ORIGINAL PAPER

Meaning Matters: The Biosemiotic Basis of Bioethics

Jonathan Beever

Received: 14 July 2011 /Accepted: 10 August 2011 /Published online: 15 October 2011# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract If the central problem in philosophical ethics is determining and definingthe scope of moral value, our normative ethical theories must be able to explain onwhat basis and to what extent entities have value. The scientific foundation ofcontemporary biosemiotic theory grounds a theory of moral value capable ofaddressing this problem. Namely, it suggests that what is morally relevant issemiosis. Within this framework, semiosis is a morally relevant and natural propertyof all living things thereby offering us an ecological, as opposed to merelyenvironmental, ethic. A consequence of this semiotic theory is that living things areaccorded inherent moral value based on their natural relational properties—theirability to signify. This consequence establishes a hierarchy of inherent moral valuebased on the scope of signification: the larger the Umwelten, the greater the value.This paper argues that a robust semiotic moral theory can take into account a muchwider scope of inherent value.. These consequences have positive ramifications forenvironmental ethics in their recognition of the natural ecological networks in whicheach organism is bound. This presentation of a biosemiotic model of value offers ajustificatory strategy for our contemporary moral intuitions concerning our semiotic/moral relationships with living things while also productively pushing our normativeethical boundaries.

Keywords Biosemiotics . Ethics . Moral considerability . Moral value . Semiosis .

Peirce

The cultural text of the last hundred years will be read as a myriad of frenziedattempts to come to terms with the moral value of life. The result of these attempts isour living and dynamic societal ethic. Our societal ethic explains what we considermorally valuable and why we consider it morally valuable as a reflection of changesin our political, social, and existential landscape. If we accept that societal ethics has

Biosemiotics (2012) 5:181–191DOI 10.1007/s12304-011-9133-1

J. Beever (*)Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USAe-mail: beeverj@purdue.edu

not only changed during this time but also developed—and we certainly have reasonto do so—we can trace a progression of moral development through shifts in ourmoral thinking. For instance, consider the reasoning of the civil rights movement inthe United States: no reasonable criterion other than being human was necessary forthe attribution of rights, so rights were extended to all human beings, regardless ofsex or race. We have made moral progress as our understanding of the natural worldand our place in it has developed. The repercussions of World War II brought aboutdeepening social concern for the protection for all human life, codified in legal andpolitical structures like the Nuremberg Code. However, this code defended humanrights at the expense of non-human animals, demanding the use of nonhumananimals as a precursory surrogate for human research subjects.1

The latter part of the twentieth-century saw this same cycle of concern andcodification emerge for non-human subjects,2 resulting in still-developing codifiedprotections for the welfare of non-human animals. The endowment of such civilprotections has been a marker of inclusion in the so-called moral club. Even morerecently, however, the moral community, concerned about the environment morebroadly, has questioned the exclusion of any living thing from this moral club,asking “should we continue to extend the moral umbrella to cover all living things?”From this story of moral progress, it is not at all unreasonable to conclude that ournear future holds the codification of similar protections for all living beings as aresult of the social concern surrounding the scope of moral value. For thisconclusion to hold, ethicists must reconcile science and morality—the worlds of so-called facts and values—to help richer ethical policy-making move forward.

The job of moral philosophers and, I challenge, biosemioticians, is to providebetter and richer justifications to the developing social ethic around the moral valueof the natural world. This is our most important task, as citizens of an ever-broadening ecological landscape. I argue that biosemiotics, as a robust scientificapproach to meaning, can offer an empirical and immanent justification for theinherent moral value of all living things. Biosemiotics is capable of playing a role injustifying a broad scope of moral considerability.

Justification for understanding moral considerability requires us to explicate someset of criteria on which this moral value is based. Historically, inherent moral valuehas been attributed to all and only human animals. While our scientificunderstanding of the natural world has been driven by empirical discovery andjustification, models of normative ethical explanation do not parallel this naturalisticfoundation of the moral habits of our societal ethics. Instead, our ethical explanationshave been founded on non-natural metaphysical assumptions, uncompelling in theirempirical indeterminacy. Why should we, for example, accept that the criterion formoral considerability is consciousness, given that we have no verifiable account ofwhat consciousness is or who has it?

