Good stuff. I envy you your 10 green beans and new connection to the ground. At the moment, all I’m growing is something unusual on my shower curtain.

RE your doppleganger, here’s a possible way around the problem. If certain sorts of actions are morally required, the requirement itself doesn’t budge if some people ignore it. If I have an obligation not to lie, I don’t get out of it because other people lie, do I?

Well, obviously you have to do more than just wanting. You have to know stuff and to care, and spending time. Remember that your evil doppelgaenger also cares about his car …

So this is your second order volition about you wanting to do more? But you cannot, like some drug addict?

Good luck to you Jean. I had my own organic garden for several years and produced enough to even sell the surplus to a local cafe - but it was a long and arduous process of building up the soil to good levels of fertility - it took several years and you can say goodbye to half your leisure time for at least a third of every year. My activities stopped when landscapers we had in dumped a couple of feet of subsoil over my beds to raise the level to that of the surrounding garden - I had neither the heart nor the energy to start over again.

My original inspiration came from an organic gardening course at the Centre for Alternative Technology ( http://www.cat.org.uk/ ) and from watching the late Geoff Hamilton on BBC Gardener’s World (his book is still available at http://bit.ly/2Ydzes ).

Hee hee. Good one.

I have to ask though - how tasty can a cucumber be? Really. I have memories extending back into childhood of trying to get cucumber salad to taste like something, and failing dismally. What are cucumbers other than pale green water? Pale green water is a good base for gazpacho, and for that yogurt and dill cold soup, but other than that…

James, I think that’s right about obligations, but how do you get yourself to fulfill your obligations? I think Pollan might be worrying about motivation (though he’s not a philosopher, and not given to a whole lot of precision). He’s trying to help you overcome a feeling of hopelessness that you might get it you think a lot about your Chinese doppelganger…or your energy wasting next door neighbor, for that matter.

Tony, Happily, we have a very long growing season here in Dallas. You can actually plant a fall garden. I know I can do this! I think I erred in thinking the garden was going to take care of itself while I sat inside reading Michael Pollan’s books. Once of my downfalls was putting the garden on a timed sprinkler, which removed the necessity to make a daily visit. Big mistake.

Ophelia, Cucumber #4 was turned into gazpacho soup, which was very tasty. Regular cucumber salad is so cool and refreshing, especially with dill and maybe a smashed piece of garlic. Also charming in raita.

cucumbers: cacik, the c’s pronounced more like j’s. is heaven sent, but from the moslem heaven. It is grated cucumber, allowed to sit and lose some of its water, combined with yogurt, much garlic, and mint. Suitable as one of a dozen small dishes I have served at what a friend of mine labeled as sort of a terrorist dinner. It is advisable, OB, to lift veil carefully when eating this to avoid making an unattractive mess. I have seen women do this skillfully, daintily really, at an airport cafe.

Jean: A good vegetable garden is daily work. I once house-sat during the summer in a home with a large and flourishing vegetable garden. I worked on it daily, and ate tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, squash, carrots, cucumbers, etc. I don’t know whether they used a rototiller since they prepared the soil and planted the seeds and plants before I arrived. That also depends on the type of soil. Since those were my zen days, I found a daily concentration on the small details of the garden to be part of my meditation. As to how to eat fresh vegetables, I’m no gourmet, and a bit of olive oil, salt and garlic is enough seasoning for me. In fact, being a vegetarian, I eat whatever vegetables are in season every day, always flavored with a diced onion, olive oil, salt and sometimes garlic. Steamed vegetables or a salad never bore me, even if I repeat the same salad every day.

I have a feeling that any Chinese with a garden or access to an allotment will work it. They have a great gardening tradition and fertiliser being so expensive they would rely on FYM and night soil. Sod bustin’ for the first time is hard. The Summer has been a wash out here (Atlantic Coast) so no tomatoes but courgettes, broad beans, carrots etc are doing well. Wormeries would be fun for children and they produce top quality humus and the juice which runs off can be diluted and watered on the plants. What they don’t understand about worms is how their end product is more nutritious than the ingredients are. My bible is ‘Getting the Most from your Garden’ by Rodale.

I do a yokel voice: “The answer lies in the soil, none of your muck from Venus or Mars”. Enjoy.

Jean: ‘James, I think that’s right about obligations, but how do you get yourself to fulfill your obligations? I think Pollan might be worrying about motivation….’ Me too.

There’s an easy interpretation of that — why fulfill moral obligations? — which has a lot of answers. The harder interpretation — why fulfill your obligations when it doesn’t seem likely to make much difference one way or the other ? — is tough.

You can say that some moral demands demand action regardless of consequences. You can say that you’re doing it in the name of consistency and not consequences. You can say other stuff, too. Maybe you vote for reasons other than the consequences of your vote, etc.

At the moment, I’m trying on the Humean thought that sometimes my reason for doing x is that people who don’t do x are complete bastards, and I don’t want to be a complete bastard. (I’m paraphrasing, obviously.)

James, It so happens I’ve been writing something about this sort of thing The best I’ve come up with is–if I do x, then I get to say “we accomplished y.” I think I’m entitled to that sentence even if my contribution is a grain of sand. If I don’t do x, then I don’t get to say that. I like saying it, so…

I think this is much the same thought as yours, but with the emphasis on the carrot instead of the stick (if y’all use that expression).

Michael, I actually have some organic gardening books, but what I think I need it “gardening for dummies.” No blather about the components of soil, just–do this, do that. No more than 20 pages. Wormeries–cool. My daughter would love that, and she deserves it after hauling all the compost.

The nice thing about avoiding being a bastard, though, is that you still get to not be a bastard even if we all end up failing to accomplish y. (I might be letting myself in for some negative utilitarianism counter-examples, but maybe that’s OK.)

Do you know Glover on this stuff? Not on bastards, but on beans and villagers? I’m writing about it too, re action on climate change.

And be careful with wormeries. They can smell rather a lot. Anyway don’t put it next to the kitchen window.

James: You seem to be pushing for some kind of virtue ethic point of view: a virtuous person lives a certain way, and that’s that. Virtue ethics seems more intuitively correct to me (and more close to the way that ordinary people reason ethically) than does utilitarianism. You could try Aristotle as well as Hume. But you already know that.

What I was thinking (more precisely) is–I will vote for Obama just to create the possibility that later I will be able to say “we elected Obama.” If I don’t vote, I foreclose that possibility.

If I eat the chicken (that’s what I’m thinking about), I foreclose all possibility of it ever being true that WE saved some chickens. (I’m not convinced by the folks who say there’s no possibility in the first place).

So I guess the carrot isn’t actually success, it’s just being a member of a group, the whole of which could succeed at y.

I think I need to think about these things more. Glover is good…what should I read? I don’t know about beans and villagers.

Are wormeries things you actually buy??

There’s interesting, entirely consequentialist stuff in Jonathan Glover, ‘It makes no difference whether or not I do it’ P& A of the Aristotelian Society.

Wormeries are things you can actually buy. Read all about them at the excellent http://www.wormcity.co.uk, where you will find further details of vermicompost, i.e. wormcrap, and perhaps find yourself strangely drawn to the Executive Wormery. I know I am.

My vote for Obama (now that my 1st choice didn’t make it) is to get him elected, not to reflect on me.
I eat the chicken because I like chicken, not because I am or am not then a member of the chicken eaters (or non-eaters) club.
I plant the carrot so I can proceed to the next step in carrot farming, not because it upholds my virtue as a carrot grower.
Is it necessary to hold up a mirror to the most natural actions as if there were only one choice and daily life was a series of pass/fail tests?

added footnote: I replaced my veggie garden with a second pond and now use some of the water for the plants I have in barrels. The fish poop works like magic and I have an abundance of the ingredients for ratatouille. I also have spontaneous wormeries all over the place.

Oh my God…(re: the wormeries AND rtk’s post).

Er, the puzzle is: why do x to achieve y, if doing x is extremely unlikely to make a difference? Sadly, my one vote for Obama has next to no chance of putting him in the WH.

For anyone who wants to prevent global warming and save chickens from a miserable existence, this is a first class good question, though the three examples (Obama, chickens, global warming) have their singular features.

Go fish poop.

So only make big dents? Is there something besides an accumulation of little x’s that will get Obama elected?

Maybe there’s some inherently good outcomes to reasonable choices without our having to identify them beforehand. Besides, the purpose of the carrots is to feed ourselves, not to do good for the world.

Yes, fish poop is a blessing. I also drain my fresh water fish tanks around the veggies and during the winter, the saltwater tank’s water goes to the brick driveway to help with the ice.

rtk: no, life shouldn’t be a series of pass/fail tests.
Virtue should be its own reward, not a sacrifice. I tend to be honest, but, as my son once pointed out to me, it’s a lot of work to lie and it’s pleasant to say what one thinks. That’s why utilitarianism seems unreal to me. First of all, I’ve never known anyone who actually calculates the results of her actions on all sentient beings. Second of all, the calculations are bound to be inaccurate: that friendly bank across the street where Peter Singer deposits the money he will give to Oxfam invests heavily in Chinese arms companies which sell arms to massacre people in Darfur. The sales tax you pay when you buy organic carrots watered with pure rain water is used to keep the Guantánamo torture center functioning.
Third, why complicate your life calculating so much, unless you always wanted to be an accountant? Vote for Obama if you like him. It takes ten minutes to vote, about as much time as posting a comment.
I don’t comment to make a dent, be it big or little. I comment because I want to.

Amos: I was responding to Jean’s reflectiveness. No pass/fail tests for me. My style is just blundering ahead, not even looking back. To a fault, probably.

Essentially this sort of forward planning and symmetrical figuring is a result of 19th Century meliorism and general optimism. There are people who have done calculations that have discovered at the end of it all that there was more unhappiness at the end of the civil war/II WW and so forth. To have folded before Hitler would have been the right thing to do according to this felicific calculation. There would have been fewer deaths and destruction of property and in time the 3rd.Reich would have evanesced. On the other hand Kant held that the good or evil of the act lies within the act itself, another example of the ‘end in itself’ thinking. So do your sums or work to produce that fine tilth ‘like breadcrumbs’. It matters not a whit what Honourable Hoe Ing is doing. Probably more than you Bud!

I think there’s a puzzle here that’s compelling whether or not you generally approach life reflectively, and whether or not you find utilitarianism appealing.

To see the puzzle, you have to think about something that you do for the sake of a future good. Like–voting so that a better president will be in office. Or–changing lightbulbs (etc) so that the future won’t be too hot. Or–joining a regiment and fighting to bring an end to slavery. Or–fill in the blank.

Since we all do think about the future and want to pursue some futures and avoid others, there has to be something you do of this sort. That doesn’t mean you embrace utilitarianism or that you reflect about everything you do. But it would be actually downright insane if the future didn’t concern you and you never chose between x and y because of their influence on the future.

So…now that we all agree we sometimes work toward a better future by doing x or y today, here’s the puzzle. Your one tiny little contribution isn’t actually likely at all to alter the future.

