More-than-human ethics

This chapter reviews how ethical claims have been mobilised in more-than-human studies over the last 25 years. It outlines a braided historical sketch of the field’s ethical gestures: revealing hybridity through the mixing of nature and culture; encountering contaminating difference through particular species and places; the promise of mutual flourishing and alliance through world-building and care. I then assess how successfully these ethical gestures engage wider questions of capitalism and coloniality. The chapter further argues that each of these ethical gestures is undergirded by an ontology of relation and vitalism. Drawing on recent work in plant studies and biophilosophy, I then suggest that this underlying ontology of relation is itself rooted in an animalistic vision of subjectivity and may not be sufficient in accounting for the full panoply of earthly life.