The negs approach to cultural analysis is one of negativity- the understanding
of society and the remainder minimizes people to signs and simulation Massumi 87- Political philosopher and social theorist, with a PhD in French literature from Yale (Brian, 1987, The Simulacrum according to Deleuze and Guattari, 1987. (http://www.anu.edu.a...orks/realer.htm.)//LC There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world, Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent, leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality whatsoever.1 That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution of signs of the real for the real.2 In hyperreality, signs no longer represent or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer only to other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions.3 But postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.4 Faced with this homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only gape in fascination.5 For the secret of the process is beyond our grasp. Meaning has imploded. There is no longer any external model, but there is an immanent one. To the syntagmatic surface of slippage there corresponds an invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange and circulation. Hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for their generation.6Meaning is out of reach and out of sight, but not because it has receded into the distance. It is because the code has been miniaturized. Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized digitality of the computerized society.7 And so we gape. We cannot be said to be passive exactly, because all polarity, including the active/passive dichotomy, has disappeared. We have no earth to center us, but we ourselves function as a ground--in the electrical sense.8 We do not act, but neither do we merely receive. We absorb through our open eyes and mouths. We neutralize the play of energized images in the mass entropy of the silent majority. It makes for a fun read. But do we really have no other choice than being a naive realist or being a sponge? Deleuze and Guattari open a third way. Although it is never developed at length in any one place, a theory of simulation can be extracted from their work that can give us a start in analyzing our cultural condition under late capitalism without landing us back with the dinosaurs or launching us into hypercynicism.
Even if power is arbitrary and operates within the hyperreal, challenging structures breaks down hierarchies Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. Baudrillards Challenge: A Feminist Reading. Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2000. Page(s) 67-76)//LC For Baudrillard, the form of power that instantiated the grand oppositions of modernity, to be played out in their dialectical struggles, was itself imaginary. Such a power performed its pretence of irreversibility in a structural order where this posturing could be contested, overthrown, power could be seized, albeit at great cost. But even so, as Baudrillard writes, power wins every time even though it changes hands as revolutions come and go. Hyperreal power is different; the logic of irreversibility is structurally integral to the premises of value and signification. 16 The hyperreal forms a totalising logic with no dialectical opposition structured into the equation; power relations merely simulate an imaginary form of power from a previous era. The secret of power, Baudrillard writes, is that it doesnt exist (FF: 51). Baudrillards view is that power can only be understood as challenge. It is reversible, and in this sense none of the grand strategies of power will succeed in being power at the extreme of irreversibility. Power is something that is exchanged, and if power is not exchanged it simply disappears (FF: 43). At the limit, a challenge to the death in the face of power exerted and not exchanged reverts that power. For example, the power of the dominant over the subordinate vanishes when the subordinate challenges the dominator to death: if the master kills the slave, there is no more slave and hence no more master (the logic of power is annulled, another slave will not suffice). In a non-essentialist critique, the essence of the relation is as much to be questioned as the essences of the subject and of the object. Baudrillard conveys a meaning of power which is not predicated on the terms of antagonistic forces, but rather which can only be understood as a reversible cycle of challenge and seduction. It now becomes clear how Baudrillard analyses Foucaults rendering of power as an aspect of his work to be forgotten, in the sense of not followed. Foucaults lucid exposition of the microphysics of power might be read as a resurrection of power in a form that is readily intelligible to those in an era when the dialectics of power relations have disintegrated. Baudrillard cant help but notice that Foucaults descriptions of the workings of power metaphorically overlay the dominant tropes of contemporary discourses. For example, he claims that for Foucault power operates like the genetic code with its ineluctable, immanent, positive generative inscription that yields only to infinitesimal mutations (FF: 34). Baudrillard investigates the similarity between power and psychoanalysis by seeing Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury. Baudrillards Challenge: A Feminist Reading. Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2000. Page(s) 67-76)//LC This leads into a discussion of Baudrillards arguments on desire and his critical view on psychoanalysis, as he points out that the same comment (as that cited just above) could be made in relation to Deleuzes molecular topography of desire, claiming that the flows and connections of such a desire will no doubt soon converge with genetic simulations, microcellular drifts, and the random facilitations of code manipulators (FF: 35). He notes that terms from microphysics and computer theory can be transferred today into discourses of desire as well as power (for example, particles, random elements, clusters, and so on). In fact, Baudrillards arguments that position Foucault in relation to Marx on the question of power are paralleled in the position of Deleuze in relation to Freud on the question of desire. Baudrillard claims that the similarities between Foucaults new version of power and Deleuzes desire are not accidental. They can be readily understood within the social, historical milieu in which they took, or are taking, shape. According to Baudrillard, desire, in Deleuzes terms, is not to be understood through lack or interdiction, but through the positive deployment of flows and intensities; a positive dissemination, purged of all negativity. Desire is a network, a rhizome, a contiguity diffracted ad infinitum (FF: 17 18). Desire is productive, as power is productive, and in Baudrillards analysis, the same concerns must be raised. Earlier, in the discussion of Braidottis engagement with Deleuzes concept of desire, I raised a question about the nomadic desiring subject embraced by Braidotti as potentially emancipatory, asking whether this might rather be a concept of desire and subjectivity that is in fact complicit with the contemporary construct of value and consumerism. Baudrillard is very clear about it: This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction. Rather than discovering the truth of the body through this productive, positive liberation of libidinal energy expressed and advocated in Deleuzes writing, it is, in Baudrillards analysis, simply unearthing the psychic metaphor of capital. Deleuze, through his critique of psychoanalysis, instantiates the axiomatic of desire in a parallel form to Foucaults instantiation of the inevitability of power in his critical distance from Marx. In Forget Foucault, Baudrillards attention is understandably drawn to what he calls the convergence of the purified axioms of Marxism and psychoanalysis in the catchword of the productivity of desire. Desire annexed to production neatly eradicates seduction, meaning, again in a parallel form to power, that sexuality is everywhere at precisely the moment it is nowhere. Desire in its positive, productive formulation functions differently from desire manifested through loss, or lack. It becomes negotiable in terms of signs which are exchanged in terms of phallic values, indexed on a general phallic equivalent where each party operates in accordance with a contract and converts its own enjoyment into cash in terms of a phallic accumulation: a perfect situation for a political economy of desire (SE&D: 103). The implications of Baudrillards arguments regarding the positioning of the feminine in relation to contemporary discourses on sexuality and desire, as these are explored in Symbolic Exchange and Death, will be discussed in Chapter 5 in conjunction with his book Seduction. My main purpose here is to foreground the critique of the productivity of desire in Deleuze, with its implications for feminist engagement with this theoretical notion. Further to this purpose, it is useful at this point to outline Baudrillards related thoughts on psychoanalysis, and the subject of psychoanalytic theory. Baudrillard refers to the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary theory in three interviews in Mike Ganes collection (1993), conducted around 1983 5. Another mention in a 1991 interview shows how his view shows no signs of weakening, and given the analysis of desire discussed above, this is not surprising. Psychoanalysis has become useless, a burden was Baudrillards claim in 1984, and he goes on to say that in its more recent, Lacanian-inspired renditions, psychoanalysis has spun itself into a delirium of conceptual production satisfying a sort of dizziness for explanations (Gane 1993: 45); and later he refers to an escalating technical sophistication of the unconscious resulting in a kind of ecstasy of psychoanalysis (Gane 1993: 83). His observations lead him to express the view that for all this, psychoanalysis in France has lost its glamour and fascination: the word psychoanalysis has very rapidly and strikingly lost its impact. It no longer has at all that authority and omnipotence that it once had (1993: 59); indeed, there has been an extraordinary winding-down, it has fallen flat, it doesnt interest us anymore . . . *t+hats for sure (p. 83). Baudrillard acknowledges that the theoretical schools continue to produce their analyses and that the practitioners continue to practise, but his view is that, although the subtlety increases, the dubiousness of the point of it all increases at a parallel rate. As Sylvere Lotringer observed (Gane 1993: 101), Baudrillard could have written a parallel to his Mirror of Production, as a Mirror of Desire. He didnt develop his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis in a text devoted to such a project, because he felt it would be useless to engage in such a frontal attack. The ideology of desire has to fall into its own trap; its demise has to