Oldal 80 [80]
78 | Tue Puttosopny or Eco-PotLIrics
“I am different from the world.” With homo sapiens a strange being
appeared on the stage of the sheatrum mundi, one who makes himself
increasingly independent from natural necessities. If this capacity,
commonly known as freedom, does not have its own measure (the laws
of ethics) or if man does not accept this measure as binding on himself,
then his seeming evolutionary success can turn into self-destruction.
Since the mechanisms ensuring the self-regulation of life on Earth
cannot sufficiently limit his expansion, man, if he behaves not as an
ethical, but as a natural being, exactly thereby upsets the dynamic
balance of the coexistence of living beings. This can lead to the collapse
of the system. Ethics, in this sense, is part of the self-regulation of the living
world and the role of ecophilosophy is not to find the role of nature in the world
of ethics, but rather the contrary: to clarify the role of ethics in the history of
evolution."
Aldo Leopold attempted exactly this in his Land Ethics. His
suggestion for the extension of the moral community, however — “...to
include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land” —
fails to account for the special existential situation of our species and
attempts to make up for the insufficiency of ethical argumentation with
ecological reasonings. While the behaviour of the other beings fits
perfectly with the conditions of their existence and the laws of evolution
ensure that it happen thus, man does not “know” how to act. He can
experiment with various possibilities of living within the much broader
framework of necessity, without the certainty of direct positive or
negative feedback. We live in a terrible uncertainty: we alone have the
possibility of erring, i.e., deliberating between good and evil.
‘The laws on the basis of which a being blessed with the special ability
of freedom chooses between good and evil — the laws of ethics — play
the same regulatory role in the life of society as the laws of nature play
in evolutionary processes. The difference is that the moral law does not
make its impact as a combination of constraints. The thinking subject
understands its judgment, recognises its validity, admits its necessity and
aims to live a life worthy of man, i.e., to determine the goal of his acts
as the knower of good and evil, to use the words of the Book of Genesis.
This too, however, is a law which destroys those who sin against it (not
the individual, but the community), for we are free only in choosing our
‘8 T argue for this in my book Oidipusz avagy a Természetes Ember (Oedipus or Natural
Man): Liget Műhely, 2015.
# Aldo Leopold: Land Ethics. In Leopold: A Sand County Almanac, p.239. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1949.