WHERE DID FRITZ JAHR’S IDEAS ON “PLANT (BIO)ETHICS” COME FROM? WHAT WAS SAID ABOUT PLANTS BY JAHR’S SOURCES?

Abstract

Fritz Jahr (1895–1953), a German teacher and priest who in 1926 first used the word “bioethics” and offered his vision of the new discipline, proposed extending human ethical duties to animals and plants. While the animal rights movement is centuries old and has achieved significant success, the idea of plant rights has only been mentioned timidly and is generally distant, even among the educated. In this paper, we were interested in what the few authors cited by Jahr say about plants, primarily the Viennese sociologist, philosopher, and psychologist Rudolf Eisler (1873–1926), the botanist, microbiologist, and philosopher Raoul Heinrich Francé (1874–1943), and the German experimental psychologist and founder of psychophysics Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887).