Larry Rasmussen’s, Earth-honoring Faith:
Religious Ethics in a New Key
Written by: Airencia Feodora Sugiarto (502022020)
“Ethics” has a Greek root. Its noun form is tō ēthos. The parallel in Latin ismos, from which derive the words “mores,” “morality,” and “morale.” Tō ēthosoriginally referred to a sheltering place for animals, a stall. The animal’s safe habitat offered security and sustenance—
nourishment and sufficient comfort and familiarity to provide a sense of home. The “stable”
meant “stability,” a secure place to be. The verb form is eiōtha. “To be accustomed to” is the meaning, a parallel to mos (“mores” are customs). Here is one of the oldest meanings of morality— behavior according to custom. Customary behavior, routine conduct, does for human society what the stall does for domesticated animals; it provides stability and security, a comfort zone. These sustain a “stable” society.
Ethics subjected common morality to analytical reflection and, after extended give-and-take, recommended behavior on the basis of reasoned argument. Ethics might indeed confirm customary behavior, thereby ratifying the standing morality. But it might also recommend a break with custom, a “better” morality that should give rise to new and different habits and customs. In short, “ethics” came to mean critical refl ection on the moral dimensions of human experience while “morality” referred to the standards of character and conduct people customarily use to guide their choices and actions. While that distinction is the chief difference between “ethics” and “morality,” it’s also necessary to attend carefully to these words in their context. People use “morality” and “ethics” in many different ways, often interchangeably and beyond the distinction we have drawn. Meanings, then, are multiple, and listening well is a standing requirement. The languages of morality and ethics range far beyond critical reason; they engage all that forges and sustains a way of life. But for our purposes, morality refers to the sources and standards of character and conduct that people use on a daily basis, while ethics
denotes the critical, rational exchange they undertake in search of a sounder and more viable morality, a search that can extend to a different way of life altogether.
Character ethics is also known as “virtue” ethics. Its answer to the question, How is the good life achieved? is this: Choose the qualities that mark the good person and the good society and internalize these as the habits of heart, soul, and mind. When habitual, these qualities express who we are at the core; they exhibit our moral identity and drive our actions. They create the good society from the inside out, as the outcome of the kind of persons we are. The focus of attention is on the moral agents, from whom actions flow as water from a spring. Communities and societies, cultures and subcultures, as well as individuals, bear moral traits. They are self-conscious about some while utterly unaware of others belonging to the unwritten moral substratum of society. Aristotle’s Ethics is a classic statement of virtue ethics. Like Borgmann, Aristotle is keenly aware that while character shapes decisions and actions, practices and actions mold character. In the words of the Nicomachean Ethics : “We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
Gilkey’s own teleological ethic, unlike the utilitarian version of industrialism, is keenly aware of human responsibility for the natural world. His Maker of Heaven and Earth and Nature, Reality, and the Sacred published in 1959 and 1993, respectively, were significant steps toward an ecological theology. Moreover, like Borgmann and Aristotle, he is aware of the interplay of actions and character, just as he is aware of our axioms of change. Sharing the parcels at the hands of the enemy expresses in outward form “a concern for the neighbor’s welfare, which concern is, if anything is, the substance of inner virtue.” Still, the decisive moral test is not with the doer (“inner virtue”) but with the deed (shared parcels). Gilkey concludes his account: “In such a view all actions which help to feed the hungry neighbor are moral, even if the final instrument is an impersonal arm of government. Thus, as I argued to Grant, efforts designed to bring about a universal sharing were moral, efforts to block such a sharing, immoral.” So while virtue is no doubt present and important for Gilkey, even for it the test resides in the quality of
actions as judged by their outcome. For Gilkey and all purveyors of consequences ethics, authentic morality is known by its fruits.
Promise-keeping and truth-telling are hardly the only examples of ground rules. Extending respect and trust are others. Life cannot be lived well, if at all, out of basic distrust or mistrust. If everyone and everything is untrustworthy all of the time, nothing can be done to anyone’s lasting satisfaction. Elemental trust is an indispensable eco-social requirement. Kant wants morality that is not susceptible to self-serving distortions. We consistently engage in ideological twists and turns that serve our limited interests. We construe our vices as virtues; we confi rm our biases;
we even believe our lies. Imperatives that are “categorical,” or right for any and every person in similar circumstances (i.e., “universal”), minimize the infl uence of our distorting interests.
Kant’s moral universalism thus yields public guidelines that are independent of the interests of the persons posing and deciding moral issues. Contrasted with the other theories, this means that, for duty ethics, neither the virtue of the person nor the consequences of her actions is the decisive test of moral value; the fundamental requirements of life together and universal applicability are.
Stealing, lying, breaking promises, rape, and torture cannot be moral yardsticks and recommended norms and behaviors. If they were universally practiced and approved, nature-society would be impossible. Or if somehow nature-society were remotely possible on such terms, then it would be a place we’d do everything possible to escape in favor of a habitat that valued respect and fair play. We would seek the shelter of a better stable.
