From Anthropocentrism to Care for Our Common Home: Ethical Response to the Environmental Crisis

Purpose of the study is explication of ethical and existential conditions of realization of human responsibility for the protection and recreation of the environment on a scale of the common world with all the other living beings. The crisis of the environment is the crisis of human morality. For responsible environmental management, it is necessary to form the ecological consciousness of society and reinterpret the anthropocentrism on the ethical foundations. The theoretical basis of the research is the analysis of ethical and existential dimensions of understanding of the human environment ranging from the sphere of the home and the natural environment to the dimension of the common world of people and all the entities. The work clarifies the genesis of the concept of home from the ancient "oikos", household to the idea of home as a "hub", a base for mental and physical mobility in the contemporary technosphere. Correspondent to the transformation of the living world of mankind is the concept of communication and universal discourse of norms and values of human coexistence of J. Habermas, К.-О. Apel, D. Böhler, W. Kuhlmann, and others. The domain of the ecological consciousness and behaviour also requires motivation at the level of human feelings, beliefs, and convictions, which is represented by the philosophic and religious thought of H. Jonas, O. Leopold, K. M. Меуеr-Abich, A. Naess, the pope Francis, and others. As the result, the study proves the relevance of the concept of care about the common home based on the recognition of the value of the existence of all beings. Originality. The study explicates the genesis and meaning of the ethos of the common home with values of love, care, openness, solidarity, freedom, and responsibility which is proved to be the ethical and existential condition of the solution of the environmental crisis. The traditional anthropocentrism is reinterpreted towards the duty of people to be the centre of the responsibility for the existence of all beings that requires both reason and care. Conclusions. The ethics of care for our common home completes the moral duty of people as providers of the universal discourse who represent the interests of all beings. Concern for the preservation of the human environment and of all creation makes it possible for humanity to realize its universal responsibility in the world. The contemporaneous science and religious thought modify anthropocentrism to the holistic ethical understanding of human’s mission to be responsible for all beings.


Introduction
The crisis of the environment is an ethical and existential challenge for mankind. Its solution requires changing the mentality of people around the world. The criticism of anthropocentrism is common in the social thought of 20-21 cc. However, just understanding of the mistake and danger of the conviction, which puts people and their interests at the centre of the universe, is insufficient to change the negative development of the civilization. We cannot take only a meditative position hoping for the autoregulation of nature and comforting ourselves by the utopianism of returning to the primary state of the world's harmony. Mankind inevitably remakes reality and has to solve the problems and environmental conflicts generated in this process.
Thus, it is necessary to turn from the critics to the formation of positive strategies. This possibility depends not in the last turn on the ethical grounds of human actions. It was understood in the 20 th century at least from the beginning of the activity of the Club of Rome, with the emergence of the ecological movements, and scientific works on this theme. Despite the significant attention to the ecological problems in the mass media, from the experts, in the political decisions aimed at the protection of nature, there is a lack of the technological, social, and worldview changes able to overcome the negative trend so far. It means particularly that the necessary improvements of moral consciousness, as well as the understanding of the priority of the protection of the environment, did not happen. In the agenda of people, corporations, and government dominate other urgent problems, worries, habits, profits, and interests. Mankind is not ready for global self-restriction for the sake of its future. Moreover, its significant part is in extremity, solves the problems of survival here and now, having no possibility to project the next steps and to reckon up the consequences of own actions.
Not only economic and technological ability to respond to the problems but also a political will as well as the pressure of the civil society and the consent of the majority of people as the customers and voters are needed for the adoption and implementation of the resolute and fundamental changes. During the last decades, there appear more and more works where the authors offer ideas in the direction of surmounting individual and collective egoism and formation of the appropriate ecological values (Bazaluk & Balinchenko, 2020). Not only journalists and scientists but also spiritual leaders of the planet join this process. The thing is in the responsibility of people and their duty to understand their mission in the world. The clarification of the ethical foundations of this understanding is a vital scientific and practical issue.

