Nature,significance,and the human perspective: Refusing the choice between scientism and posthumanism

Part one: Scientism and significance

Written when Russell was about 30 years old, ‘The Free Man’s Worship’ considers the implications for human significance of the image of the world drawn by the natural sciences:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built (1993: 66–67).

Bernard Williams believes Russell’s essay is sentimental, implying it betrays his lingering attachment to an enchanted worldview. That may seem a surprising way of reading a reflection on death, cosmic contingency, and the near inevitability of human extinction. As Stephen Mulhall argues, finding a piece of writing to be sentimental is ‘not a hypothesis about the author’s emotional state, but a judgment about the intellectual and moral texture of his writing and his thought’ (2008: 9). Russell’s writing in this essay certainly has an earnest, soaring tone; the piece is littered with flourishes (‘vast death’) and grand laments (‘Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother’ (1993: 67)). Like Mulhall, Williams does not regard sentimentality simply as an affective state, but as a modality of defective thought, here expressed in Russell’s ‘self-pitying and at the same time self-glorifying rhetoric’ (2006a: 137). According to Williams, the defect in Russell’s essay consists in a muddled idea (which runs right through the piece but comes out particularly clearly in the passage above): that human activities ‘fail some test of cosmic significance’.

It is not that Williams thought human activities were cosmically significant. Instead he thought there was no test of cosmic significance for human activities to fail. For ‘the idea of absolute importance in the scheme of things is an illusion, a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted’ (2006a: 137). Williams is bringing out the difference between not having cosmic significance and lacking it, where the latter indicates deficiency. That is why he claims a similarity between enchanted views of the world, in which human activities are taken to be cosmically special in some way, and the ostensibly disenchanted view presented in Russell’s essay, which claims to bring the news that human activities are nothing special after all. The position outlined in Russell’s essay differs from enchanted worldviews on the issue of human significance, but it contains a vestige of them because, like them, it seeks to judge human activities from a cosmic perspective. While his judgement has a different content, in other words, Russell still believes there is a place from which such a judgement can be made.

Specifically he believes the sheer spatial and temporal scale of the universe shows up our activities as insignificant, inferring from hugeness a conclusion about our importance. Viewing us from a maximally distant perspective, Russell then finds us dwarfed by the view he takes. Does he think the significance of our activities is somehow outweighed by all that vastness? What if the universe was half the size it is – would that double the significance of our (still by contrast hugely insignificant) activities? Russell’s images of a humanity discovering its own tininess ‘against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears’ (1993: 71) ascribes to us many of the features Mark Jefferson associates with sentimental projections, especially ‘littleness’ and ‘vulnerability’ (1983: 526). Consider too the predicates Russell attaches to the universe, which he describes as ‘unconscious’, ‘blind’ and similar but also (twice) as ‘hostile’ (1993: 68). Despite the apparent hard-headedness of its key claims, there is something adolescent about the picture Russell’s essay sketches of an indifferent and yet hostile world. We can find it insulting when someone shows indifference to us because we can imagine them feeling otherwise; their indifference insults because it is an (hostile or otherwise slighting) attitude they have taken toward us. Russell takes the indifference of the universe in something like that way, as though he finds an attitude to us expressed in it.

‘The Free Man’s Worship’ opens with an imagined conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles in which the demon informs the scholar that existence is a ‘great drama’ set up by God to torment his creatures for the sake of his own amusement. At the conclusion of these paragraphs Russell declares that natural science presents a reality ‘even more purposeless’ (1993: 66) than this demonic one. He is not explicit about the connections he believes obtain between the results of natural scientific inquiry and the significance of human activities. We can reconstruct the thought, however, because it is a familiar one and because it is grounded in two truths about natural science. The first is obvious enough: natural scientific theories have superseded pre-scientific accounts of natural phenomena, indicating that we do not need to appeal to divine purposes or supernatural properties to explain them. This does not merely amount to the replacement of one set of theories by another, but to more fundamental shifts in our understanding of justification and of what nature in general is like. Consider the medieval practice in which physicians consulted volvelles to determine the position of celestial bodies before engaging in surgeries or phlebotomies. Discovering that the rate of blood flow in fact bears no relationship to the phases of the Moon means discovering that such practices are empirically unfounded. It also represents one aspect of a deeper discovery, which is that nature in general does not regard us. John McDowell deploys a familiar image of the enchanted universe of the medievals: it is one where nature is conceived as ‘filled with meaning, like a book containing messages and lessons for us’ (1998: 174). Science has shown that the pages of The Book of Nature, understood in this sense, are blank. Just as the Moon teaches no lessons regarding bloodletting, nature in general contains no messages for or about human life. It is ‘not in league with us’ (Pinkard, 2012: 22).

