Anthro k 1nc Shells Policy

Cede the political

The rejection of humanist values places us closer to extinction by making us unable to act, cedes the political.

In the Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders were giv-en, repeated, widely broadcast; and men, women, and children were herded into death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did not summon us to rescue. We had become inured to the reality of human suffering. We could no longer hear what the words meant or did not credit them or not enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims per-ished in the cold blankness of inhumane silence.

Especially denying, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our sense of the past. It is said that the Holocaust never happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words must be set against it. Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of cryogenic dubiety?

Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet. "The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated by Turks in 1389! n9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, de-mands the bloody revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the Kosovo charnel-house, by adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Ko-sovo is the Serbianized [*48] history of the Flood--the Serbian New Testament." n10

A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eeri-ly perverse afterbirth of violence revisited. n11

General

Anthro Inevitable

Anthropocentrism inevitable – no guarantee humans will care at all

Freeman 07(tim freeman, “environmental ethics”, http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/03.%20Anthropocentrism.pdf)

all of these philosophers share an anthropocentric viewpoint one of the great questions we shall ponder is whether an environmental ethics requires abandoning the anthropocentic viewpoint in the last selection in this chapter Wilfred Beckerman (an economist) and Joanna Pasek (a philosopher) argue that anthropocentrism is inevitable they argue that it is possible to argue for the “intrinsic value” of nature from an anthropocentric position this may seem counter-intuitive and it is not surprising that much of the development of environmental ethics begins with a critique of anthropocentrism Beckerman & Pasek argue that an anthropocentric, or “subjectivist” argument for the “intrinsic value” of nature is actually the stronger argument than an “objectivist” or nonanthropocentric argument an “objectivist” argument is that something has “intrinsic value” because it has value in-itself, independently of any human valuations the “subjective” argument is that “values cannot exist without a valuer” (84) it is thus naive to talk of “objective” values values simply are “subjective” but one can value something for how it can serve one’s own use or one can value it for its “intrinsic value” I can value the rose for the way it pleases my love or I can appreciate the beauty of the rose and still think it has value regardless of how it serves my interests I love watching and listening to the apapane outside my window and I can also regard them as having value apart from my interests but I recognize that the source of the values are subjective the authors acknowledge that the common objection to the subjectivist position is that it can slip into moral relativism if values are merely subjective then they can very from culture to culture or individual to individual and thus there would be no firm ground upon which to criticize an individual or culture that does not recognize “intrinsic” values in nature there is no guarantee that future humans will value the environment at all
Anthropocentrism is inevitable even in a world where humans are not the dominant species

Murdy ‘75[March 28, 1975, Dr. William H. Murdy was a former Dean of Oxford College, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Biology at Emory University,  “Anthropocentrism: A Modern Version,” pg 1, http://worldtracker.org/media/library/Science/Science%20Magazine/science%20magazine%201974-1975/root/data/Science%201974-1975/pdf/1975_v187_n4182/1739476.pdf]
To be anthropocentric is to affirm that mankind is to be valued more highly than other things in nature-by man. By the same logic, spiders are to be valued more highly than other things in nature-by spiders. It is proper for men to be anthropocentric and for spiders to be arachnocentric. This goes for all other living species. The following statement by Simpson (6) expresses the modern version of anthropocentrism: Man is the highest animal. The fact that he alone is capable of making such judgment is in itself part of the evidence that this decision is correct. And even if he were the lowest animal, the anthropocentric point of view would still be manifestly the only proper one to adopt for consideration of his place in the scheme of things and when seeking a guide on which to base his actions and his evaluations of them. Anthropocentrism is a pejorative in many of the articles which deal with the so-called "ecological crisis." Lynn White (7), in his widely quoted article, "The historical roots of our ecological crisis," upbraids Christianity for being the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen: Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except perhaps Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. White is right to remind us of how tragically myopic has been our exploitation of nature. However, he is wrong to infer that it is somehow wrong for man to exploit nature for "his proper ends." We must exploit nature to live. The problem lies in our difficulty to distinguish between "proper ends," which are progressive and promote human values, and "improper ends," which are retrogressive and destructive of human values. Another attitude toward nature that eschews anthropocentrism is the "Franciscan" belief in the fundamental equality of all life. In this view, man is merely one of several million different species comprising a "democracy of all God's creatures" (7). Jordan (8) states: "The time will come when civilized man will feel that the rights of all living creatures on earth are as sacred as his own." Julian Huxley (9) expresses a similar opinion: "In ethical terms, the golden rule applies to man's relations with nature as well as to relations between human beings." If we affirm that all species have "equal rights," or, that the rights of man are not of greater value than the rights of other species, how should it affect our behavior toward nature? The golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them like-wise," is a moral axiom which requires reciprocity among ethicizing beings. How does such a principle apply to nonethicizing forms of life which cannot reciprocate? The callous, wanton destruction of life is surely not a proper end for man, but what about our destruction of pathogenic bacteria, in order that we might remain healthy, or our destruction of plant and animal life, in order that we might be nourished? To affirm that men, dogs, and cats have more rights than plants, in-sects, and bacteria is a belief that species do not have equal rights. If, however, we believe in the equality of all species, none should be genetically manipulated or killed for the exclusive benefit of another. To ascribe value to things of nature as they benefit man is to regard them as instruments to man's survival or well-being. This is an anthropocentric point of view. As knowledge of our dependent relationships with nature grows, we place instrumental value on an ever greater variety of things.

Stewardship Good

The alternative is an ethic of biocentrism - A complete rejection of anthropocentrism is necessary. Reject the aff due to their anthropocentric dominion of the Ocean – other wise humans claiming animals as a resource becomes inevitable

Sanbonmatsu ’11. (John Sanbonmatsu—Professor of Philosophy, Worcester Polytechnic Institue—“Critical Theory and Animal Liberation” – 2011)

Of course, humans seize every opportunity to claim special moral qualities, placing themselves above brutal nature and the “beasts that populate it. Yet while it is no great intellectual triumph for humans to establish their primacy over nature—they have done so for millennia—the real question turns on the exact character that primacy assumes as it is historically played out. In the present context, “dominion” (as spelled out in Genesis and other texts) has meant exploitation and abuse, that is, domination largely bereft if positive ethical content – although some recent works (for example Matthew Scully’s Dominion) have sought to ground a defense of animal rights in religion. A different kind of human obligation would point in the direction of stewardship, calling attention to equity, balance, ecological sustainability, and coexistence between humans and the natural world. So far, however, human beings have done little to distance themselves from a brutal or Hobbesian state of nature having repeatedly proven themselves the most destructive and murderous of all creatures. The view of natural relations adopted here derives from Regan’s philosophical work – namely that all sentient being has inalienable rights to be free of pain and suffering at the hands of humans. For Regan, this line of thinking holds to several interrelated premises: (1) no moral justification exists for overriding animal interests in order to serve “higher interests”; (2) what matters is not specific intellectual or communication skills but rather the capacity to experience pain, suffering and loss; (3) while much of nature is inescapably used by humans as resources to satisfy material and other needs, this logic should not extend to other sentient beings; (4) humans ought to be stewards of nature and other species within it to the extent possible; and (5) human and animal interests are closely bound together within the same social and historical processes.

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