Semiotics

The Semioethics Interviews III 175

about responsibility unless we can observe the consequences of relating to

this responsibility in this or that way, in animal behavior, human or brute.

JD: I think the kind of consequences you have to be able to observe, though, are

consequences that are not just in the cycle of animal behavior. They are

consequences that concern the way things^3 are independently of any

observer. That is the difference between human perception and the

perception of the other animals. And it is only through that kind of

awareness that you get responsibility – which is precisely the kind of

awareness that modern philosophy denies that we can have.

MT: Awareness about how things appear to us and how they are... My point

would be that even if we admit that a dog can have a responsibility for

another dog – social animal responsibility – that responsibility, I agree, is

different in principle from the human responsibility we are talking about

here.

JD: Semioethics is just recognition of – a term for recognizing – that since there

is no awareness apart from semiosis, there is no awareness without semiosis.

The very process that makes us aware of things is also involved in the

interaction of things. When they started space travel, there was no debris

from human behavior in outer space. In the early days of the space ships,

when they had junk, they just threw it outside the spaceship. There was

nothing out there. But now they are getting to the point where outer space, in

the immediate vicinity of the Earth, is starting to be a menace, because there

is so much debris out there. It is the same way that we polluted the rivers.

We have to become more aware than we have ever been of the consequences

of the means to our ends – not just of the ends. Ethics has never been

thought of in those terms. It is a whole new framework for the thinking of

ethics.

(The two look into the question of space debris, prognoses for the next 200 years
included – cf. Bonnet and Woltjer 2008).

TO REALIZE THAT THIS PLANET IS WHAT WE HAVE

MT: I will soon return to the topic of capitalism and industrial civilization. – This

is a really interesting book, by the way, and a good title – Surviving 1.000

Centuries. Some would claim that for modern consciousness, the image of

the Earth as viewed from space, and from the Moon, has been instrumental

in giving us a new kind of global awareness. They would claim that the

simple image of our planet as seen from afar has somehow given us an idea

we did not have before – something about being one human race, sharing

(^3) ‘Things‘ are here contrasted with ‘objects‘, which unlike things have an irreducible aspect of mind-
dependence. According to Deely, animals relate only to ̳objects‘, whereas a human – a semiotic animal (cf.
Deely 2008b and 2010) – can relate to both ̳things‘ and ̳objects‘. See his book Purely Objective Reality
(Deely 2009a).