-essentialising

of a determined resolve to fetishise the real or to gain insight into our role in believing we can

say it all, believing we can represent the real in its phantasised totality. On the contrary, this

preoccupation with castration in psychoanalysis leads to establishing a plethora of phallic

alibis which are then dismissed one by one in elaborate deconstructive flourishes, againostensibly to uncover the truth of castration, but which in fact lead over and over again to a

denial of castration(see SE&D: 110).

Baudrillard agrees with Haraways use of cyborganizaionCsicsery-Ronay 91- Professor of English,DePauw University (Istvan, November, The SF of

Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway,

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/icr55art.htm)//LC

Haraway intends to save the cyborg from its neurotic role in high- tech power dreams and the

technophobia of humanists. Her cyborg is a state-of-the-art theoretical construction:

simultaneously object and subject, without gender, without species, without kingdom even,

and hence free of the conventional dialectics or narratives of power. Haraway- ina move also

favored by Baudrillard- literalizes the SF metaphor into a theoretical being and detects the

existence of the cyborg in actuality, where it has not yet received its new, accurate, alien name.

Indeed, compared with most work of theory, all of Haraways descriptions of actually existing

conditions are SF: she describes a context that is so radically transformed and alien to the

comforting essentialist categories of the dominant form of theoretical discourse, or the

hyperabstract categoires of most post-structuralist theory, that it fulfills the most rigorous

conditions of cognitive estrangement, while attempting rigorously to describe the real. Cyborgs
http://www.depauw.edu/http://www.depauw.edu/


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represent for Haraway beings that combine mechanical and organic qualities, or animal and

human qualities, within the limits of their physical bodies. But for Haraway these are

localizations of a set of systematic relations in postmodern, high- tech cultures. The diffusion of

informatics technologies throughout the world has created a condition of fluid chaos regarding

the essential, objective nature of any living being or system. The cyborg is the site of a

categorical breakdown, a system of transgressions, and an irrecoverable one, since the

conditions of cyborg existence cannot be reversed, essential differences cannot be restored

with the laser-scalpel of classical rationalities. For Haraway, cyborg does not necessarily name

the tragic confusion of identities that follows on scientific hubris. On the contrary, it may

name the condition of freedom from the illegitimate categories of nature(race, gender,

species, kingdom)- a freedom that can only emerge with the destruction of those rationalities

and of the mythologies of essential identity.

Institutions are dead and wont be revived- distancing ourselves fro them is the

only possible solutionBaudrillard, 95(Jean, Simulacra and Simulation: The Spiraling Cadaver, 1995 CP)

The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking culturalsubstance oran end purpose of knowledge. Strictly speaking, there is no longer even any power: it is also in ruins.Whence the impossibility of the return of the fires of 1968: of the return of putting in question knowledge versus power itself - the

explosive contradiction of knowledge and power (or the revelation of their collusion, which comes to the same thing) in the

university, and, at the same time, through symbolic (rather than political) contagion in the whole institutional and social order. Why

sociologists? marked this shift: the impasse of knowledge, the vertigo of nonknowledge(that is to say at once

the absurdity and the impossibility of accumulating value in the order of knowledge) turns like an

absolute weapon against power itself, in order to dismantle it according to the same vertiginous

scenario of dispossession. This is the May 1968 effect. Today it cannot be achieved since power itself, after knowledge,

has taken off, has become ungraspable - has dispossessed itself. In a now uncertain institution, without

knowledge content, without a power structure(except for an archaic feudalism that turns a simulacrum of a

machine whose destiny escapes it and whose survival is as artificial as that of barracks and theaters), offensive irruption is

impossible. Only what precipitates rotting, by accentuating the parodic, simulacral side of dyinggames of knowledge and power, has meaning. A strike has exactly the opposite effect. It

regenerates the ideal of a possible university: the fiction of an ascension on everyone's part to a

culture that is unlocatable, and that no longer has meaning. This ideal is substituted for the

operation of the university asits critical alternative, as its therapy. This fiction still dreams of a

permanency and democracy of knowledge. Besides, everywhere today the Left plays this role: it is the justice

of the Left that reinjects an idea of justice, the necessity of logic and social morals into a rotten

apparatus that is coming undone, which is losing all conscience of its legitimacy and renounces functioning almost of its

own volition. It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power,

and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The

system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of the historical

and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to layseige to themone day: from private property to the small business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality

to petit bourgeois culture, justice at the university - everything that is disappearing, that the system itself, in its

atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved. Whence the paradoxical but

necessary inversion of all the terms of political analysis. Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the

university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it

therefore has only to select - it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless: why would it

refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody; why this provocative politics, if not in order to