The second truth about natural science that appears to be at work in Russell’s thought is methodological. It is that taking a detached inquiring stance is a key component of the success of natural science. A way of characterising the mistake of the medieval physician is to say that he attributed false significance to celestial bodies, transferring his own ideas onto reality. The mistake involves claiming to have found something in reality that we had actually placed there ourselves, taking a set of ideas with human provenance to have been (as it were) lying in wait for us. Using a metaphor that is more typical of contemporary Humeanism than his own philosophy, McDowell calls this a ‘projective illusion’ for this reason. Though (as we shall see) he rejects the scientism this insight often motivates, McDowell argues that unmasking such attributions of significance as projections is nevertheless ‘essential to how scientific investigation rightly conceives its topic’ (1998: 181). Natural scientific inquiry should not tell us about features of the inquirer but about the object being inquired about, and to the extent that features of the inquirer turn up in our results will undermine the success of such an investigation. ¹ When it is successful, on the other hand, natural science reveals reality as it would appear to any (other) competent observer. That is how it has undermined various illusions about human life and our place in the universe, obliging us to jettison attributions of significance when they are contradicted by how things stand. And that is why we can expect convergence on the same results for different inquirers in cases of successful natural scientific inquiry: ‘[T]he best explanation of the convergence’, as Williams writes elsewhere, ‘involves the idea that the answer represents how things are’ (2006b: 136).

Note the apparent shift in the above brief account from methodological points about the detached character of successful scientific inquiry – the fact that it takes a ‘dispassionate and dehumanized stance for investigation’ (McDowell, 1998: 175) seeking to develop what Williams calls an ‘absolute conception’ (2005: 49) of the world – and what looks to be a metaphysical claim about reality. There is nothing inherently problematic about the way Williams has pitched the metaphysical-seeming point. As McDowell argues, the realist thought that we are obliged to accept representations that we know are ‘mirroring the world…representing it as it is…need not attract our suspicion’ (1998: 178). But the same is not true of an idea that can look similar or indeed equivalent on the surface: that natural science reveals objective reality to be bereft of significance, as though what appears when we take a detached investigative stance is all there is to reality in itself. Such scientism must be distinguished from the idea that natural science seeks to discover ‘the nature of reality in so far as it can be characterized in absolute terms’ (McDowell, 1998: 181). The emphasised phrase is crucial because it stops us short of making the mistake of contemporary scientific naturalists (see De Caro and Macarthur, 2004), which Russell also appears to be making in his essay: confusing a methodological insight with a metaphysical one (see McDowell, 1998: 182). The detached stance inherent in natural scientific inquiry can grant an important mode of access to reality, one that has advanced our knowledge and shifted our understanding of nature in general. But it does not follow that ‘reality is exhausted by the natural world, in the sense of the world as the natural sciences are capable of revealing it to us’ (McDowell, 1998: 175). Natural science voids the medieval Book of Nature because it provides a means of sorting projective illusions about reality from insights into the way things stand, not because it reveals reality to be bereft of significance. It threatens the idea that our activities are significant because they are part of a story written into The Book of Nature – but that is not equivalent to threatening the significance of human activities in general.

Though his position on these issues differs from McDowell’s in some fundamental respects, ² Williams gives us useful ways of bringing out these distinctions in ‘The Human Prejudice’. As he argues, if there is no test of cosmic significance for human activities to fail then

that does not mean that there is no point of view from which they are important. There is certainly one point of view from which they are important, namely ours: unsurprisingly so, since the ‘we’ in question, the ‘we’ who raise this question and discuss with others who we hope will listen and reply, are indeed human beings (2006a: 138).

A bit of ontology will be helpful at this point, as grasping significance and its origins requires clarifying the relations between living beings and their environments. It was only when life emerged on Earth that anything here could be significant. Significance enters the picture only as living beings enter the picture because something can be significant only from the perspectives of needful beings for whom aspects of reality show up as significant. Danielle Macbeth develops an insight like this out of James J. Gibson’s influential work on the ecology of perceptual psychology:

What are otherwise merely things…come to have the significance of what J. J. Gibson calls affordances for animals, where an affordance is ‘what [the environment] provides or furnishes, either for good or ill’ and ‘implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment’. By contrast with the merely physical properties of things, affordances are intelligible only relative to a species of animal…[A]n animal…is directly perceptually aware of affordances, biologically significant aspects of its environment (2014: 31).

