**1. Introduction**

Is the existing scheme of values in today's societies sufficient to ensure the vital processes of nature? or is a change of ethical-moral paradigm necessary in which nature is the subject of rights, not the object of rights? In the light of this question, it is proposed to analyse the approach of Andean philosophy and ancestral knowledge, the ethics of Good Living (founded on the principles of relationality, correspondence, complementarity, and reciprocity between man and nature), and the philosophical bases of Andean culture with its ancestral knowledge about Pachamama. Thus, in contrast to these approaches, anthropocentrism, biocentrism, and ecocentrism are analysed from the axis that relates to man and nature. The jurisprudential analysis of the sentences issued by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador is also proposed, which marks the path of intercultural interpretation of human-nature relations. Likewise, the ethical and moral principles generated in the relationships recognised in a transversal way in Andean philosophy allow us to mark the emergence of a new normative behaviour, totally distant from economic extractivism, as the foundation of the

capitalist system, towards an economical form of subsistence characterised by respect and harmonious coexistence of the different elements that coexist in this world. To this end, a combination of historical, comparative, and argumentative analytical methods was used to analyse Western thought and an amalgam of oral and symbolic transmission of the sayings of the village elders to the vision of Andean philosophy1 and ancestral knowledge.

### **1.1 Initial discussion on anthropocentrism**

From the beginning of humanity, the fear of the unknown and the struggle to survive were a motivation to know the human and to coexist with non-human entities. The Greek tradition discussed human-animal and society-nature relations and identified humans and nature with the divine and animals as inferior entities. This initial sacred, eternal, and spiritual vision was surpassed by another that left the spiritual outside of nature and transferred it to the sacred temples. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (XIII and XVII), the human being was considered the most virtuous of all species that inhabited the earth and administered goods, animals, and the natural environment (in a limited way since complete dominion was exclusive to God) [1]. Nature, with its domestication, became an exploitable and external resource, subject to modification (raw material) for economic purposes and subject to market laws. It was accompanied by philosophical thought, which limited morality to man alone and preserved the natural world under a utilitarian conception. It considered man the absolute master of nature, whose progressive and rational mission was to dominate, use, and abuse it without limits.

However, the dominion is not for all, but only for some because the same human beings attributed to themselves characteristics that served the physiognomists to classify them hierarchically [2]. Psychic and moral characters were deduced from their resemblance to a particular animal. After passing through Gall's phrenology [2], together with Lombroso and the positivists [3], it was a tradition that entered the legal field to give scientific status to criminology, consecrating aesthetic values as the basis of racist hierarchies and associating the ugly with the bad or primitive [4].

For Plato, the separation between body and soul and contempt for the body prepared capitalism, and [5] simultaneously relegated the animal and the human—for its corporeal dimension, close to an animal condition—to the state of pure body. The human was not to worry about earthly suffering because his destiny was in his soul, and he would go to paradise [6]. The human concerned with the body, as vanity, was the closest criminal to the animal. In this environment, Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) introduces his concern for nature by comparing character with the inmates: science tortures nature, as the Inquisition did with its inmates, to reveal the last of its secrets... [7].

For his part, René Descartes (1596–1650), in the fifth part of his Discourse on Method, summarised his book Treatise on Light [8] and concluded that animals and the universe were machines regulated by laws. Animals lacked a soul, or if it was admitted that they had one, it was very different from that of man. Therefore, they could not be punished, nor was there any obligation in this regard; on the contrary, they were objects of human domination and had no rights, ethics, or legal limitation.

<sup>1</sup> The thought of the Andean philosophy and ancestral knowledge claims the existence and viability of differentiated and alternative ways of life to the Western one; it is based on a worldview based on the understanding that recognises as valid the spiritual and emotional in the constitution of the human being and his ability to relate to his fellow men and with his natural environment.

#### *Reconstruction of Ethics: Nature as a Subject of Rights DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112336*

As for the universe, everything was reduced to matter (extension) and motion [8]. In addition, he referred to God as the great clockmaker of the world, responsible not only for building the universe but for keeping it running. When analysing the method of incipient modern science, he said that the human being must become the owner and possessor of nature [2].

Schuld considers danger as the basis of inquisitorial punitive power. Nonhumans were animals, and the criminals, heretics, women, and inferior colonised humans were half-animals to be protected by superiors. In contrast, others had to be eliminated to prevent them from destroying humanity. This originated a stage characterised by political and legal domination over the subjected peoples to satisfy the interests and needs of the imperial economy.

Enlightenment and liberal philosophical thought of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and all modernity did not consider the animal as a machine. The Enlightenment had two contradictory bases: an empiricist one that gave rise to Bentham's utilitarianism and an idealist one, proper to Kantian rationalism. Kant limited ethics and the right to human relations [9]. However like Hobbes, he excluded not only animals from the contract but also some human enemies because (understood as autonomy) he could decide what would make him happy and pursue it without obstacles by making use of his freedom unless another had been granted the power to determine through a covenant [10, 11]. In one of his 1983 book, The Case for Animal Rights, the author Tom Regan corrects Kant by asserting that every living being must be considered or treated as an end in itself, not only those endowed with a moral conscience, as Kant claimed [12]. He based this assertion on the fact that many humans do not possess a moral conscience—such as very young children and the severely mentally disabled. This is the basis from which he builds the principle that no living being should be treated as a means to serve other people's ends.

Then, from the chronological review of the philosophy underpinning anthropocentrism, it can be concluded that knowledge is based on reason—knowledge contained in science and the construction of ideas. Thus, anthropocentrism uses the scientific method and denies everything that cannot be demonstrated. Furthermore, it upholds the separation of the mind from the body and emotions. It poses the denial of the spirit or the soul to justify power and its hierarchy regarding the environment.

