In the LA Review of Books, Dominic Pettman has this review of Michael Marder’s recent book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. In the book, to quote the review, Marder “not only attempts to conceive of and communicate what we might call the ill-understood and under-appreciated plantness of plants, but also to hold the plant up as an aspirational role model, one which operates in stark contrast to our own self-centered activities.” It’s a little difficult to tell just how firmly Pettman’s tongue is located in his cheek in this review–or perhaps it’s stamen-in-pistil–in this one. Judge for yourselves. (Kudos to Pettman for quoting from Withnail and I, by the way–specifically, Monty’s line that flowers are “mere prostitutes for the bees.”)
Incidentally, for some reason the review motivated me to do a search for the number of law review articles found on Westlaw that use the word “alterity.” The answer is 366. (Most of them, however, seem to come from interdisciplinary journals and European reviews, not main or secondary American law reviews.) Is it terribly wrong of me to think that that’s about 300 too many?
Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 7, 2013 at 09:46 AM
Comments
There is a wonderful (‘serious’) consideration of plants within a philosophy of ecology/environmentalism (the latter broader in scope than the former) generally in Paul W. Taylor’s Ethics Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). Buddhists have a special fondness for trees, perhaps not surprising given the Buddha’s attainment of awakening/enlightenment under a Ficus religiosa or Sacred Fig (pīpal tree), a species of fig native to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, south-west China and Indochina belonging to the Moraceae, the fig or mulberry family. See, for example, this poem from the Dalai Lama: http://www.dalailama.com/messages/environment/buddhist-monks-reflections
See to this post on the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology’s report, The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants: Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2008/05/respect-for-nature-moral-consideration.html (Today I would say things a bit differently and invoke other considerations.)
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Aug 7, 2013 10:26:49 AM
I once took a graduate seminar in ecofeminism, in which the broad question was how far to expand the circle of moral status (admittedly a bit different, I gather, from Marder’s project). I’m an ethical vegetarian, but I draw the philosophical line at sentience, and that week we were discussing plants. Someone had brought a bag of baby carrots and placed it, without irony, in the center of the seminar table as a shared snack. To illustrate my point about the moral relevance of the (non)ability to experience pain, I reached for one of the carrots, and loudly and violently bit it in half. Somehow I escaped with my life.
Posted by: Michelle Meyer | Aug 7, 2013 10:11:50 AM