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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.
