This proposition was created during the first strategic weekend of the WorldEthicForum on October 2 and 3, 2021 in Scharans (Grisons, Switzerland) based on designed by Andreas Weber and in collaboration with Martin Otto. If you identify with these or similar principles and want to contribute to the revitalizing transformation of our world, you are cordially invited to participate in the WorldEthicForum. Translated by Alena Malíková and Jiří Zemánek.
Principles and initial challenge of the WorldEthicForum
(1) The world is alive. The world is a very diverse, deeply creative process that produces and sustains living individuals. All living beings are subjects. They have an inner experiencing and feeling self through which they perceive their existence as a personal reality. In this respect, other beings are no different from humans.
(2) All living beings have rights. The effort to restore rights to all other beings as subjects is a continuation and extension of the effort to provide equal rights for people marginalized on the basis of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity. Denying other beings their existence as subjects is a form of colonization. Only in a world in which the rights of all living beings are ensured will inequalities among people be resolved.
(3) The ecological crisis is underpinned by the ideology of death. The current ecological crisis is caused by our civilization’s denial of subject status to non-human sentient beings. Non-human organisms are instead treated as things. We can therefore say that the ecological crisis is caused by the ideology of death. We want to replace this ideology with the idea of reality as an all-encompassing aliveness shared by both humans and non-human beings.
(4) People must support the society of all beings. The experience of being part of a common, shared process of being alive can change our actions and is essential to the vitality of our world. People enhance their own vitality by recognizing and supporting the nature of other beings as subjects. This means granting all living subjects a place in society and expanding it into a “society of all beings.” This requires radical changes in the fields of law, science, business, education, ethics, and religion.
These principles require us to radically change the relationship between humans and other living entities. This requires,
– to understand food production and consumption as the joint work of all species to enrich the biosphere. This “work for life” increases diversity, makes the landscape more beautiful, and brings pleasure to all.
– to conceive economic production as part of the productivity of the biosphere and no longer direct it against our shared vitality.
– to design education to help people deepen their vitality in cooperation with all other beings, helping them learn how to foster life-giving relationships.
– to limit economic development, abandon the goal of increasing gross national product and focus the economy on expanding the commons of shared life, creativity and knowledge.
– to create a legal system that treats non-human beings as full-fledged subjects.
– to make political decisions that strengthen vitality.
– to support cultural imagination and scientific research in finding new ways to create the experience of fully alive being and to develop new areas of culture as a human contribution to the fertility of the cosmos.
– to cultivate spirituality as our innate way of connecting with the core of the creative and life-giving world.