Ethics. Karl Barth

is careful not to crush insects. If he works by a lamp on a summer night he would rather keep the window closed and breathe stuffy air than see insect after insect fall on his table with singed wings. If he goes out on the street after rain and sees an earthworm that has wandered on to it, he remembers that it will dry up in the sun if it does not reach in time the earth in which it can crawl and he carries it back from the deadly pavement to the grass. If he comes across an insect that has fallen into a pond he takes time to hand it a leaf or a stalk to save it (240).25 It was easy, of course, to criticize this teaching by raising all kinds of questions about the practicability of such rules, and even to poke a little fun at it as Alsatian sentimentality. I regard that as cheap. If we divest the teaching of what is perhaps its too indicative or imperative form and understand it as a question, the simple question how we can justify ourselves if we act otherwise, then precisely with its unusual content it is unquestionably the most authentic ethical reflection because it obviously arises out of direct observation, and those who can only laugh are themselves a little deserving of our tears. |

      It is clear, of course, that the problem of other creaturely life and our relation to it can probably be really seen first only in the encounter of man and man, but it does not first begin where other creaturely life as human life can state and represent its claim upon us on an equal footing as it were. The test whether we really hear this claim is whether we hear it when it can address us only in silence, when we must detect it in the “groaning of creation” [cf. Rom. 8:22], when it is enigmatically concealed behind the apparent objectivity of animal and plant life. We cannot be deaf here if we really hear in the encounter of man and man. Or has a man really heard the command of life, which, as we have seen, is always also the command of respect for life, if he knows nothing about the synōdinein and systenazein of the ktisis that is shut up in corruptibility, if it does not matter to him that we continually contribute to it in the most outrageous fashion, if for him the slaughterhouse and vivisection, the chase, and the pitiless locking up of all kinds of forest animals and birds behind the bars of zoological gardens present no questions, or no questions applicable to him, since directly or indirectly we all of us have a share in these things? By what right does man do all these things to creation? It may be that we have a commission to do them. At any rate we should not put the question in a milder and more comfortable form—the form whether these things are allowed. Do we really have a commission? Is it not all due to our thoughtlessness, crudity, and folly? Have we a commission, not from our demonized and brutalized will for power, but from God? And if we have, are we remembering that the respect for life with which we must act cannot be invalidated, but must simply take another form, so that, fundamentally conceding the possibility of all those possibilities, the question has to be put afresh with each execution of it? Is it not clear that efforts to protect animals represent a concern that has always to be heard as a serious one? Can we deny even to fanatics, e.g., antivivisectionists or those who are vegetarian on these grounds, the relative right of a necessary reaction? |

      Naturally an absolute veto, a condemnation of the honest trade of the butcher or of high-class hunting, can as little be deduced from the command of God as an absolute permission or an absolute command on the other side. For we cannot expect either from direct participants in such things, or from all of us as indirect participants, a solemn rehabilitation and confirmation of our conduct. Here again, then, we cannot count on it that ethics will draw a line for us between what is commanded and what is forbidden. The command of God alone draws this line for the one to whom it speaks, and ethics can only recall what has always to be considered to see this line. One such thing is that respect for life as obedience to God’s command is respect for the life created by God, and this recollection will keep us from one-sidedly understanding by respect merely the will to preserve this life. Created life is life that in relation to both life and death is placed wholly in God’s good pleasure. It can be, therefore, that we have not merely permission but a commission to perform the sacrifice which all creation, ourselves included, owes to its Creator in all its temporal existence. It can be that our own will to live in one of its components must be the instrument to make this offering, just as the world too, from the Bengal tiger to the race of bacteria, seems to be full of an alien will to live which makes us the sacrifice. While recognizing the serious concern of sentimentalists and fanatics in this area, we must say to all of them that we cannot defame the Creator as a blunderer, as Marcion did, and as the poet C. Spitteler has very impressively done in our own day,26 and as all consistent apostles of the protection of animals do in fact and practice. We cannot attack the will in virtue of which creaturely life, as we first laid down in relation to ourselves, is always life and death, becoming and decaying; ⌜in virtue of which the big fish does not greet the little fish but eats it;⌝ in virtue of which the perfection of creation is to be sought in the fact that in order to be the site of his revelation it offers a radiant vision of day and a terrible vision of night, so that being is always a struggle for being, or better, an offering of being. With the same obedience with which we may not ourselves evade this revelation, with the same obedience with which the will to live must also be the will to suffer and die, with this same obedience we cannot evade the fact that we constantly have an active share in this sacrificing. We have to remember that alien life can be only vicariously the object of our respect. We do not argue for any liberation from this respect. We do not plead for permissible exceptions and the like. We contest man’s tyranny over creation: he has no right to lord it over even the tiniest fly or the smallest blade of grass. On the other hand, we cannot help but concede that respect for the Creator in the creature can mean severity against the creature, just as God’s own goodness to his creation means both gentleness and severity.

      Having considered this aspect of the matter, in a certain correction of Schweitzer’s complaint we may go on to say that the problem of plant and animal life, which is undoubtedly posed and has to be pondered, can finally have only propaedeutic significance in relation to the problem of human life. It is certainly no accident that Schweitzer himself did not take up service in an animal hospital but did the work of a native doctor in Central Africa. “Thou shalt not kill” [Ex. 20:13] means “Thou shalt not kill men.” It protects man from man. It makes man an object of respect. We are not referring as yet to humanity but simply to living human beings. Why and how far has ethics to pay special regard to the life of man? I reply: Because only as life together with man can our life be genuine life together, because only as such can it place us primarily before the command of respect for life. Naturally we are not considering here the scientifically verifiable distinctions between man and his nearest fellow-creatures, about which not too much can be stated that is certain and unequivocal. We are starting instead at the point that for us truly and indissolubly alien life is not the life of animals and plants, which on account of its absolutely concealed intellectuality it is hard for us to sense and acknowledge as life or to treat as more than a mere object, namely, an object of respect. Life, absolutely alien life, which cannot be just object, which is thus the likeness of the life of the invisible God and its primary vicar and representative, is the life of our fellowmen. This always places us primarily, and this alone places us strictly, before the factuality of an alien life that is to be respected for the Creator’s sake, before an eye-to-eye claim of this alien life which—no matter how close we may be to the rest of creaturely life—is alone made on the same footing, a claim to be the object of my awe, my piety, and my sympathy. And [it places] my own life with my will to live in a context of mutual responsibility for the promotion and restriction of life which in fact we constantly cause one another.

      We may suitably begin with the problems posed by the possibility and reality that a man may, by a direct and intentional act, transport another man from life to death. In this regard we have to consider (naturally within the limits staked out by us for this chapter) the three related questions of killing in self-defense, capital punishment, and war. If we take the first of these concepts rather broadly (including within it such special issues as the duel and tyrannicide), the three together cover all the possibilities of permissible and even commanded killing. We can only put questions here. A feature of the admitted or nonadmitted knowledge of the command of life as the command of respect for life is that all these possibilities, which may actually take very different forms, have, in all the historical periods and areas that have made use of them, the character of final reasons, borderline possibilities,