Biological Ethics

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Chapter 14. Ethical Foundations of Man's Relationship with Nature

A. Ruiz Retegui

a) Man's relationship to the world

The material condition of man, closely linked to his plurality and his sexed character, is at the same time the principle of his worldliness. Human life in its dependence on the body finds itself in a material environment in which this life is possible, and outside this environment it is not even conceivable. Although the human body is a well-defined unit, its functioning necessarily includes external elements. Man, if he is essentially bodily, is essentially worldly, a being in the world. Therefore, the creation of man in his plural sexed, bodily condition presupposes the constitution of a world in which such a life is possible.

The world, and all the multiplicity of processes and creatures in it, have been willed in a single design of creation, at the service of man; only man is found to be absolutely valuable, willed for his own sake. The world is a world for man, because man is a being in the world. In this sense, the relationship between man and the world is necessary; without relating to and "metabolising" with the world, man cannot exercise his existence.

Man's relationship with the world will be constituted by natural exchanges, which can be studied like any other material and physiological relationship subject , regulated by natural scientific laws (the laws of gravity, of surface tension, of osmotic pressure or of gases..., and, in general, all the laws of physics and physiology apply to the human body as well as to the other bodies of the world). But between man and the world there are also other influences which can in no way be reduced to physiological exchanges or physical influences, even if they develop through them. In the course of the natural functioning of the world, man is a factor of novelty. Without man, the world would be a pure unfolding of natural causes and effects. Man gives rise to "beginnings", i.e. to processes or actions that cannot be reduced to the natural development of the previous status : the relationship between man and the world is free.

Man's freedom, in his relationship with the world, manifests itself in a patent way in the construction of artifices, in which the form or structure does not derive from the subject that constitute it, nor from the work, but from human thought. The spontaneous knowledge distinguishes the natural from the artificial, because it implicitly perceives in the latter a configuration that does not belong to the subject in which it is, but is induced from outside. Thus, the artifices are not result of natural forces, but of the incarnated intelligence of man who can influence the world, mainly by means of his hands.

Freedom has an enormous capacity to modify man's mundane environment. However, as long as this capacity was technically undeveloped, man's interference with natural processes was irrelevant, and nature, seen in its imposing grandeur and material strength, appeared as the realm in which man was born, lived and died, inexorably receiving from it benefits or pains, according to the course of natural forces. The physical power of nature was presented in the eyes of the small and vulnerable human creature as far superior, and therefore an object of veneration. The more direct manifestations of the forces of nature - sun, rain, fire, fertility, etc. - have been deified in many cultures; through magic, their favour was sought. Even when a supreme creator of everything, of nature and of man, was accepted, the most important manifestations of nature were regarded as having a certain theophanic character, or as a sensible manifestation of the divine infinitude. In this sphere, man's noblest attitude was to know nature, the ideal was homo sapiens. The progressive development of technology has allowed man to dominate natural forces more and more, and to configure environments more according to his projects and less according to the conditions that nature presupposed. The result is that the "world", as the environment of man's life, no longer refers so much to a superior nature or a divine creator, but to man himself in his freedom. It does not so much speak of God, but of man himself and his capacity for free manipulation. This "world" speaks, and is understood by man, in the terms of positive science and utility internship. In it man feels called or impelled, not so much to the knowledge of truths and meanings inscribed in the very nature of things, but to transform the world, that is, not so much homo sapiens, as homo faber. As explained above, positive experimental science found a method and that method induced a way of looking at the world. The search for "natural laws" was not a search for knowledge about the reality of things, but about universal regularities of behaviour. The whole universe, subjected to the same scientific laws, became both opaque in questions of meaning, and fully available for human manipulation. Science definitively abdicated its former claim to wisdom and renounced to know the value of things in themselves: it became an essentially instrumental knowledge , it could not pronounce itself on questions of finality. Finalities became a matter of unconditioned will. With the universe and what is contained in it man can do whatever he wants. The world has no meaning and no value in itself other than that of a collection of materials endowed with well-known or scientifically conceivable properties with which man is to build as he wishes. Nature is not an object of contemplation or veneration, but of exploitation in the same way as an iron mine. It is a matter of knowing in order to foresee, and foreseeing in order to be able to.

