Environmentalism, mystical and delimitation of the moral universe

Abstract

The “ethical conscience”, the “mystical conscience” and the “ecological conscience” have in common a characteristic farness of the individuals in regards to themselves. It is related to the opening of an ‘holistic’ perspective, in which our own interests and worries are seen through the perspective of a ‘whole’ of which oneself is only a part. Nevertheless, a fundamental difference exists among them: the ‘wholeness’ of the mystical conscience is unlimited, but the wholeness of the ethics (and thus, of ecologism) refers to a particular moral universe, which necessarily includes and excludes, and therefore presents,  constitutively, a limit. The importance of the delimitation of the moral universe is made explicit in the danger  established by an “ecological conscience” that  has no clarity about the moral categories under which the individual is bond to consider himself inside or outside that boundary. An ecological conscience which noncriticly presents a “diffuse holism” is under the risk of not being able to clarify precisely the reasons by which individuals should be morally protected, and therefore weekening the moral status of these. Furthermore, it risks to bring up an extreme relativiness to the value of human beeings, favoring a dangerous undercovered antihumanism.