Found Chem DOI 10.1007/s10698-015-9242-z

Connecting the philosophy of chemistry, green chemistry, and moral philosophy Jean-Pierre Llored1,2 • Ste´phane Sarrade3

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract This paper aims to connect philosophy of chemistry, green chemistry, and moral philosophy. We first characterize chemistry by underlining how chemists: (1) codefine chemical bodies, operations, and transformations; (2) always refer to active and context-sensitive bodies to explain the reactions under study; and (3) develop strategies that require and intertwine with a molecular whole, its parts, and the surroundings at the same time within an explanation. We will then point out how green chemists are transforming their current activities in order to act upon the world without jeopardizing life. This part will allow us to highlight that green chemistry follows the three aforementioned characteristics while including the world as a partner, as well as biodegradability and sustainability concerns, into chemical practices. In the third part of this paper, we will show how moral philosophy can help green chemists: (1) identify the consequentialist assumptions that ground their reasoning; and (2) widen the scope of their ethical considerations by integrating the notion of care and that of vulnerability into their arguments. In the fourth part of the paper, we will emphasize how, in return, this investigation could help philosophers querying consequentialism as soon as the consequences of chemical activities over the world are taken into account. Furthermore, we will point out how the philosophy of chemistry provides philosophers with new arguments concerning the key debate about the ‘intrinsic value’ of life, ecosystems and the Earth, in environmental ethics. To conclude, we will highlight how mesology, that is to say the study of ‘milieux’, and the concept of ‘ecumeme’ proposed by the philosopher and geographer Augustin Berque, could become important both for green chemists and moral philosophers in order to investigate our relationships with the Earth.

& Jean-Pierre Llored [email protected] 1

Linacre College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

2

Laboratory SPHERE, University Paris Diderot, Paris, France

3

CEA of Saclay, Saclay, France

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Keywords Philosophy of chemistry  Green chemistry  Intrinsic values  Modes of access dependence  Levels of organization  Environmental ethics  Ethics of care  Pragmatism  Affordances  Ecumene  Mesology  Ecology

Introduction We propose to develop a type of dialogue between the philosophy of chemistry, the epistemology of green chemistry and moral philosophy, with the aim of showing how such a dialogue could be of interest both for chemists and philosophers in order to further investigate sustainability and to identify the prerequisite contents that applied ethics, and, more broadly, moral philosophy, should endorse in order to address ‘environmental’ issues while remaining in close contact with the ultimate developments of sciences and technology. To do so, we first summarize the results of a careful philosophical scrutiny of chemical practices (Llored 2014, 2015b). In this respect, we will point out: (1) the co-definition of chemical relations (transformations) and chemical relata (bodies); (2) the constitutive role of the modes of intervention in the definition, always open and provisional, of ‘active’ chemical bodies; and (3) the mutual dependence of the levels of organization in chemistry. Following this line of argument, we will insist on the way chemists tailor networks of interdependencies within which chemical bodies and properties are context-sensitive and mutually determined by means of particular chemical operations or transformations. We will then query how green chemistry can be understood from, and at the same time widen, the philosophical perspectives which have been previously presented. As a matter of fact, green chemistry seems to correspond to a radical change in the history of chemistry, and not merely to a greenwashing exercise undertaken by chemists in order to improve the public image of their scientific and industrial domain. We will thus point out how green chemists are transforming their current activities in order to act upon the world without jeopardizing life. We will focus our study on the reformulation of the operational, symbolic, conceptual, and normative frameworks within which chemists give sense and direction to their actions. From within the current institutional settings of laboratories and factories, chemists now: (1) take the life cycle of a chemical compound into account from the outset (design, manufacture, use, recycling); (2) tailor chemistry considering its action upon the world—in this respect the world is considered to be a ‘partner’; and (3) hold time, society, agency (human or non-human), and the world together within their activities (Llored 2011, 2012a, 2015a). This part will enable us to emphasize that green chemistry follows the three aforementioned characteristics of chemical activities while including biodegradability and sustainability concerns into chemical aims. To this extent, green chemistry clearly intensifies the co-dependence between chemical bodies, their parts, their surroundings, and their transformations, by taking their inclusion into the active retrocausal chains of ecosystems into account. In the third part of this paper, we will show how moral philosophy can help green chemists: (1) identify the consequentialist assumptions that ground their reasoning; and (2) widen the scope of their ethical considerations by integrating the notion of care and that of vulnerability into their arguments. In the fourth part of the paper, we will conversely emphasize how this investigation could help philosophers querying some consequentialist claims as soon as the consequences of chemical activities over the world are taken into

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account. In addition, we will point out how the philosophy of chemistry provides philosophers with new arguments concerning the key debate about the ‘intrinsic value’ of life, ecosystems and the Earth, in environmental ethics. To conclude, we will highlight how mesology, that is to say the study of ‘milieux’, and the concept of ‘ecumeme’ proposed by the philosopher and geographer Augustin Berque, could turn out to be important both for green chemists and moral philosophers in order to investigate our relationships with the Earth.

Prerequisites for chemical activities: the role of the philosophy of chemistry Chemical operations, relations, and relata A chemical body is defined by means of the attributes that it can display, in a precise context, against other bodies, and also by means of the operations involved to individuate it. Let us illustrate this point using Peirce’s definition of lithium: If you look into a textbook of chemistry for a definition of lithium, you may be told that it is that element whose atomic weight is 7 very nearly. But if the author has a more logical mind he will tell you that if you search among minerals that are vitreous, translucent, gray or white, very hard, brittle, and insoluble, for one which imparts a crimson tinge to an unluminous flame, this mineral being triturated with lime or witherite rats-bane, and then fused, can be partly dissolved in muriatic acid; and if this solution be evaporated, and the residue be extracted with sulphuric acid, and duly purified, it can be converted by ordinary methods into a chloride, which being obtained in the solid state, fused, and electrolyzed with half a dozen powerful cells, will yield a globule of a pinkish silvery metal that will float on gasolene; [then] the material of that is a specimen of lithium. (Peirce 1931–1958, CP 2.330)1 Peirce confidently endorses the idea that lithium can be defined as a set of instructions aimed at permitting not only the identification but also the production of a specimen of lithium. This definition is clearly provisional so that the word ‘lithium’ will acquire new meanings as we learn more about the stuff to which it refers, using new contexts of chemical operation or new types of chemical bodies. The way a body acts depends on the way we intervene upon it. For instance, operations and instruments were essential parts of the definition of substances in eighteenth-century chemistry. Following this line of defining bodies, the French chemist and apothecary, Guillaume Franc¸ois Rouelle, asserted that [c]hemistry is a physical art which, by means of certain operations and instruments, teaches us to separate the various substances which enter into the composition of bodies, and to recombine these again, either to reproduce the former bodies, or to form new ones from them (Eklund 1975, p. 2) In Venel’s description of the third column of the ‘‘Table des rapports’’ the relational character of chemical bodies appears to be of crucial importance. We should bear in mind that this table enabled chemists to compare the strength of the links between chemical bodies and to use them in order to predict chemical transformations and selective 1

Peirce’s use of italics. The reference in the text refers to the second volume of the Collected Papers of Peirce, and more precisely, inside this volume, to the paragraph number 330.

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displacements of metals. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s terminology (1974), we could claim that such operations of transformation and displacement turned out to be a ‘‘hinge’’ around which most chemical discourses and explanations then revolved. Venel asserted that One applies mercury to a silver dissolution in nitrous acid; this substance having more relation with this acid, than this acid has with silver, it unites to it and precipitates silver. If one decants the liquor one will have separated silver, and on the other side mercury dissolution in nitrous acid, if one adds a lead blade to this mercury dissolution, lead has more relation with nitrous acid than mercury, it unites it and precipitates mercury. If one decants it the precipitated mercury remains on one side and on the other side a lead dissolution in nitrous acid; if one adds a copper blade to this dissolution, copper has more relation with nitrous acid and unites to it, lead will be precipitated too and there remains a copper dissolution in nitrous acid; if one adds iron copper is precipitated, if one separates as must always be done, one will have the iron dissolution (Venel quoted and translated by Lehman 2010, p. 21). At this period, the word chemical ‘‘operation’’ was used to mean what we currently call a chemical ‘‘reaction’’ (Holmes 1996). Notwithstanding the various changes of nomenclature that occurred from this period to current chemistry and nanochemistry, instead of studying isolated bodies to be measured, compared and put into a classificatory scheme, dynamic relations between bodies have always constituted the basic set of chemical knowledge, and, at the same time, provide the grounds for the classification of the bodies themselves, as it is the case, for example, for defining scales of acidity in particular solvents. Chemical bodies—molecules and materials—are defined by their selective capacity to interact with one another within a precise context and a particular field of practice. In this respect, relations between bodies seem prior to substances. But ‘‘it is only because our chemical species per definition retain their identity during purification, that we are able to connect single facts of chemical relations with each other to build a systematic network of chemical knowledge’’ (Schummer 1998, p. 157). Relations of transformations between bodies allow chemists to define chemical entities and properties, while operations allow them to obtain pure chemical bodies, or, more exactly, bodies having a certain degree of purity, depending on their reactivity and the chemical nature of the surroundings. Chemical purity is not an ‘intrinsic’ property of matter, but the temporary outcome of transformations from composites. Those purified bodies then enter into new reactions and result in new compounds that, once purified, enable chemists to widen and deepen their classification by analogy. The process is openended and depends on the modes of access which stabilize a certain group of relations between bodies and their surroundings. As a consequence, if a philosopher aims to study chemistry, and maybe to think from chemistry, she/he cannot but acknowledge that within this domain of human activity relata cannot exist prior to relations, and that relations are not achievable without purifying operations and the presence of already purified chemical bodies. This conclusion does not stem from a logical or a linguistic study of chemical languages or reasoning only, or from an ontological perspective grounded on chemistry, but from a close inquiry about the ways chemists synthesize, purify, stabilize, and use the bodies engaged in their transformation of the world. The first conclusion to which a close attention to chemists’ activities leads is that chemical relata and relations are constitutively co-defined within chemists’ investigative and transformative enterprises. They depend on one another within an ordered and evolving network involving chemical bodies and operations (requisite 1) (Llored and Bitbol