The Earth Charter thinks this lack of respect for nature and its moral claims is bad cosmology and a fateful mistake. While eschewing the language of rights per se, the Charter joins our examples of duty ethics by including universal human responsibilities toward the rest of nature.
The very first section, Respect and Care for the Community of Life, lays out four basic principles:
1. Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.
2. Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.
3. Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful.
4. Secure Earth’s bounty and beauty for present and future generations.
Moral theory is the effort to reflect systematically upon the dimensions and forms of human moral experience. It highlights the different and sometimes conflicting “logics” in the moralities we live: Which is most vital and the heart of the matter at any given moment—character, consequences, or obligation? Which do we most live by, and how does it matter?
That said, good theory offers good maps, and maps are useful, sometimes indispensable. They aid the moral trek. Or, to shift images, good theory illumines different dimensions of our moral experience to help us see the kind of creature we are and what is at stake in the world we inhabit as creatures who are mad with morality and in need of morally formed judgment. But map is not territory, and we live in the territory. Good ethics facilitates moral understanding. Understanding morality, however, does not substitute for living it any more than a good recipe or pictures of food satisfy hunger or watching a dance takes the place of dancing. Good theory serves the moral life; it never substitutes for it.
The discussion have moved freely between those we associate with society (Shantung Compound, the mountain-climbing friends, Israel) and the nature-focused discussions of previous chapters. That free flow is intentional. The reason is twofold:
First, human society and nature are inseparable. Nothing is gained, and much goes awry, if we bifurcate society and nature or nature and humanity. It’s always nature-society, it’s eco-social humanity together with the rest of nature, whether we name it so or not. The varied examples thus share the same space even when different points are highlighted.
Second, the moral theory outlined here pertains to our experience as a whole. We do not have, and do not seek, a fourth theory, one reserved for other-than-human nature in our experience.
The Ethic We Need is not some segregated, autonomous “environmental ethic” with
fundamentally different moral categories. The Ethic We Need is an inclusive ethic tailored to the world we have in light of the kind of creatures we are and the changes we face. Human character, ends, and obligation all pertain, as do the other categories and concerns we will explore. None drop out as the moral universe moves its boundary from the ego to the ecosphere. But neither are other categories added, not even when present working moralities need to be reframed and rewritten. Other virtues and different character may well be necessary, or other consequences as the outcome of different policies and habits, or a restatement of our obligations to present and future generations of both human and more-than-human life—a major theme of this book is that these content changes are vital. But changes of substance expand the formal categories rather than replace them. The baselines of moral theory—character, consequences, obligation—remain.
An adequate account of human responsibility for nature-society incorporates them all.
Moral vision and moral narrative may change, and do. But then the story changes, as do the optics, and a different life is lived. In the first centuries of the Common Era, the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome each claimed their own distinctive way of life. Each taught “the Way,” whether Stoic, Epicurean, or Cynic, or, within the Judaism and Christianity of the first centuries, Essene, Gnostic, Ebionite, or proto-Orthodox. Competition was keen, and to change membership from one school to another was called “conversion.” Conversion meant resocialization in accord with a different narrative of the good life. It entailed an altered moral vision that affected outlook, character, action, relationships, and responsibilities. Moral vision may change at glacial speed. But like glaciers, it can move mountains. Take the example of slavery: Throughout all of recorded human history, including the present, some humans have made slaves of others. The arrangements and conditions have varied; some systems, like chattel slavery, were extraordinarily brutal. Others were less so, sometimes stamped with the paternalism of familial care, even family membership. In all cases, slavery was “moral” in that the full range of moral experience and justification was brought to bear on it. Virtue was taught:
The master should show care for the slave; the slave should respect and obey the master. Rules were laid down and enforced by law or custom. And while the rules were rules of inequality, both masters and slaves were to abide by them. The social good was an important consideration, with slavery defended as a matter of social necessity integral to a cherished way of life. Finally,
on yet another level, slavery was defended as rooted in the order of the universe itself and presented, from Aristotle until abolition, as nature’s own mandate. The arguments made for slavery always included moral ones that were deemed important, whether those rested in natural law, scripture, or the practical imperatives of civilization and the economy.
If an eco-centric ethic displaced the anthropocentrism of the industrial paradigm or if there were an Earth-friendly successor to democratic capitalism, the shift would be as dramatic and far-reaching as abolition. At present, many can no more imagine such departures from our received moral vision than earlier generations could imagine society without slavery or the
“natural” subordination of women, or than Romans could imagine the end of the empire. Yet such shifts of moral vision occur. They usually occur as a process of death and renewal, or birth and rebirth, often with strong religious overtones. They happen as an altered moral vision moves multitudes, however slowly, into a different moral environment. They occur in conjunction with the kinds and levels of change we cited in the previous chapter.
