ABSTRACT

Love of nonhuman animals and nature is often presumed to have positive moral implications: if we love elks or forests, we will also better appreciate their moral value and treat them with more respect and care. This paper investigates perhaps the most common variety of love – here termed ‘the biological definition of love’ – as applied to other animals and nature. Introducing the notion of ‘the love paradox’, it suggests that biological love of other animals and nature can also have deeply negative and anthropocentric moral consequences, due to the self-directedness and biases inherent to it. The need for more other-directed definitions of love is underlined.

摘要

对非人类动物和自然的热爱通常被认为具有积极的道德含义：如果我们热爱麋鹿或森林，我们也会更好地欣赏它们的道德价值，并以更多的尊重和关怀对待它们。本文研究了可能是最常见的爱——这里称为“爱的生物学定义”——适用于其他动物和自然。引入“爱悖论”的概念，它表明对其他动物和自然的生物爱也可能由于其固有的自我导向和偏见而产生深刻的负面和以人类为中心的道德后果。强调需要更多以他人为导向的爱定义。