Environmental Ethics / Holonic Ecology

Wilber's View

Wilber's target here is what he calls "bioequality" — the dominant move in mainstream ecophilosophy, the claim that all life forms have equal value and equal worth. He credits the underlying intuition (a felt sense of the World Soul, the "Eco-Noetic Self") as genuine, but argues the flatland framing it gets expressed in is self-defeating: if all holons are equally valuable, there's no principled way to say it's worse to kill a cow than a carrot, which paralyzes any actual pragmatic environmental action. Worse, he argues, is what happens when intrinsic value gets assigned only to the web-of-life as a whole: every individual living being is then reduced to a mere strand, a means, in service of the system — which he calls "ecofascism," and treats as the ironic mirror image of the anthropocentric instrumentalizing of nature that ecophilosophy set out to oppose.

His constructive alternative, holonic ecology, distinguishes three kinds of value every holon has simultaneously. Ground-value: every holon, as a manifestation of Spirit or Emptiness, is equally and perfectly that manifestation — a carrot is no less a "perfect manifestation of Spirit" than a cow. Intrinsic (whole-)value: as a whole in its own right, a holon has value in and for itself, and — this is the load-bearing move — the greater a holon's depth (the more of the Kosmos it internally embraces), the greater its intrinsic value; an ape has more intrinsic value than a cell because it embraces more. Instrumental (part-)value: as a part of larger wholes, a holon has value for others, and the more wholes it's instrumental to, the more fundamental (though not more significant) it is — an atom is more fundamental than an ape precisely because it's a more universal constituent. The elegance of the scheme is that it lets Wilber affirm both "everything is equally sacred" and "some things matter more than others" without contradiction, by simply distinguishing which kind of value each claim is about. What's less settled is how exactly depth is to be measured and compared across radically different kinds of holons in practice — the ranking of cow over carrot is intuitive, but the general method for adjudicating harder cases (an old-growth forest vs. a single elephant, say) is asserted rather than worked out here.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Nowhere are the difficulties of the Eco camp more obvious than in its attempts to develop an environmental ethics… most approaches center predominantly on the principle of "bioequality," a reworking of the tenets of the Descending path of Plenitude (divorced and dissociated from any true Ascent).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God" (section "Environmental Ethics: Holonic Ecology")

All things and events, of whatever nature, are perfect manifestations of Spirit. No holon, whether conventionally considered high or low, sacred or profane, simple or complex, primitive or advanced, is closer or farther from Ground, and thus all holons have equal ultimate value or equal Ground-value.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God" (section "Environmental Ethics: Holonic Ecology")

As a wholeness, any holon has "whole-value." It has a value in itself, and not merely for something else… From which it follows, the greater the wholeness, the greater the intrinsic value. Wholeness-value, in other words, is the same as depth-value. The greater the depth, the greater the value.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God" (section "Environmental Ethics: Holonic Ecology")

All holons are also parts, and as a part, all holons have instrumental value (also called extrinsic value)… An atom is more fundamental than an ape. (From which it follows, as we put it earlier, the more fundamental, the less significant, and vice versa.)

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God" (section "Environmental Ethics: Holonic Ecology")

It is much better to kill a carrot than a cow, even though they are both perfect manifestations of Spirit. They both have equal Ground-value, but one has more intrinsic value because one has more depth (and therefore more consciousness).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God" (section "Environmental Ethics: Holonic Ecology")

This attempt to introduce "wholeness" actually instrumentalizes all of us, instrumentalizes each and every individual living being, because now living beings only have part value, extrinsic value, instrumental value. Holism instrumentalizes everything!

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God" (section "Environmental Ethics: Holonic Ecology")

See Also

• holons — the units this ethics assigns three kinds of value to
• The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp — the "Eco camp" whose flatland ecophilosophy this page is Wilber's alternative to
• dominator-vs-growth-hierarchy — the same defense of hierarchy-as-such against a wholesale rejection of ranking, applied here to value rather than social structure
• repression — the civilizational-neurosis diagnosis this constructive ethics is meant to help resolve
• flatland — the ontology Wilber says "bioequality" unwittingly inherits