This is the twenty second Chapter from the online book: Living Ethics: The Way of Wholeness. See: 1) How Should We Live? 2) Ethics and Civilization 3) Worldview and Ethics 4) Self View and Ethics 5) World as System 6) The Material Cosmos 7) Biological Systems 8) Human Systems 9) Psyche as System 10) The Collective Unconscious 11) The Collective Conscious 12) Emerging From Chaos 13) The Emerging Worldview 14) The Psychological Problem 15) Approaches to Natural Ethics 16) Good, Ethics, and Evil 17) Reverence for Life and Natural Ethic 18) The Ethical Field 19) MetaEthics 20) Comparative Ethics 21) The Ethical Model
Donivan Bessinger, MD
This outline of a system of natural ethics is now complete. There is indeed a natural ethic which is found empirically in the unconscious workings of nature toward balance. It is a system without cultural or religious bias, for it is a system which values all life, and which is based in our universal experience of life.
Further, it is a system which can be brought into consciousness as a basis for ethical thought, teaching, and practice in a complicated world. As promised, the presentation is a primer, designed around teaching models which outline and point toward interpretations of the body of knowledge which can serve to help restore balance. Only through teaching can we be brought to express in the conscious world the balance that is self-regulating in the unconscious world.
The system incorporates Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life. In his preface to the English edition (1923), Schweitzer projected four volumes for his Philosophy of Civilization. Of these, only two were published: The Decay and Restoration of Civilization and Civilization and Ethics. The third volume, which existed in manuscript form but which has not been published, was entitled “The World View of Reverence for Life.” The fourth volume was to deal with the civilized state. (1)
In his first volume, Schweitzer reviewed philosophy’s (reductive) knowledge base and found it wanting, on the grounds that it lacked a valid basis for a universal principle of ethics. He objected to the attempt to found ethics on the existing worldview and proposed to shape his new worldview according to the insight of his philosophy.
Our approach sixty-eight years later has been different. We now have at hand the evidence necessary to draw a non-reductive worldview based on the interactions and systems wholeness of the universe, and we find the homeostatic principle to be operating at multiple levels. That both approaches bring us to a similar conclusion gives strong support to the validity of the principle of reverence for life.
Only the few people who may have read the manuscript of Schweitzer’s third volume are in a position to know how he painted his worldview. Despite the differences in approach and the extraordinary expansion of knowledge since he completed Volume Two, I suspect that we would be able to find many points of agreement between this approach and his. Both approaches are valid, for one’s philosophy does influence the way one looks at the world, and the way one responds to it. Respecting life draws one to recognize life’s interactions; acknowledging life’s interactions draws one to respect all life.
Yet despite our settling upon (and in effect, merging) the systems worldview and the principle of reverence for life as natural ethic, there remains the problem of demonstrating that it can make a difference. The question still smoulders in the minds of ordinary people: Why ethics? Why bother?
Why, especially at the individual level? Does not ethics deal with social interactions? At least the benefits to society are more obvious. Of what “use” are ethics to the individual?
First, the natural systems view of ethics finds that achieving the good of homeostasis requires freedom of action. For example, the internal sensors of a system’s internal environment and its communications (feedback) system that transmits the responses must operate freely and accurately if homeostatic adjustments are to occur. Barriers which prevent proper sensing of internal environment, or barriers which prevent proper transmission of responses block homeostatic adjustments. Certainly that is evident in social systems, but it is just as true in a person’s own self.
There are many barriers which individuals and societies erect which tend to block this freedom of internal adjustment for wholeness, or “individuation,” to use Jung’s term. Teachings within the culture and peer pressures of various kinds may impose barriers to appraisal and acceptance of certain feelings, sexual ones for example, reinforcing the energy of a person’s shadow rather than permitting and encouraging appropriate responses for a balanced personality.
We have already referred to the problems of racial and religious bias. There, a person, usually in response to ideas fostered within a particular subculture or isolated belief system, erects internal barriers which prevent sensing and responding to the needs of others. Thus they block the basic ethical response, while at the same time reinforcing the psyche’s shadow energy, which in turn sustains or increases the tensions within both individual and global systems.
These responses, which are pathologic from the point of view of both personal and societal health, prevent or retard personal fulfillment. Certainly it is obvious that gaining freedom through the breaking down of political barriers (such as obstructions to human rights) is important for the sake of an ethical society. The personal freedom that comes from breaking down internal barriers is just as important for the sake of personal development. The benefit to a person of natural systems ethics is a barrier-free self.
The natural systems view of ethics also finds that there must be a certain latitude of tolerance. In normal physiology, one does not find absolutely constant values for any measurement. Homeostasis holds values within a certain “normal” range, but the values may vary freely over a range of tolerances. They may vary widely, for example, when the organism changes from rest to intense exercise. Yet within that range of tolerances, normal mechanisms can respond appropriately and health is maintained.
Similarly, an individual must be prepared ethically to tolerate a range of ideas and practices in others, realizing that such freedom gives expression to one’s own opportunities for development of individuality. Obviously, the system of natural ethics also defines limits to tolerance. Actions which infringe the freedom or safety of oneself or others are unbalancing within the system, and are thus unethical.
Individualism always must find its balance between opportunity and responsibility within the operation of the whole. However, in the system of natural ethics, intolerance is always directed toward unethical behavior, not toward persons. Ethics demands that responses to unethical persons must be tailored to restore that person to ethical awareness, and to avoid their alienation from the system of ethical response.
