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76 | THe Puttosopny or Eco-Pouirics 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 nonhuman 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.
