New Materialism, Harm, and Hierarchies in Nature

This article is about an internal contradiction within the ascendant philosophy of new materialism, namely that its ethical opposition to harm clashes with its ontology. In the first part, I summarize new materialists’ attention to material entanglements and rejection of hierarchies in nature. In the second section, I argue that diagnosing and addressing harm to ecosystems and individuals (almost) always depend upon a hierarchy of beings within that ecosystem and a set of pre-determined potentials/preferences of how individual entities should be, two principles that new materialists explicitly reject. In the conclusion, I suggest that new materialists’ contradictions surrounding harms mean that they can either maintain a concern over ongoing damage to ecosystems and beings or their opposition to immaterial potentials and a hierarchy among beings—but not both. My preferred option is to retain the former and to accept that we must have some hierarchy among and within beings to address ongoing ecological deterioration around us. I close by outlining how new materialism’s key insights might be put in dialogue with other voices on the relation between humans and the rest of the world.