Morality or Moralism?: An Exercise in Sensitization

Ever since Luc Ferry's book on ecological philosophy appeared, no one seems to have doubted, at least not in France, that to endow any of the world's creatures except human beings with an ethical dimension of any kind could lead only to conceptual absurdities and moral monstrosities.¹ One may take an interest in nature, ecosystems, climate change, hurricanes, or animals, but one must do so in a "strictly scientific and factual" way, never in a moral way. And yet, for some thirty years, the new approaches involved in "science studies" have been seriously altering the division of tasks between facts and values.² Science, technology, and ecological crises-in revealing the ever closer links between humans and nonhumans-are forcing us to reconsider the premature and rather strange confinement of the moral dimension to humans alone. At a time when each of us may suddenly be "seized by scruples"-on boarding a flight, lighting our boiler, driving our car, ordering tropical wood, or eating shrimp-it would seem to be of interest to explore the mechanism whereby the list of beings able to place us under moral obligation to them is either shortened or lengthened.

This essay is intended as an experiment or exercise in sensitization and desensitization, in the immunological sense of those terms. To follow this experiment, the reader must agree to suspend belief in any a priori division between beings capable and beings incapable of obliging us to respond to their call. For a definition of what we mean by response, the reader will need to consider the etymology of respondeo: I become responsible by responding, in word or deed, to the call of someone or something.³ If this game rule is accepted, the reader will think it normal to focus on extension and reduction in the class of beings for which one feels (according to one's capacity to understand their call) more or less responsible. One may become sensitive or increasingly insensitive to the call of certain beings, whether human or nonhuman: that is indeed an everyday experience.

In the schema we have devised for this exercise, the reader will be able to register a number of variations within two dimensions that we need to learn to distinguish from each other. The first dimension entails varying the distribution of beings that are capable of interpellating us, in accordance with the familiar division between humans and nonhumans. The second dimension entails varying the intensity of the interpellation required to produce a response, whatever the type of being under consideration. Through this exercise, we should be able to see that the two dimensions are too often confused with each other and that a text taking a high moral stand from the first perspective (because it maintains a distinction between moral subjects and mere objects) may seem quite different from the second (because the text is insensitive to scruple). Such disparity is found often in the literary genre of "moral reflection," which presupposes that the only beings whose call we must answer-whose shattering visage, encountered face to face, was Lévinas's inexhaustible subject-are human beings. In this genre, to be moral is, crucially and definitively, not to compromise on the boundary between humans and nonhumans; and we are urged not to get caught up in the wild imaginings of ecologists who want to reopen the question of the range of beings to which we might be led to respond.

The exercise proposed here, in which four contrasting texts are juxtaposed, should enable us to distinguish between moralism (which is attentive to the first dimension but not the second) and morality (which is attentive to the second dimension much more than to the first). This distinction should somewhat complicate the impression that all ecological thinking must self-evidently be denied the character of moral reflection. Text 1, by André Comte-Sponville, clearly belongs to the genre of moral reflection and has been chosen to help us define the relative insensitivity of moralism to morality.⁴ This insensitivity...