Oldal 76 [76]
OCR
74 | Tue Puttosopny or Eco-Pouirics nature. He claims that those who think that man is the only being for whom living means evaluating circumstances are mistaken. In his opinion, every living system is thereby an axiological system as well, since the most fundamental activity of life is evaluation: distinguishing between good and bad options from the perspective of the survival and reproduction of the given organism: “...the genetic set is a normative set; it distinguishes between what is and what ought to be. ... Every organism has a good of its kind; it defends its own kind as a good kind... A moral agent deciding his or her behaviour ought to take account of the consequences for other evaluative systems.”* He then extends this obligation to the natural systems themselves, with the claim that the order of coexistence ensures the survival of the associated species; therefore, one ought also to attribute ethical importance to the system itself. Rolston does not distinguish between vital interests and ethical interests; it seems that for him, ethics is nothing else than the superior development of the selective behaviour determining the connection between a living organism and its environment. According to this, the foundations of ethics should be sought in biology, primarily in biocoenology, the study of the coexistence of species, or in ecology. In Rolston’s view, the source of ethical value is quite simply “there” in nature, before and independently of all evaluative actions. At one point he uses the example of the lights in a fridge: it is true that the light goes on if the door is opened, but it only goes on, because the source of the light, the bulb, was already there in the fridge. How do those reply who stand poised to jump with Ockham’s razor, to separate the will of the Creator (the “let it be”) from the sinful earthly world corrupted by Evil (what is)? The aim to naturalise ethics is henceforth subject to strenuous criticism, since the majority of ethicists since David Hume have accepted that there is no state of affairs which can be termed good in every case and without qualification. ‘Therefore, we cannot conclude from the facts to values (from the state of the world to the will of God; from the order of nature to man’s duty). Few would probably dispute anymore that biological value and the interest in the survival of the species or of the ecosystem contain perspectives unavoidable for ethical consideration. But biocentrist ethics has failed to prove to those who shrink from the axiomatic recognition of nature’s ethical self-value (and think that ethics cannot neglect the difference in class between biological and ethical value) how much and on what basis 3 Thid. pp.80-81.
