Die Zukunft der Ethik Albert Schweitzers

Summary

The basic thought of Schweitzer's ethic, the reverence for life, has manifold significance. First, it is an appeal to our moral feeling. But secondly, Schweitzer lent this thought also a general, fundamental and therewith philosophical meaning: proceeding from the “most immediate and encompassing fact of consciousness,” described by him with the proposition “I am life that will live in the midst of life that will live,” Schweitzer believed to have found in the idea of reverence for life the fundamental principle of all morality; this consists in the fact “that I experience the need to extend to all wills to live the same reverence that I extend to my own.” In addition to its effect on moral feeling and on ethical theory, the future of the thought, “reverence for life,” also depends on its compliance in the activity of men.

The future prospects of the appeal to moral feeling appear good insofar as testimonies from history permit one to assume that the awareness of the reverence for life can be awakened in all men. The ancient Greeks knew such sensibility in theaidos, Goethe in the “reverence for that which is in our midst.” This ever strengthening recognition among the peoples of the earth will, through historically succeeding generations, increasingly eliminate a full disregard for such reverence.

Less promising are the prospects of acknowledging the reverence for life as a fundamental principle of morality. On its basis Schweitzer rests his aversion to harming anything living. He does not fail to see thereby that, in order to preserve life, we must destroy some life (at least that of plants). But, says Schweitzer, I become guilty in sacrificing life, and we must constantly remain conscious of this guilt; any attempts at justification, through considerations of differences in the value of various lives, must be rejected.

However, an ambiguity in the word “guilt” underlies Schweitzer's position. On the one hand “guilt” is understood as a regrettable cause for the subsistence or eventuation of an evil, on the other as the moral reprehensibility of an attitude. Only the latter represents guilt in a moral sense. Whoever follows the necessity to destroy other, less valuable life in order to preserve his own or another life, assumes guilt only in the second sense. Therefore ethics must raise and pursue the question concerning the value priority of one life over another. This question leads to an encounter with the modern directions of ethics which proceed from the concept of value, and to the continuation of Schweitzer's ethics through this encounter. Schweitzer's explanation that life in the world is “to be brought to its highest value” likewise conduces to the same point, since it necessitates an investigation of the rank order of values.

We can note a slow progress of the reverence for life in the private domain of human activity. On the other hand in the interrelationship of peoples there is danger of monstrous mass murder through the atomic bomb.