Abstract

We live as moral beings within diverse, collectively-created networks of norms and values in much the same way as we live as physical beings within the web of life that makes up Earth's diverse habitats. This is perhaps the most conventional meaning of the word "ethos," and the metaphor of ethos as moral habitat, on one level, draws this analogy with the biotic habitat as a more holistic approach to cross-cultural ethics. On another level, I speak of moral habitat as a claim that the community that forms a network of norms, values, and meanings is more than a human community, it is a more-than-human community. For although we as latemoderns may live in a world conceptually cleaved into "nature" and "culture," human social communities are embedded within and part of biotic communities, they are "nature-cultures." This raises the possibility of understanding members of the biotic community who are other than human as having a form of morally important agency, perhaps even moral agency. Out of this development of the metaphor of ethos as moral habitat comes a reframing of the way in which we conceive human moral agency and the possibility of more sustaining relationships with the rest of the Earth community