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2013). As Schummer asserts ‘The resulting classification has turned out to be again a network structure, with substance as nodes and chemical class relation as connections’ (Schummer 1998, p. 157). The way molecules and materials are obtained and defined, and the way they act upon other bodies, cannot be captured and addressed by referring either to an ontology of pure relata, or to another using relations only. Chemical grammars require relata and relations at the same time, and often use both of them in a pragmatic manner within the same discourse. Before explaining how this first ‘lesson’ drawn from the philosophy of chemistry can be involved in current debate about environmental ethics, we would like to further insist on the dependence of chemical bodies and properties on the milieu within which they are present.

Context-sensitiveness and mode of access dependence in chemistry Talking about the provisional definition of any chemical body, the historian of chemistry Ursula Klein reminds us of [c]hemist’s substances were not universal immutable objects given by nature, but things being shaped in human practice and having the same historicity and contingency as human practice. Material substances have a history (Klein 2008, p. 41). Emphasizing the constitutive role of operations on the definition of chemical bodies, she goes on to say that: [t]he example of early nineteenth-century organic chemistry demonstrates that chemists’ new definition and identification of organic substances was entwined with new ways of material production and individuation of these things. The nineteenthcentury culture of organic chemistry material production and individuation, and the instruments, skills and connoisseurship involved in these activities, were as much a part of the constitution of the objects of inquiries as theories, beliefs, social interests, and power (Klein 2008, p. 42). In a footnote (p. 42), she even adds ‘‘I consider experimental production and individuation of objects to be part of their ‘constitution’.’’ This statement increasingly gains relevance as chemists explore the world, using new bodies, instruments, explanations, and models. The material production and individuation of bodies has enormously expanded in current nanochemistry, solid-state chemistry and materials science. New instrumentation and chemical devices enable chemists to explore temporal and spatial scales which have been completely unreachable until now. Chemists have gained an enlarged capacity to synthesize, scrutinize, and modify particle size and distribution, crystal structure, chemical composition, surface area, surface chemistry, surface charge, porosity, and interfaces. A ‘science of individuals or particulars’ arises and chemists are now able to generate and study multifarious details at the individual level (Llored 2013a, 2015c). Non-stoichiometric compounds are now legion. Chemists even contrive to combine organic and inorganic ingredients into the same hybrid body; thus, holding together types of chemistry which have always been incompatible hitherto. All those achievements are not solely a question of ingredients, quantities, and structure. They also depend on the devices and the instruments involved. As a consequence, it is a question of contextuality too. Let us take the example of the synthesis of a solid sample of CaCO3 in order to highlight the role played by the context both in the synthesis and the definition of a chemical body. Starting from different ingredients, particles will grow to attain different final sizes and morphologies (Aimable et al. 2013). Thus, the end product may appear completely

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different, depending on whether a reactive material is added all at once or gradually. By adding a small amount of fine material to be precipitated (i.e. seeds), one can better control the apparently chaotic nucleation step. For example, adding calcite seeds allows for the precipitation of pure calcite. On the other hand, without seeds, one obtains a mixture of calcite and vaterite with a larger particle size distribution and various morphologies. The body CaCO3 depends on the process used and on the time employed. This body is furthermore distributed or size-dispersed in the sense that the sample does not contain a single body CaCO3 but, on the contrary, encompasses many similar bodies CaCO3 which differ in size. Neither the device nor the history of the chemical reaction can be eliminated from the final result. Operations are thus part of the definition of the ‘nanobody’ under study. The mode of access cannot be eliminated from the final product insofar as it contributes to the determination of the whole body and its correlative parts and structure. The structure of the crystals may also differ if the chemical device changes. It can even differ within the same particular chemical device, depending on the size of the crystals, which itself depends on the environment. In a nutshell, the internal arrangement can be grain-size sensitive: The concept of structure thus sometimes becomes, at least partly, extrinsic, and needs further developments in such scientific technological contexts! (Llored 2015c) If a chemical body is thus tied to praxis, it is not a definite something or mere substrate that endures through time. Instead, it is at all times fully realized as just what it appears to be, and at the same time it never stays the same as it becomes transformed in processes of making, remaking, and learning to make. As an indefinite ‘something out there’ the chemical body enters into a series of interactions that produce determinate things that are characterized by their consistence and transformability, their performance, and their functionality (Nordmann 2013). In the context of chemistry, the dichotomy of essences and accidents thus collapses! In The Philosophy of No, Bachelard (1968) proposed replacing the word ‘sub-stance’ by that of ‘ex-stance’ in order to take the constitutive role of external determinations into account in the very definition of a body. Rom Harre´ prefers to use the term ‘affordances’ (Harre´ 1986, 2013). An affordance can be broadly defined as a disposition or capacity as ascribed to a certain material being to yield an observable effect when acted upon in a certain manner. It may be, for instance, a gas as the product of a chemical reaction when certain chemical bodies are acted on during a particular electrolysis. An affordance is relative to context, in particular to the specific interaction between some human beings and the material world. What we know about chemical bodies is not about bodies in themselves, even if we can determine their composition and structural characteristics, but about the ways we create, use, and transform them. Philosophizing about, and maybe from, chemistry requires changing our basic understanding of knowledge, by moving from a ‘spectator theory’ according to which thought is a pure representation of the world, to a ‘transactional approach’ to knowledge, according to which human thought is active and knowledge is about the result of our interactions with the environment. Let us draw our second conclusion: The modes of access used in chemistry do not ‘reveal’ pre-existing chemicals but, on the contrary, actively take part in their very constitution (requisite 2). As a result, it seems difficult to define a body at the nanoscale, or a collection of bodies at a wider scale, and the ‘properties’ related to them at those scales, by abstracting those bodies from other bodies or external conditions and operations required for obtaining and stabilizing them. It is not meant, of course, that it is impossible for a chemist, or a philosopher, to describe chemical bodies using their composition and their internal structure only, as if they were in isolation, and as if they were displaying intrinsic properties or dispositions only. Up to a certain point, this strategy could even turn out to be

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a very efficient heuristic way to produce new bodies, or to explain a certain type of reactivity during a chemical reaction. We cannot but acknowledge that such descriptions have often been used by chemists in order, for instance, to correlate the structure of a body and its chemical reactivity and properties against a biological target. But composition, that is to say, what a particular body contains, and the internal structure of a molecule or a material, can change depending on the solvent and the whole surroundings, as it has been known for a long time by chemists in the case, for instance, of acid or oxidative properties. Furthermore, as we have just shown, chemists have recently learnt that composition and internal structure can also depend on the chemical devices used in nanochemistry. Knowing all the ingredients, the components of a body and their relative position from one another in space, and computing them, does not enable quantum chemists to deduce and forecast all the possible reactions and properties of a body, but only a molecular geometry, an energy threshold, or a particular kinetic or thermodynamic attribute of the reaction, using a host of heterogeneous models. Chemists need the surroundings as well (Llored 2010, 2012b, 2014) to perform the calculation, or to carry out an experiment to identify a new property, or a type of reactivity. Structure and composition are often sufficient to practice chemistry, but not always, in particular in nanochemistry or within research projects undertaken at the frontier with material sciences where the ‘milieu’ of reaction becomes metastable or unstable. Sooner or later, depending on the investigation at stake, and the finer-grained description required within a particular research, the need to refer to a wider network including bodies, instruments and operations, within which the body under study gets is provisional significance and relevance, will become inescapable. Referring to intrinsic properties, or to isolated bodies, is all but self-evident, and can even become quickly problematic in the domain of chemistry. Such ‘intrinsicalness’ and ‘being in isolation’ can play, at best, a functional role in a particular scientific or philosophical enquiry, but no more, if one takes the way chemists actually work into account. We claim that those two discussions and conclusions, drawn from chemistry, about relations and relata, and about the constitutive role of instruments or the context-sensitiveness of bodies, could be of relevance to question the way the co-dependence of humans and non-humans, the notion of intrinsic properties of bodies, and the intrinsic values ascribed to living or non-living bodies, are discussed and used in environmental ethics. We will develop this point extensively in the third part of our paper. As this point of our work, and before entering into more details, we would like to introduce a third and last lesson drawn from the scrutiny of chemical activities, and which, according to us, could turn out to be useful to query, and maybe to develop environmental arguments against the destructive consequences of our action upon the world.