Now, you can just quickly retreat and say you really never work towards a better future, and the puzzle will vanish, but I think this couldn’t possibly be the truth. As I say–the point is not that you always do, but that in some instances you do.

The question then is–what’s the best reason we can give ourselves for making our tiny little contributions to the world’s future good?

A comment about philosophy–90% of philosophy is being willing to be puzzled. If a puzzle vanishes too quickly, it means you haven’t really grasped it or you’re just not willing to think about it.

I don’t have the panacea for humanity, but I suspect that we’d have better lives if we could learn to do things for their sake, not for the sake of the future, to garden because we like gardening, to tell the truth because it’s pleasant to speak one’s mind, to be just because one prefers to be just, to vote for Obama because one wants to participate in politics (to act, according to Hannah Arendt) and Obama is the best option. To do things for own their sake, not for the sake of a brighter future or a reward in heaven, is hard. Paradoxically, people who do things for their own sake might well have a better future.

I don’t do everything for the sake of the future. That would be a miserable way to live. But I’m a big fan of people who are future-fixers. That is–people working for a future without global warming, people doing cancer research in hopes of a future without that disease, people taking steps toward peace in the middle east, etc. etc. A lot of things these types of people do for the sake of the future just do not have here-and-now pleasantness. Why experiment on mice or have peace talks with shady characters, or invest tons of time and money as a campaign worker, or fight for a just cause, risking your own life, if you’re trying to create a brighter future? So I’d say this question of how individuals think about their own contributions is one that’s real and relevant at least for a lot of people, if not for everybody.

I suspect that we’re talking about two different types of personality structures. I’ve been involved in politics because I wanted to participate (Arendt’s action in the world), not because I thought about the future. I’ve participated in just and even dangerous causes because the injustice made me indignant and because I just plain wanted to participate, to be part of the most interesting game in town. The best part of me never gives the future a thought; the most neurotic part of me is always concerned about whether my health insurance will pay. We’re very different, that’s all.

I can easily see how interesting it can be to lean back with a cup of tea and mull over the mysterious consequences of our smallest actions. Trying to follow the sociological path of a carrot seed in a Texas back yard is genuinely a fun bit of mental travel. But for just plain living, to throw away spontaneity and weigh every teeny action would be wrapping myself in duct tape. It’s not as if there are even any answers. I’m reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. The author explains that a treatment for infertility is to sacrifice a goat or some other animal. Then eat it. Invite relatives. Hey, if it works for the Hmongs….

What we need to look at is the duration of meaning. What remains and is communicated down through the centuries is meaning. “We had the experience and missed the meaning” said Eliot in 4 Quartets surely the most profound philosophical poetry of the modern era. Experience is a time bound thing with a past present and a future and of its nature subject to erosion. How do we remain in the present and create meaning which is exempt from the attrition of time? If action is in time how is that possible? Various wisdom teaching focus on this but the core of what they say is universal - act with all the planning that entails but do not become overly involved with the fruits of that action. That allows one to stay in the moment and enjoy the process or suffer the process and not become continuously aimed at the future or the product. This is futile. When Harold Macmillan was asked by a young journalist what was most likely to throw a government of course he said : “Events dear boy, events”.

mr: Am I missing something or does “act with all the planning that entails but do not become overly involved with the fruits of that action” mean what every runner says over and over again before the race - train wisely and hard, but if you don’t win, that’s not the big deal. I happen to be saying this to myself all day because I have a race tomorrow.

Yes, Eliot’s quartets. Nothing better.

I’ll put in another vote for Eliot’s quartets, especially Little Gidding. I’m not at all religious, but the poem is more moving than reading Dawkins. Anyway, Arendt distinguishes between action and making. Politics, for her, is action or acting in the world, as, according to her, it was for the Greeks. Contemporary society sees politics as making, as creating a better world, which, according to Arendt, is a mistake, a mistake leading to technocratic nightmares, to projects as disastrous as communism or nation-building in Iraq. Action, on the other hand, is an end in itself, not a duty, but the pleasure of interacting with one’s peers, a public conversation. Perhaps an idealized view of the polis. The idea of politics as making or building a future seems to begin with the industrial revolution.

I don’t remember Hannah Arendt saying that politics isn’t for the purpose of making the world a better place. The fact that it is “action” and not just “labor” or “work” (to use her distinction) doesn’t mean the goal is not building a better future.

Let’s get concrete here. Say you attend Amnesty International meetings. It’s all very nice that this involves “action”–talking to other people, etc etc–but the point of the activity is to create a future in which there are fewer people getting tortured. Or specifically, it’s about a future in which so-and-so stops being tortured. It would be simply silly to keep going to meetings, writing letters, etc., if you knew the whole enterprise was ineffective.

I think we actually know that the whole Amnesty enterprise IS effective. But then we get into the puzzle of one’s individual contribution and whether it matters or not. To resolve that puzzle, I just don’t think it’s satisfactory to say it was never really about eliminating future torture, but about the pleasures of the meeting or some deep stuff about meaning and conversation and the polis.

In the Human Condition Arendt describes utilitarianism as the philosophy of homo faber, the man who makes or constructs. If you can find a phrase about making the world a better place or constructing a better society in Arendt, I’ll eat my hat.

As I said above, we have very different personality types. Before joining various protest movements, I have never given their effectiveness a moment of thought. First, the injustice has made me want to protest, to express my indignation. Second, something in the movement has attracted me; I’ve wanted to become a part of it. I quite often protest against things, in little ways, without thinking about the effectiveness or utility of my protest, just as I doubt that writing this post will have any effect. The woman I live with writes and writes letters of protest, without the least possibility of success and knowing that she will not be successful, because injustice moves her to protest: that’s the way she is. Obviously, in politics or any organized group, one has a position, one stands up for values (as did varying factions in the Greek polis), but one can stand up for values without expecting any result. Probably, it is symptomatic that when I vote, I vote for so-called protest candidates, from minor parties, just so that those in power will see that not everyone believes them. I never expect those candidates to win nor do I expect those in power to change their way of being. I protest for the sake of protesting like Dostoyevsky’s underground man.

But acting to affect the future is reasonable by any standard. It’s not “utilitarian” to write letters in order to stop people from being tortured any more than it’s Kantian or…whatever. Even Kant says we do have a duty to relieve the suffering and increase the happiness of others. It’s just that we can’t use just any means necessary to accomplish that. Does your partner mail the letters? If not, that’s one thing. But if she does, I should think it’s important to her to make use of even a very tiny chance to make a difference. (What does she say on this question?!)

Jean: You’ve gone from constructing a better future world to relieving suffering. They certainly are not the same goal. I do try to relieve suffering, as I imagine, would Hannah Arendt, although not harming or not being unjust play a larger role in her philosophy, as far as I recall, than relieving suffering or making the world more just. Certainly, my partner mails the letters or rather emails.

However, any decent person tries to relieve suffering.
That does not mean that we are constructing a better future or that society is progressing. Long before the idea of historical progress (which appears in the late 18th century, doesn’t it?), Buddha speaks of compassion, of relieving suffering. In ancient philosophy, both Greek or Buddhist, there is no idea of historical progress. Compassion (relieving suffering) doesn’t play much of a role in Greek philosophy, as far as I know, but it is important in ancient Buddhist thought. Relieving suffering also plays a role in the prophets of the Old Testament, who, once again, had no concept of building a better world. Now, is one obliged to pragmatically seek the most efficient means to relieve suffering, even at the cost of one’s principles? Should I pact with Bush and Cheney to help Darfur? Should I bomb civilians in Serbia in order to liberate Kosovo?
Those are complicated questions which each one has to face in the forum of his or her own conscience. It’s what Sartre writes about in his drama, Dirty Hands. Should one get his or her hands dirty in order to relieve suffering? Sartre’s play gives no definitive answer nor do I. Good night.

I’m not making any big claims about the exact nature of people’s goals for the future–just saying that we do aim for future good of various kinds. Sometimes the goal (whatever it is–a new president, relieved suffering, less global warming, fewer people being tortured) can only be achieved if a whole lot of people each contribute a tiny piece of the solution. Then you get into the puzzle about each person’s motivation, in light of the fact that no one person is really essential to the cause.

This is the point of the sorites paradox - how many stones makes a heap and its variant - is it the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. Amos’s partner sends off email to General Mayhem saying ‘stop being beastly to Shorter Oxford’. At this point Generalissimo gets fed up with being unloved and orders Shorter to be given a new suit and expelled from the country. Now was it the last email that tipped the mind of the tyrant or the cumulative force of them all which also includes email number one? Is temporality a snare and a delusion in deciding these essentially mathematical paradoxoi? Email #2 as much an actor as email n+1 in that an exceptionally tender minded General would require only two snotty emails as it were.

In real life however people have personalities, they do what they do according to rules of thumb. They know that letter writing campaigns are effective so whether they have a correct view of the mathematics involved does not concern them. Whether Honourable Gardner Ho is with them or not, let 2 tomatoes grow.

There was one person, group, mood that first said ‘Obama, you should run’. That mood becomes the persona of the group. There are mysteries about group dynamics and leadership and the sense of each person being empowered even though that may be mathematically delusional. Group personas may even become dysfunctional, one thinks of Nixon’s CREEP.

Your garden certainly looks nice, and seems to be a nice way of spending time with your children. But is creating a vegetable garden really more ‘ethical’ than not?

In terms of “commingl[ing] your identities as consumer and producer and citizen”, your gesture towards self-sufficiency represents more a partial withdrawal from society than your transformation into a more complete citizen. The system of production and distribution that you didn’t participate in consists of many positives: efficiencies, jobs, public services. If we all reconciled ‘the split between what [we] think and what [we] do’ in the same way, the result would be more expensive (and labour intensive) food, fewer jobs, less efficiency, and fewer public services.

Would that be ‘ethical’? It might be, were ethics purely calculated in terms of atmospheric concentrations of GHGs, or the backyard production of vegetables. But it also might mean increased costs, a reduction in public goods, socialisation, and the equitable division of labour, which are also good, no?

Of course, your experiment was not a total immersion in survivalism. And as you say, you still hired the rotovator, bought stuff, and drove your car. What’s interesting is that you seemed to believe that you were making a gesture towards correcting a wrong, when there are many positives in what you seem to be rejecting, just as there are many positives in your ‘evil twin’ buying a car. Its not a case of having a car is bad. As you discovered - it is quite useful, and enabled a productive enterprise. Your project to ‘commingle’ various identities in fact seemed to isolate you from the process which made ethical philosophy possible/necessary in the first place. (I’m thinking of ‘social contracts’ here; there are no ethics in the state of nature with which you experimented).

Furthermore, what could be an informal and interesting/pleasant/rewarding experience with your daughter has instead become a ritual and laborious meditation on the world’s imminent collapse.

