Nature protection as moral duty: The ethical trend in the Russian conservation movement

✍ Scribed by Anton Yu. Struchkov

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 867 KB
• Volume: 25
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5010
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00352000

✦ Synopsis

Regrettably, I must begin my talk on environmental ethics in the Soviet Union by noting a sad fact. If in the United States environmental ethics is manifested by such signs as (1) the existence of a community of scholars associated with a journal, (2) the setting up of corresponding courses at various universities, (3) an abundant literature, and so forth, then we are forced to conclude that by these indicators there is no field of environmental ethics in the Soviet Union.

I attribute this condition, first of all, to the extremely unfortunate state of our academic philosophy, which has long been "the servant of the Marxist-Leninist theology," hostile to any deviation from the so-called only true way and thus also hostile to ecophilosophy.

Worse yet, the role that our academic philosophy has accepted --namely, saying yes to the already and forever revealed truth instead of searching for truth --has still not been abandoned. Even today, when "the only true truth" has turned out to be false, the majority of our academic philosophers prefer to keep saying yes (to now diverse, but nonetheless already revealed, truths) rather than choose their own risky ways of questing. Such recent trends as the deification of Vernadsky's ideas, the parasitical repetition of the ideas of the Russian emigration, and enticement with the "Russian cosmism" are vivid examples of this "yessaying" mode} That is why those who hope to articulate new and profound ideas about problems (including ecophilosophical ones) are usually rendered solitary outsiders. Inasmuch as the outsider's destiny 1. As a rare exception that brilliantly proves and illustrates this rule, see the recent article by V. A. Kutyrev, "Utopicheskoe i real'noe v uchenii o noosfere,"