Levels of organization and their interdependence in chemistry We have studied elsewhere the wholes/parts strategies used in many methods by quantum chemists (Llored 2010, 2012b, 2013a, 2014; Harre´ and Llored 2011, 2013; BanchettiRobino and Llored 2016). Whatever may be the differences between the different quantum chemical methods studied, those papers emphasize how chemists always use and intertwine the nuclei and the electrons within a molecule, the molecule itself, and the surroundings of the molecule containing other molecules, solvents, and electromagnetic fields, within a calculation. In the present paper, we will just give a short example, using the molecular orbital approach proposed by Robert S. Mulliken, in order to help the reader understand how strong the interdependence of the three aforementioned ‘levels of organizations’ are in chemists’ reasoning.

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Let us consider the simple case of a molecule containing two nuclei. Our starting point is thus the molecular wave function w which can be usefully written as a linear combination of two atomic orbitals u1 and u2: w ¼ c1 u1 þ c2 u2

ð1Þ

This equation seems to imply that the whole, which belongs to the ‘molecular level’, is reduced to electrons and nuclei, that is to say, to a more ‘fundamental level.’ Let us just examine how the weighting coefficients c1 and c2 are determined in order to understand the underlying whole/parts strategy. To do so, let us refer to Dirac’s notation, where ‘H’ is the molecular Hamiltonian2: Z wi Hwi ds ¼ Hii is the Coulomb integral hwi jHjwi i ¼ space

Z

  wi jHjwj ¼

wi Hwj ds ¼ Hij is the exchange integral

space

  wi jwj ¼

Z

wi wj ds ¼ Sij is the overlap integral

space

u1 and u2 can, at least partially, overlap in the space region that corresponds to the intersection of each atomic space. The word ‘orbital’ takes all of its meaning from Max Born’s probabilistic interpretation, according to which the square of a molecular orbital corresponds to the probability density of finding a particular electron within the molecular space. Thus, hwjHjwi ¼ c21 hu1 ju1 i þ 2c1 c2 S12 þ c22 hu2 ju2 i

ð2Þ

c2i ,

where i is equal to either 1 or 2, Mulliken’s interpretation of the weighting coefficients implies that these respectively represent the part of the electron density that belongs to nucleus 1 or to nucleus 2 only. On the other hand, the term ‘2 c1c2S12’, namely ‘the overlap population’, expresses the part of the electronic density that refers to the two atomic functions at the same time and, thus, to the whole molecule: The whole and the parts are thus co-defined. If we now consider a system (atom or molecule) in its fundamental state, and if we call E0 the system’s corresponding Eigen value for the energy. The exact solution of the Schro¨dinger equation cannot be calculated, and chemists thus must employ a large panel of approximations. The average energy \E[, calculated from an approximate wave function w, is always superior or equal to E0: R  space w Hwds  E0 ð3Þ hEi ¼ R  space w wds The Variation Method is currently applied in order to reach the best solution possible and enables quantum chemists to determine c1 and c2. The key point is to start from a family of wave functions within which chemists believe that they will find the best approximation, according to their previous calculations and to their chemical expertise. They use a wave 2

ds is a volumic element and wi the conjugate of the complex function Wi.

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function that depends on at least one parameter, and they determine the value of the parameter(s) (in our present case, the coefficients c1 and c2), which leads to the lowest value of the average energy. Calculations lead to the following formula: hEðc1 ; c2 Þi ¼

c21 H11 þ 2c1 c2 H12 þ C22 H22 N ðc1 ; c2 Þ ¼ Dðc1 ; c2 Þ c21 þ 2c1 c2 S12 þ c22

ð4Þ

The minimization of the energy using the coefficients c1 and c2 implies that: oN oc

hEi ¼ oDi

ð5Þ

oci

We simply wish to clarify this term, in order to grasp what is at stake in the calculation of those coefficients. The numerator N (c1, c2) is written in the following way: Nðc1 ; c2 Þ ¼ c21 H11 þ 2c1 c2 H12 þ c22 H22 The partial derivative calculation, using a particular coefficient while fixing the other, implies that: oN ðc1 ; c2 Þ ¼ 2c1 H11 þ 2c2 H12 oc1

and

oN ðc1 ; c2 Þ ¼ 2c2 H22 þ 2c1 H12 oc2

In brief, each partial derivative depends upon: (1) the coefficients c1 and c2, (2) one integral (H11 or H22), which refers to a unique atomic orbital (u1 or u2, respectively), and (3) one integral H12, which deals with the energetic coupling between the two atoms inside the molecule. This situation is tantamount to saying that the two atoms intervene, particularly by means of their coupling, in the determination of each coefficient. We should bear in mind that the coupling exists once the molecule is created. In this respect, each coefficient depends upon the whole molecule and not solely upon its atoms taken in isolation! We could have drawn the same conclusion from the study of the denominator. In short, the minimization of the average energy leads to a ratio of two quantities, each depending on atoms but also on their interactions. In this respect, the weighting coefficients of the linear combination, from which one seems free to conclude that the ‘molecular level’ is reduced to a more ‘fundamental level’, requires the whole molecule to be determined! It is thus possible to conclude, from a technical standpoint, that there is no room for a basic level in this calculation, but only co-definitions and interrelations between different levels. In fact, if we now attempt to go beyond this technical aspect, another question inescapably arises: How can one justify the use of the Variation Principle and the minimization of energy that it implies? One needs to refer to the second principle of thermodynamics in order to explain why the molecular system continuously eliminates its excess energy by interactions with its environment. An energy transformation into local entropy legitimates the use of the variation method. The molecular whole, its parts, and the surroundings are thus all required, at the very same time, in order to render all these methods intelligible. Chemists have contrived specific methods within which the whole and its parts are constitutively co-defined in the presence of an environment (requisite 3) (Llored 2012b, 2013a, 2014). We claim that both the impossibility to reduce one level to another and the co-dependence between the three levels engaged in the calculation, could become interesting for querying some arguments related to the intrinsic value of bodies in environmental ethics,

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as we will develop in the third part. But before developing such a point, we would like to present the essential features of green chemistry, and the way this new domain not only strengthens and widens the three requisites that we have just identified, but also includes the world as a partner.

Green chemistry The idea of green chemistry initially emerged as a response to the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, which declared that US national policy should eliminate pollution by improved design, instead of treatment and disposal (Llored 2015a, 2016a, 2016b). In this context, improving design means including cost-effective changes in products, processes, use of raw materials, as well as recycling, into the workaday practices of chemists. Notwithstanding the fact that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was known as a regulatory agency, it moved away from the ‘command and control’ or ‘end of pipe’ approach in implementing what would eventually be called its ‘green chemistry’ programme (Anastas and Beach 2009). By 1991, the EPA Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics had launched a research grant programme encouraging redesign of existing chemical products and processes to reduce impacts on human health and the environment. As a result, the EPA in partnership with the US National Science Foundation then proceeded to fund basic research in green chemistry in the early 1990s (Llored 2011, 2016a). By definition, ‘Green Chemistry’ encompasses the design, development, and implementation of chemical products and processes to reduce or eliminate the use of substances hazardous to human health and the environment.3 Green chemistry is introduced as a branch of the public services in charge of taking care both of natural resources and life on earth. Paul Anastas, who is considered as the Pilgrim Father of green chemistry inside EPA, and his collaborator Tracy Williamson, assert that: Over the past few years, the chemistry community has been mobilized to develop new chemistries that are less hazardous to human health and the environment. This new approach has received extensive attention and goes by many names including Green Chemistry, Environmentally Benign Chemistry, Clean Chemistry, Atom Economy and Benign By Design Chemistry. Under all of these different designations there is a movement toward pursuing chemistry with the knowledge that the consequences of chemistry do not stop with the properties of the target molecule or the efficacy of a particular reagent. The impacts of the chemistry that we design as chemists are felt by the people that come in contact with the substances we make and use and by the environment in which they are contained. For those of us who have been given the capacity to understand chemistry and practice it as our livelihood, it is and should be expected that we will use this capacity wisely. With knowledge comes the burden of responsibility. Chemists do not have the luxury of ignorance and cannot turn a blind eye to the effects of the science in which we are engaged. Because we are able to develop new chemistries that are more benign, we are obligated to do so. (Anastas and Williamson 1996, p. 1)

3

http://center.acs.org/applications/greenchem.

