Earth Stewardship and the Biocultural Ethic: Latin American Perspectives - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 96

thinking and epistemologies, and pluri-topical hermeneutics . To critically examine
the one-dimensionality established by the paradigm of conquest of the people and
American nature, Mignolo has adopted key concepts from Enrique Dussel, who has
led the liberation philosophy school of thought.
Latin American liberation philosophy involves two methodological moments:
fi rst, to liberate or free thinking from being encapsulated in colonizing concep-
tual frameworks (e.g., abstract Eurocentric ethics, economic models, or Christian
credos); second, to reaffi rm local forms of thought and material realities. Dussel
seeks to overcome Eurocentrism and modernity, not simply by denying them, but
also by “thinking from the perspective of the excluded other;” i.e., the impover-
ished communities of peasants, the colonized communities of indigenous people,
the marginal communities of workers and urban citizens (Dussel 1996 , p. 14). In
his recent work, Dussel goes beyond the social domain to include ecological eth-
ics. He criticizes formal Kantian ethics, discursive ethics, and utilitarian ethics to
emphasize instead that:
Having as our horizon the ecological destruction of the earth that is articulated concomi-
tantly with misery, poverty, and the oppression of the majority of humanity (taking into
account phenomena such as central and peripheral capitalism, racism, sexism, etc.), we must
recover material references, since these “facts” can only be discovered critically via contrast
(contradiction or non-compliance) to a positive material standard previously stated. For this
reason, we need to reconstruct the truth of a material ethic -where ecological destruction and
poverty are identifi ed as ethical problems in themselves- and articulate it adequately to a
formal morality -from which we can proceed consensually. (Dussel 2003 , p. 32)
Dussel questions the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism in which the value of
capital is ranked above the value of life. He demonstrates how this scale of values is
in disagreement with the theological and philosophical texts that represent founda-
tional traditions of belief systems and ethics in Western civilization. Consequently,
Dussel argues that it is necessary to re-establish the right hierarchy of values: the
value of life must be ranked above the value of capital. The land and humanity have
“dignity;” only human-made products have “exchange value” or “economic value.”
Methodologically, he proposes that:
Material ethics [of liberation] considers goods with use value to be wealth as such
(objective goods of happiness, which is the subjective good). The political management
of these public goods is the formal practical moment, which is public and consensual
(democracy, for example). Hence, ecology and political economy speak fi rst of the
material level of ethics, but managed at the formal level of democracy or public morals.
(Dussel 2003 , p. 33)
In a similar manner, in his latest work Mignolo ( 2003a ) has also gone beyond the
purely social domain, extending it to the domain of life. His proposal of a paradigm
other seeks to construct spaces of hope not only for human life, but also for all life
forms. This extension of Mignolo's paradigm other is particularly pertinent for a
Latin American Earth stewardship, because both the Amerindian cultures and the
ecosystems, including their biodiversity, have been insensibly oppressed by the
process of European conquest. In addition, after World War II the globalization