By Leonie N. Bossert, and Davina Höll.
Microbes are the earliest and most dominant life forms on Earth. They are essential for food production, affect human and animal physical health and psychological well-being, and maintain all ecological processes. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate microbes and human-microbe relations from various disciplinary perspectives beyond the current microbial research, which is almost exclusively from the perspective of natural science and medicine. Despite their crucial role for all life on Earth, discourses of the humanities still often overlook microbes or present them as either ‘good’ microbes that benefit humans or ‘bad’ microbes that cause diseases. This perpetuates an over-simplified perspective, necessitating a reevaluation of human-microbe relations. To contribute to such reevaluation, this paper undertakes an analysis of different values that exist regarding microbes, recognizing the diverse values associated with microbes and the need for more nuanced perspectives in research and human interactions.
We discuss three different categories of values (intrinsic, instrumental, and relational) and delve into various values attributed to microbes (linking them to one or more of the value categories), such as their direct use value, life support and ecological function value, and scientific value. We examine the transformative, religious/spiritual, existence, and aesthetic values associated with microbes, highlighting their significance in human understanding, ecosystem functioning, and cultural appreciation. Finally, we discuss the aesthetic value of microbes through the lens of poetry, demonstrating that art can serve as a mirror for pressing eco-social questions, such as the threat of a ‘silent pandemic” of antibiotic resistance that occurs due to a problematic treatment of microorganisms, or the danger of collapsing soil microbiomes that may influence agriculture.
The values we present demonstrate that there are good reasons for more differentiation and complexity in our thinking about human-microbe relations. Therefore, we think these values serve as a suitable foundation for establishing a microbial ethics, a theory of ethics that is missing in the current academic discourse and that we call for to guide us, as humans, in cohabiting with other living beings in a more sustainable way.
Relational Thinking 