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Anastas and Williamson put emphasis on the moral commitment to which chemists cannot but subscribe, being known for their actual capability to implement effective measures to produce safer chemicals. Chemists must neither stint their efforts nor shirk their responsibility in transforming their science and industry in a green and sustainable way. The relationship between chemistry, public health, and the protection of the environment, is clear in this quotation. Green chemists seem to have understood that cleaning up polluted sites is not enough, and that respecting the environment requires anticipating risks at the stage of designing new processes and products. To do so, chemists must become capable of integrating the long-run consequences of their actions and productions into their practices, before they introduce a new manufacturing process or develop new synthetic products. It thus becomes of primary importance for them to consider the whole life of chemicals, and especially what effects they might have when released into the environment after use. The process of design must now respond to a global issue of reduction of environmental impacts at each stage of the manufacturing process. Green chemists are thus integrating methods stemming from ecology and toxicology into their activities in order to assess the biodegradability and the biocompatibility, not only of their molecules and materials, but also of the objects made of those chemicals and on which our social life depends. Temporality is entering into the chemical realm: This is a major upheaval compared to what the history of chemistry has been so far. In addition, tailoring chemistry by considering its action upon the world is another major upheaval in the history of chemistry (Llored 2011). The concept of ‘‘ecodesign’’ is gaining growing importance in green chemistry. Chemists learn how to use the life cycle analysis (LCA) for the identification of environmental impacts in so far as this tool enables them to quantify and compare impacts related both to available resources and to the different ways of producing, delivering, and recycling chemicals. LCA guides their choices and enables them to make decisions regarding further innovations. LCA is fourfold, since it depends upon (1) the definition of the aims and the framework which includes parameters such as the inclusion threshold—the lowest mass to be taken into account, the toxicity, and the energy consumption and the functional unit. This quantity allows one to assess the function of the system of examined products and to compare different systems, performing the same function, (2) the life cycle inventory that consists of flows of materials (minerals, iron, water,…) and energy (oil, gas, coal,…) entering into the system under study and the corresponding outgoing flows (solid waste, emissions gaseous or liquid,…), (3) the evaluation of the impacts of life cycle defining impact categories and various weighting impact indicators to achieve calculations from and against databases, and (4) the interpretation of the calculations that allows the identification of the steps that need improvement in order to reduce environmental damage (Caillol 2013). Chemists are ‘responsible’ for people who might use their products not only nowadays, but also in the future. They ‘‘do not have the luxury of ignorance and cannot turn a blind eye to the effects of the science in which we are engaged.’’ They must hand over to people a world they can live in, and not solely achieve technoscientific purposes ‘‘for a better living,’’ without taking the harmful actions of their production over the world into account. They have to combine chemical industries and environmental issues in their new way of designing bodies. In this respect, they are bound to people by a ‘kind of contract,’ which entitles their existing and potential molecules and materials to care and respect health, life, and our planet (Sarrade 2008, 2011). In a paper entitled ‘‘Green chemistry: today (and tomorrow)’’ dealing with the ‘‘key drivers’’ for major chemical changes, the chemist James Clark, another prominent leaders

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of the emerging field, highlights the reasons why and how chemists are transforming the way they practice chemistry (Clark 2006). In this respect, he identifies three main drivers for change. The economic driver which mainly focuses on the increasing costs of waste disposal or for storing hazardous substances. This driver is also related to energy and petrochemical expenses and the increasing fines for pollution. The societal driver is moslty concerned with the increasing demands of emerging nations, local and global problems of demography, the poor public image of chemistry and the negative media reporting especially after chemical disasters. This societal driver also takes into account the declining numbers of students studying chemistry and both the public and political demands for damage control. Clark also scrutinizes what he called the environmental driver refering to new legislation forcing the testing of all chemicals and the diminishing supplies of nonsustainable resources. In so doing, he seems to respond to what counts as a good type of life in countries engaged in sustainable programmes. The notion of producer responsibility remains central in his paper, as is the case for that of Anastas and Williamson (Llored 2012a). To make his statement clear, Clark describes the different steps of a chemical production to show how chemists now take account of the environmental impact from the very beginning of a chemical design. For example, he explains how green chemical innovations are integrated into the ‘‘pre-manufacturing step’’ including the biosynthesis of lactic acids, new chemical coumpounds such as ‘‘polyactic acid’’ derived from renewable resources, and so on. He then refers to the ‘‘manufacturing step’’ with its specific green industrial processes to produce ibuprofen or cyclohexanone, and also points out the use of supercritical carbon dioxide for hydrogenation. In brief, he emphasizes how chemical processes, reactions and products are co-evolving while instrumentation is endlessly adapted to reduce or detect pollution. Furthermore, he explains how crucial assessments are at this stage of the production chain. Chemists contrive ‘‘the green chemistry metrics’’ as tools to measure efficiency in a chemical process. These metrics include ones for mass, energy, hazardous substance reduction or elimination, and life cycle environmental impacts. Having made a green chemistry improvement to a chemical process, it is important to be able to quantify the change. In this respect, chemists design new concepts and methods to make assessments reliable, useful and robust. In short, Clark highlights the strong interconnection between chemical methodologies, know-how and knowledge, the rest of the society, and the world we live in. Anastas, Williamson, and Clark thus insist on the ongoing recasting of the operational, symbolic, conceptual, technical, and normative frameworks of chemistry fostered and carried out by green chemists. Over the years two sets of twelve principles have been proposed by Anastas and his collaborators that can be used when thinking about the design, development and implementation of chemical products and processes. (Anastas and Warner 1998; Anastas and Zimmerman 2003) These principles enable scientists and engineers to protect and benefit the economy, people and the planet by finding creative and innovative ways to reduce waste, conserve energy, and discover replacements for hazardous substances. Developed by Paul Anastas and John Warner, the ‘Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry’ are now considered to be the guiding tenets for working chemists and technologists. Those principles revolve around the following key purposes: (1) Waste prevention instead of waste clean-up; (2) atom economy as an important concern (synthetic methods should be designed to maximize the incorporation of all materials used in the process into the final product); (3) design of environmentally friendly synthetic methodologies; (4) design of safer chemicals (minimizing toxicity); (5) redundancy of auxiliary substances; (6) design for energy efficacy (energy requirements of chemical processes

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should be recognized for their environmental and economic impacts and should be minimized. If possible, synthetic methods should be conducted at ambient temperature and pressure); (7) use of renewable feedstock; (8) reduction of unnecessary derivatives; (9) catalytic reactions instead of stoichometric ones; (10) debasement of final products after the end of their function; (11) real-time analysis for pollution prevention and (12) strategies for chemical accident prevention (analytical methodologies need to be further developed to allow for real-time, in-process monitoring and control prior to the formation of hazardous substances, and to chemical accidents, this latter category including releases, explosions, and fires). Most people stop at those twelve first principles and most of them separate chemistry from engineering, as if it were possible to do green chemistry in the absence of engineering. Reacting against this kind of statement, and aiming at promoting a global change of chemical activities, Paul Anastas and Julie Zimmerman have proposed a complementary set of twelve ‘engineering principles’ that outline what would make a chemical process or product greener. Such principles are: (1) Designers need to strive to ensure that all material and energy inputs and outputs are as inherently nonhazardous as possible; (2) preventing waste is better than treating or cleaning it up after it is formed; (3) separation and purification operations should be a component of the design framework. This design strategy can be used at the beginning of the product’s life to isolate the desired output or at end of life to aid in the reuse, and recovery of materials; (4) system components should be designed to maximize mass, energy, and temporal efficiency. Processes and systems often use more time, space, energy, and materials than are necessary; (5) system components should be ‘‘output-pulled’’ rather than ‘‘input-pushed’’ through the use of energy and materials. Extensive energy and material inputs often drive a transformation toward the desired outcome. This logic has resulted in waste, inefficiency, and environmental damage; (6) embedded entropy and complexity must be viewed as an investment when making design choices on recycle, reuse, or beneficial disposition; (7) targeted durability, not immortality, should be a design goal. Persistence of synthetic materials in the environment and biosphere is increasingly recognized as incompatible with sustainability. The targeted durability of products and processes can help avoid the legacy of environmental impacts that have historically caused extensive concerns; (8) design for unnecessary capacity or capability should be considered a design flaw. This includes engineering ‘‘one-size-fits-all’’ solutions; (9) multicomponent products must minimize material diversity and strive for using materials that promote disassembly and value retention; (10) design of processes and systems must include integration of interconnectivity with available energy and materials flows; (11) performance metrics include designing for performance in commercial ‘‘afterlife’’; and (12) material and energy inputs should be renewable and from readily available sources throughout all life-cycle stages. Green chemistry and green engineering promote the total recasting of the way chemistry has been thought about until now. From the miniaturization of apparatus to achieve multiple reactions and separations (Hemantkumar et al. 2007) to the reduction of the size of factories; from the use of solar-chemical machines to synthetise new molecule such as Juglone with medium concentrated sunlight (Oelgemo¨ller et al. 2006) to the development of a new continuous flow process to achieve a highly selective chemical synthesis that some chemists regard as a ‘‘new paradigm for molecular assembly’’ (Baxendale et al. 2006); and from new ways of exploring and using chemical interfaces to change chemical properties of solid alloys (Rabu et al. 1999) to the introduction of ecological concepts such as the life cycle analysis into their activities, green chemists continue to transform chemistry from the inside.

