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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.