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preferably bring it into line with the sensibilities of their utilitarian
contemporaries). “For Aquinas, every creature necessarily seeks its own
good. ‘The good is that form of life that we are best fitted to live. The
evidence shows that most people most of the time find more happiness
in sociability, marriage and the nurture of children than they do in buying
and possessing material objects, but our culture has a range of hidden and
overt persuaders which try to convince us otherwise... We need to exercise
our reason and intuition... in ordering our lives and our societies to the
good for us. However if the good for us is to live in conformity with our
nature, with the objective moral order of nature in us and in the non¬
human world, then the moral ends both of our individual actions and of
human communities must include within them reference beyond human
life to the whole of the natural order whence we not only derive normative
values about human life and the good, but also those biophysical attributes
of nourishment and aesthetic beauty which are... essential elements of
the human good." Can this argumentation be maintained in isolation
from its original metaphysical foundation? Rolston would no doubt
respond that from this perspective it matters not whether a creating deity
or natural necessity gave evolution its direction, for in both cases we need
to find the measure of human behaviour in our nature and in harmony
with nature. If not, we come into contradiction with ourselves.
‘The question is not quite so simple for lay ethics (but possibly not for
the Judeo-Christian tradition either, given its millennia of grappling
with the questions of chosenness and sin). As regards our nature, one
will discover purposefulness in its historical changes and a common law
in the diversity of personalities only if one is already convinced of the
purposefulness of evolution and the goal of man (his los). The same
applies to the harmony between the two — human nature and the order
of the world; everyday experience reveals the relation of the two to be
much more ambivalent. It seems that the suppositions and opinions
relating to the order of the world do not provide a sufficiently sure
foothold for our practical activity. Before this leads us to despair, let us
remember that the name of this torturous or uplifting uncertainty is
freedom. ‘The ecological turn in ethics does not necessarily entail a
change in the theoretical conditions — including the lack of certainty
— of the ethical evaluation of our acts. The change may only affect the
range of actions that come under ethical consideration. If nature is a
1 Michael Northcott: The Environment and Christian Ethics. Cambridge University Press,
1996. pp.247-248.