From Behavioral Design to Reverence for Life: Care Policies for the Digital Environment

The article raises the problem of the ecology of a human being in a digital reality, namely, the issue of caring for a resource accessible to any person living in new conditions. The aim of the study is to substantiate the need for a transition from the behavioral design as well as the corresponding ethological paradigm to the existential design, involving a more responsible and careful approach to ecology and ethics in human capital management in the context of cognitive capitalism and digitalization of life. In the modern world it is often the question of productivity growth and technological advancement. Meanwhile, the question of human capacities and incapacities (mental, physical, behavioral) does not arise. Taking into account the absence of a caring attitude towards human capacities, this resource will never go turn into human capital. The research demonstrates that the design of digital media allows the use of the available human resources more properly if technical requirements of speed, quantity, simplicity are changed in compliance with existential requirements (changes in the subject of herself/himself, not in the objects of her/his activities) increasing his/her role, ethical meaning, feeling of presence in the event, tracking the results of actions and a deeper awareness of the results. The article is aimed at media philosophers, anthropologists and theorists of digital culture.

We Are the Earth and the Earth Is Us: How Palates Link Foodscapes, Landscapes, Heartscapes, and Thoughtscapes

Humans are participating in the sixth mass extinction, and for the first time in 200,000 years, our species may be on the brink of extinction. We are facing the greatest challenges we have ever encountered, namely how to nourish eight billion people in the face of changing climates ecologically, diminish disparity between the haves and the have-nots economically, and ease xenophobia, fear, and hatred socially? Historically, our tribal nature served us well, but the costs of tribalism are now far too great for one people inhabiting one tiny orb. If we hope to survive, we must mend the divides that isolate us from one another and the communities we inhabit. While not doing so could be our undoing, doing so could transform our collective consciousness into one that respects, nourishes, and embraces our interdependence with life on Earth. At a basic level, we can cultivate life by using nature as a model for how to produce and consume food; by decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels for energy to grow, process, and transport food; and by transcending persistent battles over one-size-fits-all plant- or animal-based diets. If we learn to do so in ways that nourish life, we may awaken individually and collectively to the wisdom of the Maori proverb Ko au te whenua. Ko te whenua Ko au: I am the land. The land is me. In this paper, we use “scapes” —foodscapes, landscapes, heartscapes, and thoughtscapes—as unifying themes to discuss our linkages with communities. We begin by considering how palates link animals with foodscapes. Next, we address how palates link foodscapes with landscapes. We then consider how, through our reverence for life, heartscapes link palates with foodscapes and landscapes. We conclude with transformations of thoughtscapes needed to appreciate life on Earth as a community to which we belong, rather than as a commodity that belongs to us.

How Reverence for a Flower Can Save a Planet

It remains a major problem that only certain things seem to matter enough to be worth saving. Many are not even on the list of endangered species, much like humans missing from the organ transplant waiting lists. If humans do not see their commercial value (profitable species), humans do not seem to appreciate them much at all (nuisance species). Psychologically, the human species tends to forget how much it loves what matters, and accidentally lets them perish (living things). Meanwhile, it falls in love with things that don't matter and can't die (writing, ideas, and cities). But if this species could only learn to have a deep and abiding reverence for a little thing (like a flower), perhaps it could learn to have as much or more reverence for its human neighbors. This chapter will go into intimate detail on how this may be practically applied. This practical application of reverence for life that stems from work with children and animals is shown to be effective in reducing intergroup prejudice. Reverence for all life can be a core and crucial learning concept for early childhood education.

The Ethics of Albert Schweitzer as an Inspiration for Global Ethics

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) was a fascinating person, a multivalent icon, mostly known as a doctor in the primeval forest of Africa. There he elaborated the ethics of boundless responsibility towards all living beings as a treatment for the restoration of a decadent civilization. Until his death, Schweitzer was struggling to elaborate a worldview of reverence for life that would be embraced by all religions and cultures. His ethics should be universally true for all people, regardless of time, place, or cultural background. In this article we present his worldview of reverence of life in a critical way. It will be emphasized that Schweitzer was not aware enough that his philosophy was culturally, religiously, historically, and also personally (biographically) conditioned, since it is impossible for anybody to step out of his or her historical and cultural backgrounds. He limited his ethical reflection to the individual sphere and did not allow for any ranking among living beings on a theoretical level. Despite these critical observations, reflection of the immediate experience of the human condition could be in our opinion a good starting point to understand the shared common morality of all humans. We are convinced that his ethical thoughts and seeing him as a role model can stimulate the search for global ethics today.

