Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2016 number 2

The article discusses the need for ecological ethics, which should teach to treat nature as our mother with loving and grateful attitude. The subject of ecological ethics is moral standards and ethical behavior in the man-society-nature relationship. Eсоlogical education should involve developing one’s ability to see nature as a spiritual beauty of the objective world. Human ecology ought to be the recuperation and enhancement of the spiritual world of society, the development of high culture and humanistic morality. Traditionally, the term ‘ecology’ refers to the field of science dealing with the study of multiple relationships of living organisms with their environment. However, the term ‘ecology’ has overstepped the boundaries of its original scientific meaning and is used in various spheres of human activity. In the public mind, the term is usually associated with the scandals related to pollution of the biosphere with toxic wastes and the damage of natural ecosystems. Therefore, the word ‘ecology’ has acquired moral overtones. The term ‘ecological’ is now equivalent to the terms ‘clean,’ ‘safe,’ ‘moral’, and ‘humane’. It is important to form a harmonious relationship between the components of the ecosystem of ‘man-natural environment’, ‘society-natural environment’, and to control therefore the processes engendered by man and dangerous to all living things. Mankind is facing the need for ecological morality, the basis of which should be man’s creative activity aimed at harmonization of the relations with nature. In the technogenic culture of the West, nature is understood as a material for the transforming activity of man. Human activity in Western culture is directed at the outside world, its transformation and submission to human objectives. A predatory attitude to nature is destructive to it and therefore immoral. In the modern period, the socio-economic orientation of human activity is changing and acquiring a universal character. This is why ecological moral standards are meant to regulate the interaction between society and the environment, both natural and cultural. This is how ecological ethics ought to be formed. The basic principle of ethical conduct was established at the dawn of civilization. It was recorded in the laws of the Babylonian king Hammurabi and the Old and New Testaments. This is the reciprocity principle: Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. In relation to nature, this principle can be defined as the commandment of the Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates: Do no harm. The turn of the twenty-first century poses the issue of the formation of personality capable of giving an adequate response to the challenges of our time. The humanistic ideas of environmental ethics, entering pedagogy, are able to be of methodological assistance in tackling this task.