The Ecological Dilemma: Ethical Categories in a Biocentric World

Abstract

Ecological ethics has grown of a double root, one factual, the other moral. The factual root is the recognition, amply attested by the successive reports of the Club of Rome and by ecological conferences from Bergen to Rio, that the commitment of global civilization to ever expanding levels of consumption on a finite planet cannot but destroy its livability for humans and as well as for other species which have inhabited it since the extinction of the great reptiles. Whether we consider the wholesale destruction of biodiversity, the destruction of forests with the attendant deterioration of the atmosphere or the destruction of the ozone layer, the conclusion is the same. Humans have become a cancer, a life-form which has lost its capacity for self-regulation and which goes on multiplying exponentially until it destroys the host organism, in our case, the Earth. Civilization as we know it is both self-destructive and destructive in ways which the planet cannot sustain. That is simply a fact, in itself morally neutral. Our species is destroying itself and other life with it. Civilizations have self-destroyed before. Civilizations do. So have species. Species do, too. So?