Antinaturalism (politics)
Opposition to essentialist appeals to nature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Antinaturalism, or anti-naturalism, is opposition to essentialist appeals to nature or natural order.[1][2] In political and ethical contexts, the term has been used in relation to antispeciesism, anti-racism, feminism and transhumanism.[3][4]
Antinaturalist arguments have been associated with parts of the French animal rights movement and materialist feminism.[1] The term is also used in xenofeminism, whose advocates argue that social and biological conditions should not be treated as fixed simply because they are described as natural.[5] Writers associated with antinaturalist arguments include David Olivier and Yves Bonnardel.[6]
Views
Antinaturalist writers have criticised appeals to nature in debates about abortion, birth control, body modification, sex reassignment surgery and other forms of bodily autonomy.[5]
In animal ethics, antinaturalist arguments have been contrasted with forms of radical environmentalism that treat nature as sacred or as valuable for its own sake. Catherine-Marie Dubreuil describes antinaturalist antispeciesism as rejecting the idea that nature as a whole has inherent sacred value, while treating ecological preservation as important insofar as it affects the well-being of sentient beings.[7]
Yves Bonnardel argues that naturalist ideology can legitimise speciesist oppression of non-human sentient beings.[1] He has also criticised the use of natural law arguments to justify the reintroduction of predatory animals to control populations of other animals, describing this as a form of speciesism.[8]
See also
- Appeal to nature – Rhetorical tactic and potential fallacy
- Bioconservatism – Cautious stance towards modifying human nature
- Culturalism – Central importance of culture as an organizing force in human affairs
- Gender essentialism – Attribution of intrinsic qualities to genders
- Gnosticism – Early Christian and Jewish religious systems
- Morphological freedom – Proposed civil right
- Naturalistic fallacy – Purported fallacy in explaining good reductively
- Predation problem – Consideration of predation as a moral problem
- Wild animal suffering – Suffering of wild animals due to natural processes