Jean: it’s clear that whenever one acts, one has some kind of future good in mind. If one gives first aid in an auto accident, a simple and almost instinctual reaction to suffering, one has a future good in mind, but that’s not exactly what people mean when they speak of constructing a better future. Most people would see that as a case of relieving suffering in the present. There is a technical meaning of the “present” and a non-technical one.

what could be an informal and interesting/pleasant/rewarding experience with your daughter has instead become a ritual and laborious meditation on the world’s imminent collapse.

Yes, but there’s nothing I find more enjoyable that meditating about the world’s imminent collapse. I’d much rather do that than weed the garden.

As to maintaining the economy, hmm…that’s an interesting angle. Maybe for maximum public good it’s best to support local agriculture. I’m not sure. Of course, the money I don’t spend on vegetables will invariably get spent on something else. In one way or another, we pay other people to do things, don’t we? There are more and less “green” things we can pay people to do. (Right?)

…one can stand up for values without expecting any result. Probably, it is symptomatic that when I vote, I vote for so-called protest candidates, from minor parties, just so that those in power will see that not everyone believes them. I never expect those candidates to win nor do I expect those in power to change their way of being.

But those in power seeing that not everyone believes them is a result. It’s a different result from the candidate’s winning, but it’s still a result.

In ancient philosophy, both Greek or Buddhist, there is no idea of historical progress.

Not true. Read the Protagoras - famous early source of ‘the progress myth’ - as it is known, with all due irony.

There’s a very good book about the idea of progress in ancient Greece by Eric Havelock: The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. Guthrie’s History of Philosophy also discusses the idea at some length, as does Bernard Knox in various essays.

Ophelia: All our actions have results. No one denies that. Even sleeping all day has results: work doesn’t get done, etc. What I’m questioning is utilitarianism, the idea that the chief or only ethical value of an action lies in its results. As to the Protagoras, it’s been a long-time since I’ve read it and my copy has no index. The lines are numbered. Do you know at what line they speak of the progress myth? However, the fact that the Greeks did have an idea of historical progress does not contradict my primary affirmation that a decent or virtuous person tries to relief suffering, without speculating on whether she is constructing a better future or not. In any case, thank you for the bibliographical references.

Now, amos…you could just say you put it more strongly than you meant to. Or something. It’s no big deal. But it’s always exasperating to be told ‘No one denies X’ by someone who has just denied X. You said ‘one can stand up for values without expecting any result’ and then offered (presumably as an example) an expectation of a result.

I naturally don’t know the line offhand, but it’s Protagoras’s long speech - he presents it as a kind of story (hence ‘progress myth’). Another example is Aeschylus’s Prometheus. An example of the reverse is Hesiod - there was a golden age and everything has been downhill since.

P.S. You’re welcome for the refs. This stuff interests me a lot, as is probably obvious.

P.P.S. Do read Knox if you haven’t - he’s terrific. And a mensch besides - fought in the Spanish Civil War, then with the French Resistance in WWII.

Amos, I think there’s a puzzle about individual contributions to larger efforts that comes up whether you’re a Utilitarian or not. The question is whether it’s worth doing something if you’re not actually essential to the cause. I think that’s still a real question whatever ethical orientation you have.

I’m not a card-carrying Utiltiarian. I have a mixed perspective, with lots of different sorts of ethical considerations all having some weight. Yet I am grabbed by the puzzle whether I should bother to do X if my contribution isn’t pivotal to the intended result. The point of changing my lightbulbs to energy efficient ones is to alleviate global warming. It’s not obvious why I’d get any virtue-credits for doing something that doesn’t have that result. I don’t see why Kant would give me any credit for doing something pointless. It’s just not obvious exactly how the resources of other ethical theories help justify doing things that are intended to achieve X, but aren’t individually crucial.

(By the way, I think Michael’s right to ponder the paradox of the heap here…)

Ophelia: Thank you for the correction. I did not express myself well. I might say that one can stand up for values without the results being one’s principle ethical concern, although there are results.

I’ve done quite a few protest votes myself…knowing perfectly well, I suppose, that the intended message would not really be received, but bloody-mindedly doing it anyway. That’s a heap, I suppose…

Jean: One more attempt before I have to work. I don’t understand the idea of virtue-credits, but are you honest with others because of the results of your honesty or are you honest just because you’re honest?

It was a jokey way of making a point. I was wondering why a person is virtuous for changing his lightbulbs if the result is negligible. Same goes for all the other example. What’s virtuous about voting if the outcome doesn’t depend on it? Concrete example–I go to a social justice committee meeting where people talk-talk-talk and achieve not much. I can’t see why there’s anything virtuous about this. The virtuous person at least has to have some reason to think he/she’s being effective, or as effective as possible…or…I’m not sure what.

Yes - that’s reminscent of a phenomenon that I notice more and more (not because there’s more of it, I think it’s just that I notice it more), of a kind of conspicuous virtue that isn’t really virtue at all. Leon Kass and the president’s bioethics panel is one example - they make a kind of parade of superfine moral sensitivities - but in fact the actual results are harmful to real people and ‘beneficial’ to people who don’t actually exist. The Catholic church’s stance on contraception is another - it gets defended as a bit of heightened moral sensitivity that is beyond most (of the earth earthy) people - but in fact, the consequences for real people are horrible. There can be a real danger in these self-flattering illusions of extra-special virtue.

Talk talk talking about social justice is at least harmless. Sometimes harmlessness can seem like the height of virtue, when there are a lot of harm-causing moral maniacs around.

Jean, it’s fair enough that you to enjoy thinking about the world’s imminent collapse. Dystopian science fiction is much the same thing, after all.

As for ‘maintaining the economy’ - it wasn’t really what I was getting at. The ‘economy’ isn’t valuable for its own sake. The point was that the more we emphasise self-sufficiency as an ‘ethical’ aspiration, the more we isolate from society, and the (social) processes from which ethical philosophy emerged. Of course, that’s putting it strongly; it would be hard for society to break down to the extent that we returned to a total state of nature. But that seems to be the direction that that aspiration wants us to face. And if it is important to think about every Kg of CO2 we produce, then it ought to be important to think about what each step in the direction we are facing will take us towards. I would suggest that far from liberating us from the producer/consumer mindset, such carbon-consciousness traps us more concretely within it; it makes matters of consumption the whole of what comprises ‘ethics’.

Ben, I really do see your point, and it seems like a good one, but it’s just not true that we’ll isolate ourselves by getting ourselves off the social grid, vegetable-wise. We are already isolated in lots of ways nobody worries about. I don’t have an army of servants doing the cooking, cleaning, child-minding, etc. But nobody would think this is isolating. You can grow your own vegetables and get connected to society in other ways–economically and otherwise. For example, you can join a book club and read dystopian science fiction together.

Ophelia, I do think Leon Kass’s “repugnance” article is interesting, but I attempted to read another book by him and it almost killed me. Lots of pious talk, almost entirely stupid. Yes, way too much angst about non-existent people.

Jean,

I think I was quite careful not to say that growing your own vegetables is a complete and total return to a state of nature. And I think I was quite clear about there being some positives to be gained from it; I am sure it is a great thing to do with your kid. The question I was raising – to repeat it again – was about the aspiration to be ethical/carbon-conscious/self-sufficient, and what it would create, were it fully realised.

So I was interested in why you ever thought it would be ‘ethical’ to grow-your-own. Just as not having a nanny is not the end of the social world, having a 10×10 vegetable patch won’t save the world, and won’t remove anyone from their false (consumer) consciousness. You seem to recognise this in the last paragraph of your post, and yet don’t seem to have reflected on this kind of ethical idea other than to say, in this instance, ‘it doesn’t work’.

These ideas are in the ascendant. All sorts of practical advice comes at us from all directions – the TV, magazines, newspapers, schools, local government, NGOs, etc, at a cost of £/$hundreds of millions. For example, the UK opposition leader announced recently his party’s plans to create legislation to mitigate climate change by encouraging wide-scale off-grid power generation. Yet there is very little discussion about the wider and deeper implications of what is being touted as self-sufficiency, and ‘ethical lifestyles’. It surprises me that we should be so concerned with what is ‘ethical’ without subjecting what is, after all, a branch of philosophy, to the scrutiny and argumentation that philosophical ideas need. Indeed, subjecting any idea relating to climate change to the kind of scrutiny that philosophy used to be about doesn’t generally yield a cool, detached, academic dialogue as much as anger. Why is that?

You say that one can ‘grow your own vegetables and get connected to society in other ways’, but I wonder how true that is. Industrial agriculture makes book clubs possible in all sorts of ways. If we’re all growing our own vegetables – which is arguably, the ‘ethical’ way to live – shouldn’t we also be printing our own books? And wouldn’t we be too busy fetching water from the well to read?

There seems to be several clear and separate purposes to growing a veggie patch. Three have nothing to do with virture: home grown carrot is fun to grow, tastes better, may be cheaper. The other two reasons are virtue, one possibly to the world at large, which requires much scrutiny and thinking along the lines of the ankle bone’s connected to the knee bone and the … etc. That is the virtue being discussed here as it should be. The other “virtue” deserves quotes because it’s just patting oneself on the back for being good without troubling to assess how good or even if it’s even theoretically, if not measurably, good.

I see the last one all the time. Go to the store, buy junk imported from WhoKnowsWhere full of WhoKnowsWhat, stop by the market and buy one nice, organic, broccoli, cook it to death smothered in velveeta and margarine. Pat yourself on the back. It’s all mindless ego massage. Far better to question, as jk does, whether you deserve the pat on the back. Still, grow the carrots anyhow because it tastes good and gives nice little girl some exercise and fresh air and a pleasant learning experience of impressive satisfaction. Skip the virtue lecture to happy child who doesn’t need holes poked into the fun. It’s quite enough that she plants seed, tends to its growth, cooks it simply, and enjoys the better health that comes from uncanned, unfrozen, unbaby (horrors) centers of aged carrots.

Ben, Why did I every think it would be ethical to grow my own? Well, I think climate change is a reality, and I think theoretically you could reduce your CO2 emissions by having a vegetable garden. Especially if your alternative is buying vegetables grown far away.

Are there social costs such as increased isolation? I doubt it. I don’t have any meaningful conversations with people at the grocery store Pollan says if I did a good job of it, I’d have extras to give away to my neighbors.

I think you’re right that a really extreme sort of Walden pond environmentalism might leave each person with less than “the good life.” If I were utterly “die hard” I might not be able to participate in a book club, what with the drive back and forth. I couldn’t go visit my family 1500 miles from here. But…I don’t hear any environmentalists telling people to go that far.

rtk, The little girl in question is super-green. Last year she got elected to elementary school student council and at the first meeting she tried to get recycling containers put in the cafeteria. This was entirely her idea. She was very disappointed that all the student council wanted to do was make plans for Hawaiian shirt day. So she’s completely on board with any environmental good that might come out of gardening.

But gardening is fun entirely apart from the “doing good” angle. We did once grow a carrot (or was it two?) and it was delicious. We’re going to pull everything out and start over with a fall garden, so the girl’s wheelbarrow work will not go to waste. By the way, we also planted flowers, and they’re doing great.