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Those two sets of principles define four major axes for research. First, the better use of raw materials: Since the nineteenth century the raw material of the global chemical industry has mainly been oil. The main idea is now to provide, either from renewable source or from waste, bio-molecules able to achieve similar reactions/performances, for instance in the domain of plastic production. Second, the development of cleaner and safer solvents: Organic solvents, such as benzene, chloroform and trichloroethylene, among many others, can cause severe damages to human and non-human health. Alternative solvents are required for various unit operations such as extraction, reaction and synthesis. Since 1973, supercritical carbon dioxide has been used, at the industrial scale, as a clean and safer solvent than organic ones. Because of its accessible critical point (31 C and 73.8 Bar) and fair transport properties (density, viscosity and diffusion coefficient), supercritical CO2 can be considered for example as a suitable solvent for: (1) Industrial decaffeination avoiding the use of chloroform, and the extraction of squalene from olive oil residues avoiding killing sharks, or the extraction of other thermosensitive bio-products for agro-food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical goods; (2) cleaning processes for metal degreasing that enable chemists to avoid using trichloroethylene; (3) the treatment of contaminated soils. In the last case, experiments have been carried out, for instance, for recovering heavy metals or radionucleides from contaminated soils. Before carrying this extraction out, a previous step of chemical complexation is necessary in order to solubilize the pollutant in the supercritical phase. As an example, cobalt can be recovered at more than 95 % from a sandy soil and the fertility of the soil is not decreased by this treatment (Sarrade 2008, 2010, 2011, 2015). The third major axe of research is dedicated to energy saving and better use of renewable energy, in particular with the view to avoiding greenhouse gas generation. When oil was considered to be effectively infinite, the development of high pressure and high temperature chemical reaction was possible at the industrial scale and was responsible for pollution. The benefit of working at room conditions becomes a major aim and implies the use of a catalyst. It also pushes chemists to further address the recycling of such catalysts, and to assess their toxicity and ecotoxicity, as precisely as possible. The fourth major axis of research is about obtaining the lower production of final waste in convenient way (solid, liquid or gaseous), avoiding dissemination and enhancing recycling. The 3 R concept is now driving waste management: Reduce, Re-use, and Recycle. Wastes are no long considered as wastes, but as potential new raw materials. As an example, supercritical water is now an industrial tool for recycling raw material of PET plastics. New methods and methodologies, instruments and devices, concepts and models, taxonomies and databases are thus appearing at the crossroads of various fields. Chemists, biologists, industrialists, and toxicologists are then asked to interpret the environmental and societal impact of their activities regarding human health and the environment. In doing so, they must allow various kinds of expertise to co-exist. Achieving such a challenge practically is anything but simple. In this context, the concept of ecodesign is coarising with the development of green metrics, and of new environmental standards. Green chemistry is currently in progress. It may succeed in reshaping and transforming chemistry or, maybe, it could fail. Its capacity to bring about a radical change depends on future consensus between policy makers, chemical practitioners and citizens in order to give green chemistry the power it rightly deserves. We conclude that green chemistry intensifies the co-dependence between chemical bodies, their environments, their transformations, chemical operations and processes, and now their inclusion into the active retrocausal chains of ecosystems. Chemical modelling used by green chemists also intensifies the articulation between various quantum and non-

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quantum methods which intertwine a whole, its parts, and the surroundings, especially within the study of the relationships between a chemical structure and its biological activities. Life Cycle Analysis opens the frontiers of laboratories and factories to wider domains, local and more global, spatial and temporal, humans and non-humans. The codependence between relata and relations has reached another step (Llored 2011, 2012a, 2013b). All that we need from the philosophy of chemistry and from the presentation of green chemistry has now been introduced, and the time has come for explaining what, according to us, the philosophy of chemistry can bring to environmental ethics and moral philosophy, and, conversely, what environemental ethics can bring to green chemists. Then, we will broaden the scope of our reflection introducing the concepts of ‘ecumene’ introduced by mesology—the study of the milieux—in order to understand why ecology and the concept of biosphere, the statements of which still rely on the subject/object dichotomy and on a concept of human freedom which leaves the world and non-humans aside, should be adapted for human and non-human sake.

From moral philosophy to green chemistry Reassessing the anthropocentric and consequentialist assumptions that underpin chemical discourses During the 90 s, EPA gradually integrated the notion of sustainable development into the basic purposes of green chemistry, implying a close connection between the two in the US, and then in many countries. As an example, the French interdisciplinary program ‘‘Chemistry for Sustainable Development’’—CPDD in French—developed and supported by the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 2006 has four major aims: (1) The use of renewable resources as basic materials to synthesize new molecules and materials; (2) the implementation of the principles of green chemistry in new schemes of synthesis including biotechnologies; (3) the optimization of sustainable processes of chemical synthesis engaging both chemistry and chemical engineering; and (4) the evaluation and the reduction of the impact of chemistry on the environment that bring together ecology, life sciences, analytical chemistry, physics and toxicology (Rico-Lattes and Maxim 2013). Sustainable development has been defined in many ways, but the most frequently quoted definition is from Our Common Future, also known as the ‘Brundtland Report’: Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts: • the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; • the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future need. (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, p. 43) Following this perspective, green and sustainable chemistry keeps on developing the image of the open-ended ‘Pursuit of Human Happiness.’ Protecting, preserving and repairing the environment are means to enable future generations to meet their own needs. Moral

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philosophers could however ask the following questions: What about the ‘environmental burden’? What about the fact that ‘‘the poor suffer disproportionately from the environmental pollution produced by society at large’’? (Jamieson 1994) If helping the poor remains a central tenet of sustainable development, its achievement is far from being effective in our world. But moral philosophers could put other questions to green chemists as well, among them are: What about animals and plants? What about non-humans, alive or inert? Do they only have a value for our own sake, or for that of future human generations? Of course, one could argue that the extraction of molecules using, for instance, supercritical carbon dioxide enables researchers to preserve animal and plant species. But, green chemistry still mainly focuses its attention on human individuals’ well-being. This situation is not without raising ethical questions. Should we consider the Earth as a resource only? Does it matter for us only because it enables human life to maintain itself over time in satisfying conditions? In addition to human beings, does the Earth, or some parts of it, have another type of value than merely that to be useful for achieving ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people who are affected by the performance of our technoscientific action over the world’? Last but not least, among many other questions to ask: What does the sentence ‘the morally right action is the one with the best overall consequences’ mean as soon as many consequences of our action upon the world which improve human life continue, nevertheless, to jeopardize non-human life and to take an active part in the destruction of our planet at the same time? What should be the ‘proper attitude’ to adopt in order to address this situation? Identifying the consequentialist assumptions that underpin chemical reasoning could turn out to be a positive result of the dialogue between green chemistry and moral philosophy. This dialogue should also be opened in order, for chemists and philosophers of chemistry, to investigate: (1) the type of representations about nature, science, progress that underpin chemists’ work; (2) the origins of the moral concepts involved in chemistry as soon as the cultural representations we have just mentioned are identified; and (3) the metaphysical grounds upon which chemists could further develop the moral and technoscientific recasting of their activities. By entering into this type of reflection, green chemists could, according to us, take advantage of the different definitions of rightness we would like to introduce in the following section.

Opening chemists’ reflections for addressing environmental issues Considering the design, development, and implementation of chemical products and processes in order to reduce or eliminate the use of substances hazardous to human health and the environment is not solely a question of adopting a consequentialist stance. Other moral attitudes should be of help for developing deeper arguments for a radical transformation of chemistry achieved in close contact with the members of the rest of the society, that is to say with people who are concerned by chemicals in their ordinary lives. In A Sand County Almanac (1949), Aldo Leopold claimed that: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this capacity… A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of

