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What must I do (and why me)? | 81
whole or does not. “Learning humility requires learning to feel that
something matters besides what will affect oneself and one’s circle of
associates. What leads a child to care about what happens to a lost
hamster or a stray dog they will not see again is likely also to generate
concern for a lost toy or a favourite tree where they used to live. Learning
to value things for their own sake and to count what effects them
important aside from their utility, is not the same as judging them to
have some intuited objective property, but it is necessary to the
development of humility and it seems likely to take place in experiences
with nonsentient nature as well as with people and animals.”
According to this, the measure of correct behaviour is not to be
acquired from nature, in contrast to the views of the early
ecophilosophers, since the problem is caused exactly by our essential
difference from other beings and not that in which we resemble them.
As a consequence of this realisation, considerations arising from man’s
particular state of being are gaining an ever-larger role in the ethical
reflections on the ecological crisis. There are strong reasons to believe
that this is not a mere return to the speciesism previously condemned
by eco-ethicists. One might even claim that the Western thought
criticised for its human-centrism always had something other than man
at its centre: the logical subject for the rationalists, the biological
organism with its own abilities and needs for the empiricists and the
concept of humanity in its own abstract universality for classical German
philosophy. The possibility of a truly anthropocentric ethics arises
perhaps only with the twentieth century thinkers — not without
antecedents, of course — who finally did not seek man in the mirror, but
recognised that he is standing next to them: he is the Other, who
addressed us and is now waiting for our response.” Then, finally, the I
is replaced at the centre by the You, to whose call — according to the
ethics of personalism or responsive phenomenology — we try with our
whole lives to answer.
>! "Thomas Hill Jr.: Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments.
In: Philip Cafaro — Ronald Sandler eds.: Environmental Virtue Ethics. Rowman and
Littlefield, Lanham (MD) 2005. p.54.
52 "This is the subject of my paper Is anthropocentric ethics anthropocentric? in the
Oedipus-book.