We should ask and have asked similar questions regarding ensoulment,rationality, language, and sentience as criteria justifying the maintenance of a moralabyss separating worthy human animals from unworthy non-humans. This Cartesiandivide between the human and the nonhuman is so deep-rooted that it continues to

1 http://ohsr.od.nih.gov/guidelines/nuremberg.html (section three) accessed 6.17.11.2 For a historical overview of this codification, see Bekoff 2010, 635–642.

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inform our understanding every mode of our existence, from the social to theecological—from the cultural to the natural. In 1986 Michael Ruse and biologist E.O. Wilson published Moral Philosophy as Applied Science in which they argued forthe empirical advance of a naturalistic—indeed biological—moral philosophy.Nearly 25 years after the publication of that article, the impact of their project hasbarely begun to be felt in philosophical ethics. Sam Harris, among others, alsopushes this position against the transcendent barriers to an empirical moral science,arguing that value is reducible to fact. (Harris 2010) These positions needn’t besevere, either: Bernie Rollins argued in his 1976 Natural and Conventional Meaningthat the dualism between natural and conventional meaning parallels the dualismbetween fact and value and has not reasonable foundation apart from a usefuldistinction (Rollin 1976, 104). The argument holds as a corollary concerning therelationship between science and ethics (Rollin 2006, 20). Yet empirical approachesto understanding value are often side-lined in ethical inquiry. So how might weexplain the slow advance of this empirical naturalistic approach? A sufficientexplanation of this slow advance is the radical disconnect between our normativetheories and our intuitions. Naturalistic approaches remains at odds with thedualisms entrenched in our thinking about value. But in bringing science andethics—the machines of facts and values—into dialogue, we might quicken thepace of positive change in our actions as a society.

But even while we have begun to question the dualism underlying our ecologicalunderstanding of our place in the world, the equilibrium between our moral habitsand our normative theorizing remains out of balance. While we moral agents on theone hand rely on contemporary scientific analysis of the natural world to inform ourmoral habits, we also on the other hand hold on to transcendent metaphysicalassumptions in our ethical analysis of those intuitions that we are unable tosufficiently articulate. This metaphysical stubbornness creates and maintains thedualism between fact and value. When we consider alternative approaches towardmoral value, we discover that each faces the same difficulty. It is this grounding ofjustification on transcendent principles that continues to split ethics from science.The empirical and naturalistic approach to moral philosophy can be a development ofour moral thinking that will allow the progress of our societal ethic to continue.

Let us briefly recount the general historical trends in these positions. Medievalphilosophers accorded a special place to the human animal, based on his having animmortal soul trapped in mortal flesh. The difficulty here is clear: ScripturalChristian and specifically Catholic justifications hinged on the empirically untestableand untenable assumption of revelation of divine creation. While the medievaltradition did bring about the rise of the “way of signs”, as argued in detail byAmerican semiotician John Deely in several places (cf. Deely 2001), that medievaltradition established a vicious precedence in the ethical thinking of European (andhence American) approaches to ethics. The early modern rationalist traditionresponded to the religiosity of the Church tradition by replacing the soul withrational capacity tout court. They refused, however, to overcome the more basicproblem of justification based on a purely transcendent metaphysic. Severalempirical approaches followed, positing capacity for language as a characteristicthat both morally mattered and continued to hold the human animal apart as adifferent and higher kind of animal.

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It wasn’t until 1789 when Jeremy Bentham famously questioned the modes ofjustification of human moral worth. He suggested that reason ought not beconsidered a criterion of moral value but, instead, the capacity to suffer. (Bentham1789) Sentience, the capacity to experience pleasure or pain—to be better or worseoff—is arguably the first criterion to offer a serious justification for the inherentmoral worth of the non-human animal.

Animal philosopher Mark Bernstein termed this approach experientialism andexplained the scope of its applicability in his 1998 book On Moral Considerability.

