For years now I've been waving the flag about garden ethics -- how empathy is at the heart of how we should be gardening. I'm always looking at how others speak to our environmental world and how we live in it, and this piece resonated, especially the last paragraph:
"We are empathic beings. As such we are profoundly connected to other
human beings, as well as to all of nature. We can feel the joy and
suffering of others, and as innately moral beings, we seek to mitigate
suffering and promote the flourishing of others, even at a cost to
ourselves. True morality carries the marks of insight and imagination.
Every true moral act is made in freedom. Yes, we are informed by
experience and the values of our society, but ultimately through
self-knowledge, we have the potential to become free of their
determinative force and choose the good (or evil) freely. In my view
this is the moment in which love takes on the character of knowing.
Love
allows us gently, respectfully, and intimately to slip into the life of
another person or animal or even the Earth itself and to know it from
the inside. In this way, love can become a way of moral knowing that is
as reliable as scientific insight. Then our highest challenge and
aspiration is to learn to love with such selflessness and purity that
love becomes a way to true moral insight, one that transcends social
construction and biological imperatives."
Read more....
5 comments:
I like this quote, but am very surprised that you have not referenced its source. Where did you read it? Who wrote it? Thank you.
FP -- Follow the hyperlink in the first paragraph of the post.
Thanks. The hyperlink is barely legible in my version of your blog. But it does not take me to that quotation. I am landed in an interesting spot, with a different quotation, which I also like.
It is not visible at all in my version.
your hyperlink is only visible once I mouseover - but there is no indication of a hyperlink - until I do mouseover.
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