ABSTRACT
WORLDS AND WORLD-PICTURES This notion that our responsibilities do not end at national frontiers – that we owe some real duty to other humans – is not, of course, a new one in our culture. It has quite strong traditional roots, which have always warred against the narrower contractual view. The idea that we might also owe duties to the non-human world is, however, much more shocking. The contractual model of rationality excludes that idea and our tradition has taken some pains to stigmatize it as sentimental, pagan and anti-human. And until lately, prudence did not seem to call for this kind of consideration either because the natural resources available to us were seen as literally infinite. As the Soviet historian Pokrovskiy put it in 1931:
This kind of confidence, generated by the industrial revolution, seemed for a long time to be a mere dictate of rationality, a simple correction of the earlier awe and respect for nature which now appeared primitive and superstitious. That is why we now find it so hard to take in the
evidence that there was an enormous factual mistake here. For three centuries we had been encouraged to consider the earth simply as an inert and bottomless larder stocked for our needs. To be forced to suspect now that it is instead a living system, a system on whose continued activity we are dependent, a system which is vulnerable and capable of failing, is extremely unnerving.