run its own course. The view expressed in these interviews needs to be understood through his critical analysis of the discourse on the unconscious and the lost object as this critique appears in a number of references in Symbolic Exchange and Death, and to a lesser extent in Forget Foucault. I have referred a number of times to the strategy of the real, a phrase that Baudrillard himself uses, postulating an historical social process whereby reality is produced through a dichotomous separation of subject and object, and of the subject/object (referent) and its representation. An identity of the subject and of the object is made meaningful through a series of exclusions. Thus reality cannot be divorced from its excluded imaginary, which is attached to it like a shadow; hence the conscious subject is real with its inevitable unconscious, its fascination with the imaginary. Baudrillard argues that the strategy of the real produces the positivity of the object and the conscious subject, but it equally produces the phantasm of the irreversible unconscious cast in terms of repression, and the forever missing lost object. This is the dual structure of this strategy, of reality, a strategy which is itself the phantasm of psychoanalysis. Although a social order of economic exchange structurally excludes or bars symbolic exchange as an organising principle, the assumption of an irreversible logic of the economic, as pure positivity, is ceaselessly haunted by symbolic reversion. Psychoanalysis, in complete contrast to empiricist forms of psychology, gravitates towards this haunting. But although psychoanalysis, in its nascent form, was attracted to the shadow side of a metaphysics of presence, or substance, Baudrillard argues that it has ended up by repelling the symbolic. It fends it off. It is not, however, just a matter of excluding the symbolic. At the same time as the symbolic is repelled, psychoanalysis seeks to contain it by circumscribing it within an individual unconscious, and by doing so reduces it to the obsessional fear of castration, under the Law of the Father (SE&D: 1). Baudrillard portrays a view of the entire movement of western history being compulsively drawn to a realism, a fascination with the real, that is predicated on this rather pitiful figure of castration. 17 A preoccupation with castration in psychoanalytic theory ostensibly concerns itself with restoring the reality of castration (and with it the grounds of the real) through a conscious recognition of the imaginary, of unconscious processes. But in Baudrillards analysis this eyeing up the void does not actually result in a recognition of castration, does not lead to a de-essentialising of a determined resolve to fetishise the real or to gain insight into our role in believing we can say it all, believing we can represent the real in its phantasised totality. On the contrary, this preoccupation with castration in psychoanalysis leads to establishing a plethora of phallic alibis which are then dismissed one by one in elaborate deconstructive flourishes, again ostensibly to uncover the truth of castration, but which in fact lead over and over again to a denial of castration (see SE&D: 110).
Baudrillard agrees with Haraways use of cyborganizaion Csicsery-Ronay 91- Professor of English, DePauw University (Istvan, November, The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway, http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/icr55art.htm)//LC Haraway intends to save the cyborg from its neurotic role in high- tech power dreams and the technophobia of humanists. Her cyborg is a state-of-the-art theoretical construction: simultaneously object and subject, without gender, without species, without kingdom even, and hence free of the conventional dialectics or narratives of power. Haraway- ina move also favored by Baudrillard- literalizes the SF metaphor into a theoretical being and detects the existence of the cyborg in actuality, where it has not yet received its new, accurate, alien name. Indeed, compared with most work of theory, all of Haraways descriptions of actually existing conditions are SF: she describes a context that is so radically transformed and alien to the comforting essentialist categories of the dominant form of theoretical discourse, or the hyperabstract categoires of most post-structuralist theory, that it fulfills the most rigorous conditions of cognitive estrangement, while attempting rigorously to describe the real. Cyborgs represent for Haraway beings that combine mechanical and organic qualities, or animal and human qualities, within the limits of their physical bodies. But for Haraway these are localizations of a set of systematic relations in postmodern, high- tech cultures. The diffusion of informatics technologies throughout the world has created a condition of fluid chaos regarding the essential, objective nature of any living being or system. The cyborg is the site of a categorical breakdown, a system of transgressions, and an irrecoverable one, since the conditions of cyborg existence cannot be reversed, essential differences cannot be restored with the laser-scalpel of classical rationalities. For Haraway, cyborg does not necessarily name the tragic confusion of identities that follows on scientific hubris. On the contrary, it may name the condition of freedom from the illegitimate categories of nature (race, gender, species, kingdom)- a freedom that can only emerge with the destruction of those rationalities and of the mythologies of essential identity.