Thanks Jean.

I think I need to repeat it. Of course social isolation is only a consequence in the extreme case of us all growing our own vegetables. But the effective mitigation of climate change by growing our own vegetables is the extreme case. You make it look absurd to suggest that growing your own veg is equivalent to such isolation, but it is absurd to suggest that you alone reducing your CO2 emissions in this way will yield any benefit. I think you agree. In order for it to be effective, everyone must do it. As you say above, ‘Your one tiny little contribution isn’t actually likely at all to alter the future’… I’m agreeing with you, and applying the same principle; the only way for lots of small things to add up to a big effect - ’saving the planet from CO2′, has its own consequences: the loss of social and public goods. (Of course, again, if reducing our CO2 is limited to us all having a 10×10 veg patch which occasionally produces a lunch, it’s no big deal, but the demands of ‘ethical living’ are more than this).

By social isolation, I mean disengaging from society, not simply the loss of conversations at the grocers. Yes, at one end that means informal social contact, but at the other, it means things like culture itself.

You say you don’t hear any environmentalists telling us to go that far. But as I said in my previous comment, it’s no rare thing here in the UK… the next Prime Minister (probably) wants us not simply to grow our own veg, but produce our own electricity in order that we are better ‘connected’ with the realities of our existence as consumers. Closer to home, perhaps, I am pretty sure I read an article by one of your fellow bloggers who appeared to be making the claim that a power-shower is ‘unethical’. Children are terrified into behaving ‘ethically’, thanks to climate-change ‘information’ campaigns in schools, as part of the UK National Curriculum, into believing that the future will be an eco-apocalypse, caused by their own parents. (How ‘ethical’ is that?)

And further afield, the drive to prevent CO2 emissions has much more serious consequences for those already living in proximity to nature, not out of a lifestyle choice, but for simply lack of choice. In other words, climate change dominates the development agenda. If you haven’t heard the demands for dramatic changes in our lifestyles and the lifestyles of others, you simply haven’t been listening hard enough. Ask your daughter.

I would suggest that merely reducing our CO2 emissions is at best a morally neutral act. You’re not aiming to achieve a good, you’re aiming to achieve a non-bad. To be carbon neutral is equivalent to not existing. How can someone that does not exist do any good? Meanwhile, things which are ‘bad’ insofar as they produce CO2 make possible - by economies of scale, etc - social progress; a good.

To accept for a moment that ‘climate change is a reality’ (whatever it means), there is argument that climate change is neither the worse thing that can happen, nor is best faced by mitigating it: social progress is a better protection from climate change even than the climate not changing.

Ben Pile:
You appear to be worried about industrial farmers. So am I. (a) They are not very industrial for it has been established that small back garden plots and allotments are 20 times more productive with far less use of inputs. You must be aware that the humble spud has more energy put into it than is got out of it by humans. That’s daft.
(b) They pollute on a grand scale.

You are echoing the worry of Jean’s and Pollan’s that an isolated little effort may be nothing more than a feelgood token whilst at the same time asking what if everybody did this. I started gardening long before there was any talk of CO2 and for me the beauty of it is growing tasty vegetables. Tonight I had tasty petit pois and courgettes. No waste and if there is some left over it goes into the compost heap. At the local Green School the children keep an organic patch. It’s all positive, no doom and gloom just bloom.

Reducing something which is known to be harmful using methods which are beneficial must be sound practice.

Ben: Although, living in an apartment, I don’t grow my own vegetables, I am a socially isolated person.
I work through internet as a translator; I rarely vote; I don’t watch TV; I speak to few people in the course of a day besides the usual formalities (hello, etc.); I don’t share the interests of most of my neighbors: football, the latest scandal, the latest fashion. What is ethically wrong with being socially isolated? Several great philosophers lived extremely isolated lives: Spinoza, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein among them. I’m not claiming to be a great philosopher, by the way.

Jean: Thoreau’s social isolation at Walden, far from
not being a good life, appears like one to me. In addition, Thoreau’s isolation produced a work on civil disobedience used by both Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Finally, you never answered my question as to whether you were honest because of the results that honesty produces or for the sake of honesty. Are you loyal to your friends because of the results that loyalty produces or for the sake of loyalty?

you never answered my question as to whether you were honest because of the results that honesty produces or for the sake of honesty.

I think we can see honesty as a type of thing that’s inherently good, or at least some people see it that way. But changing to low-energy light bulbs, recycling, planting a garden, etc. aren’t things that seem inherently good. So the worry about making a difference arises particularly acutely. If I’m honest just to be honest (sometimes I am, sometimes not), I could still think the lightbulbs, etc. have to have a rationale in terms of contributing to future good.

OK, maybe I wrote off Thoreau too quickly. I was trying to concede as much as I could to get to my main reaction to Ben…which is that isolation is a very remote worry for most of us, if it’s a worry at all.

Jean: Actually, ethics is awfully complicated, and I don’t think that any one doctrine, utilitarianism or virtue ethics, can account for all the ways and reasons we make ethical decisions: ethics is like Wittgenstein’s description of language as a city with crooked streets, straight streets, wide and narrrow ones, alleys that go nowhere and highways. One simple distinction is between virtues like honesty and loyalty which for most people are virtues in themselves (most people see honesty and loyalty as signs of a good character, whatever the results) and virtues (buying ecological lightbulbs and other ecological products) which are virtuous because of their result.

Michael, you claim that ’small back garden plots and allotments are 20 times more productive with far less use of inputs’. I doubt that very much. You have clearly neglected labour as part of your calculation - a tendency amongst advocates of self-sufficiency - whereas it was an input that Jean recognised very well. Consequently there is an ‘ethical’ dimension that you’ve missed here; I believe that it is ‘ethical’ to create alternatives to manual labour, so that people are not forced into back-breaking work. If people want such work, they are free to express themselves as they wish - as you are - in their gardens/allotments. If growing your own is what floats your boat, more power to your elbows. Don’t pretend that it’s ‘virtuous’, however, other than for any reason than is a passion of yours.

Amos. I think you’ve misunderstood what I mean by ‘isolation’. I will admit to putting something that I do not have a complete grasp of, and am ‘experimenting with’ (hopefully in the spirit of this ‘blog) very clearly.

Firstly, though, to address your point. Your isolation is (apparently) a choice you have made about the way to live your life. Industrial society gives you that choice. I am not making any kind of value judgement about the expression of your choice. I think it is a good thing that you are able to choose - as Michael is - to live your life as you see fit, and I am pleased for you that you are able to choose.

When I am talking about self-sufficiency and the withdrawal from society on the basis that it will reduce CO2 emissions, I am talking about the loss of the dynamic out of which grew and more importantly, *advanced*, society and culture - including, of course, ethical philosophy. I too doubt that even an entirely self-sufficient society would see a return of humans to the state of nature, but it is fairly clear that the conditions of such a society produce its own quasi-ethical systems. If you continued your solitary existence in such a culture, you might find yourself at the wrong end of a ducking-chair, or tied to a steak in the middle of a bone fire.

On the other hand, industrial society - the thing that we seem to be rejecting - has created the conditions for much more contemplation with regard to ethical matters. Right and wrong are no longer matters of simple day-to-day necessity. Countless social interactions and new technological possibilities create constant challenges to the idea of right and wrong and more sophisticated reasoning ensues. Ethical questions are no longer (until environmentalism, that is) the subject of orthodoxies issued by institutions such as the church. Necessity and superstition no longer form the basis of our ethical systems. We can challenge the ethics which maintained the social systems of old. Yet now we seem to be rejecting all of this. We now buy (literally – buy) into ethical systems which bear a resemblance to the ethics of the old European feudal orders. It is becoming the organising principle of political movements, and other agencies that are in the business of deciding what kind of world tomorrow ought to be. Of course, there is the ‘science’, which promises doom for our ‘unethical’ lifestyles. But science used to be about overcoming the inevitability of nature, and challenged old orthodoxies. Now science seems to be the basis of our ethical systems, rather than the dynamic which drove their progressive transformation. I can’t help feeling that this is deeply, deeply backward, illiberal, and dangerous. Ethical philosophy ought to be liberating.

Jean, I don’t think you’ve understood what I mean by isolation. It’s not a ‘bad’ in itself, as far as my point goes. Yes, of course, maintaining a vegetable garden and using energy saving light bulbs are pretty innocuous. I am talking about what happens if we universalise the ethic of self-sustainability (on the basis that it reduces CO2 emissions), or what the consequences are when we ‘all do our bit’ to the extent that it would yield some environmental benefit (assuming that it would). In the first case, I believe that it fails because it is at odds with a more universal principle. On the consequential point, I believe that it would not serve the greater good.

Apologies for the absurdly long comment.

Ben, I think a person who goes in for Kantian universalizability is going to be be a pretty decent environmentalist. Let’s say I continue exactly my lifestyle. I’ve read that the average person in the US produces 34 times the emissions that people do in developing countries. Putting it another way, you can think of your lifestyle in terms of the number of earths that would have to exist if everyone had the same lifestyle. A website will give you your earth-rating. Mine, if I recall, was 2 or 3. Thus, my current lifestyle is very clearly not universalizable. Even if I had a great vegetable garden, recycled, changed lightbulbs and bought a Prius, sad to say, my lifestyle would still not be universalizable, for various reason. I actually need to do even more. So no measures that are under discussion in this thread would worry a Kant-inspired environmentalist. If anyone proposes that everyone should withdraw Thoreau-style into his little green cave, then we can start to worry that Kant would disapprove, but to worry today, when the danger is obviously climate change and not over-isolation, just seems perverse.

I would add to the unnecessary worry of isolation, Ben’s concern about ” …. it is ‘ethical’ to create alternatives to manual labour, so that people are not forced into back-breaking work. ” That 10×10 garden plot is manual labour?

RTK and JK continue to miss the point. This is perhaps a problem of drawing upon people’s personal efforts to behave ‘ethically’.

Self-sufficiency is antithetical to social interdependence. They cannot both be universalised. Yes, the objective of various deep ecologists is self-sufficiency over society, but it’s not them I would bother having a discussion with. I believed that, as ethical philosophers, we would agree that ethical philosophy is a product of interdependence, and indeed, for better or worse, a product of industrial society. Perhaps I was mistaken. It doesn’t matter whether or not Jean’s garden is, practically speaking, universalisable, the question is whether self-sufficiency is something we would want to universalise. Or perhaps she is being disingenuous?

“to worry today, when the danger is obviously climate change and not over-isolation, just seems perverse”

The point I was making was that i) in order to confront climate change through such self-sufficiency, you would necessarily cause withdrawal from society; you would necessarily precipitate the problem I have outlined. As you have pointed out, you need to do more withdrawing, and so do many more people in order to achieve any effect. ii) That such wide-scale withdrawal from society leaves us less protected from climate change. As I explain elsewhere, mitigation of climate change by rolling back the very thing which protects us from the climate is like shooting yourself in the foot to mitigate the effects of shooting yourself in the foot.