Now if the evolution of forms of life is also the opening and actualisation of significance – rather than a process through which objects with certain properties are merely taken to be significant – then we need to be careful about how we interpret Gibson’s suggestive phrases. It is not that the environments of agents are undergirded by a brute, insignificant physical reality, ontologically prior to affordances. Rather, in actualising significance, forms of life actualise aspects of reality. The kangaroo literally makes the billabong a place to drink, just as the black bear makes a den among the rocks. Gibson’s point about ‘physical reality’ is best taken as a point about reality as it is outside the context of the activities and environments of agents, not as a point about fundamentality or ontological priority.

We can conceive of such a reality. Here is Earth about four-and-a-half-billion years ago, after the beginning of the Hadean aeon: the planet’s core and crust have stabilised, an atmosphere and oceans have formed, but there are not yet any proto-organisms in the chemical soups floating around hydrothermal vents. According to the Big Splash hypothesis, at some point in this period the Mars-sized protoplanet Theia came crashing into Earth, mixing its core and mantle with it and producing a stream of ejecta that, after orbiting around our planet, eventually coalesced into what we now call the Moon. There is nothing wrong with calling an event of this nature significant, for it was geologically highly significant, but note that it makes little sense to say that the Splash was significant in the relevant senses of being meaningful or important. The catastrophic impact destroyed Theia, but that was no problem for Theia, nor did it pose any problems for Earth, or anything on it. It did not cause any purpose to go unfulfilled or prevent any goal from being realised; it did no harm to anyone. Indeed calling it ‘catastrophic’ is a projection of its own, a sign that we may be imagining ourselves back into the event, as though it were the kind of thing we could take a viewpoint on (although it so happens that, when weighed against supernova explosions and gamma-ray bursts, it would barely register on a linear scale of cosmic blasts). The lunar accretion ended up being significant for us, of course, in that the Moon would stabilise Earth’s orbital obliquity and thus our planet’s climate, but when it took place it was of no import to anyone or anything. To borrow a phrase from Nietzsche (which Williams deploys in a slightly different context): ‘it was as though nothing had happened’ (in 2006a: 138).

This can help us ground Williams’s claim about the incoherence of the category of cosmic significance and see how a renewed understanding of human significance can emerge from it. The idea of cosmic significance is incoherent because it represents an attempt at applying the concept of significance to something without the appropriate shape for it, a desire to find it outside the only contexts in which it can emerge. Natural science is well suited to the task of reconstructing events during the Hadean because it aims for reality as it would appear to any (other) competent observer: which is to say, to no agent in particular. This is not to deny that natural scientific enquiry is itself a form of practically engaged agency. Like all human activities, it is underwritten by our norms and values (see Macarthur, 2018), but it is distinctive among our activities because engaging in it means developing a disengaged stance. That is part of why it is our only hope of coming to grips with events anterior to the emergence of agents. Philosophers like the young Russell, impressed (fair enough) with the successes of this enterprise, then make the mistake of thinking it provides an insight into the cosmic standing of our activities. It should not be news that philosophers find nothing significant when they try to view human life in the way we reconstruct the impact of Theia. It is not that our activities amount to little or nothing when weighed against the vastness of the cosmos, lacking meaning or importance: it is that nothing can show up as significant in those senses outside of the practical contexts in which significance has its home. Of course, another way of putting this is to say that there is no getting outside of significance. Natural science does not really present a perspective on reality, but a means of reconstructing reality as if from no perspective. ⁴

When Williams says that human activities are significant from the human perspective, then, he is not expressing some tautology or truism, nor is he insisting pigheadedly that our activities are significant if we take them to be so. The claim is not at all like Russell’s assertions about learning to live freely by rebelling against and dominating a nature that is in itself meaningless and purposeless. Our human perspective is not threatened by the cosmos. Nature has no perspective on us, and there is literally no sense in judging our activities from an imagined cosmic perspective. ⁵ That is why worries about our significance in the scheme of things typically melt away when we are engaged in our projects: rather than an insight into the ultimate nature of reality, such worries are based on a flight of fancy, borne from an attempt at viewing the world as an agent but without taking an agent’s perspective. That we see, understand, interpret, and evaluate things from our perspective is no limitation. Christine Korsgaard gives a useful way of expressing this insight when she writes that ‘all importance is tethered. In particular, it is tethered to the creature to whom the thing in question is important, and it cannot be cut loose from that creature without ceasing to be important at all’ (2018: 10).