If pain is always (perhaps necessarily) welfare-diminishing or harmful to anindividual, then, in accordance with experientialism, any individual with thecapacity to suffer pain is a moral patient and is therefore deserving of moralconsideration. In fact, we would have an explanation of why it is wrong togratuitously inflict pain; it is wrong because it makes the individual worse off.(Bernstein 1998, 27)

Following the basic approach of earlier consequentialists like Peter Singer,Bernstein stops at sentience, making the powerful argument that caring about painsand pleasures matters, morally. His, however, is an argument from the best ofcontemporary theoretical models, leaving open the possibility that none of theavailable models provide a sufficiently scientific account of the nature and scope ofmoral value. For, again, sentience is grounded in a theory of consciousness: aconcept that itself remains transcendent to our best scientific theories. As such, ourbest theory of moral value cannot coincide with our best ecological science,continuing the apparent explanatory divide between value and science. Nonetheless,sentience has remained at the fore of arguments concerning the moral considerabilityof animals and zoosemiotics has a role to play in its ongoing empirical developmentand justification.

This criterion, however, falls prey to the same limitations as our western societalethic continues to develop, taking into concern the value of the environment broadlyconsidered. Sentience is unable to account for the value of much of the living world.Aldo Leopold and others argued, in the 1970’s, for a land ethic: a theory of valueoffering to extend the umbrella of moral considerability to trees, plants, rivers,mountains, and ecosystems. Other theories of environmental value followed and, Iargue, none have been able to offer sufficient empirical justification for orexplanation of inherent moral value of living things, not to mention environmentalobjects more generally.

Kenneth Goodpaster, in his seminal 1978 piece on moral considerability, arguedthat the experientialist approach initiated by Bentham itself offered an untenablestopping place for the scope of moral value. Why should we think that sentience isthe appropriate or morally justified place at which to draw the line of moralconsiderability? Instead, Goodpaster sets the bar of necessary criteria for consider-ability at what he considers the only non-arbitrary criterion: the very “condition ofbeing alive.” (Goodpaster 1978, 316) For Goodpaster, life is the only boundary thatseems to avoid speciesism and arbitrariness. Commentators quickly took him to taskhere: why should we think that ‘being alive’ is a less arbitrary stopping place than,say, ‘being in existence’? (Hunt 1980, 59) Every argument for moral value faces this

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same difficulty without sufficient justification.3 While there is much more to be saidhere, this is the basic historical problem of moral justification faced by those of usinterested in the role biosemiotics might play in the consideration of moral worth.

Part II: Biosemiotic Approaches to Ethics and Value

What does semiotic analysis of biological and ecological relations teach us about thetraditional ethical framework under which we function? Jakob von Uexküll, theGerman biologist who greatly influenced Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze,4

Leopold, and Sebeok among many others with his development of the Umweltconcept as the unique individuated environment of an organism greatly influencedthe shift toward a semiotic interpretation of biology: biosemiotics. Recognizing thatall living things can be understood as semiotic systems directed toward ends,biosemiotics is compatible with the denial of the traditional dualistic model of thenatural opposed to the cultural.5 This divide—between the natural and cultural orbetween fact and value—stands only if the moral and/or the human is considered tobe different in kind from the factual/natural. Peircean semioticians hold this not to bethe case: semiotics entails the denial of the absolute natural/cultural divide based onthe holistic understanding of semiosis, the use and interpretation of signs. Instead,one finds biological information to be messages rather than mechanisms: anaturalistic intentional/purposive attitude rather than a reductionist mechanical one.6