“That 10×10 garden plot is manual labour?”

Of course it’s manual labour. Unless you get robots or the garden fairies to do it with magic. The fact that it is a trivial amount of manual labour is irrelevant to the discussion about the ‘ethics’ of tackling climate change through schemes which demand more and more manual labour. The point – which you surely recognise – is that to make a significant reduction in CO2 emissions, a great deal more manual labour needs to be done.

Ben, Sorry, but you do have to answer the point that our present lifestyle is not universalizable. You can’t keep saying people are missing your point. They’re not.

We’re not talking, are we, about the universalisation of a lifestyle, but the univeralisation of principles, from which lifestyles emerge?

I’m not making any claim that the way in which our lives are lead should not be scrutinised, nor that there are no problems with the ideas that underpin our lifestyles. I am suggesting, however, that the analysis given by the advocates of action to mitigate climate change is worse than the status quo. There is rather a lot of baby in that bathwater. The solution might be worse than the problem.

If there is a problem, then clearly, it is one that is substantially solved by the very thing which causes it. I am suggesting here that climate change might be a small price to pay for the benefits of industrial society.

“I am suggesting here that climate change might be a small price to pay for the benefits of industrial society.”
Let’s turn to the next chapter: Hello Climate Change, Goodbye Industrial Society. As well as the rest of society, including all the individuals.

Now, if you’ll just hand that shovel you’ve been leaning on all day to this little green girl, she can make quick work of that job. And back to the couch you go for a bit more sprouting.

Even if climate change is exaggerated certain things that are enjoined by the green movement would be practical and prudent. Recycling has always been with us as have kitchen gardens, bringing back glass bottles, switching off lights, fuel economy, buying only what you will actually use etc.

Now there’s a certain sort of person generally found in America who describes himself as a conservative and who considers all this to be enjoinment by liberals who are wrong about everything. That’s a foolish error all the more so because prudence is a central trait of the conservative mind. Is there a fall back position if we run short or more short of fossil fuel is a question that we need to consider as part of good housekeeping. All these are ordinary everyday practical issues that we can decide on without having a theory about the Good. Following the line of prudence we will be ahead whether or not the denial of climate change turns out to be the methane generated by hobby horse dung. Ideally we might never know for sure.

Michael, Indeed on all fronts.

Today we take the first steps toward the fall garden, namely pulling out the biggest weed in Texas. It is roughly 7 feet tall. I’m afraid I’m not kidding. Don’t worry, we won’t make the young green girl do the digging.

Poke weed? It can take over the earth while it is still only lukewarm.

“Let’s turn to the next chapter: Hello Climate Change, Goodbye Industrial Society. As well as the rest of society, including all the individuals.”

That claim has no rational basis whatsoever. Whatever ’science says’ about climate change, it is not that. And plenty of very well respected, non-sceptical, in-favour-of-Kyoto, climate scientists are on the record saying that even more moderate statements about the future than that are inaccurate, inappropriate, misleading, and ‘unethical’.

For example, Professor Mike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and former Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, wrote, following statements about ‘tipping points’ made by Tony Blair,

“The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year’s global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To state that climate change will be “catastrophic” hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.”

Michael: “Even if climate change is exaggerated certain things that are enjoined by the green movement would be practical and prudent. Recycling [… efficiency… etc]”

No one is arguing against efficiency or recycling. And neither are pertinent to the discussion of the principle of self-sufficiency according to Kantian or utilitarian schools of thought. Also not at all relevant is your discussion of American conservatives, and the matter of resource depletion. They are diversions.

“Following the line of prudence we will be ahead…”

That rather depends on what ‘prudence’ entails. It is not prudent to roll back the mechanisms which protect us from climate in order to protect ourselves from the effects of climate. As I said before, it is like shooting oneself in the foot to mitigate the effects of shooting oneself in the foot.

I notice that JK is silent on the matter of the universalisation of self-sufficiency.

Ben, I am silent because I don’t think you’ve replied seriously to my argument. You dodged it with a superficial distinction between a lifestyle and a policy. The policy behind the current lifestyle in western countries is “live as if there were no tomorrow.” Obviously, it would be impossible for everyone to have that policy, if they had the resources that we do. Do check out the website I linked to before–the one that tells you how many planet earths there would need to be if everyone lived the western lifestyle. It’s the policy of living as if there’s no tomorrow that ought to come under scrutiny first. Reason: it’s a reality. Instead of discussing it, you are insisting on examining a policy that’s rare and not the issue–the policy of total self-sufficiency.

Ben: No one wants to throw out the baby with the bath-water, except possibly a group of environmental fanatics who are not represented in this blog so far.
We all want to keep the good things from technological society. The question is what things can we preserve without a disaster, which will affect, as always, the poorest people in the world most.
Since the science or art, if you wish, of dealing with climate change is relatively new, no one has calculated exactly whether growing your food, if you have space for a garden, is a better solution than, say, eating locally grown fruits and vegetables. We’re just beginning to feel our way towards viable solutions, and we’re bound to make some mistakes in the first steps of the process. For example, do I need a big computer screen? Do I need a computer with multi-media? How much energy does a bigger screen involve? I have no idea. Does the energy saved by buying product X online instead of going to buy it in a car offset the damage done by having a giant computer screen (actually, I have a notebook)? Questions and questions, but as Jean says, it’s impossible to universalize the current western use of energy. Forgive us our clumsy errors, including possibly home gardens, in our search for sustainable uses of energy.

Jean,

When you characterise today’s ‘ethic’, as it were, as ‘living as though there were no tomorrow’, you make the mistake of looking through your own ideas to form a critique of another. Instead of saying anything meaningful about what you hope to challenge, you unfortunately mischaracterise it. And it’s a rather woefully poor description of what’s going on in the world.

Trying to make some sense of what you have written, it appears to be a complaint about capitalism through the prism of ‘sustainability’. Neo Malthusianism.

This intersects with our discussion about self-sufficiency and the withdrawal from industrial society. One problem with Malthusianism is that the more primitive the lifestyles of the society, the closer its members are to Malthusian traps. In other words, the more ‘sustainable’ your lifestyle, the more prone you are to the whims of nature. Those ‘renewables’ are only renewed at a limited, variable rate. The demand that we live ‘sustainable’ lives is a demand that we live life according to what a spreadsheet tells us. Forget Kant. Forget Mill. Ethical philosophy seminars of the future will instruct philosophy students how to use Excel. (Maybe that is the direction of consequentialism anyway).

I know the site you are referring to. And it doesn’t move me. One of the organising principles of today’s world is that scarcity creates an incentive for a shift in forms of production. There is an argument to be had about the ‘ethics’ of this organising principle, certainly; is it ‘good’, or could something else be better. But there is no question that it works. Unfortunately, your criticism of it seems to amount to no more than ‘it doesn’t work’. But clearly it does; we’re not actually running out of anything that cannot, in the medium term, be replaced through some other substance, and there is no reason to believe that, in the long term, we won’t continue to find alternatives. We are really quite good, thanks to our combined efforts (a product of our interdependence, rather than self-sufficiency) at finding newer and more efficient ways of doing things. The gains made in the respect turn into increasing standards of living, and cleaner, more hospitable human environments. That’s ‘ethical’, right?

On the other matter relating to ‘sustainability’: our outputs which are absorbed (or not absorbed) by the biosphere, such as CO2. Nobody, even in this ‘crazy’ set up, imagines a future for fossil fuels ad infinitum. There are concerted efforts to find alternatives, and there were well before environmentalists demanded that we change our methods of energy production. We could discuss whether or not there was enough of an effort; I’d probably agree that there isn’t. But such research should progress on the basis that better forms of energy production should happen because it will make human lives better, not because they promise to save human lives from a fictional catastrophe, otherwise, we are being blackmailed, not doing ethical philosophy. We should be looking at ways of increasing our capacity to generate energy, not ways of restricting its use. It is, after all, ‘ethical’ to look for ways that will improve people’s lives. Isn’t it?

I think that sustainability is not subject to the scrutiny that it ought to be. We take it for granted that it is ‘ethical’. Yet actually, it might not be at all good, either from a Kantian, or Utilitarian perspective. As a principle, it can be used to arm some retrogressive social ideas. And it has, in various parts of the world, stalled the development process. I am sure that it also holds up technological progress as it becomes the predominant organising principle.

“The question is what things can we preserve without a disaster, which will affect, as always, the poorest people in the world most.”

Then the question ought to be, ‘how can we abolish poverty’. That is the ethical question. Offering poor people gestures that only promise to slightly change the weather is an insult, especially when it’s done under the pretence that it’s ‘ethical’.

“as Jean says, it’s impossible to universalize the current western use of energy”

On the contrary. According to your own statement, universalising the current Western use of energy would clearly go a great way to solving the major problem of climate change for its effect on the poorest people.

One of the organising principles of today’s world is that scarcity creates an incentive for a shift in forms of production. There is an argument to be had about the ‘ethics’ of this organising principle, certainly; is it ‘good’, or could something else be better. But there is no question that it works…we’re not actually running out of anything that cannot, in the medium term, be replaced through some other substance…

But in the short term there are famines; there are famines right now; if there are famines, there is certainly question that it works - if there are famines, it doesn’t work. (It’s not always self-evident what causes a particular famine, but we can be pretty sure that at least local scarcity does, by definition, so in that sense it doesn’t work to allow scarcity to be the mechanism for shifting production.) Who’s the ‘we’ in ‘we’re not actually running out of anything’ and why talk about the medium term when people can starve in the short term? If some of us are indeed running out of things that cannot be replaced in the short term and that we need for survival…then ‘it’ doesn’t work.

“But in the short term there are famines; there are famines right now”

Not as a consequence of ‘unsustainable’ lifestyles, but conflict. If I rob you of all your food, or remove you from your means of survival, then, of course, scarcity is your immediate problem, even though there’s plenty of stuff in the world. Someone else living the Good Life isn’t going to give you any supper, nor will it end the conflict you are a victim of, nor will it increase their ability to help you. What is self evident is that we have the means to end poverty. The green revolutions in Asia ended ‘natural’ famines. Such are the ‘ethics’ of industrial agriculture.

The ‘we’ referred to us all, everyone, throughout the world. As you might detect, I’m a fan of interdependence. Having a local shortage of something is not the same as ‘running out of stuff’, and we have an ‘ethical’ responsibility, I believe, to ensure things are distributed to where they are needed. I think that the ‘ethics of equality’ have been displaced somewhat by ‘the ethics of climate change’. As epitomised by Mark Lynas, the environmental activist,

“The struggle for equity within the human species must take second place to the struggle for the survival of an intact and functioning biosphere.”

When you characterise today’s ‘ethic’, as it were, as ‘living as though there were no tomorrow’, you make the mistake of looking through your own ideas to form a critique of another. Instead of saying anything meaningful about what you hope to challenge, you unfortunately mischaracterise it. And it’s a rather woefully poor description aof what’s going on in the world.

