¹ My description of environmental ethics has, of necessity, been very brief. For recent book-length introductions to the field, see, for example: Attfield, R., Environmental Ethics: an Overview for the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2003)Google Scholar; Benson, J., Environmental Ethics: an Introduction with Readings (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar; Jamieson, D. (ed.), A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)Google Scholar; Schmidtz, D. and Willott, E. (eds.), Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Zimmerman, M.E. (ed.), Environmental Philosophy: from Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (NJ: Prentice Hall, Third Edition, 2001).Google Scholar

² Wading into the debate over which entities have independent moral status is a convenient way of seeing how the specific philosophical position in which we are principally interested here gains its plausibility. The debate in question is complex, however, and I cannot do anything like proper justice to it here. Indeed, I shall do no more than touch on a small sub-set of the myriad issues and, aside from our target view, I shall content myself with greatly simplified versions of the alternative positions discussed. Anyone whose interest is aroused may follow up the details in the introductions to environmental ethics listed in note 1.

³ Another way of extending independent moral status is to be a holist, and to hold that certain environmental wholes (e.g. species, ecosystems, the Earth) are morally considerable in their own right. Holism will not concern us in this paper. The introductions to environmental ethics listed in note 1 all discuss holism at some point.

⁴ Of course, someone who holds that each individual living thing is morally considerable in its own right isn't thereby committed to the thought that we would never be justified in harming any living thing, but only to the thought that when one is deciding upon a course of action, the independent needs and interests of each living thing affected by that decision must be taken into account.

⁵ See Taylor, P. W., Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Taylor, P. W., ‘The Ethics of Respect for Nature’, Environmental Ethics, 3, No. 3 (1981), 192–218Google Scholar, reprinted in Environmental Philosophy: from Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, Zimmerman, M.E. (ed.) (NJ: Prentice Hall, Third Edition, 2001), 71–86Google Scholar. To be precise, Taylor restricts the application of his biocentric individualist framework to wild organisms, and so suggests that the moral status of domesticated organisms is a separate issue. However, this qualification is a questionable wrinkle that we can simply ignore. For a prior and less sophisticated example of biocentric individualism, see Schweitzer's, Albert ‘reverence for life,’ as developed in his Cultural Philosophy II: Civilization and Ethics (London: A. and C. Black, 1929, Translated by Naish, John from the 1923 German text)Google Scholar. For a biocentric position that builds on Taylor's work, see Sterba, J., ‘From Biocentric Individualism to Biocentric Pluralism’, Environmental Ethics, 17, No. 2 (1995), 191–207.Google Scholar

⁶ Respect for Nature, op. cit. note 3, 66.

⁷ For Taylor, being an individual living thing may not quite constitute a necessary condition for an entity to have a good of its own. Parenthetically he raises the issue of artificial intelligence, and resolves to remain openminded about a possible future in which we feel compelled to say of a robot that it genuinely has a good of its own, independently of its designer's purposes. Taylor's position here is not quite clear. If he were prepared to say that such a robot were literally alive, then he might hold that being an individual thing is a necessary condition for an entity to have a good of its own. But, in the following passage, Taylor hesitates to extend the concept of life to robots, and suggests that a different system of ethics might be required in such a case: ‘If mechanisms (organisms?) of artificial intelligence were ever to be produced, another system of ethics might have to be applied to the treatment of such entities by moral agents’ (Respect for Nature, op. cit. note 3, 125, emphasis added).

⁸ Respect for Nature, op. cit. note 3, 68.

⁹ Aristotle, , ‘De Anima (On the Soul)’, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Barnes, J. (ed.) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984, Revised Oxford Translation, Volume 1), 641–92.Google Scholar The brief analysis of the psuche which I include here draws, in part, on the following paper of mine: Wheeler, M., ‘Cognition's Coming Home: the Reunion of Life and Mind’, Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life, Husbands, P. and Harvey, I. (eds.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 10–19. That paper constitutes a very different philosophical project (the goal of which is to show that the discipline of artificial life has the credentials to be the intellectual core of a distinctively biological cognitive science, one which holds that life and mind share a common set of organizational principles). Nevertheless, in that work I pursue issues that surface again here. In particular, my later discussions in this paper of (i) the Aristotelian nature of certain recent self-organization-based accounts of biological form and (ii) the implications of Kauffman's N-K model draw, in part, on that previous investigation.Google Scholar

¹⁰ ‘De Anima’ op. cit. note 9, Book 3, chapter 5. For discussion, see, for example, Wilkes', K. V. ‘Final Embarrassed Postscript’ (her words not mine) in her ‘Psuche versus the Mind’, Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Nussbaum, M. C. and Oksenberg Rorty, A. (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 109–127.Google Scholar

¹¹ ‘De Anima’ op. cit. note 9, Book 2, chapter 4, 415; p. 661 in the cited edition.

