是否且应该存在单一的、普世的、国际的环境伦理?

Can and Should There be a Single,Universal,International Environmental Ethic?

环境伦理始于美国等西方英语国家,最初是从美国式的自然审美方式中衍生出来的。这种环境伦理发展方式的核心特征是荒野概念和国家公园运动,据此,公园被界定为自然的地方,人只能作为过客,对其中的环境产生极微小的影响。但这种环境伦理方法已经对世界上其他一些地方的社会产生了破坏性影响,特别是对南亚的印度以及非洲大部分地区。在这些地方建立西方式的公园引发了传统以及人与自然关系的断裂。非西方社会批评这种西方的自然观和环境伦理是帝国主义的、殖民的和专制的。这些批评表明很多西方观点不适合应用于非西方国家。而一种更为普遍的观点则认为,伦理观点在不同国家或文化间的应用十分困难,短时期内基本上都很难成功。环境伦理大多数情况下需要建基于那些具有长期历史的本地传统的演化中。一种环境伦理想要被接受,需要与特定文化中人们的直觉相协调,至少在开始时必须如此。所谓的"传统",本质上即被波兰尼称之为"默会知识"的东西,这种默会知识往往包含着很多模糊的前提,由于相关的细节在历史过程中大多都已被遗忘,人们只把它们当作事实性的常识接受,因而难以被传统之外的人们所理解。我们只有弄明白这些前提的基础,才能令这些传统更加明确地支持某种环境伦理或者发现其缺陷,从而找到克服缺陷的方法。按照默会知识的理论,环境伦理的发展首先应发生在特定文化之中,而无需重要的跨文化借鉴。伦理因此就显现为只在某一文化传统的框架中才有意义,而不能当作某种来自外部的、强迫接受的东西。特定的环境伦理尽管基于不同的文化传统,但可能具有很多相似的特征。因此,只有在文化的相互借鉴中,当环境伦理以其自身缓慢的节奏发展时,一种单一的、普世的、国际的环境伦理最终才可能出现。它不会是某位哲学家或某一哲学家群体的发明,而只能是当处在很多不同文化中的人们已经开始接受它时,由哲学家们所发现的一种伦理。

Environmental ethics began in Western, English-speaking countries, especially the United States and Australia and secondarily in the United Kingdom and Canada. It was initially an outgrowth of an American approach to the aesthetic appreciation of nature, based on earlier European developments, particularly picturesque beauty followed by picturesque travel, now called tourism. Central features of this approach have been the wilderness concept and the park movement, according to which a park is a natural place in which humans are visitors only and have minimal impact on the environmental there. This approach has been socially disruptive in other parts of the world, in particular, southern Asia, especially India, and much of Mrica, where the creation of Western-style parks have led to the disruption of traditions and human-nature relationships. The non-Western response to this approach has been criticism that Western views of nature and environmental ethics are imperialistic, colonizing, and totalizing. While such criticism shows that much of the Western view should not have been applied in non-Western countries, the more general point should be that the application of ethical perspectives between countries and cultures is difficult and unlikely to be successful in most cases in the short term. In most cases, to be successful, an environmental ethic needs to be based on an evolution of long-standing local traditions. For an environmental ethics to be accepted, it needs to be consistent, at least at the outset, with the intuitions of the people within a given culture. Traditions are essentially, what Michael Polanyi has called ＂tacit knowledge＂. This tacit knowledge is a vague set of assumptions that are little understood because the details have been largely forgotten but are accepted as factual The basis for these assumptions needs to be made explicit so that they can more clearly support an environmental ethic or revealed as flawed so that they can be overcome as an impediment. According to this approach, the development of environmental ethics should first take place within specific cultures without significant cross-cultural borrowing, so that the ethic appears to make sense within the traditional framework of that culture and is not regarded as a foreign imposition. In this phase, many features of specific environmental ethics may turn out to be similar but based on different cultural traditions. It is possible that a single, universal, international environmental ethic may eventually appear but only very slowly as cultural borrowing proceeds at its own pace. It will not be an ethic created by a philosopher or a group of philosophers. Rather it will be an ethic discovered by philosophers after the people of many different cultures have already come to accept it.