The problem of anthropocentrism and the human kind of personhood

1. The currently common claim that humankind must de-center itself from its view of reality is a moral claim, generally (although with many variants) presented as urgent and at least in theory as universally binding (Nakagawa and Payne 2019; Plumwood 2003; Butchvarov 2015). I will present some considerations as to some of the moral implications of the ways in which we respond to this demand and will recommend considerable caution about what we choose to alter in our self-conception as a result. ¹

Under this view that claims the moral obligation of human de-centering, it is held that in so far as we act on those of our ancient or usual beliefs about a universe that cares for our well-being as we still hold, consciously or unconsciously, we arrive at falsehoods. In so far as we take the “human” point of view as a uniquely truthful perspective, we engage in destructive acts. Separating the human from the natural leads to both falsehoods and to self-destruction. Natural processes determine the human career, and explaining them on their own terms is the true account of reality that is ontologically fundamental. Just as anthropocentrism helped to generate much of the logic, ontology, metaphysics, culture, and ethics of the Western intellectual traditions, so also anti-anthropocentrism will unwind one of their foundations. This theory furthermore challenges the immense array of cultural, intellectual, scientific, social, political, and moral issues that have been anthropocentric. In the future, under this view, empirical knowledge on a more realistic basis will move us even further from the human, on which Western science and metaphysics are supposed to have long misunderstood human history, toward a holistic knowledge of how reality functions and of our de-centralized place in it.

Put this way, the issue is immense, and it increasingly commands extremely wide attention, critique, and reflection. Some advocate de-centering the human not only for the benefit of this change to us humans but for its benefit to animals, or to all living beings, or to all things. Val Plumwood argues that such a change in the form of “a dialogical interspecies ethics” would concretize and deepen our romanticized or abstract relationship to nature (Plumwood 2002, 167–195). Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett argue that ceasing to divide the living and the non-living would lead to a more truthful understanding of existence (Latour 2004; Bennett 2010). Donna Haraway holds that, in addition to such ontological developments, this altered perspective is essential for coming to a more ethical politics of life and death (Haraway 2008; see also Johnston 2012). Along other lines from the pioneer thinkers in this line, Aldo Leopold wants us to integrate ourselves into the biotic community (Leopold 1968); but Mary Midgeley sees, instead, this as the way to more intense caring and authentically compassionate relationships among living beings that share resources and needs in their ecology (Midgeley 1983). Others, such as Tom Regan and Martha Nussbaum, emphasize the intrinsic value of other forms of life as opposed to the instrumental value for us, or even for them, of improving our attitudes (Regan 1983; Nussbaum 2006). A great many people agree with these and other variants of the position, and it is safe to say that hardly any thinking person can fail to admit that something has to be altered in consequential ways.

Although it might seem that stating the anti-anthropocentric thesis in its most rebarbative form, as a universal moral demand, does not do justice to the variety of forms of the claim, the fact is that its advocates often do state it in binary terms, as an either/or. As one writer put it, “The anthropocentric framework clearly leaves little or no room for the direct moral consideration of the non-human world” (Katz 2020, 23). We find this also in the “deep ecology” of Arne Naess (Naess 1985). Panayot Butchvarov argues that the entirety of philosophy is debased by anthropocentrism in the form of anti-realist ontology and that therefore metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics must be purged of their retrograde valorization of the human (Butchvarov 2015). I refer to this kind of position as thoroughgoing disanthropocenrtization. The rigid binary is an effective spur to thought. Is it really true? Is there no kind of anthropocentrism that allows for something that might reasonably and validly be called “direct moral consideration of the non-human world”? Is there no moral claim that some measure of anthropocentrism justly has on us?

Here are examples of the sort of questions that this issue gives rise to:

1. If one is asked to take a drug that will adjust the human mind to act in accord with the demands of thoroughgoing disanthropocentrization but that might have very serious side-effects, should she take it?

2. If one knows that a life-form that sustains the environment better than we do (such as fungi) can colonize humans so as to create a more sustainable biosphere by prevailing over our species, should she try to stop it?

3. If one knows that by eating the minimal survivable diet and by living without power or other ecocidal conveniences she will improve the health of Earth, should she live in this way?

4. If one knows that a particular variety of suicide will improve life on Earth as a whole, should she commit suicide?

5. If disanthropocentrization requires that we not reproduce, should we cease to reproduce?

6. If thorough-going disanthropocentrization convincingly and empirically entails that we must not use technology that clearly benefits humans and that cannot be replaced, should we cease to use it?

7. If thorough-going disanthropocentrization convincingly and empirically argues that humankind cease to use certain raw materials from Earth or from other planets for our well-being, should we cease to find or to use such materials?

8. If thorough-going disanthropocentrization convincingly and empirically shows that caring for human survival creates conditions that degrade the survival of other current species (or of species yet to come, or of artificial intelligences, or of advanced aliens), should we cease to care for human survival?

9. Do the moral claims of other species counsel us to forego grief or alarm at the demise of humankind?

10. What moral claims does machinic intelligence have on us today?

These help to show why we should fear that what is presented as an impartialist moral demand can provoke destruction, especially by triggering our self-destructive drives—that what appears to be an ameliorative social theory actually expresses our darkest impulses.

