Are Gradations of Value Anthropocentric?
One objection to asserting that some entities have greater intrinsic value than others is that human beings make the judgment. This makes it, in one sense, anthropocentric. But by this definition the judgments made by the deep ecologists are equally anthropocentric. There is value in reminding us all that our judgments may be distorted by our limited perspectives, but unless it is shown that the judgments of process thinkers are more distorted than those of deep ecologists, little more is accomplished. A second objection is that those who make the judgments usually locate human beings as the most valuable of creatures. This too easily justifies giving priority to satisfying secondary human desires even when doing so conflicts with the critical needs of other creatures. Furthermore, the intrinsic value attributed to other creatures is typically a function of their similarity to us. Hence, critics of process thinkers do not see that our acknowledgment of the intrinsic value of other crea