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the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (Leopold 1949, p. 243 and p. 262, our insistence) Extending sustainable and green chemistry and sustainable development from humans to the whole ‘biotic’ community is a possible task. It nevertheless remains to be seen whether such a moral challenge could be compatible with an economic system based on consumption, competition and individualism. Including the whole biotic community can be done otherwise, and new proposals have been put forward in order to integrate the final outcomes of contemporary ecology in the definition of rightness. In this context, a thing is, for instance, considered to be right ‘‘if it tends to preserve the beauty of the biotic community and to disturb it at normal spatial and temporal scales. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’’ (Callicott 2013, p. 97) If we leave the question of how defining ‘‘the normal spatial and temporal scale of an ecosystem’’, or that of a more global system, aside, the central idea consists in taking the dynamic effects over time and space of our action upon the world into account. In the case of green chemistry, it is clear that life cycle analysis is a means, among many others, to achieve this assessment about the ‘rightness’ of a particular release of chemicals into the environment. Another way of questioning our action upon the world from a moral standpoint is from the work of feminists about vulnerability, and the ethics of care. Joan Tronto develops an intentionally broad understanding of ‘care,’ which she defined with Berenice Fisher as ‘‘a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, lifesustaining web.’’ (Fisher and Tronto 1991; Tronto 1993, p. 103) Caring means more than just meeting needs, developing basic capabilities, and alleviating pain; it means doing so in a manner that is attentive, responsive, and respectful to the individuals in need of care. Extending care to the environment, as Tronto and Fisher propose to do, is not uncontroversial, and implies, at least, an attempt to found the principles of ethical action on an individual basis, as in the case of eco-citizenship, or on a gendered basis, as in the case of eco-feminism. Following this line of reasoning, the crucial concepts become interdependence and interconnectedness—as it is already the case in Arne Naess’ Deep Ecology (1989), but a further argument is added: vulnerability. If chemists have always used networks of interdependency to co-define bodies, properties and transformations, as the philosophical study of their activities has revealed it to us, vulnerability does not appear in their current arguments. In this sense, life is fragile and vulnerable, or the Earth, as a whole, is also fragile and vulnerable, and we have to protect them, to care for them, to take care of them. The question of knowing the reference to which vulnerability refers or should refer, if one aims to propose an environmental ethics, is not so easy to answer. As Isabelle Stengers has pointed out, what is vulnerable should be the whole network of relationships that humans develop with non-humans, and neither the world ‘in itself’ nor ourselves (Stengers 2009). Those who, among us, believe that they are at the centre throughly mess up what they, and many other earthly beings, depend upon. Now those of us who were told stories since birth that there is something really special in being ‘‘human’’ are at a bifurcation point: Either we enthusiastically keep to that narrative, or we accept that if there is a postAnthropocene world living in, and that those who will live in it will need different stories, with no one entity at the centre of the stage. In her book, Au temps des catastrophes, Stengers emphasizes the crucial importance, in the coming hard times, of empowerment processes whereby groups, including scientists and the representatives of all the members

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of the society, acquire, or reclaim, the capacity of actively situating themselves and of inventing cooperation practices in order to address the specific questions of our time. What we should learn to defend is the way we are attached to other human beings, societies, forms of life, and non-living beings. Vulnerability is about our attachments, in a network of interdependentcies; knowing that those attachments constitutively take part in the definition, always provisional, of what we are or what we think we want to be in a particular milieu at a particular time. Attachments afford them. We are not prior to them. Ongoing debates about rightness, vulnerability and what is or should be considered to be vulnerable, are multifarious and open doors for fruitful common reflection engaging scientists, and the different actors of our societies. If, as we have underlined it, Anastas and Williamson include the notion of responsibility, and write that chemists ‘‘cannot turn a blind eye to the effects of the science in which we are engaged’’, they do not, as chemists, include the notion of what is right or vulnerable in their arguments. They connect facts and values, but do not dare to go a step farther, and this is why a dialogue between scientists and moral philosophers is of importance according to us. Hume’s fact-value distinction has always prevented this kind of dialogue from existing. We should overcome this kind of dichotomy, as Foot and Putnam, among many philosophers, advised them to do (Foot 1958; Putnam 2002). At this stage of our work, we would like to show how, in return, the philosophy of chemistry could provide moral philosophers with fresh arguments for addressing consequentialism and the question of the intrinsic value of life.

From the philosophy of chemistry to environmental ethics Reassessing consequentialist claims again Should consequentialism, leaving the question of its moral relevance aside, concern humans only? Consequentialism is the view that morality is all about producing the right kinds of ‘overall consequences.’ Here the phrase ‘‘overall consequences’’ of an action means everything the action brings about, including the action itself. For example, if you think that the whole point of morality is: (1) to spread happiness and relieve suffering, or (2) to create as much freedom as possible in the world, or (3) to promote the survival of our species, then you accept consequentialism. Bentham’s moral theory (1789) was founded on the assumption that it is the consequences of human actions that count in evaluating their merit, and that the kind of consequence that matters for human happiness is just the achievement of pleasure and avoidance of pain—Bentham, contrary to Mill (1861) who developed a qualitative hierarchy of pleasures, envisaged the future integration of animals into this scheme (Bentham 1970). Since the happiness of the community as a whole is nothing other than the sum of individual human interests (which is, we should be aware, just a mereological assumption reducing a whole to the sum of its parts), the principle of utility, then, defines the meaning of moral obligation by reference to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people who are affected by the performance of an action. For Sidgwick (1907), we should strive to greater ‘‘average utility’’ and increase population to the point where we maximize the product of the number of persons who are currently alive and the amount of average happiness! If Bentham accepts the possibility of including animals in his moral scheme, there is room for other forms of life, and the Earth itself in this scheme. Of course, one can always

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argue that if the environment is not included in the assessment of ‘the right overall consequences’, its destruction will unavoidably decrease ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.’ Following this line of argument leads us to the conclusion that life and the environment, as it is the case for sustainable development, are resources for humankind: They are means among others and are deprived of any direct or intrinsic value. But there is a problem in this story if we take into account of what we have learnt from chemistry: Chemical bodies are context-sensitive, and the ways they act upon the world always depend on context. Chemical bodies, as we have pointed it out, are mutually defined within a network including operations, instruments, transformations, and other purified bodies: They are not simply totally predictable by considering the body in isolation. Computed overall consequences are always incomplete. Schummer asserts: With every production of a new substance, the scope of non-knowledge increases tremendously, by the number of undetermined properties of the new substance as well as by all chemical reactivities of the already existing substances with the new one.’ (Schummer 2001, p. 110) Consequentialism cannot fully address, by itself, this situation. It needs to be implemented by new principles or methods that will enable philosopher to make a decision, by including animals, plants, and ‘inert’ bodies into its assessment. Its rationalized approach of ‘the right moral decision’ is overwhelmed by the relational definitions of this kind of body, Godard adds: Another feature of chemistry as a science is that it produces new substances and not only knowledge of the existing material world. New substances introduce new properties that are difficult to anticipate, with possible consequences that are difficult to fully comprehend … Due to the massive number of new chemical substances that are being introduced into ecosystems, this creative process entails an increasing unpredictability of environmental changes. The creation of a new substance and putting it on the market generates a new unpredictable potential for harming the environment and public health, increasing the difficulties associated with the control of these harms. This is a legitimate source of concern: Chemistry is a major factor in making our world unpredictable. There is no better justification for submitting products derived from innovation in the field of chemistry to rigorous procedures of public control, and to place these procedures under the flag of the Precautionary Principle. (Godard 2013, p. 87, our emphasis) Chemicals are of prime importance in the quest to raise safety standards for environmental and human health because of their specific and novel features. As an industrial and scientific domain, chemistry is a permanent source of new unknowns, which justifies special attention being paid to the risks it potentially raises for us, and for other forms of life. A model of assessment which only takes human beings into account cannot deal with this situation. Our reasoning is threefold: 1.

2.

Chemical bodies are defined and constituted by the mode of access—instruments or other bodies. Their operative definition is always open and provisional (requisites 1 and 2). Bodies are ‘afforded,’ what they ‘are’ is mainly context-sensitive. Now, they have been dispersed everywhere, at all scales, from macro to nano, in air, soil, water, and, even, inside alive or ‘inert’ bodies. Their effects on humans and nonhumans’ health are not known exhaustively, and cannot be so. Indeed, the methods

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3.

which determine their relative (eco)toxicity are being set up and stabilized. Furthermore, new chemical risks can ‘emerge’ just from a collection of bodies. Hence: Some philosophers of chemistry are reassessing the concepts of affordances, emergence, and even The Precautionary Principle, in order to address the specific situation related to the consequences of chemical activities upon ourselves, ecosystems, and the Earth. To do so, they have to scrutinize the whole-parts-environment strategies developed by chemists and biologists (Llored 2014), and the ways they stabilize different quantitative relationships between chemical structures and biological activities. This is an additional reason for promoting cooperation between philosophers of science, moral philosophers, scientists, and the other members of the society (Llored 2013b).

If we leave aside the question on how relevant the concept of happiness is for moral theories, the question on how measuring the ‘overall consequences’ of chemicals on humans and non-humans is open and controversial. Furthermore, consequentialism is currently based on a mereological assumption—a society is the sum of its individuals; an assumption which prevents philosophers from addressing other specific situations within which retrocausal effects are required for modeling the relationships between a whole, its parts, and the surroundings—as is the case whenever chemical bodies intervene upon human and non-humans (requisite 3). Reassessing consequentialism consists not only in arguing against consumerism and individualism (Norton 1984) on behalf of sustainability for instance, but also in identifying the mereological and metaphysical assumptions that underpin its development, and in questioning their relevance in the context of the consequences of technosciences. According to us, chemistry and its philosophy could have a role to play to achieve this goal.

