New Directions in Plant Ethics

In bioethics, the life of plants has recently been addressed in order to develop normative principles in cultivating plants and for evaluating the biotechnology of plants. This project aims at developing the ethics of plant life in a systematic way. It has three goals: Firstly, it investigates normative implications and baselines in cultivating plants. This exploration starts with an investigation of recent approaches to environmental virtues and of relational approaches to vegetative nature. It then explores arguments underlying an appraisal of good practices in this context. Secondly, the project discusses meta-ethical options in addressing plants. It scrutinizes recent interpretations of the life of plants in ethics, including the concepts of intentional systems, of flourishing and of integrity. It then addresses types of arguments in reasoning for a moral standing of plants. The overall goal of this second part is an exploration of new ways in addressing plants in the context of ethics. Thirdly, the project aims at discussing key issues in applied plant ethics from those newly developed perspectives. This includes recent developments in the ethics of genetic engineering, in synthetic biology, and in natural conservation with special respect to climate change. In all three respects, the project tests the options and limits of plant ethics. It also contributes to the broader debate in the ethics of nature. It responds to the growing concern of a lack of normative yardsticks in addressing non-human living entities in particular non-sentient and unconscious life.

Large parts of our world are filled with plants. Every living being interacts with, affects, and is affected by plant life in various ways. Yet, plants have been marginalized in philosophy for far too long; in environmental ethics, plants have been mostly subsumed under the category of 'nature' and rarely considered thematically. In order to change this, the research project New Directions in Plant Ethics set out to explore and establish plant ethics as an emerging field in environmental ethics, developing its own argumentative resources at both a theoretical and an applied level. The project has contributed significantly to rethink the human-plant relationship. One important outcome is the insight that plant life deserves to be recognized as a very important category not only in environmental ethics, but also in theories of cultivation and in concerns with respect to future generations and the sustainability of current life-style practices. Normative guidelines for emerging fields of applied ethics of nature have been argued and new fields of application have been explored. They include a forest ethics, an ethics of landscape conservation, approaches to the interlink between plants and robots, and guidelines for smart farming and genetic engineering. The most useful 'tools' that could be developed during the project are: concepts that provide a proper normative basis for dealing with plants both in theory and in practice, like a well-elaborated concept of plant flourishing; a theoretical basis for evaluating plant-related practices, with a special focus on people-plant relations; skills and virtues regarding plant breeding, such as the virtues of gardening; and an environmental approach to the ethics and politics of the Anthropocene that respects the interconnectedness of human life, plants and climate. Furthermore, a network of research on plant ethics was built in the course of the project. Plant ethicists were connected with each other, and with researchers from other fields, through international conferences and interdisciplinary workshops on plant ethics organized by the project team. Results were also published in a volume on plant ethics: Angela Kallhoff, Maria Schörgenhumer, Marcello di Paola, eds., Plant Ethics: Concepts and Applications (Routledge 2018). This volume presents a wide variety of approaches to the philosophy and ethics of plants from distinguished international scholars. As the first comprehensive book on plant ethics, it is a milestone in the development of this field of research and lays out rich ground for further studies.