Institutions are dead and wont be revived- distancing ourselves fro them is the only possible solution Baudrillard, 95 (Jean, Simulacra and Simulation: The Spiraling Cadaver, 1995 CP) The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge. Strictly speaking, there is no longer even any power: it is also in ruins. Whence the impossibility of the return of the fires of 1968: of the return of putting in question knowledge versus power itself - the explosive contradiction of knowledge and power (or the revelation of their collusion, which comes to the same thing) in the university, and, at the same time, through symbolic (rather than political) contagion in the whole institutional and social order. Why sociologists? marked this shift: the impasse of knowledge, the vertigo of nonknowledge (that is to say at once the absurdity and the impossibility of accumulating value in the order of knowledge) turns like an absolute weapon against power itself, in order to dismantle it according to the same vertiginous scenario of dispossession. This is the May 1968 effect. Today it cannot be achieved since power itself, after knowledge, has taken off, has become ungraspable - has dispossessed itself. In a now uncertain institution, without knowledge content, without a power structure (except for an archaic feudalism that turns a simulacrum of a machine whose destiny escapes it and whose survival is as artificial as that of barracks and theaters), offensive irruption is impossible. Only what precipitates rotting, by accentuating the parodic, simulacral side of dying games of knowledge and power, has meaning. A strike has exactly the opposite effect. It regenerates the ideal of a possible university: the fiction of an ascension on everyone's part to a culture that is unlocatable, and that no longer has meaning. This ideal is substituted for the operation of the university as its critical alternative, as its therapy. This fiction still dreams of a permanency and democracy of knowledge. Besides, everywhere today the Left plays this role: it is the justice of the Left that reinjects an idea of justice, the necessity of logic and social morals into a rotten apparatus that is coming undone, which is losing all conscience of its legitimacy and renounces functioning almost of its own volition. It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay seige to them one day: from private property to the small business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois culture, justice at the university - everything that is disappearing, that the system itself, in its atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved. Whence the paradoxical but necessary inversion of all the terms of political analysis. Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university. It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select - it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. Diplomas are worthless: why would it refuse to award them, in any case it is ready to award them to everybody; why this provocative politics, if not in order to crystallize energies on a fictive stake (selection, work, diplomas, etc.), on an already dead and rotting referential? By rotting, the university can still do a lot of damage (rotting is a symbolic mechanism not political but symbolic, therefore subversive for us). But for this to be the case it is necessary to start with this very rotting, and not to dream of resurrection. It is necessary to transform this rotting into a violent process, into violent death, through mockery and defiance, through a multiplied simulation that would offer the ritual of the death of the university as a model of decomposition to the whole of society, a contagious model of the disaffection of a whole social structure, where death would finally make its ravages, which the strike tries desperately to avert, in complicity with the system, but succeeds, on top of it all, only in transforming the university into a slow death, a delay that is not even the possible site of a subversion, of an offensive reversion. That is what the events of May 1968 produced. At a less advanced point in the process of the liquefaction of the university and of culture, the students, far from wishing to save the furniture (revive the lost object, in an ideal mode), retorted by confronting power with the challenge of the total, immediate death of the institution, the challenge of a deterritorialization even more intense than the one that came from the system, and by summoning power to respond to this total derailment of the institution of knowledge, to this total lack of a need to gather in a given place, this death desired in the end - not the crisis of the university, that is not a challenge, on the contrary, it is the game of the system, but the death of the university - to that challenge, power has not been able to respond, except by its own dissolution in return (only for a moment maybe, but we saw it).
Baudrillard is wrong- suicide is a ritualistic exchange Fernando 2010 (Jeremy, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death Pg. 125-126) We might provisionally begin our glimpse into the phenomenon by considering the notion that suicide is the expression of a subject`s will towards death. One can even posit that since one is thrown into life, and that one has no control over the point in which one dies, suicide is the subject`s way of gaining some form of control-at least of telos of life itself. Of course the irony of the situation is, the very moment in which the subject gains a form of control over her/his life is also the very same moment in which her/his life is lost. This opens the question of whether one can think of suicide in terms of an economic exchange. Even though the opening gambit is that the subject exchanges life for control, the attempted control was over life itself: Hence, if life is lost within the very exchange that is taking place, is there even a transference that occurs; is there actually an exchange? Since both the losses-the life of the subject-and the gains-control over a no longer existent life-amount to an exchange of nothing-in the economic sense of zero exchange-this is strictly speaking an empty exchange. Hence, one needs to consider suicide as a ritualistic exchange, where one stakes one`s life in order to gain form of control: and here is where form is crucial, for surely there is no content in this emptiness, to this emptiness.