About the intrinsic value of non-humans in biocentric and ecocentric ethics Most environmental ethicists reject consequentialism and anthropocentrism. Among them, biocentric ethicists assert that the ‘value’ of living humans and non-humans is not just a mean for achieving human well-being or happiness, but is, by contrast, ‘intrinsic’ (Taylor 1981). Ecocentric ethicists go far beyond this standpoint, considering that ecosystems have an intrinsic value and not solely living individuals taken in isolation (Rolston III 1994a). Why are intrinsic values so important in environmental ethics? Because, for instance, the recognition that ‘nature’ has intrinsic value could represent a well-reasoned justification for biotic diversity conservation for itself, and not as a resource for finding new medicinal products. Just as the intrinsic value of human beings provides a cornerstone for social justice, extending such value to non-humans could be a way to protect them from being destroyed by humans. There are two different views on the basis or grounding for intrinsic value. For Callicott (1999), intrinsic value is created by human valuing. On this subjective intrinsic value view, something has intrinsic value if it is valued for what it is, rather than for what it can bring about. Subjective intrinsic value is created by valuers through their evaluative attitudes or judgments—it does not exist prior to or independent from these. In contrast to subjective intrinsic value, objective intrinsic value is not humanly conferred. If something has objective intrinsic value, it has properties or features in virtue of which it is valuable, independent of anyone’s attitudes or judgments. This is typically thought to be the case with respect to the value of persons, for example. People have value in virtue of what they are, not because others value them. Their value is not conditional. If species and

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ecosystems have objective intrinsic value, then their value is discovered by human valuers, it is not created by them. Before the twentieth century, most moral philosophers presupposed that the intrinsic goodness of something is a genuine property of that thing, one that is no less real than the properties (of being pleasant, of satisfying a need, or whatever) in virtue of which the thing in question is ‘good.’ Korsgaard notes that ‘‘intrinsic value’’ has traditionally been contrasted with ‘‘instrumental value’’ (the value that something has in virtue of being a means to an end) and claims that this approach is misleading. She contends that ‘‘instrumental value’’ is to be contrasted with ‘‘final value,’’ that is, the value that something has as an end or for its own sake; however, ‘‘intrinsic value’’ (the value that something has in itself, that is, in virtue of its intrinsic, nonrelational properties) is to be contrasted with ‘‘extrinsic value’’ (the value that something has in virtue of its extrinsic, relational properties) (Korsgaard 1983). It is clear that moral philosophers since ancient times have focused their attention on the distinction between the value that something has for its own sake (the sort of nonderivative value that Korsgaard calls ‘‘final value’’), and the value that something has for the sake of something else to which it is related in some way. We should explicitly note that if, contrary to Korsgaard, we define intrinsic value against extrinsic value such a decision does not require us to endorse, or reject, the view that intrinsic value supervenes on intrinsic properties alone. In his Principia Ethica, Moore (1903) embraces the consequentialist view that whether an action is morally right or wrong turns exclusively on whether its consequences are ‘‘intrinsically better’’ than those of its alternatives. Some philosophers have recently argued that ascribing intrinsic value to consequences in this way is fundamentally misconceived. According to Geach, the sentence ‘‘x is a yellow bird’’ splits up logically into the sentence ‘‘x is a bird and x is yellow,’’ whereas the phrase ‘‘x is a good singer’’ does not split up in the same way. From ‘‘x is a yellow bird’’ and ‘‘a bird is an animal’’, we infer that ‘‘x is a yellow animal,’’ whereas we cannot draw this conclusion in the case of ‘‘x is a good singer’’ and ‘‘a singer is a person.’’ This analysis leads Geach to conclude that nothing can be good in the free-standing way that Moore alleges; rather, whatever is good is good relative to a certain kind, and is not dependent on ‘‘intrinsically better consequences’’ (Geach 1956). This short presentation of some aspects of the debate about intrinsic value highlights how subtle and difficult, and sometimes technical, addressing this notion is. Taylor asserts, and a lot of ecocentric ethicists follow him in his conclusion, that each animal and each plant, in the same way as us, has its own good. Many plants, for instance, excrete allelopathic chemicals from their roots to discourage competitors. Some of them are even actively carnivorous. All reproduce themselves. To this extent, each has a good of its own. ‘‘A life is defended for what it is in itself, without further contributory reference. That is ipso facto value in both the biological and philosophical senses, intrinsic because it inheres in, has focus within, the organism itself’’ (Rolston III 1994b, p. 173). But to do so, a plant needs the air that surrounds it, the molecules present in the soil around it, the energy received from the sun, and even the presence of some insects, among other interactive actors. This possibility to maintain itself depends on its relationships with the environment and is, to this extent, relational, and thus not fully intrinsic. The philosophy of chemistry has taught us that chemical bodies are not defined in isolation, but always depend on other bodies and gain their full, though provisional, meaning within a networks of bodies, transformations, contexts, and so on. The philosophy of chemistry could be helpful here insofar as it highlights—as did the philosophy of biology before it, but for other ‘objects’—that the definition of an individual for and by

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itself is highly problematic in the domain of chemistry. Searching for a scientific ground for intrinsic properties, and, maybe, for intrinsic values, is highly challenging, in particular in the context of moral approaches of intrinsic value based on supervenience. We are not nevertheless asserting that, as a plant is made of chemical bodies and as those bodies cannot be defined as if they were in isolation, a plant cannot have intrinsic properties, and that, consequently, if intrinsic value supervenes on intrinsic properties alone, intrinsic value does not exist at all. This reductionist programme is likely to commit a type of fallacy similar to what Rom Harre´ has called a ‘mereological fallacy’ (Harre´ and Llored 2013), that is to say, a fallacy which consists in applying to a chemical body, as a whole, a predicate that gets its meaning from its use for ascribing an attribute to a part of a body taken in isolation. We cannot fully reduce a plant to the molecules that it contains. Ecology nevertheless teaches us that we need the plant, what is contained, and its relationships with its surroundings, at the same time, to understand how the plant is able to maintain itself. Different sciences, i.e. chemistry and ecology, highlight, at different scales, and for different wholes (a molecule, a plant), the impossibility of defining those wholes ‘in isolation.’ A plant emerges from the molecular level, and is not reducible to it. Notwithstanding this situation, our aim, in this paragraph, was to emphasize how difficult, if not impossible, defining a body intrinsically turns out to be. Conceiving this body in isolation is just an analytic reasoning, having a functional and heuristic interest in science. If maintaining itself is a feature of having an intrinsic value, why could not it be the case after all that this intrinsic value, if any, depends upon the interaction with the surroundings. To this extent, this ‘intrinsic property’ would be a property of the ‘‘plantsurroundings’’ system, and not a property of the plant itself. This situation reminds us of Locke’s famous distinction between nominal essences, the attributes we use in classifying substances on the basis of observation, and real essences, the material constitutions of such substances which they possess independent of observation and which we infer from our theory of matter (Harre´ 2013). This scheme presumes that observation and experiment yield attributes of substances that are context free, or can be made so by various devices, such as Ceteris Paribus clauses. Real essence qualities are primary in the sense that they do not depend on the nature of the observer. The trouble is that in chemistry and in ecology as well, the context actively takes part in the constitution of the body at stake. We thus realize that the difficulties faced by moral philosopher to define intrinsic properties and values are, at least partly, related to the theory of knowledge that they use, sometimes explicitly, sometimes without being aware of so doing, in order to define the properties of a body or the body itself. We suggest that changing the metaphysical assumptions from context-free to contextsensitive bodies could help moral philosophers to reflect upon intrinsic properties and values in terms of ‘‘world-apparatus complexes’’ (Harre´ 1986), and not in terms of a world isolated from its mode of access. In other words, the metaphysics of affordances could turn out to be helpful in moral philosophy; the instrument being replaced by a cognitive system which interacts with bodies. Deeper consideration about this perspective will follow in other papers. For the moment, we just would like to add that if defining intrinsic value seems a problematic task within a modern standpoint which revolves around the subject/ object dichotomy; it does not follow from this situation that intrinsic values must be left aside tout court. As a matter of fact, granting intrinsic value to nature would make a huge practical difference. As Fox points out, if: [t]he nonhuman world is only considered to be instrumentally valuable then people are permitted to use and otherwise interfere with any aspect of it for whatever

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reasons they wish (i.e. no justification for interference is required). If anyone objects to such interference then, within this framework of reference, the onus is clearly on the person who objects to justify why it is more useful to humans to leave that aspect of the nonhuman world alone. If, however, the nonhuman world is considered to be intrinsically valuable then the onus shifts to the person who wants to interfere with it to justify why they should be allowed to do so. (Fox 1993, p. 101) Pragmatically speaking, nothing prevents us from ascribing an intrinsic value to nonhumans, alive or inert, in order to protect both them and us.