#### **1.2 Notes on biocentrism**

Biocentrism, as a philosophical stance, seeks to expand the limits of morality towards non-human living beings and organisms, granting them value and respect for sharing a common element, life. For this, it considers: a) the capacity, or not, to feel as a moral criterion for using species and b) the intrinsic value of each species regardless of the attributes of its life.

In this sense, concerning the capacity or not to feel, we have Bentham's utilitarian discourse in which he proposes the greatest happiness for all. He seeks to avoid pain in sensitive beings such as animals, thereby summoning their respect and recognising their rights. This was continued by Henry Salt, who published his book Animal's Rights in 1892. Also, Peter Singer, in 1975, in his book Animal Liberation, proposed avoiding animals' cruel treatment or experimentation as part of the animals' rights. In this environment, a French philosopher, Michel Serres, tested the thesis of the creation of subjects and concluded on the need for a contract with nature [13].

On the other hand, regarding the intrinsic value of each species regardless of the attributes of its life, the author Charles Darwin, in his theory of evolution, referred

to the survival of the fittest, understood as the most fertile and not as the strongest in the physical sense. Therefore, in evolution, competition should not be privileged but rather cooperation. Nature selects the fittest individuals and eliminates the least favourable variations [14]. Symbiosis recognition as an essential evolutionary force has profound philosophical implications. All macroscopic organisms, including ourselves, are living proof that destructive practices ultimately fail; only creative individuals who know how to cooperate and progress survive [15].

On the other hand, according to the law of natural selection (nature selects the most suitable individuals, eliminating the least favourable variations), Herbert Spencer, manager of subhuman justice, concluded that it was necessary to apply the same rule to humans through the homogeneous or the heterogeneous. On the other hand, they could evolve from cosmogenesis to humans, clearly divided between the white superior and inferior races. However, the tutelage of the most biologically evolved race was necessary for this [16]. Evolution was a process in which, according to positivism, the half-animals of other races were to be protected by the superiors (neocolonialism), and within the race itself, the inferiors (the delinquent half-animals) were to be eliminated, by either natural or artificial selection. The latter must be understood as the evolutionary process by which humans consciously select for or against certain characteristics.

Based on each species' intrinsic value, egalitarian biocentrism appears, establishing that every organism is a teleological centre endowed with uniqueness, an individuality whose final cause is to pursue its good [17]. This position defends substantial equality between all forms of life without considering the proper values of nature and all forms of life and their inequalities. Thus, for example, an ant is not the same as a person; rights that do not focus on individuals but on species or ecosystems are generated.

In contrast, hierarchical biocentrism conceives of a community of human and non-human living beings linked together by vital independence rather than a relationship of ranks in which humans are superior. Taylor, on his part, posits the belief that humans are not inherently superior to other living things, implying their equality [17].

James Lovelock states that the Earth regulates, maintains, and recreates life conditions using living beings. It is evident that we could not survive without living beings that supply oxygen, and they could not survive without us, as we produce their nutrients. In fact, he claimed that there is a "planetary intelligence"; that is, the Earth is not a collection of rocks or other inert elements but a coherent system linked to a purpose [18]. In this way, it was changed from a mechanistic paradigm, in which the Earth was a large mass of stone, to one in which it can be affirmed that the Earth is a living being. This thesis was called Gaia, the name of the ancient Greek goddess who generated all the beings that inhabited the planet. In terms of Varela and Maturana, it is an autopoietic system [19].

Leopold changes the status of nature from property to a member of the biotic community based on the axiology of a philosophical value, which is superior to mere economic significance [20]. For his part, Berry [21] considers the Earth an integral community that includes all its human and non-human members, limiting the human being to be just another member (biotic community).

Under the premises analysed, it can then be concluded that biocentrism analyses the conflicts between non-human living organisms, which have value and respect for the fact of sharing life. However, while the proper values of nature and all life forms are recognised, they are not necessarily equal. A person is not the same as an ant. This position generates rights that focus not on individuals but species or ecosystems. Their concern is the survival of populations and the integrity of ecosystems, which enables using natural resources, albeit under certain conditions. On the one hand, it ensures the persistence of these life forms, and on the other, it guarantees exploitation to enable their quality of life satisfaction.

## **1.3 On ecocentrism**

It starts from a holistic vision of the human being. It proposes to broaden reflections on the moral community, questioning the anthropocentric idea of harm and, with it, our exclusivity as subjects of rights. Its justification rests on an ontological belief and a subsequent ethical claim. The former denies that sufficient existential division exists between human and non-human nature to justify human beings as (a) the only bearers of intrinsic value and (b) possessing greater intrinsic value than non-human nature. Thus, there is a further ethical claim for equality of intrinsic value between human and non-human nature and biospheric egalitarianism.

The ecological question not only focused the attention of scientists but also of ecology theorists and raised a kind of division between a) an environmentalist ecology, which continues to consider that humans are the holder of rights and that, although they can recognise their obligations regarding nature, it is not up to them to assign human beings the character of holders of rights; and b) a deep ecology, which recognises personality to nature, as holder of its own rights independently of humans.

Keller & Truschkat defined deep ecology, coined by Arne Naess, as a movement that rejects the image of the man in the environment, in favour of the relational notion of a whole [22], characterised as an egalitarian and holistic environmental philosophy founded on a phenomenological methodology. In this sense, Keller & Truschkat [22] focused on an egalitarian system of values (axiology), as well as on a set of interconnected individuals within a whole (ontology) [22]. As a result, the idea of economic and productive development was accentuated in the twentieth century. The need to preserve nature in the face of environmental impact and ignorance of the ethnic and cultural diversity of nationalities became evident. Thus, the definition of a theory that would grant the status of good to nature, in itself, even in the absence of risk to human beings, emerged.
