One of the central questions of environmental philosophy is the puzzle about which account of moral considerability of an entity, system, process, object or the like is the least likely to be based on anthropocentric and/or anthropomorphic reasoning while still resulting from a human perspective. For my specific purpose of developing an account of ecological justice, political non-ranking biocentrism is what I consider to be the most defensible account of such sort in the context of justice. For this, the political constitutes a qualification and non-ranking is a specification of the biocentric focus. Granted this will be a very quick run-through leaving many open questions. Even though the intention is to provide an account of justice, it is the revisionist nature of any such attempt to move away from highly anthropocentric but influential shared premises in political theorising that necessitates this outline. Usually such premises remain tacit within accounts of justice, but I need to highlight at least some pragmatic, normative, ontological and epistemological premises on which a theoretical framework can be built.

I will focus on three central issues at hand. In the first section I will explain what I mean by a political approach to biocentrism, and then turn to how I understand biocentrism more generally in section two. More specifically, this latter section will entail an overview of my understanding of life and the moral considerability that comes with it. Again, this is by no means a defence or full description of biocentrism, but the elaboration on a few grounding premises. Then in section three I will explain why a non-ranking version of biocentrism that does not construct a hierarchy of moral significance is the most convincing account of such sort and discuss in the final section what implications such a political non-ranking biocentrism has for theorising about justice.

Political biocentrism

In contrast to more holistic accounts, my primary unit of analysis are individual living beings. Yet, I am not claiming that a complete consistent account of an environmental ethic should be individualistic because I see a biocentric account of justice situated within a pluralist environmental ethic.