A special section for correspondence and controversy

Abstract

A fantasy about the future might show a world in which the human-centered ethics that now directs the moral and political behavior of most of the people of the industrially powerful democracies has come to dominate the moral thinking of everyone on Earth. This ethics is grounded in a priori principles which, in all cases of conflict or competition, give vital human needs and interests priority over those of every other living thing. The end point of this step-by-step process of preference is the breakdown of the self-sustaining biosystem which nature has perfected. But any ethics is absurd if its practice would cause the breakdown of the biosystem which sustains civilized life. It must be revised or discarded. A new model with an empirical method must replace the old, a priori, human-centered ethics. The new model would treat ethical theories as theories about how people can live in the physical world. When so conceived, a theory of ethics would be confirmed or refuted by the harm or benefit that results when it guides individual and societal behavior. Negatively a theory is mistaken and must be rejected if its practice would jeopardize the health or stability of the Earth's biosystem. Positively and secondarily, it must enable people to satisfy a coherent mix of their conflicting needs and interests. Such an ethics can never be final. Like the theories of science, an ethical theory is always subject to correction as people discard their mistakes and substitute revised theories that work better—that better meet the negative and positive conditions of an acceptable ethical theory.