The best explanations of moral value are never far away from a fundamental truththat biosemiotics helps to bring to light; namely, that the basic concern of moralconsiderability is an ever-deepening understanding of the value of meaning. Thispoint was made by Charles Taylor in his 1985 Human Agency and Languageconcerning language as a distinctly and importantly human characteristic. There hewrote that “the twentieth-century concern for language is a concern about meaning”(Taylor 1985, 216) and that one of the two themes of the shift toward an expressivistunderstanding of language is “the problem of meaning” (Taylor 1985, 217). Humanlanguage is “the language of a community and not just of an individual… We maynot be entirely sure what this means, but we have a sense that in some meaning itcontains an important truth.” (Taylor 1985, 240) Taylor pointed his reader toward thehorizon, where semiology gives way to semiotics and informs our best understand-ing of “community” as a not just cultural but ecological series of relationships. Iflanguage is to be considered a morally relevant criterion of value, it must be soconsidered in terms of its relationship to meaning-making. Likewise, if we are toconsider sentience as a necessary criterion of moral considerability, it must be

3 We would have to, of course, tell a much more detailed story about what we mean by “sufficientjustification.” The epistemic problem must be vetted against and in context of our best scientificknowledge of the world and our place in it. Whatever the epistemological approach, the disconnectbetween our theories of value and our scientific theories is obvious and problematic. The approach I offerin this paper offers at least strong if not sufficient justificatory support.4 See Buchanan, Brett. 2008. Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2008.5 Clearly, biosemioticians are not the only ones to deny this dualism.6 For an excellent summary of the key theses of biosemiotics, see Kull et al. 2009.

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because sentience has a necessary role to play in the ways in which being better orworse off means something to the individual. We can see this underlying concept atwork in Mark Bernstein’s thinking about the justification for sentience as a morally-relevant criterion of value.

Individuals are morally considerable only if they have a prudential welfare, andit at least seems reasonable to claim that only one’s subjective experiences canultimately affect how well or how poorly one is doing. Thus, an individual hasmoral standing if and only if he has phenomenological or sentient capacity.The view is captured in many of our adages and conforms to our (prereflective)commonsense and common practices.(Bernstein 1998, 35 emphasis mine)

For, what are “subjective experiences” if not the creation of meaning from livedphenomenological experience? It seems to me that the basis of all these attempts tojustify some scope of moral considerability focus on what matters to the subject, orwhat meaning the subject gives to its umwelt. It’s not having a soul, having thecapacity for language, being able to reason, or being sentient that matters: rather,meaning matters. And so to avoid falling back into the trap of transcendentjustifications, we need an empirical and testable science to guide the development ofour semiotic analysis of meaning and its moral value. We find this justification inPeirce’s triadic semiotics, the basis of the scientific methodologies of zoo- and bio-semiotics. Biosemiotics offers us a theory of meaning based on the semiosic7

relationship of living things to their inner and outer worlds. As Jesper Hoffmeyerdefines it, “[a]ccording to the biosemiotic perspective, living nature is understood asessentially driven by, or actually consisting of, semiosis, that is to say, processes ofsign relations and their signification—or function—in the biological processes oflife.” (Hoffmeyer 2008, 4)

As a theory of biology, it helps us explain the teleological, purposive, orintentional aspects of life that strike the strict mechanistic empiricist as just asforeign as transcendent explanations based on spirits, humors, and souls. Indeedsemiotics may be essential to an advanced understanding of biology; accordingto Hoffmeyer, “[i]t’s questionable, in fact, if one can at all understand advancedbiochemistry and molecular biology without thinking in semiotic terms.”(Hoffmeyer 2008, 15)

Peircean biosemiotics offers us the initial positing of a relevant and pragmatictheory of meaning-making at the boundary of life and semiosis. If meaning is at theroot of moral considerability, and the goal of biosemiotics is to offer a scientificapproach to meaning, then biosemiotics can be understood as a study of moralconsiderability. Central to this claim is that this semiotic value theory overcomesboth the untenable transcendent ontology and the outmoded mechanical metaphysicthat have plagued contemporary ethical motivations by reengaging an approachbased on a naturalized semiotic intentionality.

There have been limited attempts to work out the ethical implications of a robustsemiotic theory to date. Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio, for example, have

7 Note the important distinction: semiosic refers to the use of signs, while semiotic refers to theunderstanding of signs as such.

