Holism

Abstract

In ethics, holism is most commonly taken to be the view that moral consideration is owed not only to individuals (e.g., individual people or individual animals) but also and independently to at least some of the larger wholes that they form (e.g., nations or ecosystems). However, holism encompasses an even broader range of theoretical claims than this very general position, even within ethics. And these multiple forms of holism within ethics are related to a further array of holisms outside ethics. In this essay, I first canvas the range of holisms in philosophy generally and use this to distinguish a number of different ways in which a theory might be said to be holist. I then use those distinctions to assess the three main kinds of holism within ethics: holism about reasons, holism about value, and holism about moral standing.