Part two: The human perspective

While ‘The Free Man’s Worship’ attacks the idea that our activities are cosmically special, arguing that natural science should undermine our pretensions that human life has any importance in the scheme of things, the essay also endorses (what some would call) a classically anthropocentric picture of nature, setting it up as inert (‘unconscious’, ‘blind’, ‘unthinking’, etc.) matter available for human appropriation, as something we can transform and refashion at our will. The two positions may seem to be in conflict but they are both expressions of the same thought, which I have argued is confused: that objective reality is lacking in significance. Russell believes science has made a discovery about reality that leads to a downgrading of human importance while simultaneously granting us a licence to do what we will with meaningless nature. From the perspective of critics of anthropocentrism, it must seem that he has given back with one hand what he took away with the other, claiming to downgrade human importance while nevertheless granting us dominion over nature. But as Tim Hayward argues, this demonstrates a tension in the theoretical discourse on anthropocentrism (see 1997: 50–51). Critics of anthropocentric attitudes have often regarded natural scientific worldviews as paradigms of anthropocentrism, but it was natural scientific discovery that first displaced ‘Man’ from his position at the centre of the cosmos. Like Russell, critics of anthropocentrism seem to take away with one hand what they give with the other, grounding their claims in scientific discoveries whose epistemic authority they nevertheless try to problematise.

Hayward’s target was the anti-anthropocentrism discourse of ecologically minded theorists writing in the 1990s, but a similar tension arises in more recent posthumanist critiques. In The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti investigates the causes and, in qualified but effusive ways, celebrates the consequences of a profound destabilisation in our concept of human that she claims is taking place in our ‘globalized, technologically mediated societies’ (2013: 2). She claims that ‘scientific and technological advances’ (2013: 3) (such as robotics, neuroscience, cognitive science, informatics, genetics, as well as prosthetics and various human enhancements) are exploding our species concept. She also attacks the notion of scientific objectivity (see 2013: 31–32) and repeatedly links natural science with ‘the humanistic emphasis on Man as the measure of all things’, criticising the ‘domination and exploitation of nature’ as an expression of a ‘worldview which equated Mastery with rational scientific control’ (2013: 48). Strictly speaking there is nothing inconsistent about celebrating specific consequences of scientific advances while attacking the worldview (supposedly) embedded in natural scientific enterprises, but the tension is instructive because of how it highlights problems regarding nature and significance emerging elsewhere in Braidotti’s work. To bring these out we should turn to posthumanist ontology.

Aligning posthumanism with Giles Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza, Braidotti says that ‘monistic premises’ defining ‘matter as vital and self-organizing’ are ‘the building blocks for a posthuman theory of subjectivity that does not rely on classical Humanism and carefully avoids anthropocentrism’ (2013: 56). This ‘vitalist materialism’ is predicated on overcoming oppositions between life and matter, instead finding ‘generative vitality’ (2013: 60) in the heart of matter. This is the ontological aspect of Braidotti’s claims about the need to unseat the human from its self-appointed position at the pinnacle of a cosmic hierarchy, as she seeks to undermine the idea that human beings have a monopoly on agency by uncovering the agentic powers present in all of nature. She draws on the work of Jane Bennett in this context, whose Vibrant Matter also tries to refigure radically notions of life, matter, and agency:

Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.…The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption (2010: ix).

The understanding of Russell’s essay developed above can help us understand what motivates posthumanist claims about nature and agency. Though the position they take is opposed to Russell’s, they nevertheless share some of his basic assumptions and commitments: that the category of cosmic significance is coherent; that human activities lack such significance; that we must to learn to accept this; that natural science reveals nature to consist of insignificant matter; and that setting up nature in this way means giving our species a licence to do what we will with it. When they turn to making their claims about the agency of matter, posthumanists are obviously in disagreement with Russell’s scientism. But this masks deeper agreements about nature, science and significance. Posthumanists believe we must reject at all costs the picture of nature presented in Russell’s essay. They claim that doing so may be necessary if we want to prevent ecological disaster. They respond to his (ostensibly) disenchanted picture of nature with a strategy of re-enchantment, trying to build agency and significance back into all of it. But this strategy can only appeal to someone already caught up in scientism. Russell believes natural science reveals a nature bereft of significance and ends up in sentimental chauvinism. Seeking to prevent this outcome, posthumanists want to reveal a nature overflowing with significance – then end up in sentimental moralism. We should not feel compelled to choose between these alternatives.