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written extensively on the concept of semioethics as an understanding of the ethicalobligations brought about as the direct result of the special place the human being—the semiotic animal—holds in the universe of living semiosic beings. (Petrilli 2004)As the only animal to not only use signs (semiosis) but also recognize signs quasigns (semiotics), they argue, the human animal stands alone under the moralobligation to justly wield semiotic armaments. John Deely agrees noting, “[p]art ofthis growing realization is the coming to light of an inevitable responsibility, besttermed “semioethics”, a consequence of this semiosic difference between senseperception as common to all higher animals and understanding as a species-specifically human modality of semiosis.” (Deely 2010b, 23)

Deely claims that this semiotic animal is different in degree not in kind, but theposition of his arguments place him in the trough of medieval dualism where, try ashe might, the human animal remains an isolated higher moral form the weight ofwhich all others must bear. Consider the closing remarks of his 2010 SemioticAnimal as evidence.

Semioethics, in short, is nothing more nor less than the question of whatwe are going to do about, how we are going to handle, the fact thathuman beings are not merely “rational animals”, still less res cogitanes,but in the fulness of their species-specifically unique being, semiotic animals,each and every one, an animal to and for whom nil semiosica alienum mecogitabile est. It is a unique responsibility, alright, springing from theawareness of semiosis as embracing the whole planet, of times past, present,and to come, and of our impact upon it as the only semiotic animals withinthe Gaia. (Deely 2010a, 125)

We might easily concede the point Deely continues to press; namely, that thehuman animal is the only semiotic animal. But the reader can hear in Deely’s prosethe Catholic impulse to raise up the human animal once again to a unique moralposition—a position of responsibility, authority and control in a universe of meresemiosic beings and objects of experience. Deely clearly recognizes the moralagency of the human animal; however, perhaps he does not necessarily exclude awider scope of moral patienthood. Nonetheless, his is a sin of omission: his focus onhuman moral agency does not offer an account of the value inherent in semiosisitself. We ought to remain wary of this impulse and to question whether whatmorally matters is semiotics or semiosis. On the account for which I argue, whatmorally matters, what makes something appropriately morally considerable, ismaking-meaning—semiosis—even if this meaning does not include an understand-ing of semiosis qua signa ipsa.

In fact, the value of meaning lays at the heart of the theoretical approaches toethics taken by several scholars who have sought out a more egalitarian approach tovalue through the lens of biosemiotics. These approaches all offer explanations ordescriptions of the scope of value, but they don’t extend beyond those explanationsto justifications. Biosemiotics can offer us an interesting and coherent explanationfor how we think life is inherently valuable, but to be a viable approach to ethicalconsideration it must also offer justification for why we should think this. It mustgive us reasons for thinking that the explanation of moral value is justified and,furthermore, prescriptive. Without foregrounding the moral relevance of meaning,

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these accounts are hard-pressed to overcome the justification problem. The work ofKalevi Kull, Morten Tønnessen, and Jesper Hoffmeyer on the relationship betweenvalue and biosemiotics offer important descriptive accounts that can form the basisof a novel prescriptive theory of moral value grounded in a biosemiotic analysis ofmeaning.

Kalevi Kull has noted that the early movement in environmental philosophy thattraces back to Aldo Leopold also parallels the biological turn in semiotics. (Kull2001, 354) He argues that value is reducible to “the intentional dimension ofmeaning that is counterpart to any sign…” and concludes that “the whole problem ofthe existence of the intrinsic values converges into a problem of the existence ofsuch signs in nature.” (ibid 359)

Such an attempt to explain our developing moral beliefs concerning theenvironment works to give biosemiotics a place in the dialogue concerning value.Kull sets up a split between perspectives on biological value (reproductive,meronomic, and functional) (ibid 357) and models of semiotic value (valeur as signnetwork complexity, purposiveness, signification) (ibid 358) demonstrating thepotential link between our thinking about biological and semiotic value. However,this early analysis is descriptive rather than prescriptive: offering us an explanationof how we do value rather than why we ought to value. At this descriptive level, itcannot stand unamended among our best ethical theories.

