Blog12th December 2024
When reflecting on my early experiences in bioethics from nearly a decade ago, I was struck by the opportunity for novices to receive orthodoxies as curiosities.
One such curiosity for me was how we define the ‘bio’ in bioethics. As a rule, the field of bioethics normally understands ‘health’ as applying to humans, as if we and our choices exist in isolation from the wider biotic community. This struck me as odd, not only because of the huge burden our health decisions have on non-human animals, but also because these decisions have a direct effect on the environment. Why, then, was viewing our human health in relation to our interactions with other animals or the wider environment a minority position?
Earlier this year, I chaired the Nuffield Council on Bioethics’ (NCOB) first Environment and Health workshop. Emerging from the rich discussions was a sense of how the landscape of bioethics has shifted since the Covid-19 pandemic.
The pandemic was an object lesson in biological continuity and ecological interdependence – the undeniable and irreversible relationality between life-forms (humans included), food chains (and our food systems), ecological communities, and the environment. Yet our strategic response was and still is fundamentally anthropocentric. Any opportunity to routinely frame health as intrinsically interconnected with other species, the environment, and the climate was missed.
Despite this, the NCOB workshop felt like a progressive moment for bioethics – a convening of expertise across climate change, health, environmental ethics, and animal welfare, not only as a consultative process but as part of a new outlook. Many attendees argued that it is no longer reasonable to approach questions of health within a narrow set of human priorities. Instead, there was a call for something like a multispecies lens. But how easy and effective might this expanded approach be? As noted by political philosopher Danielle Celermajer, the unique challenges of health and environment are “in tension with and embedded in structures of human exceptionalism”. Given these limitations, the success of applying a more expansive lens depends, in part, on how we conceive of and prioritise scales in nature.
When seeking to understand what is driving a pandemic, an epidemiologist will interrogate systems and scales to understand the causal flow. From an ethics perspective, we may seek out and respond to impacts and responsibilities at different levels of human action and organisation. But while understanding the causal chain is a priority for embedding both ethics and solutions, moving through systems and scales is also fundamental to the logics of moral principles.
Health begins and ends in the individual biological body. The point of entry for a pathogen, for example, is through the individual. From there we might move to an epidemic at the community level or a pandemic at the global level. When we make decisions at an international level to overcome a pandemic, human behaviour can have impacts at the planetary scale, through emissions or pollution, for example. These societal and planetary effects, in unbreakable circularity, swing down again to impact the health of the individual body of a biological being (human or non-human), and thus the cycle continues.
What is important to note, however, is that this biological flow is mirrored in the flux of ethics. In human health, we are grounded in the inherent worth and standing of the individual human being, which is also the primary site of health impacts. From this fundamental symmetry, we then move outwards and upwards through other levels where moral challenges arise, embedding ethics and safeguards along the way. Throughout this ethical journey, our moral compass is constructed around the poles of society and the individual, with the shared understanding that core principles like justice and autonomy sit upon the moral foundation of the human individual.
When adopting a so-called multispecies lens, then, it is critical to acknowledge that this foundation is missing. Despite the science on consciousness, sentience, and agency in a wide range of non-human animals robustly bolstering the calls for moral subjecthood, and recent moves within philosophy to recognise the dignity of other animals and their intrinsic worth, this thinking has yet to establish itself in systems that routinely objectify or exploit animals and nature. In the absence of moral standing or sufficient protections for other species, it is almost impossible to achieve a similar symmetry when adopting a multispecies approach to bioethics. Instead, our point of entry when we hope to include other life-forms and the environment in our bioethical approach is almost always at the ecosystem or planetary scale, which, for the most part, determines that our perspective will remain an anthropocentric one.
We can see this novelty in the two most common frameworks that encourage societies and institutions to see human health as situated alongside other species and the environment: One Health and Planetary Health. Both support recognition of our interdependence, the former by highlighting, for example, the pathways of zoonoses, and the latter through incorporation of climate science. Yet, in either framework, the scales of nature we prioritise are those of the planetary or ecosystems, and without necessarily seeing these as having any inherent value. Biological individuals are circumvented altogether. Therefore, these approaches may expand our knowledge base but without fundamentally altering our moral foundations.
Amid this uncertainty, bioethics will likely continue to reinforce anthropocentrism, for better or for worse. And there are good grounds for believing this could fall out for the worse. The pandemic made the point that thinking about the ‘bio’ in bioethics in broader terms has always been a better fit for the common dependencies and vulnerabilities of biological life-forms, including our mutual reliance on a healthy environment and our roles in shaping one. Climate change will offer an even more formidable lesson. Will bioethics take up the challenge to transform itself to meet the moment?