Purpose
The purpose of this study is the explication of the ethical and existential conditions and forms of realization of human responsibility for the protection and recreation of the environment on a scale of the common world of people with all the other living beings. That means reinterpretation of the anthropocentrism on the ethical foundations.

Statement of basic materials
The famous biologist J. von Uexküll defined three circles of the existence of every living being as following: environment, surrounding, and the outside world. The environment is a sphere of marking and action. Here the living being fights for the resources and avoids the threats for survival. The surrounding is the sphere where the being lives unaware of it. It consists of necessary elements of reality such as water, air, soil, etc. The outside world is the widest horizon of existence, presenting the universe of all its conditions and possibilities. A human being perceives the existence of other beings as parts of their environment. Naturally, one adapts and includes the spheres of the existence of other beings. Accordingly, at the start of biological research, we have to understand and construct the environment of other beings (Uexküll, 2010, p. 53).
In the philosophical research, we analyse natural, social, and spiritual dimensions of reality and recognize how an individual integrates the world in the anthroposphere as a continuum of his or her existence (Kyselov, Hardashuk, & Hrabovskyi, 2015, p. 10). In own consciousness, a human being is the centre of the visible and imaginary world. In the ancient cosmologies and religions, human existence was understood at the intersection of the effects of nature and fate, of the fulfilment of cosmic laws and divine designations. However, a human being was an aim of those processes. The world-views have been changed but always contained the understanding of human place in the world, the orders of values, and the moral obligations. Therefore, the recognition of the selfhood of the other beings was and remains a kind of a challenge for people.
Human existence is a response to the necessity of withstanding its external dangers and internal disorder. Answering these challenges, a human being consolidates own life, exerts spiritual efforts, and reveals morality (Muliarchuk, 2019, p. 154). Surely, one of the first human phenomena was a home. We are not talking about a dwelling first of all. To set home is to distinguish oneself, to create a safe environment, to organize the circle of own people, to commence and continue kin, to establish own charter and ethos. Thus, people take a place in the spatial and temporal dimensions of the universe. Let us recall that Aristotle clarified the communicative nature of people and put a family in the base of society. Round the families as the first forms of community arise settlements and states (Aristotle, 2003, p. 18).
Therefore, a home is a model of human life in the world. The Greek word "oikos" which is namely translated as "home", "family", or "household" is the root of all modern words that have "eco" in them. From the idea of home begin the concepts of economy and ecology since both are about where, how, and with whom we live. Every household exists at the same time in various surroundings: physical, natural, social, etc. Just in the existential modus of care, these surroundings transform into a human environment. Thus, making our dwelling in the world, we enter into the neighbourhood with other people, penetrate and change the worlds of living beings and things. In those relations, one can be careful or ignorant, feel oneself a master, a partner, or a slave, behave honestly or cunningly. In the family or community, we have rights and cause conflicts.
Every home is grounded on the feeling of ownership and privacy. As Marion Young (1997) writes in her essay "House and Home", the constitution of a home is the sedimentation of our physical surroundings and the practice of "endowing things with living meaning" (p. 149). Thus, arises inevitably the problem of responsibility and justice of human actions. So far as we change the material and social world for the sake of our identity, ethics calls for taking into consideration the beings, on account of which we settle in the world, even when they are just the things which cannot claim their rights.
Human life in own home is subjected in turn to various threats. We can lose our home or at least the feeling of its safety. Homelessness physically or as a feeling can happen and it happens. Understanding of a human as a stranger in the world puts forward a spiritual claim to find own home in a metaphysical or religious meaning. Answering those challenges, we develop our understanding of ourselves. In the course of life, one has to reterritorialize own home, keeping something from the past and opening oneself to the future. Home is understood in time. Here we preserve our being, continually reconstruct its connections. We do that in our narrations -biographic, family, or national, secular or religious as well. Thus, we keep the truth of our existence as "being at home" wherever it is and however we can understand it, in a worldly or heavenly residence.
