Cosmocentric Food Ethics in the Light of Tashkīk al-Wujūd: A Metaphilosophical Reconstruction of Naess, Singer, and Regan

Abstract

Contemporary food ethics that seeks to move beyond anthropocentrism draws on three principal sources: Peter Singer’s utilitarianism, Tom Regan’s deontology of animal rights, and Arne Naess’s deep ecology. Attempts to integrate these three into a single cosmocentric model of food ethics have yielded juxtaposition rather than integration, since the three positions operate with criteria of moral considerability that are logically mutually exclusive, namely sentience, subject-of-a-life, and membership in the biosphere. This article argues that the resulting impasse is ontological rather than ethical and cannot therefore be resolved at the level of normative ethics. Employing hermeneutic and comparative methods applied to scholarly sources, the study proposes Mullā Ṣadrā’s doctrine of tashkīk al-wujūd (the gradation of being) as the ontological foundation of such an integration. The Sadrian principle that what differentiates entities is identical with what unites them permits the formulation of an intrinsic value at once universal and graded. Naess’s cosmocentric claim can thus be sustained without the flattening of value, while Singer’s sentience and Regan’s subject-of-a-life are read as markers of degree along a single scale of existence rather than as competing criteria. The doctrine of ḥarakah jawhariyyah further reinterprets Christian Coff’s tragedy of eating as istiḥālah, the elevation of being, which yields a model of food ethics grounded in accountability: the sacrifice of a lower degree of being is legitimate only insofar as the higher degree genuinely realizes its elevation. Cosmocentric food ethics thereby acquires its metaphysical foundation from the tradition of ḥikmah mutaʿāliyah, a tradition hitherto absent from global discourse on food ethics