PROCESS ECOLOGICAL ETHICS
 (continued)

Introduction

The Process Relational Metaphysical Vision


The Passage to Ethics

The passage from a metaphysic to an ethic is not always smooth, and 
rarely if ever a matter of straight deduction (cf. Vogel 1995).  Often it is 
just a difficult to define species of coherence between the metaphysics 
expressed and the ethics espoused.  Given the metaphysics, some 
ethical stances make more sense than others and certain ethical 
stances look rather irrational in the circumstances.

There are at least two way of getting ethics out of our metaphysics.  

One could for example lean on the process relational version of the 
Buddhist 'No Self' doctrine and push it in a direction reminiscent of 
some of the Deep Ecologists (e.g. Naess).  A human person is a 
succession of events with personal order, maintaining a high degree of 
similarity through time, a certain style, such that in looking for causes 
we look to previous mental and bodily events.  But we look not only to 
past mental and bodily events.   The distinction between past mental 
events, the body and the social and natural environment is only a 
relative distinction.  I am a (creative) function of my body and of my 
total natural and social environment.  Which is stronger or more 
important in an individual case is an empirical matter.  I am constituted 
by/constitute myself on the basis of my total past environment, in view 
of the total future, which is in this sense also my total future.  In the 
final resort, I am everything that affects me and everything that I affect.  
All boundaries are relativised, all boundaries are permeable.  Given 
this, there appear to be no reasons why concern should not be 
generalized to include all elements which affect me and which I affect.  

The more usual pattern for a process ecological ethics, however, is to 
rely on certain features of the metaphysical vision in order to do two 
things.  Firstly, we rely on the fact that we are very much natural beings 
in the midst of natural beings in order to motivate an extension of  
'intrinsic value' or value in and of itself, value as an end not just a 
means, well beyond the human sphere.  Secondly, we rely particularly 
on the differentiated ontology to motivate differential assignment of 
value for the sake of solving conflicts.  Thus Birch, Cobb, McDaniel, 
Armstrong-Buck (see references).  In the next section of this paper, we 
will spend time on some general features of this more usual view.

Go now to Index OR
Go to Next Section