However, it has been the development of technology that has accompanied the formidable progress of the positive sciences that has called its validity into question. This development, on the one hand, has improved the human condition in the world, made it safer and more comfortable. But technology has no limits of its own, and while its first advances produced a parallel improvement of human conditions, it soon became clear that technological progress and improvement of human conditions are not identical. The high development of technology has given rise to new phenomena, unforeseen in the enthusiastic beginnings of modern science: the breakdown of natural environments, the danger of resource depletion, the various chemical, radiological, nuclear and other forms of pollution, etc., are like a complaint from nature in the face of an aggression that technology is not certain to be able to remedy. A new fear has arisen in man himself, which is a direct consequence of the technical development : insecurity in the face of the possibilities of domination and invasion of the most strictly personal spheres put within the reach of almost any de facto power. The terrible destructive possibilities of new weapons that have radically changed the idea of war, the possibility of influencing people through knowledge of the psychological mechanisms of man and the media, mean that never before has man been the potential subject of totalitarian power. If in ancient times princes had theoretically unlimited power, material limitations prevented them from extending it to too wide a circle. That power is now given potentially effective through the technological development . Man is afraid of his own power; it is the scientists, the most conscious of the potential power they are generating, who are the main protagonists of the ethical discussion . Man feels anxiously urged to dominate his own domain; he has realised that the scope of this domain must have an ethical regulation, measured by the dignity of the person and the truth of things. Rationality without limits is ambiguous: capable of both good and evil, of humanising man and of aggressively violating his dignity. The same science can be used to build gas chambers or a hospital, for intrauterine surgery or for abortion, to build an aeroplane or an atomic bomb. We will now try to show the elements that must be taken into account for the elaboration of the deontological rule that guides the technical domain. These will be basic criteria that will have the character of a knowledge of the truth of the relations of man with the world, and of the world with man, so that human freedom does not violate objective realities. For the sake of clarity, I will set out each of the aspects of this truth that seem to me to be relevant, and after explaining the content of each of them, I will try to derive some practical consequences.

b) Ethical criteria for the technical mastery of nature

Nature is not a product of human action

Man finds it as given, prior to any intervention on his part. This implies that man's intelligence is not the measure of natural reality, but that he must adapt his knowledge to a reality that transcends him, because its truth is measured, as we explained when we spoke of creation, by Creative Wisdom. We cannot exhaust the truth of things because we cannot attend to the act of the divine intelligence that measures and constitutes natural beings. For this reason, natural realities will always have something mysterious about them, and in this sense a certain component of attentive contemplation is proper to a right relationship with nature. The knowledge that man can attain from nature can never become like that which he has from that which is the exclusive product of his own intelligence. This should not be an irritant or a cause of discouragement for scientific and cognitive activity in general, but a stimulus to ever better knowledge and, at the same time, to recognise that the creator of the world is God and not man, to feel that he is a caring and attentive steward and not an absolute dominator.

This character of the world, not fully intelligible to man, can be source of two closely related temptations.

Scepticism, which consists in the subjective rejection or invalidation of all knowledge that cannot be fully mastered by human reason. The most important questions, such as man himself, the meaning of his life, his activity, love, happiness, despite not being fully exhaustible by his exact knowledge , are real and knowable. As is evident, in the face of these realities, the attitude must be a certain intellectual humility and value the contemplative, non-scientific knowledge , even if it does not have the very satisfactory characteristics of the imposing validity of the exact knowledge . The fact that the knowledge of these realities can be attacked or questioned is not an apodictic sample of invalidity. Especially when dealing with "objects" possessing a particular dignity, such as the human person, or even animals endowed with life, this contemplative dimension must be present. Certainly a physicist can say that time is "what clocks measure", but that is only as a physicist; that same physicist, as a human person, must be aware, and not entirely forget, that time is a highly mysterious worldly dimension.

Scientism, which leads one to consider that all reality consists of what has been explained or achieved by science, without it being possible to acquire more true knowledge than the positive-scientific one. In particular, this temptation must be avoided when dealing with questions that are inherently beyond the consideration of the scientific method, which in itself achieves a high level of accuracy at the cost of reducing its field of observation to the phenomenal and experimentable. For this reason, indiscriminate application of the scientific method leads not to a more exact and precise knowledge of all realities, but to the reduction of the realities being studied to subjects of regular behaviour, according to laws that can be expressed in mathematical terms. This transformation of the object of study, due to the scientific method, is especially evident in the areas of knowledge properly human. It is a "commonplace" to say that in modern treatises on scientific anthropology the great forgotten subject is man. Similarly, ethics or the study of human behaviour according to the truth of man, which seeks the quality of good or bad, has been transformed in scientistic fields into a "science of customs", where the search is no longer for the goodness or badness of behaviour, but for quantitative, statistical, tendential criteria, etc., in which the qualifiers become "majority", "dominant", "integrated", etc.; in other words, qualifiers that are alien to moral qualification and are reduced to quantitative criteria. However, the inevitable moral dimension of man means that, although the ethical qualifier "is expelled through the door, it re-enters through the window", and these criteria become equivalent in the internship to "good" or "bad". Good" will be identified with "majority", or "dominant", or "integrated", etc., and "bad" with "contrary". But there is no scientific justification for this identification. The most the scientist can claim to do is to give an account of the "values" socially prevailing in the various social groups, but the true value of these values, i.e. their authenticity or intrinsic dignity, cannot be explained, and therefore scientific ethics has no capacity to pronounce on the value of facts. Passions and ideals traditionally considered heroic and good, and those traditionally considered mean are considered equally significant in the Chemistry of behaviour, in the knowledge of the "human material" with which positivist law tries to rationally build society. Law has completely separated itself from ethics and must now only take into account the forces and properties of the human material in order to propose any goal.

