Here's something that keeps me up at night.
I'm sitting in my apartment in Tirana, looking out at the plane trees lining the boulevard below. Their branches sway in the November wind, and I'm asking myself a question that would've seemed absurd to me five years ago: Do I have a moral duty to that tree?
Not because it provides oxygen. Not because it's useful. But because it's alive.
This isn't some abstract philosophical exercise for me anymore. When you spend as much time as I do thinking about our place in the cosmos—about what connects us to the universe and to each other—you start noticing the cracks in our conventional moral frameworks. We've drawn these neat little circles around who matters: family, friends, fellow citizens, maybe all humans if we're feeling generous. Animals? Sure, if they're cute enough or smart enough. But trees? Mushrooms? The moss growing on that wall outside?
We've left them in the cold.
The Elephants Who Made Rome Weep
Let me take you back 2,000 years to a scene that haunts me. Picture this: The Theatre of Pompey, 55 BCE, the final day of celebrations. Twenty elephants are being slaughtered in the Circus Maximus for entertainment.
The elephants don't fight back. They walk around the arena with their trunks raised to the sky, trumpeting in agony, as if begging the crowd—pleading with them—to make it stop.
The Roman audience breaks down. They're crying. They're cursing Pompey's name. Cicero, who was there, writes about it with this palpable discomfort. He says the crowd felt misericordia—compassion, pity—because they suddenly recognized that these elephants had societas with them. Fellowship. Belonging. Community.
That word—societas—it's doing so much work. It's the Latin term for the bonds that create moral obligation. Who belongs with us? Who's "one of us"? These questions determined the limits of ancient moral duty. You owed things to your kin, your fellow citizens, those with whom you shared fellowship.
The Romans standing in that arena had a sudden, visceral recognition: these elephants weren't just things. They were kin.
Three Provocative Claims That'll Make You Uncomfortable
Before I go further, let me lay out three ideas that challenge everything we think we know about morality:
First: The modern obsession with impartial, objective ethics—treating everyone equally regardless of relationship—might be fundamentally alienating and inhuman.
Second: Ancient "partialist" ethics, which said relationships determine obligations, weren't necessarily prejudiced or narrow-minded. They just needed to be expanded to include the right beings.
Third: You can have moral obligations to a laurel bush, and it's not because harming it damages your character or makes you a worse person. It's because you've wronged the bush itself.
Sit with that discomfort for a moment.
Now let me tell you about a philosopher who understood all this 2,500 years ago.
A Man Who Remembered Being a Fish
Empedocles lived in the 5th century BCE in Acragas, Sicily (modern Agrigento). He believed something radical: that all living beings belong to a single community governed by a universal law of justice.
Not some living beings. All of them.
His reasoning came from multiple angles, and they're all fascinating. First, Empedocles believed in the transmigration of souls. He thought long-lived spirits (daimones) were condemned to cycle through incarnations—from plant to animal to human—because of the "original sin" of killing and eating flesh.
He claimed he remembered his past lives: "Before now, I have been a boy, a girl, a bush, a fowl, and a fish traveling in the sea."
(Legend says he eventually leapt into Mount Etna to rejoin the gods, leaving only his sandals behind. I mean, if you're going to go, go dramatically.)
The ethical implication hits like a freight train: there's kinship between plants, fungi, other animals, and humans because the living other might literally be "one of us"—a reincarnated spirit working its way back to the divine.
But you don't have to believe in reincarnation to find Empedocles' second argument compelling.
We're All Made of the Same Stuff
Empedocles was also one of the first Western philosophers to identify the four fundamental "roots" of matter: earth, air, fire, and water. He saw these as governed by two cosmic forces—Love (philia), which combines and unifies, and Strife (neikos), which separates and atomizes.
All life forms emerge from the combination of these same basic elements, just in different proportions. Empedocles compared it to a painter creating "trees and men and women, animals and birds and water-bred fish" from a basic palette of colors.
Despite appearances, we're all made from the same material stuff. There's no absolute birth or death, only "mingling and interchange of what is mingled."
I'm sitting here thinking about this in the context of what we now know about biochemistry. We share DNA with every living thing on this planet. The same nucleotides, the same amino acids, the same metabolic pathways. A human cell and a bacterial cell are running on fundamentally similar machinery.
Empedocles didn't have microscopes or gene sequencers. He couldn't see the molecular evidence. But he intuited something profound: the boundaries between species are less fundamental than the continuity binding us together.
He went even further. According to his cosmology, the universe began in a state of perfect Love—everything fused in a sphere. Then Strife entered, pulling things apart until they completely separated. Then Love started reasserting itself, gradually combining elements until our familiar world took shape.
During the early stages of this process, Empedocles imagined something wildly ahead of its time: body parts roaming around independently—"faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads." These parts randomly combined to form creatures, some functional, some not. The maladapted hybrids died out. The well-adapted survived.
This is essentially natural selection, described 2,400 years before Darwin.
For Empedocles, there's nothing special about human beings. No design, no designer setting us apart.
The Intelligence of Plants
Here's where it gets really interesting for someone like me who thinks about consciousness and intelligence. Empedocles believed that all living things—including plants—have a share of intelligence (phrónêsis) and thought (nóêma).
Before you dismiss this as ancient nonsense, consider what modern plant science has discovered. Plants can sense their environment, make decisions, communicate with each other through chemical signals and fungal networks, remember past events, and solve problems. They don't have brains, but they process information and respond intelligently to their circumstances.
If cognitive faculties make humans and animals kin, shouldn't we include plants as "recognizably intelligent problem-solvers able to make sense of their surroundings and respond accordingly"?
I'm watching that plane tree outside my window with new eyes now.
