Oldal 71 [71]
OCR
What must I do (and why me)? | 69 2. Back, but where to? For the first representatives of radical or deep ecology, it seemed obvious that the expansion of the range of actions falling under ethical judgment goes together with the denial of the special role of human beings. The rules of the republic of nature apply to our species just as much as to anyone else and the privilege of self-awareness, if anything, obliges homo sapiens to behave in accord with these laws. The philosophers aiming to create the ideological basis for the animal liberation movement thoroughly scandalised their contemporaries when they dismissed as speciesist prejudice the traditional position of humanism, according to which the only inhabitant of the ethical universe is man.*° But why should the capacity for rational thought entitle our species to privileges over other beings, whose other good qualities place them far above man, such as flying, climbing trees, running or the capacity to communicate with their fellows at long distance? From a neutral, i.e., inter-species standpoint, this approach can by no means be called ethical or just. It rather indicates that we are not superior to our fellow beings. That only man knows good and evil — i.e., only he possesses ethical self-awareness — does not excuse him from taking the interests of other beings into consideration. If we want to be consistent, claims Singer, we cannot present a single criterion of moral considerability that would apply to all humans and that would not thereby also apply to other beings besides us. (Ethical self-awareness itself is by no means the possession of every human: for instance, no-one has it in the first year of his/her life, i.e., it is not born with us. ‘This is nevertheless no obstacle to including infants or the mentally disabled under ethical accountability.) Whose wellbeing matters, therefore? Whose good should we will? ‘The adherents of various schools of ethics offer varying answers to this question (also). If, as the utilitarians claim, the ethical good can be identified with the greatest happiness of the greatest number and evil with causing suffering, then it follows that we have to take into account the interests of all those capable of joy and suffering, according to their level of sentience. Those with a central nervous system are placed in front and even within this group the hierarchy is determined by the development of the brain functions enabling the experience of pleasure 30 Peter Singer: Animal Liberation. A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Harper Collins, 1975.