If People Are Attached to Plants, Do They Love Other People? Case of the Russian Youth

People’s attachment to the plant world makes a great contribution to the maintenance of psychological well-being. At the same time, little is known regarding the contribution of attitudes to plants to people’s morality; the current study is aimed at filling this gap. We assumed that the more positive the attitude to plants is, the higher the level of moral motives is. The survey was conducted on the Russian sample; 257 participants (students from Moscow universities, 199 female, Mage = 21.1, SDage = 2.5) were recruited. The following tools were used: a questionnaire People and Plants (PaP) consisting of five sub-scales (joy, esthetics, practice, closeness to nature, and ecology) and Moral Motives Model scale (MMM scale) including six sub-scales (self-restraint, not harming, social order, self-reliance (industriousness), helping/fairness, and social justice). It was found that all parameters of the positive attitudes to plants, except practice, were strongly positively connected with moral motives. Multi-regression analysis allowed developing certain models demonstrating the contribution of attachment to the plant world to people’s morality. The proscriptive motives (especially self-restraint) are more sensitive to attitudes to flora as compared to prescriptive motives; prescriptive motive self-reliance was not predicted by the attitude to flora at all. Moreover, the findings seem to be gender-sensitive (predictions are higher in females). The obtained results are discussed referring to the reverence for life ethics by Schweitzer, deep ecology by Næss, biophilia hypothesis by Wilson, and psychology of moral expansiveness by Crimston et al.

Philosophy and Animal Welfare Movement

This work provides a Russian translation of Albert Schweitzer’s “Philosophy and Animal Welfare Movement” (Philosophie und Tierschutzbewegung, c. 1950, possibly 1936). There, Schweitzer considers the issue of the man’s proper attitude to the living beings around. At the same time, he analyzes the history of the formation of different approaches to the is­sue in the course of the development of western and eastern ethical thought. In particular, he examines briefly the attitude towards living beings in Chinese and Indian ethics, the ethics of early and modern Christianity, and European philosophy. Finally, Schweitzer highlights the inevitability of the convergence between universal human ethics and the principles of reverence for life and love for all life. In this convergence, he sees a complex task facing contemporary society.

From Traditional the Ethics of Neighbor to the Ethics of Reverence for Life: The Unfinished Step (A. Schweitzer, H. Jonas, S. Donnelley)

This is a preface to the translation of one of Albert Schweitzer’s major works, Philosophy and Animal Welfare Movement (Philosophie und Tierschutzbewegung), included in the modern “canon” of Schweitzer’s texts on the reverence for life. We analyzed the development of the ethical thought from the traditional ethics of attitude towards fellow beings through the principle of reverence for life to the modern ethics of life, as outlined in Schweitzer’s works and those of his followers. Our main tasks were to comprehend modern versions of human­ism, the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of life itself, as well as to confirm the relevance of Schweitzer’s ideas through the concepts of life developed by his followers, using com­parative analysis as the main research method. As a result, we showed the continuity and relevance of Schweitzer’s ideas in the new moral realities of the 21st century. The traditional ethics of attitude towards fellow beings is naturally expanded, recognizing living creatures and life in general as the objects of a moral, humane attitude. In addition to the principle of reverence for life, examples of a new ethics are H. Jonas’s ethics of responsibility and onto­logical axiology, as well as S. Donnelley’s ethics of the living, which, in particular, rises the issue of the animals’ individuality. The man’s need to use animals for his own purposes and choose between different life forms, as well as his ability to destroy life itself remains a ma­jor moral problem of the new ethics. Albert Schweitzer paid particular attention to this in his works, one of which was translated by the authors of the article into Russian.