I wish to look at an issue that arises in considering how to modulate our way out of problems the binary schema that the claim to throroughgoingly disanthropocentrize thought and culture uses or readily leads to. I apologize for the word disanthropocentrize. It is ungainly, but I made it up because we have no other single word for all the arguments that we must de-center the human being and the perspective of humankind in our epistemology, ontology, and moral philosophy, as well as in politics, culture, and the arts. This word includes not only arguments as such but also a moral claim within the framework of the Anthropocene that humankind must will and impel itself to make these changes, if it is to become more just with respect to other beings as well as to itself and even if it is to survive. This claim is found throughout the tangled history in which the Anthropocene has been conceived (Albritton Jonsson 2015). If we are to re-create our relations with other species, we must first think about whether and in what ways we can have a non-human perspective. How can we and do we respond the moral claim on the basis of our own moral agency and its capabilities? It is this part of the moral claim of disanthropecenrization that I shall address.

2. In order to frame my argument, I shall state in advance that the philosophical point of view that I find to have the best resources for addressing this part of the problem of anthropocentrism is personalism. Of all philosophical approaches to this great moral problem, personalism might seem to be the feeblest because it is the one most boxed into a corner by the re-evaluation of the status of humankind in the universe that is now under way. Personalism is the philosophical approach that takes personhood as the centrally important category of reality—as the most important thing in the universe at least for us or as the chief object of philosophical inquiry, which it insists must enhance the dignity and worth of all human persons. Personalism takes many credal, ideological, and philosophical forms (Williams and Bengtsson 2022). But all of these forms have traditionally taken personhood to refer to the human person, while some of them have also taken God, Jesus, and certain spiritual and non-material beings to be persons. Personalism thus seems to be a quintessence of humanism, although some of its religious versions might reject classical humanism and certainly reject “humanism” taken as secularity. Personalism has value if it can be an important way of sustaining the value of the worth and dignity of all human beings; indeed, every philosophy that sustains this value may be seen as personalist in some sense or to some degree.

Critiques of humanism fly in from every corner, because it is feasibly understood as the idea, in brief, that humans are sovereigns over the Earth and over other humans; and very vigorously from anti-anthropocentric thought, because it is feasibly understood as the idea that humans are sovereigns over nature. As Claude Lefort put it with enduring precision, the humanist discourse of personhood can “...cover up the question of its genesis...by rearranging the boundaries of that which has no genesis...[and] by identifying a disturbing growth of irrational facts whose development must be arrested” (Lefort 1986, 207). Early modern humanism, he pointed out, relied on the self it created to validate its own project (Lefort 1978). To those urging that we de-center the human and to many other thinking people today, it appears that the rape of indigenous cultures, the rape of the planet, and the rape of the human spirit over centuries have left world civilization stuck in an awful system today, one that imperils our survival and is at the very least murderously unjust. Our situation is much as Emerson described the disorientation of human self-regard in his own day: “Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance” (Emerson 1983, 79).

Personalism of the sort I favor does have a resource for adding to the progress of philosophy rather than becoming a discard. ² This resource is simply to regard as a person any being—human or animal, material or immaterial (if such exist)—that meets certain criteria that make the effort worthwhile. Clearly this broad approach reflects the complexity and ambiguity of the notion of importance in the thesis that the person is the most important category of reality. The difficulty is to describe with some precision what this importance is, what criteria are important in our standing in the universe; and, furthermore, what the elevation of non-human beings to personhood that this formula allows amounts to and what good this does. Here is the one point that knots together the questions that centrally concern this essay. For these criteria grow from the importance assigned to human personhood as moral agency, a phrase for our practices of judgment and action upon judgment. Therefore the sort of personhood at stake here concerns the role of the moral agency of persons in a disanthropecentrized perspective. Its importance is what is in dispute when we are urged to deflate the role of human persons as moral agents in the universe.

Given that we ought no longer regard humankind as separate from nature in the traditional manner of separation, given that humankind must no longer proceed as if it were sovereign over nature, given that the notion of the sovereign autonomy of persons as transferred to nation-states has proven to be so dangerous that we must challenge moral philosophy so as to preserve the beneficial aspects of autonomy from the wreckage of its other aspects, given that the wreckage and the danger of biological and social catastrophes must be our overwhelming concern, given that fear of catastrophe must modify our views of human personhood, and given the human personhood is vastly both deepened and deflated by scientific biology—given these facts, stated as minimally as possible, which I ask the reader to presume without detailed argument here—can human personhood as I shall define it be our model for understanding, appraising, and accepting the personhood of non-human species, or of other sorts of intelligent beings, and even of objects and at what cost?

In the perspectives of modern history, contemporary science, and theory of culture, humans are both too natural to be considered very specially and even sacrally apart from nature and not natural enough to act as good co-operating partners in the planetary biomass. We are, in short, not what we used to think we are. And yet there is no simple answer as to what we actually are in the light of our accumulated knowledge and experience. There are too many of us, our temperaments too private, our cultures too diverse, our activity and production in such manic flux, that there seems to be no answer to our questions about what our normative tasks are in the world today. If we must disanthropocentrize, we are to undertake changing ourselves not only in theory but in virtually every dimension. Into what? Along what principles, under what guidelines? Whereas in modernity we have developed the ideas that the deep part of our existence is our relationship to existence and the deepest part of our history is our relationship to history, we seem now to be obliged to turn from interpreting ourselves toward a wider and more intimate hermeneutic with other histories, other bodies of experience, other types of existence. ³ The Anthropocene concerns such “historical futures.” ⁴ But there are no guidelines for this expanded hermeneutic. Looking through and past the growing body of thought on the Anthropocenic future, I will endeavor to discover what the historicity in our existential position with respect to the future of our existence tells us about how successfully to face the issues of re-evaluating our status. Doing anything without hope and self-confidence is very difficult; doing any such thing of this sort in a position of lost confidence and lost self-respect is a desperate situation.