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crystallize energies on a fictive stake (selection, work, diplomas, etc.), on an already dead and rotting referential?Byrotting, the university can still do a lot of damage (rotting is a symbolic mechanism not political but symbolic, therefore subversive

for us). But for this to be the case it is necessary to start with this very rotting, and not to dream of

resurrection. It is necessary to transform this rotting into a violent process, into violent death,

through mockery and defiance,through a multiplied simulation that would offer the ritual of the

death of the university as a model of decomposition to the whole of society, a contagious model

of the disaffection of a whole social structure, where death would finally make its ravages, which the strike tries

desperately to avert, in complicity with the system, but succeeds, on top of it all, only in transforming the

university into a slow death, a delay that is not even the possible site of a subversion, of an

offensive reversion. That is what the events of May 1968 produced. At a less advanced point in the process of the

liquefaction of the universityand of culture, the students, far from wishing tosave the furniture (revive the lost

object, in an ideal mode), retorted by confronting power with the challenge of the total, immediate

death of the institution, the challenge of a deterritorialization even more intense than the one that came from the system,

and by summoning power to respond to this total derailment of the institution of knowledge, to

this total lack of a need to gather in a given place, this death desired in the end- not the crisis of the university,

that is not a challenge, on the contrary, it is the game of the system, but the death of the university- tothat challenge, power has not been able to respond, except by its own dissolution in return (only for a moment maybe, but we saw

it).

Baudrillard is wrong- suicide is a ritualistic exchangeFernando 2010(Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death Pg. 125-126)We might provisionally begin our glimpse into the phenomenon by considering the notion that suicide is the expression of a

subject`s will towards death. One can even posit that since one is thrown into life, and that one has no

control over the point in which one dies, suicide is the subject`s way of gaining some form of

control-at least of telos of life itself. Of course the irony of the situation is, the very moment in which the

subject gains a form of control over her/his life is also the very same moment in which her/his

life is lost. This opens the question of whether one can think of suicide in terms of an

economic exchange. Even though the opening gambit is that the subject exchanges life for

control, the attempted control was over life itself: Hence, if life is lost within the very

exchange that is taking place, is there even a transference that occurs; is there actually an

exchange? Since both the losses-the life of the subject-and the gains-control over a no longer

existent life-amount to an exchange of nothing-in the economic sense of zero exchange-this is

strictly speaking an empty exchange. Hence, one needs to consider suicide as a ritualistic

exchange, where one stakes one`s life in order to gain form of control: and here is where form

is crucial, for surely there is no content in this emptiness, to this emptiness.


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AT: Anthro

Environmental movements that reject anthropocentrism cant solveLight 2Professor of environmental philosophy (Andrew Light, professor of environmental philosophy

and director of the Environmental Conservation Education Program, 2002, Applied Philosophy Group at

New York University, METAPHILOSOPHY, v33, n4, July, p. 561)//LC

It should be clear by now that endorsinga methodological environmental pragmatism requires

an acceptance of some form of anthropocentrism in environmental ethics, if only because we

have sound empirical evidence that humans think about the value of nature in human terms and

pragmatists insist that we must pay attention to how humans think about the value of nature.

Indeed, as I said above, it is a common presupposition among committed nonan-

thropocentrists that the proposition that humans are anthropocentrist is true,though

regrettable. There are many problems involved in the wholesale rejection of

anthropocentrismby most environmental philosophers. While I cannot adequately explain my

reservations to this rejection, for now I hope the reader will accept the premise thatnot

expressing reasons for environmental priorities in human termsseriously hinders our ability tocommunicate a moral basis for better environmental policies to the public. Both

anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric claims should be open to us.

Humans are key to environmental ethics- anthropocentrism isnt a good

starting point because the protection of future generations will always come

firstNorton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and Weak

Anthropocentrism, Volume 6, Issue 2 of Environmental Ethics,

https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=enviroethics&id=enviroethics_1984_000

6_0002_0131_0148)//LC

I argue that this equivalence is mistaken by showing that the

anthropocentrism/nonanthropocentrism debate is far less important than is usually assumed.

Once an ambiguity is noted in its central terms, it becomes clear that nonanthropocentrism is

not the only adequate basis for a truly environmental ethic.3 I then argue that another

dichotomy, that of individualism versus nonindividualism, should be seen as crucial to the

distinctiveness of environmental ethicsand that a successful environmental ethic cannot be

individualistic in the way that standard contemporary ethical systems are. Finally, I examine the

consequences of these conclusions for the nature and shape of an environmental ethic. Before

beginning these arguments, I need to clarify how I propose to test an adequate environmental

ethic. I begin by assuming thatall environmentally sensitive individuals believe that there is a

set of human behaviors which do or would damage the environment. Further, I assume that

there is considerable agreement among such individuals about what behaviors are included inthat set. Most would decry, for example, careless storage of toxic wastes, grossly overpopulating

the world with humans, wanton destruction of other species, air and water pollution, and so

forth. There are other behaviors which would be more controversial, but I take the initial task

of constructing an adequate environmental ethic to be the statement of some set of principles

from which rules can be derived proscribing the behaviors included in the set which virtually

all environmentally sensitive individuals agree are environmentally destructive. The further

task of refining an environmental ethic then involves moving back and forth between the


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basic principles and the more or less controversial behaviors, adjusting principles and/or

rejecting intuitions until the best possible fit between principles and sets of proscribed

behaviors is obtained for the whole environmental community. In the present paper I address

the prior question of basic principles. I am here only seeking to clarify which principles do (and

which do not) support the large set of relatively uncontroversial cases of behaviors damaging to

the environment. An ethic will be adequate, on this approach, if its principles are sufficient to

entail rules proscribing the behaviors involved in the noncontroversial set. My arguments, then,

are not directed at determining which principles are true, but which are adequate to uphold

certain shared intuitions. Questions concerning the truth of such principles must be left for

another occasion.