The natural systems view of ethics also removes barriers to religious understanding. By harmonizing science and human spirituality, the systems worldview opens the way for a person to respond both to the natural impulses of consciousness for inquiry and for knowledge (the scientific function), and to the impulses of the unconscious for personal fulfillment and for symbolic expression of unity with creation (the religious function).
The basic religious function is a universally present human function, though it may be repressed under the influence of belief systems derived in consciousness. In that case, the belief system may be denied and called “science,” but it functions to relate the person to creation nonetheless. Further, it functions symbolically, perhaps using such symbols of science as equations and models.
We have followed Jung’s development of the significance of the collective unconscious in understanding religious experience. The natural systems ethic draws us toward “thinking sincerely” about the wholeness of ourselves within the wholeness of creation. In that process, despite the many different symbol systems which human cultures have developed through the centuries, we are drawn to a common understanding as well as toward the revitalization and reaffirmation of the truths represented in our own cherished symbols. We are drawn toward reawakening to the meaning of our involvement in all life around us.
Does not such a broad concern for all life lead inevitably to frustration? We cannot possibly provide for the needs of all life. There is, of course, a limit to our individual “reach.” As mentioned in the discussion of the ethical field, there is a certain “friction” that limits the effects of our actions. Reverence for life calls for concern for all life, but imposes no guilt for unsolved problems that are beyond our reach. However, this natural ethic and its systems worldview also reveal that through combined awareness and cooperative forces, reach can be extended potentially to bring all of the globe into the reach of ethics.
This system of ethics also supports a broader understanding of the multiple levels of experience which confront the individual in daily life. All of us must deal concurrently with experience of our inner selves, with the immediate family group, work group, and larger society, all the while confronted with global uncertainties over which we feel little control. The natural ethic reveals that all of these levels are inter-related, and that even where we do not perceive control, we have influence.
A rules-based concept of ethics exalts a “pure” or perfected state, and leaves us faced with continual frustration about the inability to be perfect, or preoccupied with the failures of all the less-than-perfect souls around us. A pure ethic of that sort leads either to an adversarial worldview, and ultimately to confrontation, or to a denial of involvement and to withdrawal.
By contrast, the natural ethic is not frustrated by lack of absolute ethical behavior. It does not have to cope with everyday tension between “pure” and situational responses, and seeks instead to respond toward balance and survival at whatever level action is necessary. Sometimes, balance and survival require actions which in the larger or more ideal situation would be undesirable. The natural ethic realizes that faced with the aggression and hostility of others, survival action is necessary.
Well then, is the natural ethic merely a survival ethic, an ethic of survival at all costs, whatever the result for other life?
No, the natural ethic calls for action that is only sufficient to serve the needs of life. Reverence for life determines that I must avoid all unnecessary injury to other life, but faced with the realities of my own survival, I must kill to eat. Faced with aggression of others, I must respond to insure my own survival. However, reverence for life leads me to seek the alternatives which contain the aggression with the least possible injury to the aggressor and to other life, without responding in revenge.
Is reverence for life then a pacifist philosophy?
No. A situation may indeed require even war, if all other attempts at healing have been exhausted, and there is no alternative for survival and for restoring the balance of life. Surely the world’s experience of Hitler makes that clear. Reverence for life is prepared to do what life requires it to do, but always with a view toward the balance and welfare of the whole of life, and always with regret when any injury results.
Perhaps, then, there are different tiers or levels of ethical standards, excusing actions at one level that are proscribed at another level?
No, the one ethical standard is to serve the balance of life on all levels. One must not become preoccupied with executing a certain plan or project. One must remain preoccupied with the balance of the whole. Even as a member of a board or some other form of governing assembly, a person must act individually with reverence for life, and seek to direct collective actions toward ethical outcomes, concerned with means as well as ends.
If the system of natural ethics confers the obvious benefits of improved understanding, it also imposes some definite responsibilities. The practice of ethics requires knowledge of the situation in which one is acting, and knowledge and skill in applying means. In that sense, “good ethics” begins with good science.
Ethics also requires effort to seek to “know oneself,” and to develop awareness of the interactions of the forces within ourselves with the world around us. “Thinking sincerely,” as Schweitzer put it, is thinking toward increased awareness of relationships in life.
Awareness of the relationship between sincerity and ethics, however, is not unique to Schweitzer. The Confucian Doctrine of the Steadfast Mean places great emphasis on the principle of sincerity, and in so doing, sums up the individual’s necessary response.
Sincerity is the way of heaven. The attainment of sincerity is the way of men. He who possesses sincerity is he who, without an effort, hits what is right, and apprehends without the exercise of thought … he is the sage who naturally and easily embodies the right way. He who attains to sincerity is he who chooses what is good, and firmly holds it fast.
To this attainment there are requisite the extensive study of what is good, accurate inquiry about it, careful reflection on it, the clear discrimination of it, and the earnest practice of it. (2)
Copyright 2000 by Donivan Bessinger. All rights reserved.
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More by Donivan Bessinger, MD
References:
(1) “THE WORLD VIEW OF REVERENCE FOR LIFE”—Norman Cousins describes efforts to bring the third volume to publication. op. cit. (17).
(2) “SINCERITY IS THE WAY OF HEAVEN”—”The Doctrine of the Steadfast Mean”. Portable World Bible, R. O. Ballou, editor. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. p 513.