Posthumanist thought shares another feature with the thought of the author of ‘The Free Man’s Worship’. Russell and the posthumanists evade a human perspective on nature and the forms of responsibility inherent in it. It is the perspective of one species among others, with a particular evolutionary history; it is also the perspective of a species that, because of certain developments in that evolutionary history, knows itself as such. Part of nature and wholly material, we are nevertheless self-conscious, enjoying a natural capacity to distinguish ourselves from the rest of nature. The relevant point is not that we have superior cognitive powers, or specific abilities – to use language or tools, for example, or to carry out acts of reasoning – separating us from unselfconscious animals (some of which may have capacities like these). The relevant point is that being self-conscious opens us up to forms of answerability to the world that do not touch the lives of unselfconscious animals.

One of these forms can be characterised as epistemic, as it involves responsiveness to how things stand in the world, a need to get them right regardless of how they happen to appear to us. As Terry Pinkard puts it: ‘[T]hings can show up for humans in a way that they cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. As such self-conscious creatures, we become capable of wondering whether the way things show up for us is the way things really are’ (2017: 8). While a gull can make a sort of appearance/essence distinction, as when it catches a fish that turns out to be ‘disgusting’ or ‘unsatisfying’ (Brandom, 2019: 677) to it, the gull has no reason to consider whether its mistake was a simple error or the result of a projection of significance of the kind our medieval physician made. The gull does not discover a reason to shift its understanding of what nature in general is like; it just discards the inedible fish and continues the hunt. Like other animals, we move about in an environment of affordances, in which aspects of reality are actualised as significant because of the role they play in our form of life. Unlike other animals, we know ourselves to judge in judgement, and thus face the problem of whether the significance we (claim to) find in reality is contradicted by the way things are. ‘[A] non-rational animal’, as Korsgaard writes, ‘thinks about things in the world as she perceives them, not about her own attitudes towards those things’ (Korsgaard, 2018: 39). Natural science is a theoretically and experimentally mediated development of our capacity for self-conscious judgement, which gives us a means of reconstructing reality outside contexts of significance. Allowing us to get a grip on events in the Hadean, it also obliges us to give up astrology.

Considering posthumanists’ socio-political commitments, the tension in their attitudes to natural science appears especially problematic in relation to the scientific standing of discoveries about anthropogenic climate change and other human activities now destroying the affordances on which Earth’s forms of life are dependent. On the one hand, avoiding scientism means understanding the limits of natural scientific inquiry: that because of the detached stance peculiar to it, natural science does not grasp the significance of reality. On the other hand, this is also a way of registering the epistemic authority of natural scientific inquiry, which depends on its capacity to reveal the world as if from no perspective. To maintain the notion of natural scientific objectivity (and explain the possibility of convergence) we require the thought of reality as it is outside environments of significance, of a physical world indifferent to the goals and needs of living agents. But on pain of rendering the significance of reality unintelligible, we must avoid the mistake of taking this reconstructed world to be ontologically more fundamental than the significant world actualised in forms of life. Registering the authority of natural science requires demarcating that authority, and vice versa. ⁶

Another aspect of our answerability to the world, which we could call ethical, arises out of our relationships to other animals. All animals are purposeful agents, pursuing ends proper to their species in specific contexts of significance (see Foot, 2003; Thompson, 2008: 25–82). Though the posthumanists needlessly extend the notion of agency, losing the thought of a physical reality indifferent to living agents and hence of natural scientific objectivity (see Korsgaard, 2018: 51–52), they are right to oppose modern philosophical understandings of animals that deny their status as actors and the meaningfulness of their lives. Human beings do lack a monopoly on agency. We nevertheless enjoy a distinctive form of it. There is no sense in blaming morally the carp who destroy the ecosystem into which they have been introduced, but we can blame the humans who introduced them. Again, the point is not simply about our cognitive powers (the fact that we should have known better); it is that, as self-conscious animals, we are responsible for (what happens to) the creatures in the ecosystem in a way that the carp are not, even as they destroy the affordances on which the other species are dependent. Answerable to how things are, we can grasp that fish have their own purposes emerging out of their own species-specific forms of dependency on nature, that they too move about and act in a meaningful environment (see Korsgaard, 2018: 38). ⁷ And though we can see that the carp has its own point of view on the world, leading a life that matters to it, the carp cannot see the same of us or of the other fish in the river system. ⁸ We know, as other animals do not, that they deserve to flourish as the creatures they are, their forms of life respected (see Nussbaum, 2011).

