Enlightenment and Environmental Ethics
Keywords:
Enlightenment, God’s vicegerent, ethics, Environment, Religious Commitment, Scientific Revolution, right of natureAbstract
Man’s encroachment on environment began after the Second World War. Henceforth, man’s status as the vicegerent of God was substituted with a new status—i.e., domination over the nature—and he established an instrumentalist relationship with his environment; to the extent that he gradually began to manipulate genetic modifications of living organisms.It seems that the current environmental challenges and crises can be rationally tackled and significantly alleviated if the three essential and necessary elements of “morality/ethics, religion, and science” are simultaneously recognized. This paper is concerned with the significance of religion in its bearing on the conservation of nature in traditional societies, and the significance of morality with respect to environment in the contemporary world. Therefore, the pivot of the argument for the problem in the modern era seems to be ethics.
