The Other Voice: Toward a Dialogical Ecoethics for the Biosphere

Abstract

[EN] A new century and a new millennium call for new reflection on the environmental issues that beset our planet and our societies, and on the ethical principles needed to tackle them. Ethical principles are not treated here in isolation, but turn out to have far-flung implications, with extensive consequences both in space in time. At the same time, these principles and the values implicit in them hold out new opportunities beyond antropocentrism as well as new challenges to make possible the flourishing of life (both human and non-human) and of society. Dialogical ecoethics discusses the central debates surrounding the environmental ethics (anthropocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism, etc.), as a new form of ethics in relationship with communicative aspects of nature. These epistemological basis of communication, biotic and abiotics, decentring hegemonic human-centred ethics (anthropocentrism), opening up to other animals and beyond (to the rest of biosphere). Counter-hegemonic ethics stances includes specially comunicative principles. One of the most important among these principles is listening and attentiveness to the oher (communicative justice with the biosphere), a stance which can help to counter the human deafness, and backgrounding which obscures adn denies what the non-human other contributes to our lives and collaborative ventures. Openness and attentiveness give us sensitivity to the world as alive, astir with responsive presences that vastly exceed the human communication. Overall, what is involved here is a movement from a monological to a dialogical ethics conception of the human self and its possibilites for relationship to the non-human world. Our future depends on a new ethic, an ethic for the biosphere.