They cannot resolve environmental issues- they arent at the core of

environmental ethicsNorton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and Weak



6_0002_0131_0148)//LCI suggest that the distinction between anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism has been

given more importance in discussions of the foundations of environmental ethics than it

warrants because a crucial ambiguity in the term anthropocentrism has gone unnoticed.4

Writers on both sides of the controversy apply this term to positions which treat humans as the

only loci of intrinsic value.5 Anthropocentrists aretherefore taken to believe that every

instance of value originates in a contribution to human values and that all elements of nature

can, at most, have value instrumental to the satisfaction of human interests.6 Note that

anthropocentrism is defined by reference to the position taken on loci of value. Some

nonanthropocentrists say that human beings are the source of all values, but that they can

designate nonhuman objects as loci of fundamental value.7

Humans should be placed at the center of discussions of the environmentNorton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and Weak



6_0002_0131_0148)//LC

Suppose a generation of the entire human species freely decided to sterilize itself, thereby

freeing itself to consume without fear ofhanning future individuals. Would they do wrong?

Yes.19 The perpetuation of the human species is a good thing because a universe containing

human consciousness is preferable to one without it.20 Thisvalue claim implies that current

generations must show concern for future generations. They musttake steps to avoid the

extinc- tion of the species and they must provide a reasonably stable resource baseso that

future generations will not suffer great deprivation. These are the bases of rules of managementanalogous to the rules for administering a trust fund. They do not have individuals or individual

interests as their reference point, but they do govern behavior that will affect future individuals.

It is now possible to outline a weakly anthropocentric, nonindividualistic environmental ethic.

Such an ethic has two levels. The distributional level has as its principle that one ought not to

harm other human individuals unjustifiably. This principle rests upon the assumption that feIt

preferences, desires that occur within individual human consciousness, have equal prima facie

value. Rules for the fair treatment of individuals are derived fronl the principle of no harm and


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prescribe fair treatment of individuals, whether regarding benefits derived from the

environment or from other sources.Since there is nothing distinctive about the environmental

prescriptions and proscriptions that occur on this level-they do not differ in nature from other

issues of individual fairness-I do not discuss them further. Decisions on the second level of

environmental ethics, which I call the level of "allocation," cannot, however, be based upon

individual considerations. The central value placed on human consciousness is not a result of

aggregating the value of individual consciousnesses, because the value of ongoing

consciousness cannot be derived from the value of individual consciousnesses they cannot be

identified or counted prior to the making of decisions on resource allocation.21 Therefore,

obligations on this level are owed to no individual and can be called "generalized obligations."

They are obligations of the current generation to maintain a stable ow of resources into the

indefinite future and, consequently, they are stated vis-a-vis resources necessary for ongoing

human life, not vis-a-vis individual requirements. Resources represent the means for

supporting life looked at from a nonindividual perspective. The individual perspective

determines needs and wants and then seeks means to fulfill them. Concern for the continued

ow of resources insures that sources of goods and services such as ecosystems, soil, forests,

etc. remain "healthy" and are not deteriorating. In this way, options are held open and

reasonable needs of individuals for whatever goods and services can be fulfilled with reasonablelabor, technology, and ingenuity. The emphasis of this concern, however, is not individualistic

since it is not focused on the fulfillment of specifiable needs, but rather on the integrity and

health of ongoing ecosystems as holistic entities.

Human centric frameworks can provide a sufficient environmental frameworkNorton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and

Weak Anthropocentrism, Volume 6, Issue 2 of Environmental Ethics,

https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=enviroethics&id=enviroethics_1

984_0006_0002_0131_0148)//LC

The point of this essay, however, has been to show that one need not make the questionableontological commitments involved in attributing intrinsic value to nature,since weak

anthropocentrism provides a framework adequate to criticize current destructive practices to

incorporateconcepts of human affinity to nature, and to account forthe distinctive nature of

environmental ethics.All of these are essential elements in an ethicthat recognizes the

distinction between felt and considered preferences and includes important aesthetic and

ethical ideals. These ideals, which can be derived from spiritual sources or from a rationally

constructed worldview, can be based on and find their locus in human values.And yet they are

sufficient to provide the basis of criticism ofcurrently overconsumptive felt preferences. As

such they adjudicate between ethical concerns for distributional fairness in the present and

concerns of allocation, which have reference to the long-term future. Essential to this

adjudication is the development of principles of conduct that respect the ongoing integrity of

functioning ecosystems seen as wholes. In this way they transcend concern for

individualistically expressed feIt preferences and focus attention on the stable functioning of

ongoing systems. If all of this is true, Occam's razor surely provides a basis for favoring weak

anthropocentrism over nonanthropocentrism.

seaborgs aff k updates - michigan7 2014 (2)

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