Intrinsic Value

Elsevier, Biological Conservation, Volume 245, May 2020
If moral concern for nonhuman nature underpins conservation, it is essential to understand how individuals populate their “moral communities,” a core concept from environmental ethics, with various elements of biodiversity. Using data from an online survey of the United States public (N = 1331), we investigated the extent to which respondents' moral communities align with four worldviews discussed in the environmental ethics literature: anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism. Each worldview provides a vision for how the moral community should be constituted.