Another approach considering the ethical implications of biosemiotics comesfrom the early considerations of Morten Tønnessen. Tønnessen, in his 2003 UmweltEthics, explores the relationship between biosemiotics and Arne Naess’ approach toenvironmental value, developing what he terms “an Uekullian interpretation orspecification of The Deep Ecology Platform.” (Tønnessen 2003, 282) Tønnessenexplicates Naess’ eight theses of Deep Ecology through the lens of von Uexkull’sconception of the human animal as what Tønnessen describes as a unique anddistinctive bio-ontological monad. (Tønnessen 2003, 290). He argues that moralconsiderability derives from the semiosic nature of living things.

The reason why it makes sense to regard all semiotic agents, i.e., bio-ontological monads, as moral subjects, is that in respect to these entities, ouractions make a difference. Only for semiotic agents can our actions ultimatelyappear as signs that influence their well-being. In capacity of meaning-utilizers, all semiotic agents, be it the simplest creature, are able to distinguishbetween what they need and what is irrelevant or harmful to them.(Tønnessen 2003, 292)8

Like Kull before him, Tønnessen offers us a descriptive interpretation of thepossible connection or compatibility between the ecopolitics of Naess andbiosemiotics derived from von Uexkull; again, however, we have no novelprescriptive account of moral considerability. As a direct parallel to the DeepEcology movement, Tønnessen’s Umwelt Ethics faces similar difficulties. Forinstance, Naess argues for the value of nature based on our emotive responses toholistic connections to the world: while biosemiotics has the potential to more fully

8 Following our earlier distinction from Deely, we will assume that Tønnessen meant “semiosic” ratherthan “semiotic” in this passage.

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and empirically describe our ecological connections, neither Naess nor Tønnessensufficiently justify the morally-relevant content of our emotive responses or semioticconnections. While the Deep Ecology Platform has had a continued impact onecopolitics and social morality, it does not offer us a justificatory metaethical accountof value that would be fully prescriptive. Tønnessen does, however, point out theholism inherent in both Naess’ ethic and biosemiotics understanding of theinterconnectivity of semiosic nature. The importance of holism for any approachto environmental value cannot be overlooked.

It remains unclear whether, how, or to what extent the distinctive features of thehuman animal Tønnessen lays out should morally matter. The Umwelt Ethic doesn’tseem to offer us justification for semiotic value nor a thorough account of how wemight apply that value. However, the Umwelt Ethic does point us toward thejustificatory strategy suggested above: the well-being of semiosic life is contingent,at root, on their abilities as what Tønnessen describes as “meaning-utilizers”(Tønnessen 2003, 292). Here again, at the root of approaches to value, is a centralconsideration of meaning.

Perhaps the earliest and most formative approach to understanding the rolebiosemiotics might play in our theorizing about moral value comes from the work ofDanish biologist and semiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer. Tønnessen describes his work as“the first systematical exploration of biosemiotics’ relevance for environmentalethics (Tønnessen 2003, 283) and, we might add, one of the most sustained.Hoffmeyer, a product of the shift in our societal ethics concerning the environment,came to semiotics after recognizing that “a serious imbalance existed between livingthings and the science of living things; that is to say biology.” (Hoffmeyer 1993, 90)There he found a novel perspective on our moral thinking about the living world.While evolutionary biology might offer a basis for the identification with the naturalworld at the heart of Naess’ Deep Ecology, Hoffmeyer’s approach finds its historicalgrounding in the Spinozistic animist ethical approach of Jon Wetlesen “as thefoundation for an ‘analogical extension’ of the concept of ethical status.” (Hoffmeyer1993, 138 and Hoffmeyer 1995, 152) Wetlesen argues that Spinozistic strivingcreates and maintains the living individual and that that particular mode of existinghas moral relevance as the basis of individual existence. Striving is the criterion thatmarks out moral considerability—and marks it widely since every living thingstrives on Wetlesen’s view. But even if we were to accept this model as anexplanation of the moral value of animals generally, the metaphor of striving doesn’tseem to extend all the way to ecosystems or even to plants without seeming a far-fetched mere mnemonic. Neither does it offer us a testable empirical metaethicaljustification for the scope of moral value. But this might be a poor argument againstit. “Striving” is a metaphor—but a metaphor for semiosis. Like sentience et cetera,semiosis and meaning-making are found at the root of our ethical stories. Doessemiosis offer a testable/observable hypothesis or is it, too, merely a metaphor?