The atrocity of factory farming, for example, is not merely – as utilitarians would have it – that it causes huge quantities of suffering (see Diamond, 1978; Crary, 2007). The atrocity is that factory-farmed animals are placed in environments that lack the affordances they need to get on as the creatures they are. The factory-farmed pig is harmed as a pig (not just as a sentient being) because it cannot get on as a pig should in the disorienting confinement of its stall. Its opportunities for action are diminished. It struggles to make sense of what is happening, and not simply because it lacks the cognitive capacity. Its pig capacities are injured as its world is damaged. ⁹ This is why we can say that factory farming attacks the dignity of pigs (and without evoking anthropomorphising notions of animal rights ¹⁰ ). Factory farming destroys the meaning in the lives of animals.

Here too we might consider the struggle waged against Taseko Mines by the Xeni Gwet’in people of the Tsilhqot’in Nation when the company proposed to build a gold and copper mine in the south of the territory known as British Columbia. The mine was to produce large quantities of toxic waste rock, tailings so poisonous they would have required storage underwater to prevent the contamination of the surrounding ecosystems. To create a dump for non-toxic rock, Taseko wanted to drain off Fish Lake, a location of profound significance to the Xeni Gwet’in. Taseko was also proposing to build a dam across an adjoining valley to prepare other bodies of water, including Fish Creek and Little Fish Lake, for the storage of toxic tailings. As compensation for these acts of destruction, the company proposed to create Prosperity Lake, into which fish from the destroyed lakes and tributaries would be transported. The activism of Chief Marilyn Baptiste of the Xeni Gwet’in played a key role in the political and legal battles that led to the cancellation of the project. She described the Prosperity Lake proposal as follows: ‘The mining company want to put our wild trout in residential school to see if they’ll survive in a lake that’s foreign to them. It’s another part of the assimilation process and now they want to do it to our wild trout’ (quoted in Zimonjic, 2009).

Though it is ecologically implausible, as Canada’s Federal Government eventually found, let us accept for the sake of our analysis the claim from Taseko Mines that the creation and stocking of Prosperity Lake could somehow ‘compensate’ for the destruction of Fish Lake by sustaining the trout population. This paper’s account of the agency of non-human animals makes clear that this would represent profound disrespect to the trout of Fish Lake. ‘Far from projecting human values onto fish’, as Jonaki Bhattacharyya and Scott Slocombe write, ‘Chief Baptiste was recognizing their inherent right to a fishy quality of life’ (2017: 12; see also Hoogeveen, 2016; Todd, 2018). To say that fish have a right to a fishy quality of life is to say that they are creatures with lives to lead, with their own sense of what matters, and that this is something that calls for our respect. Even if their transportation to an artificial lake would have preserved their lives, destroying Fish Lake would have meant destroying their world, which is a form of harm. Destroying Fish Lake would also have harmed the Xeni Gwet’in, ruining part of their world while undermining their ‘responsibility for the well-being of lands, waters, fish, and wildlife’. ¹¹ As this paper has argued, this is a distinctively human form of responsibility, for only animals who know themselves as agents have an obligation to respect the agency, and so to preserve the worlds, of other creatures.

Rather like Williams, Hayward argues that the ethical criticism of anthropocentrism is confused because certain forms of human-centredness are ‘unavoidable, unobjectionable, or even desirable’ (1997: 51). While there is no rational basis for giving exclusive preference to the interests of humans, we need not be worried about the fact that ‘we are interested in ourselves and our own kind’ (1997: 51), and there is no necessary connection between maintaining a deep concern for human wellbeing and disregarding the moral claims of other species. The conclusion of this paper is stronger: inhabiting a human perspective is not just unobjectionable or desirable, but necessary for grasping our relation to nature and so our responsibilities for it, our (epistemic and ethical) answerability to what it is really like. Nature is indifferent but significant to the animals who make their environments in it, actualised in novel ways by specific forms of life. These ask for the respect of self-conscious animals. That we so often fail to respect those forms of significance does not show we do not know this, only that we can deny and evade that knowledge. Rather than mistakes in our theorising, however, for this we should blame a social system that objectifies animals as raw materials and which, because capital accumulation is its overriding priority, cannot rationally regulate the metabolism between human beings and the rest of nature (see Burkett, 1999). Russell’s sentimental, still-enchanted scientism is best understood not as the cause of these practices but as an expression of them, and one of their ideological supports. To overcome such systematic practices, we may need some clearer thinking about nature and significance. More than that, we will have to exercise some human agency (see Malm, 2016).