The conception of moral agency understood as an necessary or foundational part of human personhood, with its specific means of development embodied in certain human practices (which I will partially elaborate below) that the historical humanist and many different philosophical schools and different religious traditions, for all their different metaphysics and epistemologies, share in significant measure, now confronts moral needs of which the authors I mentioned above and others endeavor to make us aware, ranging from the need for a painful humility with which we can at last successfully answer the just demands of the human political world to the supererogatory demand for sacrifice for other persons and even other species or forms of intelligence. In approaching these demands, it is important to note that they are highly externalist moral motivations, made even more lopsided by a fear of extinction that makes reservations about de-centering ourselves appear o be foolish and vain. The philosopher Rasmus Dyring puts it very aptly:

This [i.e., what follows], indeed, characterizes the human condition in the Anthropocene. The demand for action, for taking responsibility, is posed “relative to us”, but the “us”—while many people saliently feel implicated in it, despairingly feel the impact of its demands—is unfathomable and unbounded. (Dyring 2020: 315)

At its most extreme our response to this situation leads us to have an outward socially related self at the most maximal kind of collectivity and relatedness we can possibly imagine, or at least see the way to, and at the same time to diminish our inward relationship as a species to ourselves to a speck. This question at these extreme boundaries is good for thinking about how to mitigate the supererogatory demand in order for us to makes choices in the actual world that are based on coherently articulated values.

As a matter of convenience of focus and expression in this paper, I will confine my consideration of this issue to the way it applies to the personhood of human and non-human carbon-based life on Earth. But much of what I will say can be applied to our relations to alien life, to human-created non-human life, to golems and such, and to non-material beings.

3. Before defining the human kind of personhood, let us look at the ways in which arguments for de-centering the human affect what we will do or not do with this kind of personhood in de-centering ourselves. The intuitive and a common but superficial approach is by a fork that gives us two routes for modeling non-human personhood on human personhood. These are the hierarchical and the non-hierarchical (Cooke 2020). They are familiar even from before the current clutch of Anthropocene issues as the “great chain of being” concept and the versions and critiques of this concept. Under the hierarchical view, we would value the intellective, psychic, and moral capabilities of humans as the highest versions of these capabilities of which we have direct and certain knowledge. We would then rank other species according to their version of these capabilities. Even the simplest ranking requires our valuing some capabilities over others, but in any case arriving at a decision as to the personhood of other species involves some process of estimation and calculation. This is very roughly the procedure of a determination by anthropocentric hierarchy. It fails to answer a question that must precede it: why do we so highly value the human as to model all personhood on it? The trouble here is not that we must presume there to be no good answer to this question. It is, instead, that the question must be answered in order to proceed with the calculation unless it presumes the answer it provides in the result. This petitio principii jabs in us the prick of conscience that says the hierarchical procedure is morally untenable, that if we adopt it we fool ourselves.

We might develop the non-hierarchical approach in the following way. Science and ethics oblige us to start from (1). The greatest possible respect for other species, (2). A frank acceptance of the many limits to our knowledge of the capabilities of other species, and (3). Any and all other consideration requisite for de-centering the human in re-thinking our relations with other species. We would then take stock of the ways in which members of non-human species support the lives of other members and the ways in which species support the flourishing of other species. Thus, for example, trees in a forest can message one another about an approaching fire or grow in ways that encourage other trees to grow. Under this approach, however, what do we do about the competition for survival among in nature? Furthermore, there does not seem to be a way to choose among species for the ascription of the moral value in personhood or even to limit that ascription to any range less than that of all living beings. Our knowledge of nature is now too deep and broad for us to settle for half-measures within scientific knowledge without higher-order theoretical commitments. ⁵

Both the hierarchical and its non-hierarchical counterpart offer actual ways, with different strengths and weaknesses, to confront the difficult ethical demands attendant upon disanthropocentrizing, which in turn are steps in coping with the ecological and social challenges of the circumstances collectively called the Anthropocene. But without ways to moderate the competing claims of hierarchical human and non-hierarchical nature, we are left with a supererogatory demand to ignore all local duties in favor of the most universal and comprehensive duties taken as required by one or the other of these approaches. Supererogation does not guide anyone as to how to exercise attention in such a way as not to raise unintended bad consequences in this complicated world. It negates not only the compassionate actor’s local projects but also those of many others or is always dangerously close to doing so. It becomes an essence, a thing out of existence. In this capacity it might harm people both as individuals and as groups, for the local projects of societies are no more categorically good or divine than anyone’s selfish desires. The question of whether human personhood can be the model for the ascription of personhood to other species as the category of moral worth and dignity becomes, at this point: can we save the moral duties arising from our human personhood in a non-anthropocentric relation of humankind to other forms of life? The procedures of classification according to moral hierarchy or to non-hierarchical life-mass do not help us to answer this question. Because they do not suffice, there is so far no argumentatively defensible way to meet the demand for disanthropocentrizing our point of view; this demand is not its own self-evident ground, as if it were apodictic behind and away from the problems of deliberation about moral values and our obligations to them.