Nature is for man

The radical perspective offered by the consideration of the world as a creature tells us, as we have already seen, that nature was created in the act of man's creation, for it was not willed for its own sake, but in function of man. Logically this does not mean that until man appeared there was nothing. We know with scientific certainty that for millions of years the world has existed without man; man's appearance is relatively late. But from the beginning the world has been willed by God as a world of and for man, therefore the world was created in view of man and in unity with man's creation.

Therefore, the world has no absolute value and cannot be fully understood in itself, for Creative Wisdom has not understood it for itself. This means that all the values and goods of the world are values and goods in relation to man. The world is, in this sense, an essentially human world, not just any world, a world with a unity and harmony not just any world, but a world centred on man. It is therefore in relation to man that the values of the world take on a real character goal . This must be taken into account because our way of knowing starts from the knowledge of individualities, and only by a rational process can we detect the implications of order and unity. To us the world seems to be primarily a collection of individualities, of concrete creatures that are then interrelated. We understand the reason for the unity of the world as a unity of composition, and for this reason we tend to give more importance and to consider as fundamental the character of things in themselves, that is, of substantiality, of creatures, as opposed to their character of relationship. But the more radical perspective warns us that unity has priority of nature with respect to each of the parts, for, as the Christian tradition points out, the good of each creature depends on the good of the whole, which is superior; and this good of the whole is not an anonymous or collective globality, but the good of the person.

Nature is therefore "for" man. We have to see the practical meaning of this "for". What has been said in the previous paragraph warns us that natural beings are not neutral materials offered to man's manipulative capacity. If we were to understand that the world is for man because man can dominate it, we would not be giving an account of the intrinsic ordering of the world to man, that is, we would not be saying anything about the world, but we would be speaking exclusively of man. Rather, it is this ordering of the world to man that makes it possible to situate the scope and nature of man's dominion. That is to say, man in his lordship over the world must take into account the objective values, the proper meanings of things, and not consider them as neutral materials, endowed with the properties attained and described by Science. Values such as life, beauty, etc., must not be disregarded in man's domineering activity. Even if these values are not strictly expressible in scientific terms, they should not be considered empty or insignificant. The attentive and contemplative attitude on the part of those who are engaged in science and thus enable and develop the technical capacity for domination will ensure that domination does not destroy objective values, but respects them and develops them according to their own value. It is not a question of man's domination of the world being a pure service to these values as if they were absolute. They are not absolute, but they are real. Man will not treat animal or plant life as if they were indeed absolutely valuable, he will not bow down to these values, but will indeed hold them as given, for his own good. Man must benefit from natural resources, but without despising or mistreating the objective values found therein. The classics expressed this balance in terms of symbiosis. Plato gave the example of the shepherd, whose art is not defined by the existence of mammals, but by the nature of sheep. The shepherd, as such, seeks the good of the sheep, even if he then butchers them, milks them and ends up killing them to eat them. But human benefit is related to the sheep's own good. An example, on the contrary, quite illustrative, is farms where the whole attention with the animals is defined by human profit: hens are kept locked up and have their eyes gouged out so that they can only fatten up and lay eggs. Only when one loses the sense of the value goal but relative value of animals and the world does one fall into the two extremes: on the one hand, a fierce veneration of animal life as if it were an absolute good, and on the other hand, the exploitation of all the material that the world has to offer, without taking into account any value other than that which man has set for himself. The animal itself, its life, its pain, the decay or extinction of the species, would then be of no importance. The animal would have its scientific properties as iron has its own.