Love Versus Strife: The Real Battle
Empedocles understood the danger in partialist ethics. When you base morality on relationships and belonging, you risk creating an insider-outsider logic—tribe against tribe, nation against nation, with all the resulting horrors.
But his solution wasn't the modern one. He didn't say we should adopt an impersonal, God's-eye view and treat everyone equally regardless of relationship. That approach, he might argue, asks us to sever the very ties that make us human.
Instead, Empedocles said we need to forge new bonds and recognize bonds that already exist.
This is the work of Love. While Strife separates like from like, creating homogeneous, isolated groups, Love combines unlike and like, creating higher unities. Love overcomes prejudice not by abandoning partiality but by giving it a more inclusive form.
The highest form of partiality is partiality toward the living as such.
Empedocles imagined a Golden Age when this actually existed—when humans and animals lived in peace, when "their friendship burned bright," when killing animals for food or sacrifice was considered the greatest defilement.
The question he leaves us with: If the spirit of friendship burned bright once, can it not burn bright again?
Can You Be Friends with a Tree?
I know what you're thinking. This is where the whole thing falls apart. Friendship with animals, sure, maybe. But a tree? A tardigrade? Come on.
But wait. What is friendship, really?
A friend is someone you spend time with, whose company you enjoy, whose ways you come to know through shared experience. You live alongside them. Your lives become intertwined.
Can you spend time in the company of an old tree? Rest against its trunk while you read, shaded by its branches? Can the emotional intimacy with which individual trees shape our lives count as friendship?
I think it can.
I have a relationship with the trees along my street. I notice when one's leaves change color earlier than usual. I worry when I see disease or damage. I feel genuine pleasure sitting beneath them on hot afternoons. Is that so different from friendship?
The philosopher in the text argues that if there existed a tardigrade the size of a dog, once we overcame our unease at its unfamiliar appearance, friendship would be possible.
The limit isn't moral. It's practical.
The Hard Question: What Do We Eat?
Right. So if we have moral obligations to all living things, and it's wrong to kill them, what exactly are we supposed to eat? Rocks?
This seems like a reductio ad absurdum—proof that the whole position is absurd.
But ancient partialist ethics doesn't flatten everything to equal moral significance. The degree of moral significance depends on the closeness of the relationship and the nature of the being.
It's more unjust to wrong a friend than a stranger. It's more unjust to harm a human than an animal. It's more unjust to harm an animal than a plant.
So under conditions of necessity—like needing to eat—it's less unjust to kill and consume a plant than an animal. All things considered, that should be our choice.
But—and this is crucial—it's still wrong to harm a plant for no good reason. If you cut down a mature tree for a thrill, or trample wildflowers on a whim, you've committed a moral wrong. Not because you've damaged your own character or violated some abstract principle. You've wronged the plant.
Not because it reasons or suffers. Because it's alive. Because as a living body, it belongs with us in the community of life.
What This Means for Us Now
I'm writing this as someone who spends a lot of time thinking about our place in the universe. About how we fit into the cosmic story, about what connects us to everything else that exists.
Modern ethics asks us to be objective, impartial, to calculate interests without regard for relationships or species membership. It's a view from nowhere, a God's-eye perspective that treats my child the same as a stranger on the other side of the planet.
There's something deeply alienating about this. It asks us to pretend our relationships don't matter, that the bonds constituting our very identity are morally irrelevant prejudices to be overcome.
Empedocles offers a different path. Not a view from nowhere but a view from within the web of relationships that make us who we are. The task isn't to transcend our partiality but to expand it. To widen the circle of our concern until it encompasses all of life.
The way to do this isn't through abstract calculation. It's through engagement, interaction, really seeing the other. Spending time with beings different from us. Opening our eyes.
When I look at that tree now, I'm not thinking about its instrumental value or its intrinsic worth measured on some objective scale. I'm thinking about kinship. About the fact that we're both alive, both temporary arrangements of matter that somehow became capable of responding to the world, of persisting, of striving.
A Principle Worth Living By
The Roman crowd at Pompey's theatre heard the elephants' cries and recognized something they'd been blind to: these beings belonged with them. The recognition sparked moral outrage at the injustice being committed.
That recognition—that sudden seeing—is what Empedocles is asking of us. Not toward just elephants or dolphins or other charismatic megafauna. Toward all life.
I am a living being. Nothing alive is alien to me.
This isn't some flowery sentiment. It's a governing principle for how to move through the world. When you internalize it, when you really believe it, your choices change.
You think twice before thoughtlessly destroying. You feel the weight of necessity when you must harm. You cultivate attention and care for the living world that sustains you. You remember that you're not standing apart from nature, observing it objectively. You're woven into it, implicated in it, part of it.
The spirit of friendship Empedocles spoke of—that ancient Golden Age when it "burned bright" between species—it's not just a myth about the past.
It's a possibility for the future.
We live in an age of Strife. Species extinction, habitat destruction, climate chaos. Everything pulling apart, becoming estranged. But Love, that cosmic force of connection and unity, is still available to us.
The question is whether we're willing to see what's already there. Whether we're willing to expand our circle of moral concern beyond the comfortable and familiar.
I'm looking at that tree again. The November wind is still moving through its branches. Somewhere in its tissues, water is being pulled up from roots to leaves. Chloroplasts are capturing light. Fungi are trading nutrients through its root system. It's solving problems, responding to its world, living.
It belongs here. So do I.
And that shared belonging—that kinship in the community of life—means something. It has to mean something.
Or we're lost.
What beings do you share fellowship with? Where do you draw the line of moral concern, and why there? I'm still working through these questions myself, still learning to see what Empedocles saw 2,500 years ago. Join me in this work. The spirit of friendship is waiting to be rekindled.
Post a Comment