Trying to make some sense of what you have written, it appears to be a complaint about capitalism through the prism of ‘sustainability’. Neo Malthusianism.

Wow, what a lot of weird twisting you’re ready to do to avoid an obvious point. People around me have huge cars, huge houses, and habits that are hugely wasteful. They have huge carbon footprints. The “policy” behind this can be described this way or that, but however you describe it, it’s a no-no from Kant’s perspective. By living this way and not wanting everyone to live this way, the person with a huge footprint is making an exception of herself. Not good, on Kant’s view. (And do recall, you brought up Kant, not me.)

One of the organising principles of today’s world is that scarcity creates an incentive for a shift in forms of production.

Aha, so as more people come to live as we do, you think people will figure out what to do about the mess as they come to create it. I don’t think that’s a point that’s Kantian in spirit, but never mind. Maybe they won’t figure out what to do. As Ophelia points out, the climate-related problems we already have today are not getting fixed. Think drought in the Sahel region of Africa.

On the other hand, if you’re confident that fixes will emerge as more people consume like we do, the very same thing could be said in response to your worries about people trying to avert global warming. As more and more people have gardens, and recycle, and modify their livestyles in lots of ways, we will monitor the results. We will evaluate whether we’re getting too isolated as we go. It seems like excessive isolation, if it ever comes to be a problem, is certainly more reversible than depletion of resources, drought, etc.

Well anyhow…I have lots of things to do. The idea that environmentalists are pushing us toward some kind of moral catastrophe honestly strikes me as worth only so much of my time, and I’m afraid I’m now over quota.

Well, Jean, Kant is long gone. So his views (according to you) on what is or isn’t ‘ethical’ with respect to people having big cars in this age of abundance are a bit meaningless. He is interesting to meta-ethics.

“Aha, so as more people come to live as we do, you think people will figure out what to do about the mess as they come to create it.”

That rather depends on what you mean by ‘mess’. As economies have industrialised, they have got cleaner. That why, in London, there is cleaner air than there has been for centuries. I don’t see the ‘mess’ beyond the immediate human environment. It seems fairly obvious that ‘as people come to live as we do’, their lives become less messy.

What ‘climate-related problems’ does Ophelia point out exist, which are not getting sorted? Famine is not a climate-related problem. Conflict, and distribution of food, are the problems.

“Think drought in the Sahel region of Africa.”

There have been droughts in that region since well before climate change took the blame for them. What’s your point?

“… the very same thing could be said in response to your worries about people trying to avert global warming…”

Not really, because, as I pointed out, the product of interdependence is the ability to do things like innovation. And, of course, construct ethical systems. “We will monitor the results”, you say. But how do you interpret the results? How do you measure something as subjective as interdependence, and the social possibilities that are being lost through isolation?

“excessive isolation, if it ever comes to be a problem, is certainly more reversible than depletion of resources, drought, etc.”

Tell that to people in the middle of a drought, as you sip water from the (manufactured) cup that you filled with water from the (manufactured) tap, which was installed (by a plumber) in your house (which was built by other people) which is connected to the water main by a public utilities company (consisting of thousands of employees, all with houses, taps, and access to supermarkets), which is in turn connected to a reservoir, which was built and maintained by many people, in an industrial economy – all for the greater good.

Or would it be more ‘ethical’ to have a well next to your vegetable patch?

Ben: To be blunt, I don’t think that we are having a conversation in good faith about Kant or about the merits of wateringJean’s garden with a well. I have the impression that you don’t believe that global warming is happening. If so, just say it. The conversation probably will come to an end, but wouldn’t it be more honest and more efficient (since you and I both have a good opinion of our contemporary technological society) to put your cards on the table, so to speak? This is a philosophy blog, not a poker game.

A few points.

Kant is not just metaethics, and Ben, you brought up universalizability, not me. Kant’s the universalizability guy.

About the African Sahel–there have been reports in the last year claiming the drought there in the last few decades has been an effect of global warming, plus there have been reports connecting the drought to the wars in Darfur and southern Sudan. Al Gore explains the science behind this in An Inconvenient Truth.

This stuff is complicated, but there is reason to think we are already having climate-related problems and we are already seeing that they’re not easily fixed.

I don’t think building a well next to my garden is going to work, but my dentist told me how to build a cistern to collect rain water. What, I should reject the idea to keep myself plugged into the community water system? The fact is, there is no risk I’m going to wind up a hermit, whereas there is a risk the world’s resources are going to be depleted.

Amos–Have a look at Ben’s “climate resistance” site. They don’t seem to be climate change deniers, but something equally contrarian.

Anyway, I’m done…but it’s been interesting.

Amos, you appear to be shifting the discussion, from the ethics of various forms of action to mitigate climate change, to whether my engagement with the conversation represents some kind of crypto-denialist agenda. (Perhaps you believe Exxon have paid me to be here.) The implication seemingly being that I’m not being honest, and therefore am not a legitimate participant of any discussion.

For what its worth – and I doubt that it will make any difference – I started my adult life very much convinced of the arguments in favour of mitigation. However, taking a deep interest in the way science and politics relate made me wonder how ‘science’ can turn into moral imperatives, and I became sceptical of the claims made by environmentalists (as distinct from climate scientists). I do not believe that the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change necessarily creates any new ethics, and so we can approach climate problems in many more ways than just taking it for granted that they must be prevented by dramatically altering the way we live (which is a contemporary form of the is-ought fallacy, in my view). In summary, I am ‘agnostic’ about the scientific evidence of anthropogenic CO2 affecting the climate; what determines its effect on human society is how well prepared humans are for it.

Am I lying about what I believe? You can never know. That’s been a problem for philosophers since philosophy began. Hasn’t it?

Jean. Kant may not be only about metaethics. However, since we seemed to be talking about universalisation, it seemed that we were only interested in his metaethics. I am not particularly interested in what side of the debate you believe he would find himself on today. I was quite happy to explore the ‘ethics’ of your garden from a consequentialist perspective. I tried too.

As a matter of fact, it was Michael who bought Kant into the discussion, well before I was here. I saw that there appeared to be utilitarian/kantian element to the discussion, and decided to go with that.

With regard to the Sahel. As I said, there have been droughts in the region – long, nasty droughts – since well before global warming could have been blamed. So in what respect can we say that a drought in the Sahel represents ‘climate change’? If drought episodes in the region last the best part of 30 years, and intermediate episodes slightly longer, and ‘climate’ is evaluated on the basis of 30 years weather, then it seems to me that climate in such a region is always going to be changing. That’s not to make a facile, trivially true statement, it is to say that the region experiences very difference conditions in any 30 year slice of time. With regard to the climate being blamed for the war in the region, I have little time for such highly speculative and intellectually fragile environmental determinism. The whole point of what I was getting at is that self-sufficiency brings you closer to environmental determinism. You could say, therefore, that environmentalism makes resource wars *more* likely. No doubt there are shortages in the region which exacerbate the effect of conflict, and perhaps even raise the stakes. The ‘ethical’ response to this, then, ought not to be ‘how can make the weather different in the region’, but ‘how can we actively help’ in addressing the conditions which give rise to conflict. There probably is some good argument that the West is in some sense both culpable for some of the conflict, and owes some form of responsibility to the region. (Not, I might add, such that it should intervene militarily.) But how about some assistance in the form of establishing water, industrial, and agricultural infrastructure on easy terms? It’s well within our capability.

“The fact is, there is no risk I’m going to wind up a hermit, whereas there is a risk the world’s resources are going to be depleted.”

The quantity of resources in the ground is a product of our ability to exploit them. That, in turn is a product of our interdependence. While we are busy being self-sufficient, we reduce the means available to develop new ways of exploiting resources. Therefore, the more we retreat from industrial society, the fewer resources we have available. That too, is not merely trivially true. For example, sustainability, as it informs plans relating to the future of energy supply, prevents the development of centralised power generation. Decentralisation creates the need for a greater labour force, given over to the maintenance of more widely-distributed systems, of lower capacity, and greater number of parts. Where 100 people at a time can maintain a medium sized plant connected to a distribution grid, serving hundreds of thousands of homes, the much poorer mean-time-between-failures of tens of thousands of poorly-maintained, domestic installations would mean hundreds more 24/7 engineers on standby, travelling, fixing, at the expense of a great deal more downtime, and thousands more supporting them. It is much more expensive, in other words, in all respects: it is less efficient, it is more labour-intensive, and it uses more resources – even if those resources are ‘greener’. The result is that less is available for the development of better ways of doing things.

So, the point is that by universalising withdrawal, you necessarily increase the rate at which you deplete resources. The way to address the problems of resource shortages are through more and more people, working together, not fewer and fewer people, living further apart.

Ben: I never accused you of lying. Let’s see if I understand your position. You affirm that global warming is a reality, but that the measures that the environmental movement proposes to combat global warming are counter-productive. Am I correct as to your position? Now, most environmentalists affirm that we, that is, humanity, must reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. Do you agree with that affirmation?

“Let’s see if I understand your position”

This is a good idea.

“You affirm that global warming is a reality”

Wrong. I am agnostic about the ‘reality of global warming’. I’d also subject the claim that ‘global warming is a reality’ to a great deal of scrutiny. What does it mean? It requires a great deal of unpacking; some of it ’science’, some of social science, some of ethics and so on. The claim is made far more often than not with almost zero understanding of what it means by very influential people, and is used to arm a huge number of (often very different, and frequently contradictory) arguments. I don’t think that the ‘reality’ of global warming in any rational sense of the expression carries any special *necessary* ethical consequences.

“the measures that the environmental movement proposes to combat global warming are counter-productive”

My view is that environmentalism is a political ideology, which is prior to anything that emerges from ’science’. With or without ‘the reality of global warming’, I believe it is not simply counter-productive, but that environmentalism is a dangerous and destructive idea. I also believe that the predominance of environmentalism causes us to confuse scientific and political questions.

I hope that clears things up.

“most environmentalists affirm that we, that is, humanity, must reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. Do you agree with that affirmation?”

No. For several reasons:

1. I don’t think that it is a ‘good’ in its own respect - given that cutting fossil fuels out, for its own sake, has consequences which are worse than their effects.

2. I think that we will reduce our consumption on fossil fuels, as alternatives are created which provide cheaper and more abundant energy. Searching for alternatives is a good thing, in its own right, not because a switch is necessary.

3. I think that we ought to be finding new ways of producing energy which increase its abundance, for the sake of living better lives. If fossil fuels offer that in the present, I am happy to weight the environmental consequences of that against its social benefit. And fossil fuels create far more benefit than cost.

4. I am not ‘opposed’ to ‘renewables’ on any matter of principle. I am, for example, interested in the idea that an area the size of the Sahara, paved with solar panels, would provide more than enough energy to power today’s world. If such a thing would be an economic and practical alternative to fossil-fuel use, I would struggle to find an argument against it.

