Beyond Value Attribution: Xunzi and Norton on Relational Environmental Ethics

Abstract

This study undertakes a meta-theoretical critique of the value attribution framework that has structured environmental ethics since the 1970s: the assumption that ethical inquiry must begin by locating value in human beings alone or extending it to non-human nature. Rather than adjudicating between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, it examines two traditions that independently bypass this framework: the classical Confucianism of Xunzi, whose ethics rests on the relational character of the Heaven-Earth-Human triad, and the environmental pragmatism of Bryan Norton, whose convergence hypothesis renders the intrinsic-value debate practically irrelevant. Their convergence, an internal critic of the framework and an external tradition that never adopted it, offers diagnostic evidence that value attribution itself is the deeper obstacle, pointing toward a relational environmental ethics grounded in normativity from relationships, temporal integration, and the primacy of practice over theory.