Original scientific paper
FROM ANTHROPOCENTRIC TO ECOCENTRIC ETHIC
Andrej Kirn
; Faculty of social studies of Ljubljana University, Ljubljana
Abstract
The growing ecological problems require enlargening of ethic regulation of human attitude towards nature. The whole anthropocentrically based European culture opposes the fact, especially the anthropocentrically limited and aggressive economy and ethic. There are two sources to European ethical anthropocentrism: Greek culture and Jewish-Christian thought. Within the anthropocentric ethic the morality is limited to human community, that being the community of free and wise men. Essentially the limitations of anthropocentric ethic were not in defining humans as moral subjects, but in narrowing of the field of moral objects.
After the 2nd World War, even before that, several scientists and experts have expressed, almost simultaneously, the need for the new ecological (environmental) ethic: the forest expert Aldo Leopold and the German physician and humanist Albert Schweitzer. Leopold s „ethic of the country“ and Schweitzer s „ethic of respecting life“ have initiated stiff resistance within the worldly as well as within the religious ethic traditions. Ecological ethic is not only to be enlarging the existing ethic norms to new a new field , but it is also requiring deeper changes in the very understanding of moral subject and object. The practice is in fact developing new heteronomous ecologic ethic. The future may bring the development of autonomous ethic position, which would be admitting the value of natural beings as well as be protecting them, not only from the point of view of benefiting or causing damage, but for their own value as well. Anthropocentrism has stamped the theory of rights as well. As the ecologic problems have changed thus enlarging the ethic concept, so will the anthropocentrically narrowed doctrine of rights have to be altered.
Keywords
anthropocentric ethic; autonomous and heteronomous ethic; ecocentric ethic; intrinsic values of natural entities; lordship; moral object; moral subject; rights of natural entities; sustainable development
Hrčak ID:
138701
URI
Publication date:
15.7.1992.
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