Energy is the mother of all material resources. With sufficient energy, all other resource problems become matters of engineering. We could irrigate every part of the world, we could have fantastic transport infrastructure, we could have high-intensity ‘agriculture’, isolated from the environment, releasing vast areas of land to whatever purpose we wanted - inluding nature reserves, if we decide we want them. This would elevate us substantially. We ought to be committed to making that a possibility. There is plenty of energy in the universe, after all.

Instead, environmentalists want us to live *within* nature, and ‘natural limits’. I believe that this fundamentally precludes the possibility of us taking control over our own future.

Ben: I don’t doubt that there are fanatics and extremists within the environmental movement. However, I tend to believe mainstream environmentalists like Al Gore, George Monbiot and even my own sister, a librarian who, at age 60, has returned to the university to get a second degree in environmental studies. One reason I believe them is that otherwise I’d have to suppose a giant conspiracy to impose the idea of global warming on the public and a conspiracy with what purpose? I confess that I am not a scientist nor have I read deeply about the subject and therefore, I am not qualified to debate your affirmations. I realize that you have put more of yourself into this conversation than I have, and the depth of your learning is impressive. Thank you for communicating your views with such generosity.

“While we are busy being self-sufficient, we reduce the means available to develop new ways of exploiting resources. Therefore, the more we retreat from industrial society, the fewer resources we have available.” I’ll use this as a starting point for many grievances that I have with your overriding conception of self-sufficiency. The use of exploitation immediately serves as a red flag, an indication of the material perspective that permeates your positions of environmentalism and industrial society. Indeed, if you were to plug in the idealized concept of “self-sufficiency” into a syllogism, it would be incompatible with inter-dependence, for a self sufficient being is one who is by strict definition non-dependent on others. However, this overlooks, and conversely stems from a dichotomous relationship with nature, the very inherent inter-dependency that is an ubiquitous quality of the natural world; including homo sapien sapiens. The inter-dependence you talk of, the industrial inter-dependence, is reaching a state of transparent inefficiency, and all the while it has begun to erode the “higher” functions of humanity–mainly self-determination and conscious autonomy. The question of self-sufficient living is not one of seperation, but rather of scale. Why should one be subjected to the whims of global economics and food distribution (let us remember that the ultimate energy unit is the calorie), when the concerted efforts of a locally accessible community can often address the consumptive needs of its constituents. You are fond of highlighting the caprices of nature, but nearly unwilling to acknowledge that the growing response of localization is one to the caprices of markets that aren’t tangibly present to members of a community. Nature, not seen merely as resource of potential exploitation, but rather as an integral component of meaningful interaction, allows, in my mind, for a greater capacity of humility and acknowledgment of our dependent existence. The lack of appreciation for the dependency upon others is a symptom of our seperation from our participation with nature. We have no connection and therefore no understanding as to how one thing leads to another, because we ourselves don’t participate in the process. Therefore, the growing of a garden for example, enables an individual to proximately experience the process, and affirms there autonomy and capacity to contribute to there own subsistence and meaningful existence. To suggest that this makes us incapable of living a life with ethical considerations is convoluted, and in fact contrary to the outcome of such actions; they often enhance our capacity to consider the well-being of others and in turn help them. Also, self-sufficiency is a deeply communal practice, as evidenced by the growing emergence of co-ops and other communal farming programs. This is not a denial of the comforts of modernity, but surely we should avoid dogmatic worship, which incapacitates our ability to alter our state of being. The thinking that there will always be something else that will perpetuate our current states of consumption is the very thinking that lead us into the problem we now face. Industrialism was born out of the idea that man was distinct from nature, that our exploitative powers demonstrated an independence from its dictates, but this is clearly not so, and these thoughts are preversely tinged with the idea that resources are not finite, that our state of being is de facto not contingent upon the environment. There is an astronomical amount of information that clearly states the opposite. All of this can be stated without reference to global warming, for it is just one event of an even larger degradation of existence that a field like conservation biology has documented since the 1950’s (and well before that as well). I also feel that your emphasis on interdependency, and industrial society, has two disturbing consequences, (a) it ignores the immense amount of social struggles that have occurred within this paradigm of comfort that you are so supportive of and (b) it dissolves the necessary responsibility of individuals to act in ethical ways. I will end on that, though my own critical reserves still have plentiful content to disperse with. There are possible lines of spiritual thought that can address these issues as well, but I know from previous posts on this blog that that is another powder keg unto itself. One last thing, I’m still entirely flummoxed by this idea that withdrawing from industrial overuse in some way decreases our resources. Again, it seems as if you characterize material as something that has to used, a use of resources for use of resources sake. More sustainable practices maintain the threshold of resources, efficiently cycling the energies that transpose from one state to the next, and this is in no way an anachronistic return to nature, but a highly rational understanding of our state of existence and the environment that we inhabit. I have this sense that you are seeking to propagate a futuristic perspective, involving the inhabitance of other planets, and I say this in relation to your comment that there is plenty of energy in the universe. Perhaps we are headed for the next evolutionary split, the earth dwellers and the planetary explorers. Safe travels to all… : )

…I forgot to mention one thing…environmental protection, and acts that are generally considered to be harmonious or in conjunction with environmental health, allow for greater plurality of actions; that is, they do not coerce others to live a particular way and in many ways allow for others to live as they choose. Environmental degradation eliminates choice because it eliminates the diversity of environments we can act in, and essentially forces people to conform because alternatives literally don’t materially exist. Temperance is needed, and that is what many people who are concerned with the environment and subsequently global warming are calling for. Once the health of an ecosystem is degraded, it takes an immense amount of time for revitilization, a period that necessarilly precludes human settlement. This is another immoral aspect of laissez-faire environmental perspectives; they are antithetical to free and meaningful ways of life because they eventually coerce people into a restricted state of being–i.e.-dependent upon systemic, often mechanistic (technologically mediated) types of experience.

…so if planetary travel is your game, at least leave the planet in a condition that others can legitimately inhabit.

Amos,

Just to reply to your point, regarding trust in your sister, etc. You say “One reason I believe them is that otherwise I’d have to suppose a giant conspiracy to impose the idea of global warming on the public and a conspiracy with what purpose?”

I don’t think that looking at this problem in terms of conspiracies is helpful. Have a look at my blog for more detail on this. Our argument there is that environmentalism has emerged at a peculiar moment in politics. You ask “with what purpose”, and my answer would be ‘for the sake of having a purpose’. That is to say that there is no conspiracy to use environmental fears to achieve anything in particular, but that political elites struggle to find ways to connect to the public in today’s world, and nothing legitimises lame authority more than a crisis. Today’s politics is characterised by crises. The war on terror, climate change, obesity ‘epidemics’, ‘bird flu’. The inability of political leaders to engage the public by constructing positive ideas about the future means that it instead – again, not consciously, as part of a conspiracy – merely responds to the world – especially anxieties – rather than builds it. Various commentators have attributed this to the collapse of the global Left (ie, the death of Socialism/Marxism/Communism). But I think this exhaustion is equally true of the Right. Political movements have had to reinvent themselves without ‘grassroots’, or mass politics to legitimise them. (And this is where the likes of Monbiot step in.)

These political philosophies don’t merely represent sectarian identities, but analytical frameworks that, in the past, have engaged people, and connected world events to their day-to-day existence. That is to say that, at the heart of environmentalism’s ascendancy, may be a vacuum of philosophical ideas.

One final point. You say that you don’t regard Monbiot as a particularly extreme or fanatic. I beg to differ. Monbiot’s contribution to the ethical understanding of climate change is to make claims such as ‘transatlantic flying is the moral equivalent of child abuse’. Such unsophisticated reasoning is not the mark of a deep though and careful argument. Similarly, his utterly disproportionate reaction to challenges to climate orthodoxy paint a picture of the world, that is dominated by exactly the conspiratorial thinking that you are opposed to. His analysis owes far more to emotional hysteria than philosophy.

Jake. I have tried to locate what I think are your key points.

You make the point that I have overlooked our relationship with nature. On the contrary, my argument has been that our inter-dependence reduces our dependence on the natural world. You then say, “… industrial inter-dependence, is reaching a state of transparent inefficiency, and all the while it has begun to erode the “higher” functions of humanity–mainly self-determination and conscious autonomy.”

I think there are two issues here; inefficiency, and the erosion of higher functions. On the first point, I don’t think it is obvious, nor even transparent that we have reached a state of inefficiency. The opposite case could be easily argued. How are you measuring efficiency? On the second point, I might agree with you. But this is a political question about the way things are organised within industrial society, not a necessary product of industrial society itself. Ditto your comments about the market, you swap dependence on the whims of markets for dependence on the whims of nature. You seem to be conflating industrial society and capitalist society, but they are not synonymous. I have no objection to criticism of capitalism. I just don’t think environmentalism is a particularly good one. Especially when you appeal to ‘localisation’ and ‘community’, which don’t seem radically different to ‘parochialism’. You can find deep social conservatives arguing much the same thing.

You then seem to claim that an appreciation of nature achieved through nurturing a garden somehow confers an understanding of ethics. I think this is simply romanticism. Ethics, I would argue, instead come from human interaction, after some kind of social contract, not communion with nature.

I do believe that humanity is distinct from nature. We are able to define ourselves. So with regard to your comments about industrial society’s tendency to undermine self-determination, and conscious autonomy, it would seem that your naturalism posed a greater threat to subjectivity. After all, if we take the view that we are just parts of nature, we could not easily challenge the parochial orthodoxies that sustain such ethical frameworks, and social systems; we would lack the intellectual and material means. Of course, there is also a problem where humans are regarded as simply components of an industrial machine, but where they are, they are sufficiently powerful to begin to challenge it. Hence we see, in industrial societies, welfare, healthcare, liberal values, far more than where industry has not yet influenced society (of course, there may be confounding factors). And I take your point about dogmatic worship of industrial society. In reply, I would say that industry is a necessary but not sufficient condition for social progress.

You are confused by my argument that resources may not be finite, or diminish as we increase our dependence on nature. The point is that it is our intellectual resource which determines the possibility of exploiting ‘natural’ resources. Oil, coal, gas, all existed before we understood how to use them, but they were not resources. And, to my knowledge, no commune or cooperative has produced either sufficient means, nor fostered an intellectual culture sufficient to enable the exploitation of atomic energy. Dependence on nature, meanwhile, limits material possibilities to what is immediately available. Therefore withdrawing from the process by which our intellectual abilities are expanded means that the resources available to us diminish.

You say I ignore the social struggles that have occurred within the process of industrialisation, and that it dissolves the necessity to behave with regard to ethics.

On the first point, that is simply not true. The industrial process has enabled conflict, of course. But the suffering in an industrialising society is nothing compared to the suffering experienced in feudal society. The difference is that industry concentrates populations, and so makes inequality more visible. It is much harder to see a pretty row of happy peasants outside their pretty little hovels as reflecting grinding poverty and unchallengeable oppression… if you’re of a romantic mindset. But that is the reality of it. Industrial society, however, enabled people to challenge the conditions they found themselves in. Challenging inequality became an ‘ethic’.