The hierarchical approach disallows our developing an actual flourishing relationship to other species and indeed to nature as a whole, and the non-hierarchical approach generalizes the relationship to a point of banality or self-destruction. In the terms I used above, under the former we are not natural enough to relate to nature and under the later we are too natural to be different enough so as to stand in relation to an other. Neither view guides us to grasping the quality of human persons that is specifically valent in our relationships to non-human persons. Neither directs our attention to whatever we so value that we might develop it in theory and practice so as to enter into a better integrated community of life. This fork is fruitless, although it is intuitive. ⁶

To get another approach we have to thank about our moral intuitions apart from the theologized and scientistic forms that these two approaches tend towards—above all, to consider what to do with those moral intuitions of the value of the human which tell us that we owe a necessary deep allegiance in some form to our own species. This is paradoxical, not simple; the way through it requires us to discern what we esteem in human personhood that survives being mapped onto other types of intelligence or consciousness in a helpful way while maintaining our self-respect. Vain self-centeredness and supererogatory demands for self-blame, self-rejection, or self-sacrifice do not show anyone how to exercise moral attention in such a way as not to raise unintended bad consequences in this complicated world. Both negate not only the compassionate actor’s local projects but also those many others kinds of projects, or are always dangerously close to doing so. The strongly anthropocentric and the strongly anti-anthropocentric views become ontologies of essence, of a thing out of the real course of our existence. In this capacity they harm people both as individuals and as groups, for the project of naturalizing human consciousness is no more categorically good than anyone’s selfish desires.

Let us then set aside the question of whether a position on the resources of human personhood for recognizing the moral worth and dignity of non-human animal species and individuals is hierarchical or anti-hierarchical. And let us not be concerned if someone should use the term hierarchical as an accusation. We do not disanthropocentrize by not being anti-hierarchy or by being pro-hierarchy. Neither position settles the question of our values. The theory of dis-anthropocentrization is generally tilted against hierarchy, but I neither say that this is altogether wrong nor favor a human-topped ontology. This kind of thing is the wrong question. What the problem of anthropocentrism requires is an inquiry into how human personhood encompasses the moral agency with which we will contemplate our relation to other species. We humans perennially require this introspection if we are to try to be good and just.

4. The road of inquiry into moral agency as the core of the human kind of personhood takes the question of personhood into a direction different from some of the historically more familiar approaches. ⁷ It does not focus on rationality, as Boethius did in the first definition of personhood; or on the God-created being, as Thomas Aquinas did; or on intelligence, as John Locke; or on the problem of the deep fact of personhood, as Derek Parfit did; or on biology, as Peter Singer and many others from different perspectives do. This inquiry is tricky because it seeks things that are universal to human beings but that do not elide variations or oppress differences among collectives and individuals. As this of course is one of the really hard perennial difficulties in philosophical anthropology, social thought, theory of culture, and political philosophy, I am not aiming here to solve it in all its painful grandeur. But despite our collective ineptitude at settling these questions, we can advance some unprevaricating concepts suiting present purposes by designating one or some transcendental and critical conditions of a human ability to value humans.

As I have stated, the question of whether we can take anything of human personhood to apply to non-humans for the designated purpose points us to the capability for moral evaluation. The reason is that if we are thinking about how to ascribe moral worth to non-human animals, it is our capacity for any such evaluative ascription that stands in front of any such act. Regardless of whether it is free or determined, emotive or real, cognitive or not, it is the primary agency that we must take into account as such before, while, and when exercising it with respect to other species. Also, when we morally evaluate we do so without needing to think about whether individual identity perdures or endures or whether subjectivity is single or multiple and whether a self is a deep fact or merely a colligatory term, although reflection on these matters can help us when we try to praise and blame or when we feel shame or assign guilt. Our reflection on these same matters often enters into debate about what personhood is in so far as this question is taken up as either a metaphysical problem or a positive inquiry based in empirical observation. But in this case these debates do not directly concern the moral challenge of whether we ought to rely on the moral agency of persons when we consider the possible personhood of non-humans. Though concept analysis or data can assist us in meeting that challenge, the business end of the matter is the moral demand upon us to do the right thing in our relations to ourselves and to other species. This is the kind of question that analysis or science cannot answer, nor indeed can ontology. It gives us a solid to reason to set aside arguments about hierarchy in favor of an inquiry into values. In fact, the freedom to take our practice of normativity qua morally agentive without concerns about its meta-ethical or positive features gives advantages to our deliberations about non-humans to whom questions of human free will, epistemology, and ontology just might not in the least apply. If moral agency as humanly understood is the core of personhood and if we can attribute this kind of moral agency that we can understand to some non-human bioforms, then we have a perspective that is accessible to us in which to de-center ourselves in our conception of nature.

Amidst the variety of human moral practices, the capability for moral evaluation that is part of any ascription of personhood seems universally to require two things as necessary minima. One is having temporality in the simple sense of using retentional and protentional memory, memory through objects including documents but also every other production, personal memory, and social memory. I use temporality to mean the way that humans beings exist in finitude, which is conceptualized, schematized, and lived in many different ways. This is a universal existential condition, not the manifold of contingent historical facts and events. We develop the ethical through our behavior and activities, but being the sort of beings who can conceive and can orient ourselves toward the ethical is the existential pre-condition of all such development. The second requirement is the practice of interpersonal communications considered globally, including the social formation of values, the practices of philosophical deliberation, religion, the power of mystical experience, the political life, and all our expressive activities. The first of these is inward-facing, the second is outward-facing. Although moral life can be parsed and tabulated in many different ways, these two spheres are necessary to giving the capability of moral valuation its agentive character. Temporality and communications combined are the relatedness of all human affairs as they develop in the prolonged diachronesis of human sociality and interdependence. They are the conditions of the possibility of moral evaluation as we know it in our temporality of finitude.

