Ethics as a situated modulation of natural processes, not a rejection or blind obedience to them.

Thinkers Who Reject the Nature/Ethics Dichotomy Entirely

John Dewey

Dissolves the distinction between humans and nature; ethics is intelligent participation in natural processes, not battling them. He writes that “nature includes man and his works,” so ethical life is adaptive and experimental, not oppositional.

Alfred North Whitehead

As a process philosopher, Whitehead sees value and moral feeling as extensions of natural creativity. There is no cosmic battle between “natural struggle” and “ethical restraint”; ethics arises from the same relational flux.

Hans Jonas

In The Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas argues that ethical responsibility emerges from biological life itself. Rather than opposing nature, ethics deepens our obligation to maintain the conditions of life.

Ecological and Evolutionary Thinkers Who Reject “Nature as a Free Fight”

Peter Kropotkin

His Mutual Aid is the classic rebuttal to the “nature is pure struggle” myth. Cooperation is not morally imposed against nature—it is a natural strategy for survival and flourishing.

Evelyn Fox Keller

Highlights how models of competition were projections of Victorian ideology onto biology. She argues that we need an ethically and politically aware ecological frame that doesn’t treat “nature” as inherently antagonistic.

Lynn Margulis

Her endosymbiosis theory radically undermines the vision of nature as fundamentally competitive. Evolution proceeds through integration, merger, and co-constitution: sometimes with the grain, sometimes against.

Donna Haraway

Her work (especially Staying with the Trouble) argues that ethical life consists of “response-ability” within multispecies entanglements. Not opposing nature; not submitting to it; staying inside it and modulating relations.

Anti-Reductionist Anthropologists and Philosophers of Nature

Tim Ingold

Argues that humans do not stand apart from nature but are “along with” it. Ethical skill is learning when to align with flows and when to diverge.

Philippe Descola

Rejects the “naturalism” that draws a hard boundary between humans and nature. For Descola, morality follows from relational ontologies, not a war against biological determinism.

Bruno Latour

Objects to the modern divide between Nature and Culture. Ethics is a negotiation with forces, not an external constraint applied to them.

Thinkers Who Warn Against the Hubris of “Combating Nature”

Rachel Carson

In Silent Spring, she exposes how the belief that humanity must “overcome” natural dynamics leads directly to ecological harm. The moral task is to understand and work within ecological systems.

Aldo Leopold

His land ethic is built on the idea that humans must “think like a mountain”—that ethics should align with the grain of ecological processes, not impose a counter-natural regime.

Val Plumwood

Her ecofeminism critiques the logic that sets “human ethical reason” against “natural struggle.” That framework leads to domination. She advocates an ethic of respectful engagement with ecological processes.

Relevant Biopolitical and Critical Thinkers 

These thinkers don’t talk about ecology per se, but their critiques support a stance against a dominionist, anti-natural ethics.

Giorgio Agamben

His critique of biopolitics shows how the state’s claim to “correct” the natural order leads to domination and harm.

Michel Foucault

Rejects any fixed “nature” that ethics must either fight or follow; ethics is a practice of self-formation within complex power relations.

Isabelle Stengers

Warns against the “sorcery” of technocratic control—humanity trying to combat or override nonhuman processes. Advocates situated, partial, humble forms of engagement.

Modern Thinkers Who Articulate My Position Almost Exactly

Deborah Bird Rose

Develops an ethic of “mutual flourishing” based on attentiveness to multispecies life. Not harmony, not warfare—careful relating.

Anna Tsing

In The Mushroom at the End of the World, she shows how survival and ethics are shaped by contingency, entanglement, and improvisation across species.

Jane Bennett

Her “vital materialism” argues that we navigate a field of forces, sometimes resisting, sometimes aligning, never outside nature.

Philosophers Who Would Support My Caveat Against Huxley

These thinkers would back my critique:

• Cora Diamond – ethics as sensitivity to life, not mastery over it.

• Martha Nussbaum – rejects reductive biological accounts of nature.

• Amartya Sen – ethics as capability enhancement within constraints, not domination.