Welche Natur sollen wir schützen?

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Abstract
What Nature has to be Protected? There is no doubt that our environment has to be protected against the immense growing interferences by human beings. But which nature do we want to protect or should be preserved? Is “nature” defined by the presently reached state? Or is “nature” the requirement for the human species in order to preserve and survive the kind of nature which we want to protect? Or do we mean by “nature” the lost “intact nature” before the human's interferences? – It seems obvious that these questions can be answered by natural science. But we will get very limited answers, because science describes nature – determined by its methodical approach – as that what is the case. Along these lines the ozone-hole and the AIDS-virus are part of nature. Science can describe certain natural balances, can trace threshold values for certain effects and put them in conditional sentences, and is able to give a description of which risks for the human species and it's environment are connected with certain processes. Normally these scientific findings are sufficient to keep up a particular balance in nature and to secure a minimum of conditions to survive. Questions about preservation of species, conservation of the landscape, or a human environment require broader concepts of ends than the pure scientific description of nature does. – In which way are the natural scientific, socio-cultural, moral and esthetical aspects connected in the question “What nature has to be protected?” to be answered? The protection of nature – following the author's thesis – appears in a complex practical deliberation which includes various premisses. These premisses are unrenounceably connected with the conditional sentences of the natural science as criteria of regularity; and also connected with statements about transutilitarian ends as criteria of obligation. That is why ecological ethics does not only give an evaluation of possible consequences, but gives also a rating of possible ends. As nature is no unequivocal practical dimension of orientation, and it's partial ends are in conflict, is the precise nature-to-protect always a result of a weighing up of goods (Güterabwägung), which has its own rules of preference (order of priority, reversibility, range, et cetera). As these rules of preference do not lead to an exact order, each practical deliberation about nature's protection has the character of a compromise, which can only be reached by a discourse of the various social groups. As the protection of nature does not only mean survival, but also includes a meaningful life of man, the discourse will lead to a social dispute of which the basic rules have to be determined by legal regulations and policy established ends.

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