Respect for Life: Can Zen Buddhism Help in Forming an Environmental Ethic?
Zen Buddhism Today, No. 7, September 1989, pp, 11-30. ISSN 0912-8298 Respect for Life: Can Zen Buddhism Help in Forming an Environmental Ethic? Holmes ROLSTON, III Environmental ethics stretches Western ethics to a breaking point. All ethics seeks an appropriate respect for life. This has required applying ethics to business, law, medicine, technology, international development, and nuclear disarmament—especially where science, pure and applied, has given us recent understanding and power, coupled with deeper sensitivities to human rights discovered by ethics and religion. But none of these asks whether there can be duties past humans. Respect for life demands an ethic concerned with human welfare, analogous to the others and now concerning the environment. But respect for life in environmental ethics goes further, to ask whether there can be nonhuman objects of duty. We need an ethic for the nature that mixes with culture, even an ethic for wild nature. Western ethics, classically, has not thought that it needed values outside of human subjects, but environmental ethics must be more biologically objective, that is, nonanthropocentric. It challenges the separation of science and ethics, trying to reform both a science that has found nature value free and an ethics that assumes that only humans count morally. This has been conceptually dif- ficult because Western science and ethics have agreed on a boundary between fact and value, between what is and what ought to be. That life exists is an in- disputable biological fact—not only human life but five million other species on planet Earth. One ought to respect life.
[Show full text]