Daoism and environmental ethics : viewing the world through the lens of Laozi

Abstract

The discussion between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism is widely debated in environmental ethics. Many philosophers have come up with theories or movements to defend the non-anthropocentric view including Paul Taylor’s biocentrism and Arne Naess’s deep ecology movement. However, each view, with its respective individualistic and holistic feature, faces a challenge. In this paper, I propose and defend an environmental ethic inspired by Laozi’s Daoism. I do this by discussing the concepts of dao, de and ziran in the Daodejing to show that the Daoist environmental ethic is non-anthropocentric and holistic. I also explore the practical implications of Daoism in terms of the actions and attitudes we can take by examining the concepts of wuwei, guan and fan.