The "law" of man's relationship to the world

It is not only rational, but natural: in reality it is a consequence of the above. By rational law we mean the order established by reason, motivated exclusively by the ends it proposes, and, therefore, as the sole configurator of values. Rational law would then be that which ignores natural meanings and values and sees in nature only material available for any arbitrary end. Rational law only takes into account the "scientific" properties of bodies, just as a technician takes into account the properties of iron or cement in order to build whatever he wants, and orders these properties to achieve his products.

Natural law is that which orders things by taking into account their own meanings and the values found in the world. It does not ignore them, but neither does it feel itself to be the exclusive creator of meaning. This ordering does not consider the world as a totally homogeneous space available, but recognises spaces or points that have a particular density of good and value, and thus it is not a law of exclusively human destruction of man's environment.

Natural law takes into account that the unity of the world in man is not constituted by human reason but by creative Wisdom. The human realm is not the artificial world of science fiction, but a realm which man has received and which he must govern wisely, not only technically. This is why natural law has serious reservations about the possibility of triggering processes on earth - as man's proximate realm - that only take place at distant points in the universe. Nuclear reactions, for example, are natural in the sun and stars, but not on earth, and we do not know whether they could destroy the earth, not only in military use, which they clearly could, but also in supposedly peaceful use.

Man is not the manager of the good of the world or of the universe - One of the most obvious consequences of the scientific consideration of the world is to see it as a homogeneous subject of universally valid laws, and therefore as a field of at least potential domination by man: everything is experimentable and everything is manipulable. It is therefore under the absolute rule of man, and man consequently feels manager of the order of the world and the universe. But this does not take into account the reality of things. The order of the world has not been established by human reason, and therefore cannot come to dominate it completely; it has a certain character of mystery before which the attitude must be primarily contemplative, i.e., recognising something that is encountered but cannot be exhausted. The reductionism proper to scientific experimentation can reach some laws of nature's behaviour, but it must be careful not to think that the order of the universe is adequately and exhaustively expressed in those laws. Even from the strictly scientific point of view, these universal laws have undergone remarkable corrections: the enthusiastic scientism of the 19th century, which claimed to have practically exhausted Mechanics, was followed by the surprising relativistic correction, and a few years later by the new perspective of the second generation of Quantum Mechanics, which already recognised the high Degree of non-determinism to be found even in the material processes of the microcosm. But without resorting to such experiences, and staying within the scope of a general consideration, the order of the universe appears so extraordinarily precise and delicate that indiscriminate technical irruption is threatening. Arrogance has been followed by fear. The only guarantee that man can have that his action on nature will not be destructive is not in ever more all-embracing rational planning, but in respecting as carefully as possible the natural meanings of values and natural processes themselves, without trying to subject them to indiscriminate utility. Sometimes it may happen that, even with such respect, nature becomes threatening, but that is no longer up to us, but to God.

"status" of man in the world

Modern science has placed man in a perspective on the world from which, we might say, he looks at it from the outside, as a whole. There was a time when the world was conceived as a surface of land, supported on the water by columns and covered by the vault of heaven which separated it from the waters above. There is something essential in this representation: its partial character. It is not a representation of the totality, for this outline said nothing about how the columns of the world rested on the water, nor about where the water was contained. It was a representation of what man sees "from his status" in the world. The transformation of perspective will take place when the physics of proper places is transformed into a physics of universal laws. The construction of the telescope by Galileo plays a major role in this transformation, which is the real core topic of modern thought. This change in the perspective of science does not coincide with the natural perspective of man who, although he knows that the earth revolves around the sun, continues to see that the sun "rises" in the morning and "sets" in the evening. In other words, in man's real life, in his own mundane sphere, the scientific perspective, which considers space to be infinite and homogeneous, does not guide his behaviour. Nevertheless, it has an influence on judgements and evaluations at B . In particular, it can be said that scientism has given rise to an "objective" perspective. Before modernity, this knowledge goal , as a characteristic of the human knowledge , was present in human knowledge of things; however, the universe as such was not subject of knowledge goal .