Concluding remarks: from ecology to mesology and its consequences for green chemistry and moral philosophy We have often insisted, throughout our paper, on the role of the surroundings, the environment, or on that of the milieu. We would like to clarify this point, showing that mesology, i.e. the study of the milieux, opens new perspectives in order to ground a new type of ethics, namely, an ‘ecumenal’ ethics. This conclusion will just propose key concepts that will be developed elsewhere (Llored 2016b, 2017). The starting question is: Are the surroundings a spectator, a place detachable from the body under study, or an active element of its constitution? ˆ ra (vx9 qa), the basic meaning of which In Plato’s Timaeus, we can find the name of cho is that of the territory of a polis (city-state), enabling it to exist in a relationship of mutual ˆ ra is, in the first place, the countryside which surrounds the city proper (astu), fitness. Cho and which nourishes it. Plato uses this term by analogy as an ontological image, in which ˆ ra becomes the nurse (titheˆneˆ) of relative Being (genesis), which was born, lives and is cho ˆ s on, eidos, idea), which exists in itself bound to die. Differing from absolute Being (onto ˆ ra. Both are inseparable, and transcends space and time, genesis cannot exist without a cho ˆ ra is not only the nurse or even the mother and this relationship is ambivalent, since the cho ˆ ra—in (meˆteˆr) of genesis, but also its imprint (ekmageion). As regards relative Being, cho other words the milieu of a certain being—is thus both one thing (a matrix) and its contrary (an imprint); i.e. both A and non-A (Plato 2008). Here is an aporia which Plato never surmounts. Augustin Berque has shown that this aporia comes from the fact that Plato’s rationalism relying on the principle of the excluded middle, i.e. that there cannot exist a third term which would be both A and non-A, he could not intellectually admit the ‘‘third and other gender’’ (triton allo genos), neither absolute nor relative Being, which he nevˆ ra (Berque 2009, 2012; Pradeau 1995). This idea is very different ertheless attributes to cho from that of topos proposed by Aristotle, according to whom ‘‘the place of a thing is the innermost motionless boundary of what contains it,’’ (to tou periechontos peras akineˆton proton, Aristotle 350 before B.C.E., Physics IV 212a20). This topos is a place detachable from the body, with which the body cannot have any ontological link, contrary to Plato’s ˆ ra from which genesis is not detachable. For Aristotle, what defines the identity of a cho body lies inside its own local boundary. Modern science has gradually reshaped this notion of topos; implementing systems of coordinates in order to localize bodies in space. Current topology is about the description of the place as if it were detachable from the body. In 1934, the Estonian naturalist Jakob von Uexku¨ll (1864–1944), introduced a distinction between Umgebung and Umwelt (the ambient world, or milieu, proper to a given species, as it exists for that species). Mesology is about the study of the Umwelt. Ecology is about Umgebung. The general idea is that a species and its milieu are a mutual elaboration,

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in which the animal is not like a machine reacting to an action with a movement, but rather like a driver reacting to a signal with an operation (Uexku¨ll 1956). This clearly counts against a simple dualism. The reality of a milieu (Umwelt) lies below the dichotomy between subject and object, A and non-A. Uexku¨ll was also a forerunner of biosemiotics, i.e. ‘‘study of signification.’’ His mesology implies indeed the necessity to study how the facts of the environment become, or do not become, signifying traits of the concerned animal’s milieu. In other words, how the information contained in the environment ˆ ra than to becomes the signification of a milieu. (Berque 2013) Umwelt is closer to cho topos; and simple information provided by an environment turns out to become the signification of a milieu for a particular species. In 1935, the Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsuroˆ (1889–1960), published Fuˆdo. ˆ satsu (Milieux. A study of the human linkage), in which he introduced a Ningengakuteki ko ˆ (the environment, as abstractly objectified by modern founding distinction between kankyo science) and fuˆdo (the milieu, as concretely experienced by a certain society). This distinction is exactly homologous to that which Uexku¨ll established between Umgebung and Umwelt, Uexku¨ll deals with the ontological level of the living in general, whereas Watsuji deals with that of the human in particular. Uexku¨ll did not think of a concept for the coupling of an animal with its milieu. On the other hand, concerning human milieu, Watsuji created for that the concept of fuˆdosei, which he defined as the structural moment of human existence (Watsuji 1935). Berque translated this concept with mediance (Berque 1986). Mediance is a neologism derived from the Latin medietas, which means ‘half’. Watsuji’s idea is indeed that, in the human, ningen in Japanese, two aspects, or halves, are dynamically combined into a ‘‘moment’’ (like two forces in mechanics), one which is individual, the hito, and one which is collective, the aida or more concretely aidagara, i.e. the linkage intertwined between people and, through this linkage, between people and things, historically constituting a milieu (fuˆdo). Ningen being properly the linkage of these two halves, human existence is necessarily medial (fuˆdoteki); hence the ontological concept of mediance (fuˆdosei). The human is medial, and his degree of mediance is higher than that of any other living being, since, more than any other species, he has added to his animal body an interlace of technical and symbolic systems, all necessarily collective and constituent of his very existence; that is to say that he cannot live without this medial body: his eco-technosymbolic milieu. Nevertheless, contemporary ontology remains largely that of dualism and its correlative individualism. We are still far from accepting easily the idea that the reality which surrounds us is not that of an objective environment (Umgebung), constituted with objects confronted by an individual subject, but is that of a milieu, constituted with things which participate in our very Being because of our mediance (Berque 2014). This dynamic coupling animates the milieu, giving it meaning and value. Its focus is the human’s subjecthood, but Berque extends it to the animal’s subjecthood as well. There is indeed a homology between Uexku¨ll’s and Watsuji’s theses, since both distinguished ˆ ), both considered submilieu (Umwelt, fuˆdo) from the environment (Umgebung, kankyo jecthood (that of the living in general, or that of the human in particular) as the condition of the existence of a milieu, and both advocated a particular discipline for studying that: Umweltlehre or fuˆdogaku, that is, in Berque’s sense, mesology as distinguished from ecology (which studies environments). And just as Uexku¨ll stressed that Umweltlehre implies a Bedeutungslehre in order to grasp what its proper milieu means for the concerned animal, Watsuji stressed that fuˆdogaku implies a hermeneutical method in order to grasp the meaning of its milieu for a certain human society, or a certain culture. The notions of subjechood, and that of interpretation instead of information, are crucial for mesology.

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Starting from Watsuji’s conception of fuˆdo, Berque defines the ‘ecumene’ as the total sum of human milieux, and thus as the relationship of humankind with the Earth. As such, the ecumene is fraught with mediance. This ontologically distinguishes it from the biosphere, as well as life ontologically distinguishes the biosphere from the planet. The planet (a physical–chemical being) founds the biosphere (an ecological being) which founds the ecumene (a medial being); but neither can the ecumene be reduced to the biosphere nor the biosphere to the planet, because, from the lower to the upper of these three ontological levels, something emerges which does not exist at the lower ones. (Berque 2009) What emerges from the planet to the biosphere is life. Then what emerges from the biosphere to the ecumene? For overcoming the modern aporia, the answer to this question must not be given only in moral but also in scientific terms. However, the essential elements of this answer can be found in anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986)’s theory of the emergence of the human species. In Gesture and Speech (1993), he has shown that this emergence was brought forth by three interrelated processes, each of them supposing and making possible the other two: physiological change (the evolution of an ape into Homo sapiens), the development of technical systems, and the development of symbolic systems. The latter two were an externalisation of the functions which initially were, like in the apes, those of the body itself. For instance, the functions of the teeth were externalised into the use of choppers. Over time, these externalised functions, which Leroi-Gourhan calls our social body because they are necessarily collective, have developed into what is our present civilisation. They are indispensable to our existence as humans, no less than is our specific animal body. For instance, humans would not exist without the symbolic system of language, which in its turn requires physiological capacities which the apes do not have. According to Berque (2009, 2014), this theory shows on strictly positivistic grounds the reality of mediance, a concept which Leroi-Gourhan ignored, that is, the externalisation of human existence into the ecumene. This corresponds indeed exactly to the idea of coming out and staying outside, which we have seen above on phenomenological grounds. As a matter of fact, what comes out and stays outside of our individual animal body is not only a social body. As it necessarily combines with our ecological environment, it becomes a medial body; that is, our milieu. The ecumene emerged (ex-sisted) from the biosphere by dint of the development of technical and symbolic systems, supposing and making possible at the same time the emergence of the human species; and this is why the ecumene must ontologically be distinguished from the biosphere: it is not only ecological, but also, at the same time, technological and symbolic. The ecumene is a set of eco-technosymbolic relationships; and so is each of the milieux which compose it. Supposing as such human existence, the ecumene is by that very fact impregnated with human values. It is not only physical, but moral as well. Each of its aspects is fraught with ethical implications, which necessarily participate in the moral system of a certain culture—that of the society which lives in the concerned milieu. This is another essential difference between the ecumene and the biosphere; that is, reasoning in ecological terms can only lead to abstract universal principles, whereas reasoning in ecumenal terms supposes an understanding of the mediance at work in a given milieu, at a given time in history. That is, to understand and respect the subjecthood of the humans who are or were living there (Berque 2009, 2014). Purely environmental ethics is therefore a chimera. Its referent is only the biosphere, and as such it ignores the reality of mediance. It can only grasp half of it, that is our animal bodies, while it can only make the other half an object, dichotomised from human subjecthood. The possibility of a sound ethical reasoning requires taking ontologically the

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ecumene into account; that is, to acknowledge the structural moment of human existence: mediance. In that sense, « environmental » ethics should be conceived of in terms of medial (or ecumenal) ethics. Developing an ecumenal ethics requires acknowledging that the concept of subjecthood more than those of intrinsic properties or values, and that of mediance are of crucial importance. Each and every species interprets its milieu, and not solely receive information from the environment. Mesology and Berque’s works should be, according to us, better known and investigated by moral philosophers and green chemists as well.

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