¹² Here I am ignoring all sorts of nuances and difficulties. For example, it is clear that while the canonical example of a form (a statue's shape) allows form to be interpretable as structure, other examples (an axe's capacity to chop, an eye's capacity to see) somehow involve an additional notion of function. My use of the phrase ‘distinctive mode of organization’ is supposed to fudge this distinction (which is why I called my characterization a ‘first approximation’). The issue of form and function (and so functionalism) in Aristotle is now an industry in Aristotelian scholarship. (See many of the papers in the aforementioned Nussbaum and Oksenberg Rorty collection on De Anima. For an evolutionarily oriented take on the issue, see my ‘Cognition's Coming Home: the Reunion of Life and Mind’, op. cit. note 9.) In addition, Aristotle himself characterizes the relationship between form and matter in a different way when he turns from a non-biological to a biological context. Roughly, he suggests that the matter of a statue is only contingently enformed by its shape, whereas the organic body is essentially enformed by the relevant psuche. See, famously, Ackrill, J. L., ‘Aristotle's Definitions of Psuche’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 73 (1972–1973), 119–33.Google Scholar For one response to this problem, see Shields, C., ‘Aristotle's Psychology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), URL http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2004/entries/aristotle-psychologyGoogle Scholar

¹³ Charles, D., Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

¹⁴ See Code, A. and Moravcsik, J., ‘Explaining Various Forms of Living’,Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Nussbaum, M. C. and Oksenberg Rorty, A. (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 138–41.Google Scholar

¹⁵ ‘De Anima’ op. cit. note 9, Book 3, chapter 9, 432; p. 688 in the cited edition.

¹⁶ I should confess that Aristotle's account of the psuche is not quite as straightforward as I have made out in the main text. For one thing, he gives different master-lists of life-capacities in different places. For another, there are exegetical disputes among scholars about exactly how the various life-capacities ought to be divided-up. Finally, the relationship of presupposition may not always be as straightforward as I have suggested. These admissions need not concern us here, however, because these fine-grained details of the psuche, while important in other contexts, do not bear on the argument of this paper. For a systematic analysis of the structure of the psuche, see Matthews, G. B., ‘De Anima 2. 2–4 and the Meaning of Life’, Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Nussbaum, M. C. and Oksenberg Rorty, A. (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 185–93.Google Scholar Reprinted as ‘Aristotle on Life,’ The Philosophy of Artificial Life, Boden, M. A. (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 304–13.Google Scholar

¹⁷ This point is nicely made by Des Jardins. See Des Jardins, J. R., Environmental Ethics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2001), 24–5.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Sober, E., ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’, Philosophy of Science 47 (1980), 350–83Google Scholar; reprinted in Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology Sober, E. (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994, second edition, from which page numbers are taken), 16–89.Google Scholar See also Sober, E., ‘Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism’, The Preservation of Species: the Value of Biological Diversity, Norton, B. (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 173–95Google Scholar; reprinted in Environmental Ethics, Elliott, R. (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 226–47Google Scholar. In the latter paper, Sober argues that some positions in environmental ethics are problematic because they implicitly endorse the natural state model. More on this in note 25 below.

¹⁹ This Aristotelian gloss on Newton's first law of motion is also to be found in Sober; see Sober, ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’, op. cit. note 18, 168–9.

²⁰ To keep everything above board, I should confess that there is a tension between Taylor's biocentric individualism and a Darwinized teleology. Taylor often writes of organisms as teleological centres of life. This locution signals the belief (a component of the biocentric outlook, see main text) that each organism is a unique individual pursuing its speciesspecific good in its own way. In unpacking this idea Taylor explicitly resists a move that might seem to be on the cards following the proposed Darwinization of teleology, namely to identify the concept of an organism realizing its own good with the concept of Darwinian fitness (See Respect for Nature, op. cit. note 3, 121, footnote 7.) Taylor points out that some individual organisms (e.g. some social insects) sacrifice their lives (and thus their own goods) to enhance the probability that their genes will survive into future generations (thus increasing their inclusive fitness), and he observes that some human beings freely choose to forego having children (thus reducing their fitness) in order, as they see things, to realize a good life.

²¹ Mayr, Ernst, ‘Typological versus Population Thinking’, in his Evolution and the Diversity of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 26–9Google Scholar; reprinted in Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, Sober, E. (ed.) (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1994, second edition, from which page numbers are taken), 157–60.Google Scholar

²² Op. cit. note 21, 158. Mayr's analysis gives us a template for how to explain biological nature. However, in the paper in question there is, intertwined with this explanatory template, a picture of the different metaphysical commitments that underlie typological and population thinking respectively. Mayr argues that for the typological thinker types are real while individual variation is an illusion, whereas for the population thinker varying individuals are real while ‘types’ (understood as statistical abstractions, as averages over populations of individuals) are not. Sober, rightly in my view, rejects both halves of this claim. (See Sober, ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’, op. cit. note 18.) In the present context Mayr's questionable metaphysical picture need not be a cause for concern. His key insight concerning the explanatory priority of individual variation in population thinking does not depend on the dubious metaphysical window-dressing he supplies, and so may be formulated without it (which is what I have endeavoured to do in the main text). I take it that this is Sober's view also.

