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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.
