The mind-nature divide structurally blocks assigning intrinsic value to insentient creatures

Evidence

The psychoepistemic pervasiveness of this denuding act, which now itself becomes “natural” (which is to say, normative, habitual, and nothing short of a habitus), has exercised a hegemony that has constituted, I think, the most formidable obstacle facing the environmental ethicists in assigning intrinsic value to insentient creatures. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 361

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on infrastructure and valuing non-human things — the tree grafting essay treating trees as infrastructure rests on the same anthropocentric gesture this passage describes. — connects to: The organic-to-mechanistic shift reconstructed nature as dead and subordinate — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 51