Put together, they comprise what we can call historicity. ⁸ Human experience is necessarily social. It primarily concerns events that more than one individual creates, participates in, observes, or has memory of. Where it concerns a solitary person, the motive for making an account of her is the interest others have in her life or activities in order to appreciate, or even just to establish, relations between others and her. Even more broadly, recollection of the past, knowledge of it, and reflection on past events—personal or public, academic or lay—establishes the hermeneutic community in which cultural and social development is a sort of endless exegesis of the shared pasts of persons. Human historicity as interdependence is the primordial condition for the events, with their attendant thoughts, feelings, and expressions, of our relations with one another and with the natural world. This is also a story of the interdependence of human life and the sphere we commonly call nature. No moment of the life of any being or species can be lived apart from the affordances and constraints given in the circumstances of nature and of society, nor can any account of it be conceived without comprehension of the ineluctability of these relationships. We sometimes approximate whatever it is that works as the interdependence in which our life is lived by calling it reason, or laws, or forces, or drives, or by some conception of universality and unity. On the human side this is historicity in its profound sense. Historicity is the mode of being in which our experience of the past leads us to pursue evaluative explanations of interdependent persons, groups, events and acts and the causes that bring them together.

Valuing and disvaluing others requires historicity—memory or history and sociality—as its critical conditions because our relations with others, both privately considered or publicly developed, vary according to our normative concepts formed from the retained and communicated experience of events involving others that we evaluatively express as our history. The evaluating force in human behavior establishes historicity because evaluation, including moral judgment, is a poly-logue that ties us up with other even if we reject them since they are part of our life-world. Evaluation brings others within our circle of thought and feeling. Personhood as moral agency therefore requires the interdependence that is included in historicity. Inquiring into the constituting conditions of human moral evaluation—our temporality that arises out of a past from which our consciousness extends—we find that something which is just what we humans are and is a matter neither of our dominating nature nor of naturalizing our self-conception. And this something is our ethical relations with other people and with the world, rather than our separation from them (cf. Whitebook 1979, 52). It tracks the way in which knowledge itself historically develops.

This then sets moral evaluation as the act of personal agency that is of concern to us when we inquire whether human personhood can be a model on which to recognize the dignity and worth of other persons as being like our own. The human kind of personhood is the primitive basis of interdependence I am calling historicity in which we evaluate and thereby exercise moral agency across spans of time and in communication with one another. These concepts are existential conditions of human life. Although the life of humankind has been modeled or formulated in many other ways, these features are ones that bring into relief the problems of understanding our own species and other species in relation to one another that this paper addresses. The importance of these features for thinking about de-centering the human in disanthropoectrization requires some further explanation

For present purposes “moral” refers to the activity of evaluation as to good and bad of circumstances that agents share and about which agents communicate to one another and agents’ prescriptive decisions about right and wrong actions. But how do we understand agency? Intention, motive, reasons, beliefs, desires, mind, and will, not to mention the virtues and the vices, are all parts of human moral agency that we just cannot get outside of; and we just cannot yet go far enough into animal consciousness to discern them or their cognates. Allow that both animal and human species have lives to which history, sociality, and communication, and all these together in the interdependence that is the historicity of these living beings, are essential, the problem remains. We must have a principle of reason and evidence by which to decide whether our agency from historicity is enough like theirs for us to enhance our awareness of interdependence and community in such a way as to convince us that individuals and collectives in some or many non-human species have personhood.

If we view human moral agency as pre-conditioned by human historicity because human personhood is pre-conditioned by human historicity, then we should view this agency through its diachronesis. As Talbot Brewer and others have forcefully argued, Anglo-American philosophical ethics broadly tends to analyze moral life as propositions that refer to static situations and rarely reflect the dynamics of actual life (Brewer 2011; Hämäläinen 2019). Here we ought not to take agency as a quality or possibility apart from its existence as exercised by persons in the course of events. An actor responds to circumstances that pit conscience against convenience in moral situations, sometimes making them urgent and sometimes sinking them into forgetfulness. The building of moral claims can last for centuries, or it can spring up in minutes that seem like centuries when the risks are great. Obvious, recovered, and deeply instilled memories combine with ideas and information communicated to an agent to which her will responds. To the extent that personhood is characterized by agency of any sort, personhood itself is more of a process than a thing or a single state of being. A person is not a bundle of propositions. Instead, a person is the actor in ongoing inquiry, reception of experience, valuation, and choice, as aspects of the material, emotional, and psychic processes of a living being.

Our human moral agency is thus intelligible through our temporality. The temporality of finitude brings about the vulnerability and mortality that comprises moral dilemmas. We shape our world according to the many scales of time we require or find useful as individuals and as collectives. We respond to an intense web of meaning that develops through the historical processes by which knowledge and values are created, disseminated, stored, and retrieved and recalled for further development in new situations and eras. The historicity peculiar to ourselves circumscribes our understanding of our moral agency. Agency for us denotes durative actions, and in humans it is human historicity that governs their diachronesis. Our moral agency is profoundly tied to our own history through which it develops. Because it is our own standpoint in its deepest layers, the constitution of the moral agency we need in thinking about other species constrains us from extending personhood as moral agency to them. In fact, the Anthropocene is, among other things, a problem in historiography as to defining and locating it and in philosophy of history as to understanding its meaning in the history of human life (Ellis 2018; Steffen et al. 2011; Westermann & Höhler 2020). It seems we must define and understand it as humans, with all the attendant uncertainty and inadequacy of our knowledge. The Anthropocene Era does not speak on its own behalf. Even in its coils, it is a project in our self-understanding. Our personhood as we must take it to be is not expressible from outside the human.

