On Agency
Putting ontological value into things, granting them the right of existing as their own respective complexities
the complexity of all things as entangled knots in the web of existence humans have the duty to care and maintane things they created (because of the impact on the world and the respective complexity)
In a cartesian dualism/humanism the things get equalised to humans if a necessary basis of it’s humanness can be attributed while as in animism or new materialism all things are equal from the beginning. There is no human exceptionalism but a flat ontology. Humans, animals, plants and things don’t need to be ethically divided. They are put into social relations.
- Tim Ingold: Being alive to a world without objects - Handbook of Contemporary Animism
- http://criticalposthumanism.net/new-materialisms/
- https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agency.html
- Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time
The endangered species act is pretty clear that when a species is endangered it does not matter if we can find why that species is valuable or not. The species is valuable - according to the Endangered Species Act - just because.
For example, one of the most robust psychological phenomena in behavioural economics is the endowment effect, first reported in 1991 by Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman and Jack Knetsch. There are various versions of the effect, but probably the most compelling is the observation that we value identical goods (eg, coffee mugs) equally until one becomes owned, whereupon the owner thinks that his or her mug is worth more than a potential buyer is willing to pay. What is interesting is that this effect is more pronounced in cultures that promote greater independent self-construal compared with those that promote more interdependent notions of the self. Again, this fits with the extended-self concept where we are defined by what we own exclusively.