Privatization of natural resources and responsibility in the age of globalization

U radu će se iznijeti rezultati istraživanja o čovjekovu odnosu s prirodom (prirodnim okolišem), odnosno o načinu ljudskoga ophođenja prema prirodi u suvremeno doba, te o problemima koji su nastali ili još uvijek nastaju podvrgavanjem prirode čovjeku u znanstveno-tehničkoj civilizaciji i (post)industrijskom globalnom društvu. Sāmo istraživanje bit će provedeno u metodološkom obrascu integrativne bioetike, gdje središnju ulogu igra filozofija, ali se nužno susreće i plodotvorno nadopunjuje s pristupima drugih znanstvenih polja. Kroz analizu i kritiku antropocentrizma kao svjetonazora i kapitalizma kao ekonomsko-socijalno-političkog modela nastojat će se dokazati neodrživost navedenih »izama« s obzirom na njihov (negativan) utjecaj na prirodu i ljudsku egzistenciju te ukazati na potrebu promjene načina razmišljanja o prirodi i ophođenja prema prirodi na niti vodilji (etike) odgovornosti. Kao primjer neodrživosti razmatrat će se problem privatizacije vode (»vodnih resursa«) u svijetu. The research is based on the methodological principles of integrative bioethics – interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, pluriperspectivity and integrativity. The material used for the preparation of the work is the literature from diverse areas: primarily philosophical works, but also works from the fields of sociology, religious sciences, economics and political science, as well as legal documents and various reports. Materials, i.e. literature materials, were processed using critical, comparative, analytical, analogical and synthetic methods. The introductory part of the work contains an explanation of the basic framework of the work and the context for considering the main topic of the work, as well as definitions of concepts and terms necessary for the implementation of the research. The first part of the work deals with the relationship between the British colonial settlers and the natives from the 18th century, their different understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature, and the example of the Whanganui River in New Zealand, which is understood as a living being and declared a person and certain rights are recognized (Te Awa Tupua /Whanganui River Claims Settlement/ Act, 2017; The Whanganui River Report, 1999). The second part of the work deals with the causes of the ecological crisis. It shows the difference between pre-industrial and industrial society in the understanding of the human and the nature, and their relationship, how Christianity and ecology are connected, and the modern understanding of nature based on the works of René Descartes and Francis Bacon. In the third part of the paper, the question of anthropocentrism and biocentrism as an example of monocentrism is discussed, as well as the concept of deep ecology. In the fourth part of the work, the value of water is discussed through instrumental, intrinsic and systemic value. Also, the role of the mental subject is re-examined. Through the theoretical approaches of liberalism of John Rawls and John Stuart Mill, the state’s role in protecting the environment and human health is re-examined, as well as the change in the understanding of natural and social primary goods, and the question of responsibility towards future communities is introduced. In the fifth part of the work, the corporate politics of capitalism and the neoliberal state are discussed, during which the new term ‘corporocentrism’ is introduced, and the example of the British monarchy as a corporation is discussed. With this in mind, the assessment of the object’s value is re-examined, and the question is raised whether possessing an intrinsic value is essential for establishing a moral obligation in terms of biodiversity. In the sixth part of the paper, the development of capital accumulation concerning corporations and corporate logic in the context of neoliberalism and human relationship to nature and natural resources is considered. In order to articulate the problem of biodiversity protection, the need for a multi-view is introduced instead of the monocentric ones discussed earlier. In the seventh chapter, the concepts and roles of ownership and rights are discussed through examples of different ways of understanding the aforementioned concepts among British settlers and Māori natives, paradigmatic wars for water, theories of water rights, criticism of neoliberalism and privatization of natural resources. In the eighth chapter, the concept of responsibility and the concept of corporate social responsibility are discussed. The chapter deals with the codes used to determine corporate social responsibility, and the UN Global Compact code is an example. The philosophical discipline ecological ethics, which studies the moral relationship of human beings to the environment, the value of the environment as a system and all members of that system, which sets the demand for environmental protection, is also introduced into the discussion while referring to the concept of human responsibility towards non-human nature. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is discussed as an example of proto-ecological ethics, and Hans Jonas’s principle of responsibility is examined through the subchapter on biocentrism. In the ninth part of the paper, the development of bioethics as a new discipline is discussed, as well as the distinction between new medical ethics and bioethics, and the reason for establishing new ethics. The origin and development of bioethics are presented through the work of Van Rensselaer Potter and Fritz Jahr. Also, the methodological pattern for considering and solving the previously mentioned problems is dealt with, namely, the methodological practice of integrative bioethics, in which the issues of life, manipulation of life and maintenance of life are approached in an interdisciplinary and pluriperspective manner. In doing so, it is shown that the advantage of integrative bioethics compared to other bioethical approaches to the problem of life and manipulation of life in the modern age is that it does not only take into account issues related to clinical practice, health care, biological, biomedical and pharmaceutical research, but also issues related to other living beings and nature as a whole. The main features of integrative bioethics – multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, pluriperspectivity and integrativity – enable, namely, the broadest overview and maximally effective resolution of the problem of privatization of natural assets of responsibility in the age of globalization. In the final part of the paper, the results of the aforementioned research are summarized, and the philosophical problems related to the privatization of natural resources and the question of responsibility in the age of globalization are extracted and analyzed. This refers, above all, to considering and proving the thesis that the main problem of modernity is the problem of “centrism”: whether the ethical (and then social-political) authority is placed in the human being (classical anthropocentrism) or corporations (neoliberal capitalism).