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ethical self-awareness and moral feelings live together with beings that
listen to their natural instincts, in close mutual dependence?
However, it is likely that such coexistence cannot be called a
community. Luke Roelofs rightly warns that to call biocoenosis a
community, is nothing other than twisting words.*' The distinguishing
characteristic of an ethical community is intentionality, a mutual
commitment based on a conscious decision. In this sense, the coexistence
of living beings is not a community; it is what it is. This should not
prevent us from maintaining that our behaviour towards our fellow
living beings is subject to ethical considerations, but then this conviction
has to be proven, which has yet to occur.
3. The ethical value of nature. Ethics and evolution
It seems that one cannot conclude to the ethical significance of nature
from the man-centred theories of modern moral philosophy without
contradictions. Can one argue instead for the intrinsic ethical value, ie.,
“goodness” of nature itself? At first sight this does not seem so difficult.
Who would deny that photosynthesis is a good thing? ‘The laws of life
can only be good laws or vice versa: what else can be good and beautiful,
if not the order of life? From Akhnaton’s Hymn to the Sun, through
Spinoza’s Ethics to Holmes Rolston’s environmental philosophy,
humanity has always been aware of this connection: “The way the world
is informs the way it ought to be. We always shape our values in
significant measure in accord with our notion of the kind of universe
that we live in, and this process drives our sense of duty.” We cannot
imagine anything better and the reason we cannot is that we ourselves
are the work of nature too. This order, the order of coming to be and
passing away, is that of eternal change. If we have managed to
understand some of it, it initiates us into the meaning of our own
sufferings and mortality: one’s decision is good if one’s goals are in
harmony with the processes maintaining the integrity, wholeness and
beauty of the natural systems. ‘This is still Land Ethics, only no longer
on a pragmatic, but instead on a teleological basis.
Holmes Rolston, one of the founders of environmental ethics, raises
another important argument in favour of the ethical value inherent in
# Luke Roelofs: There is No Biotic Community. Environmental Philosophy 8.2.,2011.
” Holmes Rolston Ibid., p.95.