²³ Lewontin, R., ‘The Organism as the Subject and Object of Evolution’, Scientia 118 (1983), 63–82.Google Scholar

²⁴ My brief analysis of Drosophila morphogenesis that follows is, in essence, the local application of a general theoretical analysis, advanced by Sober, of the different ways in which natural state thinking and population thinking approach development; see his ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’, op. cit. note 18. In that paper Sober considers, only to reject, a number of different moves designed to reduce the tension between the natural state model and population thinking.

²⁵ As mentioned above, in his paper ‘Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism’ (op. cit. note 18, 233–40), Sober traces certain difficulties facing some environmentalist positions to their implicit adoption of the natural state model. Sober's target is the very general claim, plausibly at work in a number of environmentalist positions, that what is morally reprehensible about an action that frustrates an organism's endogenous developmental tendency to reach its natural state is that any such action places the organism concerned in an unnatural state. As Sober points out, once development is conceptualized on the population biology model, the idea that any one phenotype is the only natural one is deeply problematic. The worry about neo-Aristotelian environmentalism that I present here clearly reprises Sober's critique in certain respects, although I have endeavoured to add fuel to the fire by showing in detail exactly how that natural state model underlies the detailed neo-Aristotelian structure of one prominent environmental-ethical framework. More importantly, as we shall see, I think the natural state model lives to fight another day, whereas Sober doesn't.

²⁶ I am not the only person to have claimed recently that modern biological science is inadvertently rediscovering supposedly discarded Aristotelian concepts and principles. For example, Denis Walsh has been arguing that contemporary evolutionary developmental biology explains why organisms have the particular phenotypes they do (and in particular, the organismal capacities that underlie the evolvability of organismal lineages) by appealing to a reciprocal relation between the goal-directed plasticity of organisms and the causal powers of their underlying developmental systems. According to Walsh, this reciprocal arrangement maps onto, and, in the end, plays the same fundamental explanatory role as, the kind of interactive unity between a biological form and its realizing matter that constitutes an Aristotelian organismal nature. See D. Walsh, ‘Evolutionary Essentialism’, unpublished conference paper given at Teleology, Ancient and Modern, University of Edinburgh, 16–18 August 2004. Although the analysis that follows in this paper exploits different aspects of Aristotelian philosophy of biology and of contemporary developmental biology, it is clearly an overlapping and complementary approach.

²⁷ For seminal appeals to self-organization in biology, see, for example: Goodwin, B., How the Leopard Changed its Spots: the Evolution of Complexity (London: Phoenix, 1994)Google Scholar; Kauffman, S., The Origins or Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. For typically lively and incisive discussion, see Maynard Smith, J., Shaping Life: Genes, Embryos and Evolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998).Google Scholar

²⁸ Op. cit. note 27, 105–19. I have used this example a number of times before to introduce the idea of self-organization in biological development, but then it is such a good example. See, for example, Wheeler, M., ‘Do Genes Code for Traits?’, Philosophical Dimensions of Logic and Science: Selected Contributed Papers from the 11th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Rojszczak, A., Cachro, J. and Kurczewski, G. (eds.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 151–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ Lennox, J., ‘Kinds, Forms of Kinds, and the More and the Less in Aristotle's Biology’, in his Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 162Google Scholar.

³⁰ Goodwin is one source for this conceptualization of how genes contribute to development. As he puts it: ‘During reproduction, each species produces gametes with genes defining parameters that specify what morphogenetic trajectory the zygote will follow’ (op. cit. note 27, 102). For further discussion, see M. Wheeler, ‘Do Genes Code for Traits?’ (op. cit. note 28).

³¹ ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’ op. cit. note 18, 179 (original emphasis).

³² ‘Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism’ op. cit. note 18, 179.

³³ See Crawford, C., ‘Environments and Adaptations: Then and Now’, Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas, Issues, and Applications, Crawford, C. and Krebs, D. L. (eds.) (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), 275–302.Google Scholar

³⁴ See, for example, Frede, M., ‘On Aristotle's Conception of the Soul’, Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Nussbaum, M. C. and Oksenberg Rorty, A. (eds.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 93–107.Google Scholar

³⁵ See, for example, Thelen, E. and Smith, L. B., A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 62.Google Scholar

³⁶ Kauffman, S., The Origins or Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution,Google ScholarPubMed op. cit. note 27.

³⁷ Burian, R. M. and Richardson, R. C., ‘Form and Order in Evolutionary Biology’, PSA 1990: Proceedings of the 1990 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association ii, Fine, A., Forbes, M., and Wessels, L. (eds.) (East Lancing, Mich., 1991), 267–87Google Scholar. Reprinted in The Philosophy of Artificial Life, M. A. Boden (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 146–72.

³⁸ Harvey, I. and Bossomaier, T., ‘Time Out of Joint: Attractors in Asynchronous Random Boolean Networks’, Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life, Husbands, P. and Harvey, I. (eds.) (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997), 67–75.Google Scholar

³⁹ For important discussions many thanks to Denis Walsh, Matthew Elton, Timothy Chappell, and audiences at the University of Dundee and the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London.