Anthro k 1nc Shells Policy
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2ac Aff BacklinesAltGenericWe are humans and looking down on animals is inevitable this makes the Alt failHayward 97 (Tim Hayward, Professor of Environmental Political Theory; Director of the Just World Institute; Director MSc International Political Theory; Convenor Fair, “Anthropocentrism: A misunderstood problem”, pg 56-57, http://timhayward.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/hayward-anthropocentrism-misunderstood-problem.pdf) But if the project of overcoming speciesism can be pursued with some expectation of success, this is not the case with the overcoming of anthropocentrism. What makes anthropocentrism unavoidable is a limitation of a quite different sort, one which cannot be overcome even in principle because it involves a non-contingent limitation on moral thinking as such. While overcoming speciesism involves a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge of relevant similarities and differences between humans and other species, the criteria of relevance will always have an ineliminable element of anthropocentrism about them. Speciesism is the arbitrary refusal to extend moral consideration to relevantly similar cases; the ineliminable element of anthropocentrism is marked by the impossibility of giving meaningful moral consideration to cases which bear no similarity to any aspect of human cases. The emphasis is on the ‘meaningful’ here: for in the abstract one could of course declare that some feature of the nonhuman world was morally valuable, despite meeting no determinate criterion of value already recognised by any human, but because the new value is completely unrelated to any existing value it will remain radically indeterminate as a guide to action. If the ultimate point of an ethic is to yield a determinate guide to human action, then, the human reference is ineliminable even when extending moral concern to nonhumans. So my argument is that one cannot know if any judgement is speciesist if one has no benchmark against which to test arbitrariness; and, more specifically, if we are concerned to avoid speciesism of humans then one must have standards of comparison between them and others. Thus features of humans remain the benchmark. As long as the valuer is a human, the very selection of criteria of value will be limited by this fact. It is this fact which precludes the possibility of a radically nonanthropocentric value scheme, if by that is meant the adoption of a set of values which are supposed to be completely unrelated to any existing human values. Any attempt to construct a radically non-anthropocentric value scheme is liable not only to be arbitrary – because founded on no certain knowledge – but also to be more insidiously anthropocentric in projecting certain values, which as a matter of fact are selected by a human, onto nonhuman beings without certain warrant for doing so. This, of course, is the error of anthropomorphism, and will inevitably, I believe, be committed in any attempt to expunge anthropocentrism altogether. But is admitting this unavoidable element of anthropocentrism not tantamount to admitting the unavoidability of human chauvinism? My claim is that it isnot. What is unavoidable is that human valuers make use of anthropocentric benchmarks; yet in doing so, they may find that in all consistency they must, for instance, give priority to vital nonhuman interests over more trivial human interests. For the human chauvinist, by contrast, interests of humans must always take precedence over the interests of nonhumans. Human chauvinism does not take human values as a benchmark of comparison, since it admits no comparison between humans and nonhumans. Human chauvinism ultimately values humansbecause they are humans. While the human chauvinist may officially claim there are criteria which provide reasons for preferring humans – such as that they have language, rationality, sociality etc. – no amount of evidence that other beings fulfil these criteria would satisfy them that they should be afforded a similar moral concern. The bottom line for the human chauvinist is that being human is a necessary and sufficient condition of moral concern. What I am pointing out as the ineliminable element of anthropocentrism is an asymmetry between humans and other species which is not the product of chauvinist prejudice. To sum up, then, what is unavoidable about anthropocentrism is precisely what makes ethics possible at all. It is a basic feature of the logic of obligation: if an ethic is a guide to action; and if a particular ethic requires an agent to make others’ ends her ends, then they become just that – the agent’s ends. This is a noncontingent but substantive limitation on any attempt to construct a completely nonanthropocentric ethic. Values are always the values of the valuer:3 so as long as the class of valuers includes human beings, human values are ineliminable. Having argued that this is unavoidable, I also want to argue that it is no bad thing. EcoCentrismA full shift to ecocentrism is not necessary, weak anthropocentrism provides many benefits – status quo solvesNorton ‘84 [1984, Bryan G. Norton is the head philosophy professor at Georgia Tech, “Anthropocentrism vs. Nonanthropocentrism,” Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthroprocentrism, pg 327-329]//AA In the final section of this paper I develop these two sources of value in nature more fully. Even there my goal is not to defend these two bases for environmental protection as embodying true claims about the value of nature-that, as I said at the outset is a larger and later task. My point is only that, within the limits set by weak anthropocentrism as here defined, there exists a framework for developing powerful reasons for protecting nature. Further, these reasons do not resemble the extractive and exploitative reasons normally associated with strong anthropocentrisrn. And they do not differ from strongly anthropocentric reasons in merely theoretical ways. Weakly anthropocentric reasoning can affect behavior as can be seen by applying it to last man situations. Suppose that human beings choose, for rational or religious reasons, to live according to an ideal of maximum harmony with nature. Suppose also that this ideal is taken seriously and that any- one who impairs that harmony (by destroying an- other species, by polluting air and water, etc.) would be judged harshly. But such an ideal need not attribute intrinsic value to natural objects, nor need the prohibitions implied by it be justified with nonanthropocentric reasoning attributing intrinsic value to nonhuman natural objects. Rather, they can be justified as being implied by the ideal of harmony with nature. This ideal, in turn, can be justified either on religious grounds referring to hu- man spiritual development or as being a fitting part of a rationally defensible world view. Indeed, there exist examples of well developed world views that exhibit these characteristics. The Hindus and jains, in proscribing the killing of in- sects, etc., show concern for their own spiritual development rather than for the actual lives of those insects. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau is careful not to attribute independent, intrinsic value to nature. Rather he believes that nature expresses a deeper spiritual reality and that humans can learn spiritual values from it. Nor should it be inferred that only spiritually oriented positions can uphold weakly anthropocentric reasons. In a post-Darwinian world, one could give rational and scientific sup- port for a world view that includes ideals of living in harmony with nature, but which involve no attribu- tions of intrinsic value to nature. Views such as those just described are weakly anthropocentric because they refer only to human val- ues, but they are not strongly so because human be- havior is limited by concerns other than those derivable from prohibitions against interfering with the satisfaction of human felt preferences. And practically speaking, the difference in behavior be- tween strong anthropocentrists and weak anthro- pocentrists of the sort just described and exemplified is very great. In particular, the reaction of these weak anthropocentrists to last man situations is un- doubtedly more similar to that of nonanthropocen- trists than to that of strong anthropocentrists. Ideals such as that of living in harmony with nature imply rules proscribing the wanton destruction of other species or ecosystems even if the human species faces imminent extinction Nor need weak anthropocentrism collapse into strong anthropocentrism. It would do so if the dichotomy between preferences and ideals were in- defensible. If all values can, ultimately, be inter- preted as satisfactions of preferences, then ideals are simply human preferences. The controversy here is reminiscent of that discussed by early utili- tarians. john Stuart Mill, for example, argued that because higher pleasures ultimately can be seen to provide greater satisfactions, there is thus only a single scale of values-preference satisfaction.” It is true that weak anthropocentrists must deny that preference satisfaction is the only measure of hu- man value. They must take human ideals seriously enough so that they can be set against preference satisfactions as a limit upon them. It is therefore no surprise that weak anthropocentrists reject the reductionistic position popular among utilitarians. Indeed, it is precisely the rejection of that reduc- tionism that allows them to steer their way between strong antliropocentrism and nonanthropocen- trism. The rejection of this reduction is, of course, a commitment that weak anthropocentrists share with nonanthropocentrists. Both believe there are values distinct from human preference satisfaction, rejecting the reduction of ideals to preferences. Since the hierarchical model forces the higher privilege to provide a standard of change for those of lower privilege, the only real way of change is to participate in movements against the preconceptions of anthropocentrism instead of staying in this debate round and “problematizing” the situation.Stets and Burke 03 (Jan E. Stets, currently Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Social Psychology Research Laboratory at the University of California, Riverside. Peter Burke, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the 2003 winner of the Cooley-Mead Award for career contributions to social psychology, “A Sociological Approach to Self and Identity.” Pp. 128- 152 in Handbook of Self and Identity, edited by Mark Leary and June Tangney. New York: Guilford., http://wat2146.ucr.edu/papers/02a.pdf) This hierarchical model also helps us understand how identities change. Identity standards of lowerlevel control systems are the outputs of higher-level control systems. In other words, when a higher-level control system behaves, it provides the reference standard to the control systems just below it. When a higher-level system brings the higher-level perceptions into alignment with the higher-level standard, it does so by changing its outputs – thereby changing lower-level standards. In this way the meanings contained in lower-level standards are altered (Burke & Cast, 1997). Further, because the overall perceptual control system is continuously operating to verify identity perceptions at all levels for identities that are activated, identity change is always going on, though at a much slower pace than behavior that alters the situation. Nevertheless, when actions cannot change the meanings in the situation to verify an identity, the identity standard itself will change toward the meanings in the situation.9 For example, Burke and Cast (1997) show that the birth of a child to a newly married couple provides a new set of meanings in the situation that is difficult to change. The consequence of this is that the gender identities of the husband and wife both change. Husbands become more masculine in their self-views while their wives become more feminine. Identity change has also been examined by Kiecolt (1994). She argues that a change occurs when a stressor such as chronic role strain or a life event disrupts valued role-identities, and among other things, people believe they can change, they see that the benefits of self-change outweigh the costs, and others provide support for their self-change. More recently, Kiecolt (2000) argues that involvement in social movements can result in change by changing one’s salience hierarchy of identities. This can be done in three ways: 1) either adding or discarding an identity, 2) changing the importance of an identity without changing the ranking of the identity (for example, the “activist” identity can become more important as one becomes more involved in a social movement, but its importance relative to other identities does not change), or 2) changing the importance and ranking of an identity. One could also change the meanings of an identity. Consistent with the idea that higher levels of the perceptual control system change more slowly, Kiecolt indicates that if social movement participation results in self-concept change, the change is gradual, not sudden. ALT fails: doesn’t address patriarchy
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