On the values of microbes: an ethical investigation of relational values associated with the microbial world.
Abstract
Current microbiome research has revealed that microbes support nearly all life on Earth, are essential for food production, affect human physical health and psychological well-being and maintain ecological processes. Consequently, there are many reasons to value them, especially in times of ecological crises and the pending end of the so-called antibiotic era. However, a theoretical analysis of the existing values regarding microorganisms is still missing in environmental ethics and the environmental humanities. In this paper, we provide such an ethical analysis. Therefore, we briefly introduce different value types (Section 2.1) and then discuss what values exist with respect to the microbial world, focusing on the various instrumental and especially relational values (Section 2.2). The different values we examine are the direct use value, life support and ecological function value, scientific value, transformative and religious/spiritual value, existence value and aesthetic value. To introduce the latter, we use the example of visual and poetic art that humans co-create with microorganisms to illustrate what this value encompasses. Concluding, in Section 3, we argue why such values could be used as a cornerstone to establish distinct microbial ethics and human-microbe relations that do justice to the complexity of our human entanglement with microbes.