Paul Taylor

Last Thursday in Philosophy we went over a life-centered envornmentalist named Paul Taylor, who does not believe in anthropocentricism. Basically he believes that all species that exist .. even useless polar bears .. play a vital role in nature. His argument is that every species has intrinsic value and deserves concern and consideration of all moral agents. Since he believes that everything is inherantly valuable, this is a Kantian argument. His faults are, though, that his reasons are normative and cannot be measure emperically. He assumes that everything plays a role in nature without any true evidence and refuses to consider the teleological fact that biologically everything's purpose is to breed and keep their species alive. His biocentric outlook is that we are all part of a complex web and losing a species would cause a domino effect and result in the downfall of life. I do not believe in this because we lose species all the time and we are not affected by it. We lost the dinosaurs ages ago and we're fine. We would be fine wtihout seagulls, wouldn't we?