AT: Anthro
Environmental movements that reject anthropocentrism cant solve Light 2 Professor of environmental philosophy (Andrew Light, professor of environmental philosophy and director of the Environmental Conservation Education Program, 2002, Applied Philosophy Group at New York University, METAPHILOSOPHY, v33, n4, July, p. 561)//LC It should be clear by now that endorsing a methodological environmental pragmatism requires an acceptance of some form of anthropocentrism in environmental ethics, if only because we have sound empirical evidence that humans think about the value of nature in human terms and pragmatists insist that we must pay attention to how humans think about the value of nature. Indeed, as I said above, it is a common presupposition among committed nonan- thropocentrists that the proposition that humans are anthropocentrist is true, though regrettable. There are many problems involved in the wholesale rejection of anthropocentrism by most environmental philosophers. While I cannot adequately explain my reservations to this rejection, for now I hope the reader will accept the premise that not expressing reasons for environmental priorities in human terms seriously hinders our ability to communicate a moral basis for better environmental policies to the public. Both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric claims should be open to us.
Humans are key to environmental ethics- anthropocentrism isnt a good starting point because the protection of future generations will always come first Norton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism, Volume 6, Issue 2 of Environmental Ethics, https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=enviroethics&id=enviroethics_1984_000 6_0002_0131_0148)//LC I argue that this equivalence is mistaken by showing that the anthropocentrism/nonanthropocentrism debate is far less important than is usually assumed. Once an ambiguity is noted in its central terms, it becomes clear that nonanthropocentrism is not the only adequate basis for a truly environmental ethic.3 I then argue that another dichotomy, that of individualism versus nonindividualism, should be seen as crucial to the distinctiveness of environ- mental ethics and that a successful environmental ethic cannot be individualistic in the way that standard contemporary ethical systems are. Finally, I examine the consequences of these conclusions for the nature and shape of an environmental ethic. Before beginning these arguments, I need to clarify how I propose to test an adequate environmental ethic. I begin by assuming that all environmentally sensitive individuals believe that there is a set of human behaviors which do or would damage the environment. Further, I assume that there is considerable agreement among such individuals about what behaviors are included in that set. Most would decry, for example, careless storage of toxic wastes, grossly overpopulating the world with humans, wanton destruction of other species, air and water pollution, and so forth. There are other behaviors which would be more controversial, but I take the initial task of constructing an adequate environmental ethic to be the statement of some set of principles from which rules can be derived proscribing the behaviors included in the set which virtually all environmentally sensitive individuals agree are environmentally destructive. The further task of refining an environmental ethic then involves moving back and forth between the basic principles and the more or less controversial behaviors, adjusting principles and/or rejecting intuitions until the best possible fit between principles and sets of proscribed behaviors is obtained for the whole environmental community. In the present paper I address the prior question of basic principles. I am here only seeking to clarify which principles do (and which do not) support the large set of relatively uncontroversial cases of behaviors damaging to the environment. An ethic will be adequate, on this approach, if its principles are sufficient to entail rules proscribing the behaviors involved in the noncontroversial set. My arguments, then, are not directed at determining which principles are true, but which are adequate to uphold certain shared intuitions. Questions concerning the truth of such principles must be left for another occasion.