5. This conclusion seems to choke off an optimistic outlook on responding to the need to disanthropocentrize by regarding non-human living beings as being in that community of moral agency with called personhood. The phenomenologist Dan Zahavi, in considering how a plural identity, understood as the intersubjectivity (or “collective intentionality”) of a “we,” can come about, says something that applies to the problem here of a community of human and non-human species:

When having a headache, I am not faced with a two-step process in which I first detect the presence of an unpleasant experience, and then wonder whose experience it might be. Rather, experiences are necessarily like something for a subject, they necessarily involve a point of view, they come with perspectival ownership. Experience entails what-it-is likeness and what-it-is-likeness entails what-it-is-like-for-me-ness....

To relate to and address another as a you (rather than as a he or she) is to relate to someone, an I, who in turn relates to me as a you. Second-person engagement is a subject–subject (you-me) relation where I am not only aware of and directed at the other and, at the same time, implicitly aware of myself in the accusative, as attended to or addressed by the other, but where the attitudes of mutual address establish a form of “communicative connectedness”.... It is a reciprocal exchange of address and response that affects and transforms the self-experience of the participating individuals. (Zahavi 2021, 9, 16)

While Zahavi is concerned that we understand the way that individual selves form communities, rather than thinking that communities form before individuals do and that the individuals are formed out of communities, the intricate hermeneutic of address and response among individuals and between them and their community that he describes applies to the membership of our species of animal in the community of animals (and, as I have said, altogether other forms of life or of being). Community begins in the life, then in the self-awareness, and then in the self-understanding of the individual. By extension, a species like ours needs its self-understanding in order to form a community with other species. But self-understanding of our sort is so self-encompassing that it apparently blocks access to the self-understanding of other species. Indeed, it nearly blocks our understanding of others of our own species. For membership or belonging there must be connection through communications, and communications necessarily arise upon by the critical condition for each agents possibility of expression and connection. This is another form of what I described as the inquiry into values that is the field of thought for disanthropocentrizing—now more concretely and complexly established in these terms. Here, again, we are a long way from simply stigmatizing the separation of the human as a habitual error and simply demanding change that is nearly supererogatory if we take seriously the necessity to us of the specific human historicity of our sociality and communications. But we have merely begun communication with other species, and we are very far from a community of inquiry with other species.

The difficulties in understanding other species by disanthropocentrization, as revealed to us by using this perspective of personalism, are not to be waved away. The fundamental difficulty is that human personhood is made possible by its historicity. This historicity constituting our way of being yields, first of all, our inquiries of moral values in our moral lives through moral agency. Our inquiries and the social formations that they result in use temporalities that are so specific to forms of human life such that it is hard to see how we might enter into the different temporalities of other animals. In addition, our knowledge of the values inquiry, or moral lives, or diachronic agency of other species, if there be any of these at all, is cripplingly limited. This is exactly due to the critical conditions of historicity: the ways in which memory, communication and expression, and the formation of knowledge from the diachronic accumulation of communications and memories work for us humans. Many new realist ontologies, holding that human cognition ought to recognize all that happens in the universe outside our firmly bounded cognitive sphere to be as withdrawn and inaccessible yet wholly real, deny not only the physically open nature of dynamic systems such as hermeneutic communications but also very strongly deny any possibility that human intentionality extends human understanding into the real nature of the other-than-human as vicious idealism. ⁹ This position is in error, as I believe, but it is common and can be a forceful argument for extreme and radical dis-anthropocentrization. One of the problems with it, however, is that it must reduce historicity to natural causality, putting the human in an “ontologically equal” level with other forms of life. The issues internal to ontology are beyond the scope of this paper. As to moral equality, there can be little wrong with some form of it, but this is where I urge caution. Consider more closely ways in which we are bound to our own perspective.

First, whereas we might wish to accord moral equality to other species using some non-human kind of personhood, it would be difficult to do so because of the way that our historicity comprehends everything that we do. That the difficulty we have even in defining the Anthropocene is a strong reason for caution shows that our historicity limits our access to a disanthropocentrized perspective (Santana 2019). As I have used the concept, explained above, our temporality comprehends the most universal aspects of our moral agency. Respect for ourselves requires adherence to our historicity as something distinctly ours from which our self-respect, our understanding of our own moral capabilities, arises. In daily life respect for other persons requires that we maintain our respect for ourselves, if it is to be sincere and beneficial. And so our respect for other species that do not share our relation to the passage of time, whose moral agency differs from ours, requires that we not lose our special relations to our personhood.

Second, our moral agency develops out of our temporality through our communications with one another over generations and eras because it is through these communications that we make and commit ourselves to estimable actions. Another way to out this is that moral commitments come to be through expressions by both words and images. Speaking of J. L. Austin’s purposes in theorizing illocutionary acts, Nancy Bauer says

Austin is primarily interested not in producing a viable theory of linguistic competence or a description of the conventions and quasi-conventions that govern illocution in natural language but in drawing our attention to the human capacity to make various commitments to and in the presence of others. He is especially interested in the human capacity to make judgments, to justify judgments, to enforce judgments, and to evade judgments. (Bauer 2015, 95)

Language along with non-verbal expression create the webs of meaning within which we think and act, and these all occur within our intimate relationship to time. We cannot yet know what other species, if any, share the capacity for morally committed actions in sufficient degree for mutual understanding. The human kind of personhood might well not help us in such a project, and yet at the same time we cannot afford to de-center ourselves when we are at the center of the existential circumstances in which we make meaning and pursue meaning-making projects over time.

