The Biocentrist Thinker Type

What is a Biocentrist?

Most ethical traditions draw a circle around the beings that count morally, and for most of history that circle has been drawn tightly around human beings. Some thinkers have argued for widening it to include the animals that can suffer. The Biocentrist argues for widening it further still, as wide as life itself.

The Biocentrist thinker type, one of the eighteen archetypes mapped by the Kwokka quiz, holds that all living things have inherent moral worth, not just humans, and not only the sentient creatures, but every organism. Each living thing, on the biocentric view, has a good of its own, a way that its life can go well or badly for it, and that is enough to make it worthy of moral consideration. The Biocentrist rejects the assumption that nature exists merely for human use, and brings to the living world a reverence, and a humility about humanity's place in it, that anthropocentric thinking lacks.

The Roots of Biocentrism

Biocentrism is a position in environmental ethics, with a clear philosophical lineage.

Schweitzer and reverence for life

An early and influential expression came from Albert Schweitzer, whose ethic of reverence for life held that the will to live is present in every creature, and that all life is therefore to be revered and not casually harmed.

Paul Taylor and respect for nature

The major systematic statement is Paul Taylor's. He argued that each living thing is a teleological centre of life, a being with a good of its own that it is pursuing, and that this gives every organism, not merely the sentient ones, genuine inherent worth.

The widening circle

Biocentrism is best understood as one stage in a widening of the moral circle: from anthropocentrism, which counts only humans, through the view that all sentient beings count, to biocentrism, which counts every living individual, and on toward ecocentrism, which values whole ecosystems.

Reverence for Life

The move that defines the Biocentrist is the extension of inherent moral worth beyond its usual boundary. To say a thing has inherent worth is to say it matters in itself, and not merely because it is useful to someone else. The anthropocentrist grants this to human beings alone. The Biocentrist grants it to every living thing.

The reasoning rests on a simple but powerful observation. Every living organism, however humble, is a teleological centre of life: it has a direction, a good of its own, a way that things can go well or badly for it. A tree can flourish or be stunted. An insect can thrive or fail. This good is the organism's own, pursued for its own sake, not assigned to it by human interest. And once you see that a being has a good of its own, the Biocentrist argues, you have already found the thing that makes it worthy of moral consideration.

From this follows the biocentric stance: a reverence for life as such, including the unglamorous and the unloved kinds, the weed as well as the rose, the beetle as well as the bird. It follows, too, a deep humility. If worth is spread across all of life, then humanity is one species of morally considerable being among a great many, not the sole point of the whole. The Biocentrist thinker is the one who feels that humility, and who treats a harm to the living world as a genuine moral matter and not merely a practical or aesthetic one.

How To Tell If You're a Biocentrist

Read these sideways and notice which ones produce a quiet yes.

1. 01You believe living things have worth in themselves, not merely worth as resources for human beings.
2. 02You feel a genuine moral pull toward the non-human living world, the unglamorous and the unloved as much as the charismatic.
3. 03You are uneasy with the assumption that nature exists simply for human use.
4. 04You think every living thing has, in some real sense, a good of its own and a stake in its own flourishing.
5. 05You believe the moral circle has been drawn too narrowly, and should include more than the human, and more than the merely sentient.
6. 06You feel a reverence in the presence of life as such, even very humble life.
7. 07You think humanity's sense of its own central importance is a kind of moral blind spot.
8. 08You believe a harm to the living world is a genuine moral matter, not just a practical or aesthetic one.

If three or more of those landed, you carry a strong Biocentrist component, whatever the full quiz returns.

The Strengths of the Biocentrist Mind

The Biocentrist's gifts are the gifts of a mind that has widened its circle of care by principle.

A wide and consistent moral circle.

The Biocentrist extends moral concern by a clear principle, life itself, rather than by what humans happen to find appealing, and so is consistent where sentiment is selective.

Reverence and humility.

The Biocentrist holds humanity's place in proportion, as one kind of living being among many, and that humility is a genuine corrective to a deep-seated human arrogance.

Attention to the overlooked.

Because worth is not reserved for the charismatic, the Biocentrist notices and values the humble and the unglamorous life that most outlooks ignore entirely.

A principled basis for care.

The Biocentrist's environmental concern is not mere feeling. It rests on a reasoned account of why the living world matters, which makes it steady and defensible.

Freedom from the human blind spot.

The Biocentrist is not trapped in pure anthropocentrism, and so can see moral facts about the living world that a human-only ethics is structurally unable to register.

The Shadow Side: When Biocentrism Goes Wrong

The Biocentrist's shadow is the difficulty of a principle that, taken straight, is very hard to live by.

The livability problem.

If all life has inherent worth, then simply existing, eating, building, moving, constantly harms other living things. A biocentrism with no clear way to weigh competing claims can become paralysing, or a source of constant guilt.

Difficulty prioritising.

Pressed hard, biocentrism struggles with comparison. If every organism has worth, the Biocentrist needs a principled way to weigh a human life against a microbe's, and that is genuinely hard to supply.

Seeming to devalue the human.

