Oldal 79 [79]
OCR
What must I do (and why me)? 177 novelty in eco-ethics not as the source of ethical law but only as the object of acts that fall under ethical consideration, then evolution is still unlikely to be of any assistance in how to deal with nature. We may recall that it is exactly the independence achieved in this area that is usually celebrated as mans special evolutionary achievement. Does it change anything if, through our freely willed acts — or at least acts which we have to view as if we had performed them out of free will — our independence henceforth extends to the ability to interfere with the course of evolution itself and if this interference proves fatal? In general, it can be said that the hitherto-presented arguments of environmental ethics, either the extensionist (pathocentric and biosocial) or the biocentrist (bioegalitarian and ecocentrist) schools that other beings are the source of categorical ethical obligations for man, are not entirely convincing. On the one hand, they are contradictory (which should we consider among the interests of the individual and the ecosystem?). On the other, they bypass the boundary dividing biological association from ethical community and, generally, nature’s state of subjection to necessity from freedom (which is not a state), without convincing of the justification of their proceedings those who think we are ethical beings precisely because our behaviour enjoys a relative independence from natural necessity. Albert Schweizer, whom in my opinion the eco-ethicists cite much more rarely than they should, rightly emphasises that it is not nature that teaches us to respect life but the conscience. Schweizer speaks directly of life’s “terrible play”, which remains a painful mystery for man, and of the self-doubt in the will towards life. “I can do nothing but hold to the fact that the will-to-live in me manifests itself as a will-to-live which desires to become one with other will-to-live. That is for me the light that shines in the darkness. The ignorance in which the world is wrapped has no existence for me, I have been saved from the world. I am thrown, indeed, by the reverence for life into an unrest such as the world does not know, but I obtain from it a blessedness which the world cannot give. If in the tender-heartedness produced by being different from the world another person and I help each other in understanding and pardoning, when otherwise will would torment will, the division of the will-to-live is at an end. If I save an insect from a puddle life has devoted itself to life, and the division of life against life is ended.” # Albert Schweitzer: The Ethic of Reverence for Life. In Civilization and Ethics, p.246. Adam &Charles Black, London, 1946.