In the dimension of the home, people bear their finitude and open infinity. Everyone would prefer to die at home because there he or she is not just a part of nature, nor a loser in a fight for control of own life and environment at the end submitted to the transformation of own material substance into the elements of the surrounding. Contrariwise, one imagines death at home like passing his or her will to family and giving own soul to God. I am a person, not just a human species, when able to keep my home. Still, wanting a place for insulation, people also need to go beyond the mastered territory. Home is a place to return with a new experience of oneself and the outside world.
The digitalization of a living world drives this adventure of home further. Contemporary people feel themselves everywhere like at home when keeping in a smartphone, computer, or tablet all the dearest belongings, and means of regeneration and communication. Using gadgets, one is able to hide oneself from the world and simultaneously to open its widest horizons. People change themselves from nomads to "technomads". Thus, today as Oona Horx-Strathern (2017) observes: "…home is a hub, essentially providing a base for mobility -both mental and physical…".
This change of the concept of the home reflects the transformation of human subjectivity in the contemporary world. The events of the 20 th century shook the former confidence in human self-sufficiency, the ability to choose between good or bad, as well as to be the center of the universe (Liakh, 2020, pp. 79-80). The human being appeared incomplete, too much dependent on the inner unconscious incentives and the outer social factors, unable to control own impulses and oneself created technologies. Therefore, human existence found itself at the intersection of inescapable conflicts, dilemmas, discrete events, and spaces. The anthropocentric project of the world turned to be an unrealized utopia and should be revised in the context of the contemporaneous understanding of human existence.
Some of the basic principles of home ethos, for sure, retain during all the times. The examples are love and hospitality. The first is represented in Greek literature by the person of Odysseus, whose wandering for almost all his adult life was warmed by the thought of home in Ithaca kept by his beloved spouse Penelope. Yet the ancient Greek idea of love and home got a universal scale when Socrates rejected to be exiled from Athens and, even more, accepted death as a way to Elysium -the eternal home of philosophers. Love to motherland and wisdom enabled his feeling of home. Therefore, E. Spence (2011) writes: "Love is what provides our true sense of home and helps us feel at home in the world".
Similar is hospitality. R. Winkler analysing various ways of the thought from Hölderlin and Heidegger to Levinas and Derrida observes how the hospitality to the other, unconditional reception of the foreigner is explicated as the ethical and ontological possibility of human dwelling. We open the universe when open to each other. Finally, feeling at home means not only cordial acceptance of the guest. As  includes: "…there is no home that is not already hospitable to the host and master of the home" (p. 368).
It is worth pointing out that the ethos of contemporary civilization has some significant positive trends. That is particularly openness, an understanding of home as a "sphere of co-living and a sharing economy" (Horx-Strathern, 2017). The psychological researches found out how on-line shared space with one another opens possibilities of actions, interpersonal understanding, and "affective scaffolding" of people . The last publications also reflect the productive role of virtual reality in the self-realization of the individual (Lyubiviy & Samchuk, 2020). This leads to the confidence that the ideas of a common home and solidarity can be developed in people's co-existence on a planetary scale. At the same time, there are problems related to the erosion of traditional family values, individualism, digital addiction. We have to mention the "illusion of communication" which is particularly a point of Pope Francis's (2020) last encyclical letter "Fratelli tutti". The pontiff argues that when the distances between people are shrinking "the right to privacy scarcely exists" (Francis, 2020, para. 42). Instead of mutual support "digital media can also expose people to the risk of addiction, isolation and a gradual loss of contact with concrete reality". So, Pope Francis (2020) had the ground to say: "Digital connectivity is not enough to build bridges. It is not capable of uniting humanity" (para. 43).