While I believe there is merit to thinking of semiosis as a scientific concept andwhile Hoffmeyer is sympathetic to the biopolitics of Wetlesen and indebted to hismodes of thinking, Hoffmeyer’s own biosemiotic thesis remains a metaphor parallelto Wetlesen’s; namely, that a kind of organic code-duality or semiotic survival marksout moral considerability. On this view, the message and not the body is central.(ibid.) When biosemioticians trace the development of semiosis from the simplest to

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the most complex they, at some point, start the attribution of moral considerability tothe individual. (Hoffmeyer 1993, 139)

The human animal is placed in the position of authority through the “semioticindividuation process” (Hoffmeyer 200, 328) whereby the human being becomesunique. As for other merely semiosic animals, the specific place of attribution ofmoral considerability in the semiosic hierarchy seems to be determined by a complexinterplay of empirical semiosic complexity plus level of human empathy through“the principle of analogical extension” (Hoffmeyer 1995, 153). Hoffmeyer furtherexplains that “…the decisive factor in triggering empathetic feelings towardorganisms of other species is the degree of semiotic individuation that we perceivein them.” (Hoffmeyer 2008, 331) The uniquely semiotic role of the human animal isessential to the creation of moral value, on this view. Despite this anthropocentricturn, the semiosic holism of biosemiotics offers the broadest possible criterion forvalue, one that coincides with life itself. “[W]e may consider living systems assubjects in this restricted sense, that they are temporal beings capable ofdistinguishing and acting upon selective features of their surroundings andparticipating in the evolutionary incorporation of the present into the future.”(Hoffmeyer 1995, 149)

Hoffmeyer’s view here is an admittedly “bioanthropologically based set ofethics,” (ibid. 141) and only helpful in explaining how humans might order livingthings according to their value instrumental or familiar to us. While Hoffmeyeravoids the transcendence of earlier dualistic theories of meaning and value that gavea unique place of moral worth to the human animal, he replaces it with a naturalisticsemiotic hierarchy that does the same. Thus, while Hoffmeyer’s early positionemphasizes the role of semiosis in the attribution of moral value, it seems to do so atthe expense of the holistic approach that is necessary for a theory of moralconsiderability that might take into account all of nature. It is insufficient to accountfor the moral value of nature merely be analogical comparison to the semiotic natureof the human animal. Meaning, at the heart of semiosis, is not a property exclusiveto human animals.

Despite facing difficulties as a coherent and prescriptive approach to justifyingmoral value, biosemiotics and the work of Hoffmeyer, Tønnessen, and Kull mark animportant milestone in our thinking about value. For, rather than relying on existingholistic theories of value that have failed to find relevance for science and overcomethe metaphysic of fact/value dualism, a biosemiotic approach offers both anempirical methodology and an inherently holistic foundation of moral value. Abiosemiotic ethic is necessarily an ecological ethic, bringing together the semio-sphere and the biosphere in a theory of meaning tied to individual umwelten andjustifying the moral considerability of all living things.

The shortcomings of previous attempts at justifying our best explanations ofmoral considerability may be overcome by a robustly developed biosemiotic accountof value as meaning-making. Biosemiotics “establishes a basis for a new theory ofmeaning that reflects the deep dynamics of life itself, because meaning is nothingmore and nothing less than the formation of interpretants in the Peircean sense—thatis, the formation of a relation between a receptive system and a supposed object thatresults from the action of a sign that somehow itself is related to that same object.”(Hoffmeyer 2010, 386) Biosemiotics has the empirical potential to avoid

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transcendent explanations of morally relevant properties. Furthermore, it offers anaccount of the source and scope of value that is foundational to popular accountssuch as those based on sentience.

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