Avoiding Misanthropic Sacrifice in African Environmental Ethics: Is Vitalist Teleology the Solution?

Holist nonanthropocentric approaches in ethics face the challenge of avoiding the misanthropic sacrifice objection. Those who raise the objection do so on the basis that holist, nonanthropocentric ethics imply that it might be permissible to sacrifice individual humans, groups of humans, or even humanity as a whole, for the sake of preserving broader ecological wholes. The misanthropic sacrifice objection is thus relevant to African environmental ethics, where nonanthropocentrism is often developed through frameworks that are holist--or at least relationalist--because of how they develop communitarian and vitalist resources (typically but not always in combination). In his recent work on moral status, Munamato Chemhuru emphasizes teleology alongside vitalism. I argue this focus on teleology, in combination with vitalism, (a) has some unrecognized promise as a way of avoiding misanthropic sacrifices within a nonanthropocentric African environmental ethics, but (b) nonetheless faces three key challenges that will need to be met before that promise is fully realized. These challenges concern the ability of hierarchical vitalism to afford both nonanthropocentric protections for nonhuman entities and protections for humans (and their communities), as well as an ambiguity at the heart of vitalist teleology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]