Thus, we have to reckon thoroughly the possibilities of human openness in the context of the development of the ethos of a common home. In modernity, the horizons of the home were limited by household while the outside world was understood within the utilitarian concept of envi-ronment. Thus, for ages, the indifference of people to the other beings, to the balance of the elements of nature and more was cultivated. Straightforwardly speaking, people must use animated or inanimate entities for their living. However, endowed by reason, everyone should understand the need for respect to other people and other beings. Otherwise, people will not tolerate one another and nature can force them out. That is a reason for the beginning of real communication of people and imaginary communication between people and the non-human world.  (Yermolenko, 2010, pp. 250-251). The ethical imagination is important here to comprehend all the beings "as if" (als ob) they have their voice in a discourse of norms and values. It means to hear the "voices" of things and beings which have no language, to understand their ontological right to exist, and to respond for it as well as before them. That is a social problem because only in communication among people the rights and justice to nature can be realized. It is a call for the solidarity of humans for the sake of the entire world (Yermolenko, 2010, p. 272). On this ground, in the environmental ethics appears the value of a consensus.
The holistic ethics is particularly based on the immediacy of human feelings and authenticity of the experience. As H. Jonas (2001) writes, a feeling of sacredness is necessary to restrain the exceeding power of mankind (p. 45). К. М. Meyer-Abich (2004) also argues about a revival of feelings for political will and everyday ecological consciousness to be efficient (pp. 22-23). With such a supplement, ethical obligation gets an ontological foundation. The emotional component is needed to add to the best reasonable arguments for effective motivation. Thus, ethics of responsibility appeals to the existential experience of care. The meaning of care was explicated by Heidegger (1967) in both ontological and ontic modes. Care (Sorge) aims at the experience of finitude, whereas pre-ontological experiences of worry (Besorgnis) and grief (Bekümmernis) are guided by the persistence of the existent (p. 197). In application to ecology, all those states of mind are needed.
The responsibility and care of mankind for the environment are topical in the present religious thought as well. Religion is still an important factor in society. Church leaders possess sound political and public authority. Therefore, it is important to shatter the fixed conceptions about religious anthropocentrism and consequently about the insufficient regard of the ecological issues, particularly in Christianity. Taking for example the directives of contemporary Catholicism, we observe the last papers of the Roman Pontiff Francis.
Francis (2015) dedicated an encyclical letter "Laudato si'" to the problems of ecology. On the first pages, the pontiff reminds his predecessors, who paid significant attention to the ecological issues during the last 50 years, beginning from Paul's VI "Octogesima adveniens" (1971). Francis also refers to the contribution of the representatives of the other churches in the understanding of the responsibility of people for the protection of the environment. In this context, the pope mentions speeches and publications of Patriarch Bartholomew, particularly "Message for the Day of Prayer for the Protection of Creation" (2012).
Briefly observing the reflections of Francis, let us emphasize the following. Humanity is called to concern about all being and do not posit anything below oneself. For instance, saint Francis of Assisi "communed with all creation … just as if they were endowed with reason" (Francis, 2015, para. 11). It is necessary to deny the perception of nature as an object of exploita-tion and "to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development" for work "in building our common home" (Francis, 2015, para. 13). The dialogue and "new universal solidarity" are required when "many efforts to seek concrete solutions to the environmental crisis have proved ineffective, not only because of powerful opposition but also because of a more general lack of interest" (Francis, 2015, para. 14).
Theology today declines the mistaken understanding of Christian anthropology and rejects the religious legitimation of supremacy of people over all creation. Francis (2015) expresses it in the words: "We are not God. The earth was here before us…" (para. 67).
In various cases, the pope proves: "Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures" (Francis, 2015, para. 68).
"The ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us" (Francis, 2015, para. 83). "…each creature has its own purpose" (Francis, 2015, para. 84).
