Oldal 79 [79]
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.