Today i received a formal notification that my abstract "Biosemiotics and animal ethics" has been accepted for oral presentation at the second Minding Animals conference, which is to take place in Utrecht, the Netherlands, July 3-6.
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BIOSEMIOTICS AND ANIMAL ETHICS
Morten Tønnessen
In «Meaning Matters: The Biosemiotic Basis of
Bioethics» (Biosemiotics, published
online October 15 2011), Jonathan Beever suggests that “Biosemiotics
has the empirical potential to avoid transcendent explanations of morally
relevant properties. Furthermore, it offers an account of the source and scope
of value that is foundational to popular accounts such as those based on
sentience.” This is because biosemiotics as a scientific discipline or approach
interprets living systems as sign systems, and is focused on investigating the
origin, emergence and development of meaning and of meaning-making at various
levels of biological organization. A fundamental concept in biosemiotics is
that of the Umwelt, introduced by the
Baltic-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) in 1909 and further
developed through a series of works of his which are all of foundational
significance for Biosemiotics, noteworthy Theoretical
Biology (1920, 1928), A Stroll Through
the Worlds of Animals and Men (1934) and Theory of Meaning (1940). According to conflicting contemporary
interpretations, the Umwelt is either the experiential world (subjective world,
phenomenal world) of animals at large, of animals with a nervous system
(including or excluding humans), or of any living creature whatsoever. The
Umwelt is often portrayed as species-specific, but I have argued that the term
and model of the Umwelt can be applied from any level reaching from the
individual organism via populations and species to possibly even higher taxa. I
am further aiming to develop the Umwelt notion as applicable within the human
realm by specifying it in various aspects, including by developing a tripartite
model of the (human) Umwelt.
In this paper I will review Beever’s approach
to biosemiotics as foundational for bioethics with a particular emphasis on
animal ethics, and present developments of my own approach to the same topic. My
approach was first presented in the 2003 article «Umwelt ethics» (Sign Systems Studies 31 (1): 281-299), which is in large measure an Uexküllian
interpretation of the deep ecology platform – and one out of three early
dealings with biosemiotics’ relevance for ethics treated by Beever in his
recent article. In that article I stated that “[t]he reason why it makes sense
to regard all semiotic agents […] as moral subjects, is that in respect to
these entities, our actions make a difference. Only for semiotic agents can our
actions ultimately appear as signs that influence their well-being. In capacity
of meaning-utilizers, all semiotic agents, be it the simplest creature, are
able to distinguish between what they need and what is irrelevant or harmful to
them.” I further theorized: “But why regard higher-level bio-ontological
entities as moral subjects? Because a living being is not an isolated incident.
In a profound sense, a subject is what it relates to. The contrapuntal relations
that it takes part in do, largely, define what being this subject is all about.
The individual self branch[es] off into the society of phenomenal subjects and
into the phenomenal world, it is already social, already worldly, already
more-than-individual. You cannot really value a subject without at the same
time valuing the web of contrapuntal relations that it takes part in.”
There is no consensus on the ontological and
epistemological status of the Umwelt in the biosemiotic community, and even
less so on ethical matters (which are essential to some and anathema to
others). Nevertheless, the prospective of biosemiotics as foundational for
animal ethics is well worth inquiring into. Though I might disagree with Beever
on his apparent gradualism with regard to moral standing, I definitively see a
common project in his quest for a biosemiotic ethic.
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