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What must I do (and why me)? | 73 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.