And third, as an example, consider the ordinary human appreciation of the awesomeness of one’s having the love of another person that is so very central to our lives. If other species do not share it, or we cannot ascertain that they do, we must maintain it at the same time as we build relationships with other species. This argues that dis-anthropocentrization must be limited from de-valuing ourselves. This is easy to say, but relating to other species and simultaneously maintaining our self-respect will require a long and practical negotiation. Our self-respect will grow by treating other species with compassion, just as it grows when we treat other humans with compassion; but we will face different kinds of lives and different kinds of compassion from other bioforms. We would, I submit, fail the challenge of the situation if we proceed so as to lose the sense of what is special about human personhood.

In sum, the human kind of personhood separates us from other species, but it is our home base and our point of view. Supererogatory application of the moral claim for de-centering the human can lead to terrible destruction by taking us off this home base. Very good examples of this are, unfortunately, today right at hand. They are Longtermism and Effective Altruism (Torres 2021). Both of these theories hold that the only moral choice is for us to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of beings at any cost to ourselves. Thus, since there will be trillions of beings living after us, probably in forms of existence we do not share, we do more good by helping them rather than by caring for those now alive even if in need. Our present tragedies and needs are truly and literally insignificant by comparison, according to this doctrine. Indeed, it continues, since the wealthy today can do more for future beings than can the poor, we ought now to help, serve, and take care of our rich do that they can work for the happiness of the future trillions. Billionaires are pouring many millions of dollars into promoting these hideous ideas.

6. So much for limits. But the concept of personhood also gives us reason to hope that we can form a community with other species by using what we know about human personhood as a model for the differing personhood(s) of non-humans. The value in seeing agency as essentially temporal is that we see it must change of its own nature and therefore is capable of very great changes, given that mutability expands upon itself. Once a clinamen enters a system, the possibilities exponentially augment; what does actually come to happen is, as modern physics shows, a result of the probabilities in the dynamics rather than of determinations rigidly subject to causality. Novelty in fact does enter human consciousness. As depressingly difficult and limited as understanding other persons often seems to a human person, we do gain understanding of others. We do communicate, despite the difficulties and flaws of our efforts. How interpersonality brings this about is rather too far a question for this essay, though it commands increasing attention as an ethical and political problem (Youatt 2017) and as research projects in animal intelligence (e.g., Ross 2019). We are slowly, very slowly, learning more than ever thought possible about the intelligence of other hominoidea, such as the genera Pan, Gorilla, and Pongo; of Cetacea, that is, whales and dolphins; of Cephalopoda, such as the octopus; and even of fungi, like mycelium and others. We do not know much, but somehow we have learned a little that is vastly larger than what we used to know.

There is another possibility for using human personhood to discover animal personhood that provides, in my opinion, a larger hope. Human persons value their community with other humans about as much they value life itself in an individual basis—and sometimes more, very much more, in ways that deeply inhabit our affections, loyalties, and loves. We do not like to be lonely; only a few flourish in great and extended solitude. Most of us feel the void that is around us and to which we are indissolubly linked. Virtually every spiritual tradition of humankind is organized, at least in part, as a response to this existential situation. We affirm our need for the society of others when it issues in recognition of the other and her right to live. As Emanuel Levinas and Simone Weil said in their different ways, this acceptance of others breaks out of every natural and human system, both standing apart from their restrictions and adding to them something that their most totalized forms cannot take in. This might turn out to be a release of human subjectivity as we so far have known it to be. And, however that may be, the passion to be in community with others that drives historicity can have the resources to find, or to create, community with other species, or other beings, based upon sufficient (though not necessarily full) integration of their moral worth and dignity with our own.

The interdependence that is integral to our historicity can in time bring us into community with other species. Our way in life is evaluation conducted amidst the dense web of meanings that we communicate to one another. One could not but think that there is no way for the extension of personhood to develop other than by a diachronesis of conflict, polemic, and actions in which we learn and judge. It will not come into place by a demand that is posed as if it were self-evident, for that is a function not of moral persuasion but of political power. What will work is a process: our intellective, cognitive, and social abilities work dynamically, reflecting into our epistemic base and onto our moral, social, and political bodies of experience the nourishment on which they grow. They do not inevitably grow, but to the extent that they survive over long periods they do find new understanding. Inquiry is both conservative and radical; it moves through and with old forms as it seeks the next form in which it must live. It must determine what is the next right thing to do. And it must absolutely avoid triggering our too-active self-hatred and self-destructiveness, which themselves are causes of Anthropocene ecological collapse. A part of the questions of the survival of humanity raised by ecological collapse, by the catastrophe of warfare, and by the frightful and murderous outcomes of oppression and poverty are the questions we have about our relations with animals. As scientific and humane matters, these global challenges include non-human personhood, and this is why our arc of development—if we are able to continue it—might lead us to answers to we have so far just started to glimpse.

Our kind of personhood, as I see it, give us the means and hope of community with our whole species and with other species just because it does rest upon our moral agency. This usually is taken to separate us from other species, and indeed it does this as well because it is both product and producer of our own way of making meaning within human temporality, language, symbolic expression, and our world of feeling that these preserve and communicate. If we so dislike the manner and extent of the distinctions between our species and other species that our kind of personhood causes, then the way to envision closer relations is to naturalize human behavior so far as to equalize it with the behavior of other forms of life. But this is disrespectful of other species, as it is disrespectful of ourselves. It might be argued that we have very good cause for such a reduction, that it is more truthful than a non-reduced view. That might be the case within a view of truth that has been circumscribed in a certain way. But as to the moral obligations in our relations with other species and in an age in which we increasingly appear to be an insignificantly small part of the universe we must ask exactly how such a flat ontology could build community with others. It signals community, it tells community and commands it, but it does not show it or enact it. It is our moral sensibility that comprises the energies and will to move to community with life. Moral sensibility as a non-natural property is not pure as a flat ontology is or tidy as a naturalized philosophical anthropology is. It is neither firmly hierarchical nor cleanly anti-hierarchical. But it is capable as a struggle, as a conflictual process. It has the only ability we know of with which to change our understanding.