You seem to be of a fairly deep ecologist persuasion. On that point, and the point about subjectivity, and nature, I don’t believe that it can be argued that subjectivity is ‘natural’. And so, making ethics out of ‘nature’ would seem to confine us to a very narrow range of possibilities, not determined by our own discovery, but by what ‘natural ethics’ (‘is-ought’) dictates. Not only is this corrosive to subjectivity – it consumes us with the task of survival – it precludes the possibility of us ever testing the idea that we are not part of nature. In essence, then, environmentalism (or deep ecology) becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; we *become* subjects of nature – objects – and its horrors become reality, explained as our sins against nature.

Fortunately, I think people will resist it. I am worried about the damage it will do in the meantime.

Yes, there is an abundance of energy out there in the cosmos. Do you think there is any ‘natural’ reason why we shouldn’t go and get it for ourselves, as opposed to waiting for it to fall here?

quote Pile: “These political philosophies don’t merely represent sectarian identities, but analytical frameworks that, in the past, have engaged people, and connected world events to their day-to-day existence. That is to say that, at the heart of environmentalism’s ascendancy, may be a vacuum of philosophical ideas”

In all your posts I get the very strong message that the political affiliation of global warming is at the bottom of your hostility. I sense that if it were Bush instead of Gore who was making known the recent work of reputable scientists, you might be more objective. Your pro-industrial anything stance is so vigorous that “nature” becomes a pejorative in your essays.

A little more detachment when considering scientific matters is called for. Science is not a political subject. Pitting industry against nature is uncalled for and sounds like rabble rousing rather than analysis.

And all that non-stop interdependence! If you can bear the manual labor, I suggest a little walk in the woods. Alone.

“I sense that if it were Bush instead of Gore who was making known the recent work of reputable scientists, you might be more objective.”

You couldn’t be more wrong, and less objective yourself. My point about political exhuastion applies equally to Bush. As I say on my blog, there is an equivalence between global warming and the war on terror. It just so happens that the subject of the blog post here is the ethics relating to climate change.

“A little more detachment when considering scientific matters is called for. Science is not a political subject.”

And yet… and yet… it is ’science’ which is being appealed to by politial environmental movements, which urge us to dramatically alter our lifestyles, our economics, our values… and that there is no alternative, and that if we don’t, we shall witness catastrophe after catastrophe.

Tell me again that science is not a political subject.

Oh, wait… wasn’t that *my* point?

Ben: All the problems that you mention are realities: obesity, terrorism, bird flu. Bush utilized the attacks on 9-11 for his own purposes, creating the war on terror, but the attacks existed. Or are you an agnostic about 9-11 too? So too with global warming. It may well be that some people use the problem of global warming to sell newspapers or documentary films, but the problem is a reality. You are confusing the way that facts are packaged or organized (there may not be an obesity epidemic) with the reality of the facts (there are a lot of obese people).

Amos, you will notice that I haven’t ‘denied’ (great word that), that problems related to climate may exist, nor that even climate change might cause some problems. My argument has been about the way ‘ethics’ and other frameworks are constructed around the idea of crisis, in order to give them currency/momentum/legitimacy. I think we can approach climate/environmental problems without environmentalism.

You recognise that Bush utilised the 9/11 attacks ‘for his own purposes’, yet seem reluctant to see that the reorganisation of policies around issues of security is the same phenomenon as the reorganisation of society around the climate issue.

Ben: In a previous post, you define yourself as an agnostic about global warming. So that’s a bit different than my position on Bush and terrorism. I’m not an agnostic about terrorism: terrorism is a reality.
I believe that Bush has used the theme of terrorism for his own purposes and that in addition, he has not dealt well with the very real problem of terrorism. Your position on global warming appears to be that you’re not sure (you’re an agnostic) if it is a reality and in any case, the measures being taken by the environmental movement are not suitable to deal with what might or might not be a problem in your agnostic opinion.

Amos, ‘terrorism is a reality’ is an interesting statement. I mention it, because you expressed your belief that ‘global warming is a reality’ in the same way. But I wonder how meaningful an assertion is. For something to be a ‘reality’, it only has to be plausible. Therefore, in order for the argument, ‘X is a reality’ to have consequences for the way people live their lives, or the world is organised, X merely has to be shown to maybe exist, rather than the problem quantified.

Yet the chances of being killed by global terrorism are, according to some, less than being killed by meteorite. Crossing the road is a great deal more of a numerical risk. What is more, being a quantifiable risk, precaution is a rational approach while crossing the road. It may not be so for terrorism.

Concern about terrorism allowed security to become the locus of US/UK foreign and domestic policy because it is *not* possible to quantify it as a risk, not because it is a risk. While terrorism was arguably ‘a reality’, what drove the response to it was not a reality. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous ‘known unknowns, unknown unknowns’ speech epitomises the absurdity of this approach. In the face of uncertainty, rather than risk, the precautionary principle is unwieldy. How many terrorists are there? Millions? Thousands? Hundreds? We know of tens, and they are all dead, or incarcerated. What weapons do they have? Atomic bombs? Chemical weapons? Airborne virulent diseases? Plastic explosive – yes, but they don’t know how to use it properly, and their most spectacular result was achieved using mere box cutters. What drives the response is therefore not the actual problems caused by terrorism’s reality, but the possibilities that are created in our imaginations. We look for vast networks of well resourced, highly skilled, and well-armed activists, but what we find are rather isolated, nihilistic, rather incompetent and socially inadequate young men, who have found empowering the conceited idea that they might suddenly posses the means to bring Western civilisation to its knees. What a surprise. Therefore there is an extent to which saying that ‘terrorism is a reality’ makes it so. Creating the role of terrorist allows anyone to elevate themselves by stepping into that role. Terror is created for the terrorist. He doesn’t actually have to do anything.

Saying ‘terrorism is a reality’, being such an indefinite expression, means that we can discuss it without regard for the extent to which it is a problem, and how it becomes a reality. As has been said before, it is a difficult concept to understand. For that reason, I am certainly agnostic about ‘terrorism is a reality’. I happy to concede that terrorists do, from time-to-time exist. Just as climates do cause problems, and from time-to-time, change, and may even be influenced by human activity. Pinning that down to something actually meaningful – i.e. understanding the ‘reality’ is much harder.

To bring this back on topic, like the war on terror, anxieties about global warming create a framework through which political ideas gain currency. They create ethical imperatives that are unchallengeable. They create enemies, and stories about the way in which people throughout the world relate. And they create the illusion of an objective, which otherwise directionless political leaders can promise to achieve.

Being agnostic about X does not mean merely that you are unsure about whether or not X exists. There are also the questions of what X consists, how X came about, and what X really means, and what its consequences are. If I am agnostic about X, it merely means I do not put X at the centre of my perspective on the world. As per Huxley (who coined the term); the data are inadequate, yet the appeals for respect of the orthodoxies are highly charged. (How can anyone be anything other than agnostic in the face of ‘unknown unknowns’?) As such, I am not convinced that the truth of the statement ‘global warming is a reality’ necessarily carries any consequences. I hope that clears up where I am coming from for you.

Ben: I doubt that one’s chances of being killed by a metereorite are greater than those of being killed by terrorists, but it is clear that there are greater possibilities of being run over by a truck than of dying in a terrorist attack. Terrorism (and by terrorism I mean intentionally attacking civilians by state or non-state actors) seems exceptionally evil, while being run over by a truck is generally an accident, due to a lack of caution on the part of the driver or the pedestrian. Exceptional evils seem to call for special treatment. Probably, more people died of heart disease in the years 1941-1945 than died in the Holocaust, but the evil of the Holocaust appears to outweigh the normal mortality (some of it which could be prevented by better medical-care, to be sure) due to heart disease.

It doesn’t make any difference to the precaution you take to avoid terrorism or road accidents what degree of evil either represent.

I don’t for example, worry more about being the vicitm of a terrorist attack more than being run over by a truck, because it’s more evil. I take precautions about crossing the road precisely because it is far more likely that I will get run over, than murdered by a fundamentalist loony.

Furthermore, if I worry myself unduly about the unmitigated evil of terrorism, I have done his job for him, haven’t I.

Ben,
I understand your argument about resources, but what I’m proposing is that your idea of a withdrawal is a misnomer and egregiously mischaracterizes the ideas of a more sustainable system of mass energy consumption. To base or subsistence on resources that are finite and demonstrably dangerous to our health (e.g. coal and to an extent nuclear) is a betrayal to what I’ve labeled the higher capacities of the human mind. Just because unexploited resources may exist does not suggest that there is an ethical imperative to exploit them. Furthermore, within the paradigm of a more tempered, logical, and sustainable energy system we may be able to utilize those resources in ways that would be otherwise wasted on the inefficient extraction of their potential spontaneous energy conversion. I apologize if my presentation came across as romantic, but I feel it in some ways mirrors your portrayal of industrial society.
On the matter of distinctness, I’m not making the claim that we as humans are the very same as a grain of dirt or a domesticated animal, I recognize and can discriminate the differences in capacities between species and materials. However, as the distinctions are made, I begin to realize that each is quite clearly dependent upon the overarching substance that we designate as nature. Proposing that we have broken our dependence upon nature through industrial measures is to ignore the source of those industrial resources. Furthermore, our subsistence is dependent upon the food resources that the earth provides, regardless of whether or not your living in a feudal society or a post-industrial one. I agree that there have been great advancements in how we procure our food, but to think that this has granted us distinct control over nature is a leap of faith. You seem to suggest that self-sufficiency is a withdrawl from the great emancipatory ways of industrial life, and then yourself talk of industrial society as a self-sufficient entity. The question is not about a devolution of society, but a consideration as to how best allocate our resources in a responsible, ethical manner. The conditions of environment allow for the higher mental capacities (eg ethics), something you understand but only allow for in an industrial paradigm. What I’m stating is that it’s a fallacy to suppose that industrial society rests upon its own constructs and is not inherently, like all social systems, reliant upon the comprehensive environment which includes natural elements. This is a further problem of this discussion, because the dichotomy is created that doesn’t exist, man and nature. Man is an expression of nature, and it is detrimental to continue to delude ourselves from thinking that we have an existence fundamentally separate from it. This is not an idea of inherent limitation as you suggest it is. Your thoughts of the arrival of ethics is interesting, and something I don’t entirely disagree with, though I do think it again ignores the fact that human history is littered with ethical thought and progressions, and that pre-industrial, and many aboriginal societies have developed comprehensive ethical systems. It takes time for these ideas to develop, but to suggest that their existence is owed exclusively to industrial society is wrong. Though I understand the space alloted here does not allow for detailed and thorough distinctions. I hope that clears some things up though I feel like I’ve yet to clearly state my position, but there are a lot of issues on the table here. I will say that environmental considerations has had such little political clout historically, that with the growing consensus of the environments importance amongst national populations, it is about time that it finds a greater political expression; as this expressions is an indication of its political necessity.

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