The non-objectivity of the universe as a whole has been expressed throughout the history of human thought in different ways, but always pointing out that man finds himself in his own perspective with limits that he cannot cross. Dante's Ulysses crossed the Pillars of Hercules in the Strait of Gibraltar and in his boldness came to visit the mountain of Purgatory, but the depth of the water prevented him from reaching it and plunged him into hell. This myth does not mean that Dante thought that the world has geographical boundaries with supernatural transcendence. It is not a morphological description of the world, but to show sin, to seek a complete knowledge - as in the biblical description of Paradise where, the woman succumbs to the temptation to seek a divine knowledge : you will be like gods. In this way, Dante's genius gives a foreknowledge of what is already imminent. Even then, the incipient positive science was already foreshadowing that man could place himself in a universal perspective with the pretension of dominating the world in its totality - at least potentially - in the same way as he dominated the "objects" he was dealing with. The new Ulysses was not Columbus, nor Galileo or Newton, but those who, dazzled by the new science, wanted to make the perspective achieved by science the universal human perspective: to transform science into wisdom. Columbus made Dante's myth anachronistic, but it was above all Hobbes who placed himself - not scientifically but philosophically - at that extra-cosmic point from which the world is known as an object. He boasted of having discovered a new intellectual continent, but it remained to be seen whether that continent, located beyond the Pillars of Hercules of thought, was habitable by man, or whether the depth of the water - or rather, the depth of being - would not turn that status into a hell for man. Such is Dante's diagnosis of man's status when he makes the scientific perspective his vital and all-embracing perspective. Certainly, it may be difficult to harmonise the knowledge obtained by Science and the knowledge "situated" man in his own worldly sphere, but the defence of "one's own place", of "one's own environment" is a requirement in the face of the scientistic perspective. Without taking into account man's own status as an essentially mundane creature, the current defences of the environment, of the earth itself, and the affirmation that "small is beautiful" are unintelligible and irrational.

Man's "engagement" in his living environment

We do not only find limits to knowledge goal when it refers to the universe as a whole. Also the knowledge of singular things and persons have characteristics that exceed those of the knowledge goal . The real "world" of man is in fact a mixture of what anthropologists and ethologists call the peri-world -medium, um-welt- and the world -welt-. In fact, alongside the abundant literature on the knowledge goal , contemporary anthropology has developed an extensive phenomenology of the distinction between the street and the home. Both themes - the knowledge goal and that distinction - are closely related and called to complement each other. At home, man finds himself as in his own environment -um-welt-. The attitude "at home" is not only objective, the person's behaviour towards "his own" is not a distancing from knowledge goal , but a "commitment" to the realities of his home. This status cannot be equated with that of the animal in its um-welt, but the classical doctrine of man's passions points to an almost metabolic exchange with reality. The frequent assertion of phenomenologists that love is not blind, but extraordinarily lucid, expresses that the knowledge goal , to be plenary session of the Executive Council, is composed with a certain sympathy for the known. The pretence of a pure knowledge goal , which is incompatible with reality and the human condition, is the pretence of an uprooted man without a home and without faith, without a home and without a homeland. This is the image of what is usually expressed by a certain sense of the word "intellectual" in the sense of critical aloofness, against which J.J. Rousseau already rightly spoke out in his First speech, presenting him as independent, stateless and cosmopolitan.

Scientism breeds totalitarianism

We have already pointed out that the finding of the universality of positive scientific laws means that science tends to consider the world as homogeneous, without privileged or differentiated places, but measured in all its points by the same laws. When this perspective is extended to the field of the human and particularly to Ethics, human space and humanity also become homogeneous, immediately measured by the same ethical norms. So if every man is to measure his action by justice, for example, and justice measures everything, it means that every man is to be concerned with everything. But this means, again, adopting - or trying to adopt - the perspective of a universally provident God. This is the principle of totalitarianism: universal responsibility.

We would find ourselves in the perspective of the pure knowledge goal , the perspective of the pure intellectual, who judges everything, criticises everything and is not committed to anything, with no other references than the universal laws. This means corrupting, by hypertrophy, what is peculiar to the human knowledge and, therefore, vitiating it at its very core. What is human is not judging only from justice -or from any other universal moral value-, but from justice and what is proper as two heterogeneous and inseparable references.

Christian morality avoided this danger, pointing out that man is not manager of all justice or, in general, of the universal good; he is not manager directly involved in the establishment of good in the world, but insofar as from his own status he collaborates with God's plan for him. The concept of mission statement staff was included in the vision of an ordered and finalised universe in which man is always situated - in his time, in his human sphere, etc. - and with a responsibility delimited by this status.

Thomas Aquinas gave a classic example: it is the duty of the ruler to arrest and punish the offender, but it is the duty of his wife to hide him and free him from the police's claim. To the question whether it is not the duty of every man to will what God wills, he answers no, because we do not know that until it happens. Every man must want what God wants him - the man - to want. Thus the woman has the responsibility for the private good of the family, the ruler has the responsibility for the good of public affairs, and God alone has the responsibility for the good of the universe.