In decentring humanity, the Biocentrist can be heard, fairly or not, as ranking human beings lower, and that perception can cost them a hearing they deserve.

Impracticality about unavoidable harm.

Some harm to other life is simply unavoidable. A biocentrism that cannot accept this gracefully can become absolutist about costs that no one could actually avoid.

The drift to misanthropy.

A reverence for life-in-general can curdle, in its unhealthy form, into a low and bitter view of humanity in particular, which is a betrayal of the principle, since humans are living things too.

Biocentrism in Thought

Biocentrism's clearest figures are the thinkers who argued the moral circle outward to all of life.

Albert Schweitzer

is the example of biocentrism as a felt ethic. His principle of reverence for life held that the will to live in every creature commands respect, and gave the outlook a memorable and humane core.

Paul Taylor

is the example of biocentrism made rigorous. His systematic argument that each organism is a teleological centre of life with a good of its own gave the position its strongest philosophical statement.

The environmental ethics tradition

is the example of the wider debate. The sustained argument over how far the moral circle should extend, from humans, to sentient animals, to all life, is the conversation biocentrism belongs to and helped shape.

The case against anthropocentrism

is the example as a turning point. Biocentrism is, at heart, the considered rejection of the long-standing assumption that human beings are the sole bearers of moral worth.

In culture, the biocentric sensibility appears in the long tradition of writing and art that decentres the human and extends kinship and care to the whole living world, the perspective that asks us to see ourselves as members of life's community rather than its masters.

Biocentrist Careers and Working Life

Biocentrist instincts are at home in conservation and ecology, in environmental ethics, law, and policy, in botany and the life sciences, in veterinary and animal-care work, and in sustainable land management, all fields whose work touches the wellbeing of the non-human living world.

The type also does well in education about the living world, in nature writing and communication, and in any role concerned with widening how a society values and treats the life around it.

Worst-fit work is the extractive industry or any role premised on treating the living world purely as raw material, where the Biocentrist feels they are being asked to act against their deepest conviction.

A note specific to the type: the Biocentrist's contribution is strongest when the wide principle is paired with a workable way of weighing competing claims. Reverence for all life is a powerful starting point, and it does the most good when it is matched with honest, practical judgement about the unavoidable trade-offs of actually living in the world.

Biocentrist Relationships

The Biocentrist brings a wide and gentle compassion to a relationship, a reverent attentiveness, and a humility that makes them generous and unusually capable of noticing and valuing what others overlook. A partner is loved by someone whose care is principled and steady.

The friction point is subtle. A care extended so evenly across all of life can sometimes leave a partner wanting more of the particular, partial, central love that a relationship specifically needs, the sense of being not one worthy being among many, but the one. And the Biocentrist's scruple about unavoidable harms can, at its most intense, be wearing to live alongside.

There is also the matter of being heard to value the human less. A partner can occasionally feel that, in the Biocentrist's wide moral vision, the human, and so they themselves, has been quietly decentred.

The person who will love a Biocentrist well shares their reverence for the living world, and can be reassured, in turn, that the wide circle and the deep particular love are not rivals: that a reverence for life includes, with full force, this one life and this one beloved person.

Common Misconceptions About Biocentrists

Biocentrism is not the claim that humans do not matter.

It is the claim that humans are not the only things that matter. Human beings retain full moral worth in a biocentric ethic, alongside the rest of the living world rather than above it.

Biocentrism is not the same as ecocentrism.

Biocentrism centres the inherent worth of each individual living organism. Ecocentrism centres whole ecosystems, species, and the land. They are related but distinct positions in environmental ethics.

Biocentrism need not mean every life is equal in every situation.

Many biocentric ethics include principles for weighing competing claims. Holding that all life has inherent worth is not the same as holding that all lives count equally in every decision.

Biocentrism is not anti-human at its core.

It can curdle into misanthropy, which is its shadow, but the considered position simply widens the moral circle. Humans, as living things, are inside that circle, not outside it.

Biocentrism is not mere sentimentality about nature.

It is a reasoned position in ethics, resting on an argument about the proper scope of moral worth, not just an affectionate feeling toward the natural world.

Biocentrist vs Other Thinker Types

The Biocentrist is clarified by contrast with the types that draw the circle of worth differently.

Biocentrist vs Ecologist.

Close kin, with a clarifying difference. The Ecologist thinks in systems, webs, and interdependence, and centres the health of the whole. The Biocentrist centres the inherent moral worth of each individual living organism. One reveres the web, the other reveres each strand of it.

Biocentrist vs Humanitarian.

Both widen the moral circle, and stop in different places. The Humanitarian's circle is all of humanity. The Biocentrist's is all of life. They share the impulse to extend moral concern, and differ on where it reaches.

Biocentrist vs Transhumanist.

A sharp contrast of focus. The Transhumanist is intensely concerned with the human and its enhancement, and tends to treat the rest of nature as material. The Biocentrist decentres the human entirely and reveres all life as it already is.

Biocentrist vs Atomist.

A contrast of how the living world is seen. The Atomist's reductive gaze tends to see an organism as an arrangement of parts and the living world as mechanism. The Biocentrist sees each organism as a centre of value, with a good of its own.