Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics - Eubios Ethics ...

2 Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 22 (January 2012)
to protect against earthquakes, however, the scale of the
earthquake was far beyond expectation. It caused not
only a huge tsunami with the loss of nearly twenty
thousand lives, but also the serious atomic-power
accident at Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant that
lead to the serious radioactive leak and nuclear
meltdowns in three reactors.
The Great East Japan Earthquake revealed problems
in far-reaching fields, e.g. seismology, tsunami
engineering, architectonics, nuclear power engineering,
politics, historical science. It is necessary for them to
collaborate closely with each other to prevent the disaster
and restore the damage. It also revealed the problem
which is philosophical and especially related to the
essence of environmental ethics, i.e. the relationships
between humans and nature.
Mainstream of Environmental Ethics and Disaster
Prevention
The mainstream of environmental ethics in the U.S.A
has focused upon conservation of nature, not disaster
prevention. One of its historical backgrounds is to
establish National Parks after the pronouncement on
‘disappearance of the frontier’ in 1890. The nature to be
conserved in U.S. environmental ethics is, above all,
‘wilderness’, which is primitive and undeveloped nature.
Wilderness area is separated from inhabited areas;
therefore, wildfire, flood and landslide can be regarded
not as a disaster but as a natural process.
In Japan also researchers of environmental ethics
were mainly concerned with conservation of nature;
however, recently, they began to criticize the dichotomy
of anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism which
has been the core of U.S. environmental ethics. Now
Japanese researchers are more concerned with
symbiosis between humans and nature. The typical good
relationship of the symbiosis between humans and
nature in Japan has been represented as a pastoral life
near Satoyama (a wooded area near a village).
The Great East Japan Earthquake shows the necessity
of disaster prevention, which has been ignored for a long
time in environmental ethics. Disaster prevention has
been regarded as a task of engineering sciences,
however, disaster prevention is necessary to form,
maintain and restore good relationships between humans
and nature. For example, the Japanese ideal situation of
symbiosis in Satoyama is realized only if a village is not
destroyed by disasters. Ideal relationships symbolized by
Satoyama may be only transient happiness that appears
when there occur good relationships between humans
and nature.
There are several reasons why disaster prevention has
not been considered as a task of environmental ethics.
One is concentration on wilderness concervation or on
symbiosis between humans and nature, whereas
negative features of nature such as a disaster is outside
the field of vision. In fact, nature has two aspects; a
gentle, beautiful aspect and a capricious, furious aspect.
The second is overestimation of human power over
nature. Because our power has become so strong, we
have responsibility to conserve natural environments. It
may be said that modern technology and environmental
ethics have a presupposition in common, i.e. our
technology exceeds nature and in the future we can
control natural power. In this context also disaster
prevention is not a task of environmental ethics but that
of technology.
Nature as Life
If we pay attention to the aspect of disaster prevention
as well as nature conservation, what kind of view of
nature should be adopted? It may be possible to adopt a
mechanical view of nature, i.e. every natural event occurs
according to the laws of nature and it is causally
determined, and if its causal process is not known to us,
it may be regarded as contingent. In this viewpoint,
disasters themselves remain events essentially outside of
our lives and we can approach them only by natural
sciences, such as seismology, meteorology, tsunami
engineering and volcanology. Disasters themselves don’t
seem to have anything to do with environmental ethics;
however, environmental ethics can play a role in
discussing natural disasters. It may deal with the issues
such as moral and practical effectiveness of damage
control and recovery from the damage, or inequality
among the victims. Also we can hold a view of nature as
life. Nature as life not only gives us blessings but
sometimes shows fury to us. It is a primitive animistic
view and seems to lie deep in our mind. In this animistic
standpoint, we understand the significance that disasters
have for our behaviors, and natural disasters, our daily
life, politics etc. are mutually related, i.e. linked
cosmologically. Some may adopt the mixture of both
viewpoints, i.e. nature contains not only lives such as
animals, plants, bacteria, but also inanimate matter.
It may seem mythical to regard nature as life, but,
especially in Japan, even now, there remains a lot of
customs whose origin is animism, such as a sacred rope
around a tree, ground-breaking ceremony, mountain
opening ceremony, sea opening ceremony, bon festival
(memorial to the souls), itadakimasu (thanksgiving to the
lives eaten), picnic under the cherry blossoms, moon
viewing, memorial services for laboratory animals,
monuments of fish and shellfish near the fish market,
monuments of kitchen knives, memorial services for old
needles, and so on.
Good relationships as peace
Environmental ethics and bioethics are two of the
major applied ethics, and they not only may feature
different principles but have different issues to discuss.
Though the principles of environmental ethics vary
according to researchers; however, in general, they
include non-anthropocentric principles, i.e. intrinsic value
of individuals or species other than human beings,
restraints on liberalistic rights, and responsibility to future
generations. Corresponding to its principles,
environmental ethics deals with rights of animals, plants
and eco-system, global warming, ecological destruction,
energy issue and population issues. As is well known,
principles of bioethics include respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence,
beneficence, justice, respect for human
dignity, sanctity of life and solidarity. It deals with ethical,
legal and social issues concerning medicine and
biomedical sciences. The philosophical basis of bioethics
is a modern concept of persons and liberalism, whereas