Concerning other beings, we have "to acknowledge their right and proper place" because "otherwise, we would not be doing the creatures themselves any good" (Francis, 2015, para. 88). The word "creation" in the Judaeo-Christian tradition has a broader meaning than "nature" which is "usually seen as a system which can be studied, understood and controlled", "whereas creation can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all, and as a reality illuminated by the love which calls us together into universal communion" (Francis, 2015, para. 76). Therefore, the pontiff infers: "…all of us are linked by unseen bonds and together form a kind of universal family…" (Francis, 2015, para. 89).
Humanity has to overcome "an excessive anthropocentrism" of modernity which "today, under another guise, continues to stand in the way of shared understanding and of any effort to strengthen social bonds" (Francis, 2015, para. 116). Renewed attention to reality, the ethical reinterpretation of human relationships will lead us from the idea of "dominion" over the universe to "the sense of responsible stewardship" in it (Francis, 2015, para. 116).
The ground of "an integral ecology" proclaimed in the encyclical is the notion of the common good, defined as: "…the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfilment" (Francis, 2015, para. 156).
In this way, however, appear the new impediments. The encyclical "Fratelli tutti" mentions digitalization which brings excessive openness and false communication, "blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships" and growing up individualism (Francis, 2020, para. 43). However, as teaches the church in both mentioned papal encyclicals, consolidation of people united by love and moral good, can be factors of true openness. To solve the ecological crisis mankind needed "primarily ethical decisions, rooted in solidarity between all peoples" (Francis, 2015, para. 172). The point is in the raise of ecological sensitivity, development of ethics of ecology, and effective pedagogy, helping people "to grow in solidarity, responsibility and compassionate care" (Francis, 2015, para. 210). We need harmony "within ourselves, with others, with nature and other living creatures, and with God" (Francis, 2015, para. 210). It means the establishment of a "universal fraternity" of all beings as God's creatures (Francis, 2015, para. 228).
We can see that philosophic and theological views on the environmental crisis coincide in many ways. Researchers observe for instance the similarity of many theses from the encyclical "Laudato si" and deep ecology of A. Naess and J. Sessions, certainly except birth control (Tine, 2017, pp. 172-173). Thus, activists, intellectuals, and religious leaders support the idea of the in-dependent and even sacred value of nature, regard for every life, potential or actual. A human being is understood as a subject of responsibility in the world.
Not "biocentrism" is needed instead of "misguided anthropocentrism" but recognition and value of "unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom and responsibility" of human beings (Francis, 2015, para. 118). Outlining the directions for the contemporaneous philosophical anthropology, Ukrainian philosopher M. Kyselov accentuates the necessity of integration of anthropology, ecology, and ethics because "the thing is in the consolidation of the energy of all the mankind on a global scale, the consolidation which is guided by morality and ecological culture" (transl. by Y. M.) (Kyselov, Hardashuk, & Hrabovskyi, 2015, p. 15). This way mankind will be the centre of responsibility in the world.

Originality
The study explicates the genesis and meaning of the ethos of the common home with values of love, care, openness, solidarity, freedom, and responsibility which is proved to be the ethical and existential condition of the solution of the environmental crisis. The traditional anthropocentrism reinterpreted in the direction of the duty of people to be the centre of the responsibility for the existence of all beings which requires both reason and care.

Conclusions
Answering the present day's ecological, existential, and ethical challenges, philosophy and theology are developing the ethics of care about the common home of all the beings in the world. This ethical state of mind overcomes the narrowness of the modern concept of the world as just an environment of people. It raises the demand to people, as the only bearers of the ethical reason, to realize their obligation to be the providers of the universal discourse of norms and values where the voice of every being should be represented. Christian theology supports the contemporaneous ecology, anthropology, and ethics in the understanding of care and responsibility of human beings for the environment and interprets every ecosystem as a sacred gift of God. Thus, via the transformation of anthropocentrism in the direction of holistic ethical responsibility for every living and inanimate creation in every part of the world scientists and religious thinkers see the way of the solution of the environmental crisis.