They cannot resolve environmental issues- they arent at the core of environmental ethics Norton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism, Volume 6, Issue 2 of Environmental Ethics, https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=enviroethics&id=enviroethics_1984_000 6_0002_0131_0148)//LC I suggest that the distinction between anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism has been given more importance in discussions of the foundations of environmental ethics than it warrants because a crucial ambiguity in the term anthropocentrism has gone unnoticed.4 Writers on both sides of the controversy apply this term to positions which treat humans as the only loci of intrinsic value.5 Anthropocentrists are therefore taken to believe that every instance of value originates in a contribution to human values and that all elements of nature can, at most, have value instrumental to the satisfaction of human interests.6 Note that anthropocentrism is defined by reference to the position taken on loci of value. Some nonanthropocentrists say that human beings are the source of all values, but that they can designate nonhuman objects as loci of fundamental value.7 Humans should be placed at the center of discussions of the environment Norton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism, Volume 6, Issue 2 of Environmental Ethics, https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=enviroethics&id=enviroethics_1984_000 6_0002_0131_0148)//LC Suppose a generation of the entire human species freely decided to sterilize itself, thereby freeing itself to consume without fear ofhanning future individuals. Would they do wrong? Yes.19 The perpetuation of the human species is a good thing because a universe containing human consciousness is preferable to one without it.20 This value claim implies that current generations must show concern for future generations. They must take steps to avoid the extinc- tion of the species and they must provide a reasonably stable resource base so that future generations will not suffer great deprivation. These are the bases of rules of management analogous to the rules for administering a trust fund. They do not have individuals or individual interests as their reference point, but they do govern behavior that will affect future individuals. It is now possible to outline a weakly anthropocentric, nonindividualistic environmental ethic. Such an ethic has two levels. The distributional level has as its principle that one ought not to harm other human individuals unjustifiably. This principle rests upon the assumption that feIt preferences, desires that occur within individual human consciousness, have equal prima facie value. Rules for the fair treatment of individuals are derived fronl the principle of no harm and prescribe fair treatment of individuals, whether regarding benefits derived from the environment or from other sources. Since there is nothing distinctive about the environmental prescriptions and proscriptions that occur on this level-they do not differ in nature from other issues of individual fairness-I do not discuss them further. Decisions on the second level of environmental ethics, which I call the level of "allocation," cannot, however, be based upon individual considerations. The central value placed on human consciousness is not a result of aggregating the value of individual consciousnesses, because the value of ongoing consciousness cannot be derived from the value of individual consciousnesses they cannot be identified or counted prior to the making of decisions on resource allocation.21 Therefore, obligations on this level are owed to no individual and can be called "generalized obligations." They are obligations of the current generation to maintain a stable ow of resources into the indefinite future and, consequently, they are stated vis-a-vis resources necessary for ongoing human life, not vis-a-vis individual requirements. Resources represent the means for supporting life looked at from a nonindividual perspective. The individual perspective determines needs and wants and then seeks means to fulfill them. Concern for the continued ow of resources insures that sources of goods and services such as ecosystems, soil, forests, etc. remain "healthy" and are not deteriorating. In this way, options are held open and reasonable needs of individuals for whatever goods and services can be fulfilled with reasonable labor, technology, and ingenuity. The emphasis of this con- cern, however, is not individualistic since it is not focused on the fulfillment of specifiable needs, but rather on the integrity and health of ongoing ecosystems as holistic entities.
Human centric frameworks can provide a sufficient environmental framework Norton 84- philosopher at Georgia Tech (Bryan G., Summer 1984, Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthropocentrism, Volume 6, Issue 2 of Environmental Ethics, https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=enviroethics&id=enviroethics_1 984_0006_0002_0131_0148)//LC The point of this essay, however, has been to show that one need not make the questionable ontological commitments involved in attributing intrinsic value to nature, since weak anthropocentrism provides a framework adequate to criticize current destructive practices to incorporate concepts of human affinity to nature, and to account for the distinctive nature of environmental ethics. All of these are essential elements in an ethic that recognizes the distinction between felt and considered preferences and includes important aesthetic and ethical ideals. These ideals, which can be derived from spiritual sources or from a rationally constructed worldview, can be based on and find their locus in human values. And yet they are sufficient to provide the basis of criticism of currently overconsumptive felt preferences. As such they adjudicate between ethical concerns for distributional fairness in the present and concerns of allocation, which have reference to the long-term future. Essential to this adjudication is the development of principles of conduct that respect the ongoing integrity of functioning ecosystems seen as wholes. In this way they transcend concern for individualistically expressed feIt preferences and focus attention on the stable functioning of ongoing systems. If all of this is true, Occam's razor surely provides a basis for favoring weak anthropocentrism over nonanthropocentrism.