A runaway ethical utopia: positive animalist intervention in Nature

Abstract

We may recognize the importance of totalities and systems (being holistic) in the ontological, and still maintain moral individualism: it is the lives of individual organisms that count morally. Species and ecosystems have only a derived moral value. We care, morally, for the centers of sentience and consciousness we call individuals. But in nature it is above all the totalities that count... Although our best moral theory may be individualistic, it happens that, ontologically, individuals count little ―the reality is systemic, evolutionary and relational! Our best ontology will not be individualistic. (It will be based, rather, on complex adaptive systems). Not understanding this explains, I believe, a good part of the disagreements between animalism and environmentalism. We need to develop non-fossilistic ideas of liberation (human and animal). The proposal of a positive animalist intervention generalized in nature seems to me to be a runaway ethical utopia (“desmadrada”, that is “outside of mother”, of Mother Earth in this case: Gaia/Gea).