ABSTRACT
By appealing to nature, Bill Devall evinced a classical response in his search for political values. Just as Plato appealed to nature to justify benevolent despotism, Aristotle to champion Athenian democracy, Hobbes to argue for absolute monarchy, and Locke to defend liberalism, so Devall invoked nature to justify the principle of biocentric equality. Yet, however attractive, his idea was no less arbitrary than those advocated by earlier political philosophers. The notion of the individual as a subordinate member of an indivisible organic community of interdependent parts — the idea on which biospherical egalitarianism rested — was not so much an insight of empirical biology as one of German metaphysics. Hegel was both a monist and a holist, who, like Devall, applied his ideas to politics. Everything in the universe, Hegel believed, is composed of spiritual substance; only complex wholes, and not their parts, have independent reality. As the philosopher Walter Stace explains, for Hegel "the state is a true individual.