7. The answer to the practical forms of the question as to whether our kind of personhood as moral agency can reveal or lead to us to ascribe, by invention or preference, personhood to non-human animals is this: that we must wait to see. There are good enough evidences of animals choosing according to what can fairly (or at least provisionally) be called, by abstraction, moral purposes or principles to compel you or me or others to accept the personhood of non-human animals. But the matter has not yet had the widespread acceptance that marks the success of novel moral ideas, such as the equality of the so-called races of humankind, or new social practices such as the availability of abortion and gay marriage—matters that are not assented to by absolutely everyone but that have clearly come to occupy a place in contemporary society reached by long processes of struggle and deliberation (Appiah 2010; Baker 2019).

Jeremy Davies has pointed out that there are three courses of action in facing the Anthropocene, each corresponding to a horizon of time (Davies 2018, 200) The first course and the first future are actions of environmental repair and ecological sustainability. Bad actors easily manipulate these, and even on good intentions many of these actions have ethically complex consequences. The problems of the first future are too near to see clearly. The third future, which Longtermism and Effective Altruism purport to address, is the farthest. We try to address it when we try to manage our activities for the many millennia, or hundreds of millennia, that we think the Anthropocene will occupy. But here we look too far ahead, to matters we cannot control and that distracts us from what we are actually capable of doing. The middle range “for the birth of the Anthropocene” is the sphere in which we can augment our moral personhood and nourish it in ourselves and so far as possible in others by democracy, an end to war, and the increase of social and economic justice. Without these, our personhood will become rather hollow. By striving for these, we will enter into a community of morally responsible persons wherever we shall find them. I do not know what we shall find or when, but I do think that as we make these choices our process of decision will be rather like this analysis.

What there is in our personhood that can recognize the personhood in other species is our exercise of moral responsibility toward others and the extension of that community to which we are responsible to ever wider territory. In attempting thus, one must remember that community does not necessarily require agreement or harmony. Indeed, it is particularly characteristic of democratic community, and as Chantal Mouffe reminds us, that a decent politics has a good deal of tumble and conflict in it (Mouffe 1993). Finding personhood in other species is not a matter of either applying our criteria for our self-admiration to them or of not applying these criteria. It is instead a matter of the development of our sociality so as to get ourselves to include very different others despite our disagreements. This is in a line with the moral development of human personhood itself as a moral project. When we employ personhood in his way, we follow the principle that moral authority comes out of our reasoning responses in conversation with one another and not out of the supposed correspondence of a course of action to objective truth or to a permanent and objective source of truth. This avoids the great danger of the way in which dis-anthropocentrizing moral claims, especially in urgent and rigid forms, are framed so as to pretend to speak to us from nature itself, as if from a divinity who does not deal with us as freely choosing reasoning communities of moral agents—as persons—but speaks to us as if personhood means nothing.

Our best hope is that conversation with animals and a growing knowledge of their histories will contribute to the difficult job of distinguishing the rigid from the rational so that we act as enlightened moral agents, rather than as puppets or children, in correcting our relations with animals. Recognizing the moral agency of others is a moral responsibility resting upon us if we are to be responsible actors. We will take the responsibility to honor the moral personhood of non-humans as we strive to be decent, honest, and ethical persons, through treating our kind and then all our kin in nature in right ways. When considering the many apoirias and trade-offs that grappling with biodiversity, sustainability, and interspecies ethics present, if we recognize the human kind of personhood—our moral agency founded upon historicity as interdependence developed in ways specific to humankind—as the source of our self-understanding and self-respect, we can remain able to flourish in community with other species. This is because we will then see them as moral agents and therefore as persons without losing the confidence on which rests our own moral agency. We cannot recognize moral agency personhood in other species if we deflate or abandon the condition of moral agency that our personhood requires. This same condition constrains us, separating us from entering into the self-understanding of other species; but there is no way forward other than to maintain our integrity while learning what we must in order to extend it to the inclusion of non-humans.

As with any moral obligation, the binding comes because we willingly choose to constrain our will toward a valued end. This means that part of our personhood requires responsibility. But because our moral life as a species is founded on our temporality, our personhood is a process that unfolds over time, as we wrestle with ourselves, rather than a title with which we are endowed just by virtue of being human. We are born, it is true, with moral worth by virtue of being human, and with a quantum of it we never can lose. But the moral agency of personhood is, like any agency, a practice with a history behind and ahead of the practitioner at every present moment. So, just because we are temporal, the recognition of personhood in our kind of moral personhood is a dynamic of communication and deliberation, not a logical function, that develops according to our knowledge and the urgency of affairs. The extension of our notion of personhood will take time, if it is to happen at all. As of now, we must wait while working for more knowledge and for more wisdom.

Counseling caution is not an exciting position to take. It hasn’t the glamor of novelty or the heroic pretense of the visionary. It is not likely to win applause from the fans of disruptive futures. But it is not anthropocentrism or even the Western theoretical practices that do anything; it is we, we ourselves as personal agents, who must choose what to do and he do it. How can we have the caution that care requires when we care for other species or for the Earth system if we brush aside cautious care for ourselves?