Doublethink #28 Planetary Domains

 

Pi is pleased to present another bonus episode of

 Youngjin Kang's Doublethink

 

Environmental Ethics and Climate Change

Posted by Keith Tidman

The signals of a degrading environment are many and on an existential scale, imperilling the world’s ecosystems. Rising surface temperature. Warming oceans. Sinking Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Glacial retreat. Decreased snow cover. Sea-level rise. Declining Arctic sea ice. Increased atmospheric water vapour. Permafrost thawing. Ocean acidification. And not least, supercharged weather events (more often, longer lasting, more intense).

Proxy (indirect) measurements — ice cores, tree rings, corals, ocean sediment — of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that plays an important role in creating the greenhouse effect on Earth, have spiked dramatically since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The measurements underscore that the recent increase far exceeds the natural ups and downs of the previous several hundred thousand years. Human activity — use of fossil fuels to generate energy and run industry, deforestation, cement production, land use changes, modes of travel, and much more — continues to be the accelerant.

The reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, contributed to by some 1,300 independent scientists and other researchers from more than 190 countries worldwide, reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides ‘have increased to levels unprecedented in at least 800,000 years’. The level of certainty of human activity being the leading cause, referred to as anthropogenic cause, has been placed at more than 95 percent.

That probability figure has legs, in terms of scientific method. Early logical positivists like A.J. Ayer had asserted that for validity, a scientific proposition must be capable of proof — that is, ‘verification’. Later, however, Karl Popper, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, argued that in the case of verification, no number of observations can be conclusive. As Popper said, no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white. (Lo and behold, a black swan shows up.) Instead, Popper said, the scientific test must be whether in principle the proposition can be disproved — referred to as ‘falsification’. Perhaps, then, the appropriate test is not ability to prove that mankind has affected the Earth’s climate; rather, it’s incumbent upon challengers to disprove (falsify) such claims. Something that  hasn’t happened and likely never will.

As for the ethics of human intervention into the environment, utilitarianism is the usual measure. That is to say, the consequences of human activity upon the environment govern the ethical judgments one makes of behavioural outcomes to nature. However, we must be cautious not to translate consequences solely in terms of benefits or disadvantages to humankind’s welfare; our welfare appropriately matters, of course, but not to the exclusion of all else in our environment. A bias to which we have often repeatedly succumbed.

The danger of such skewed calculations may be in sliding into what the philosopher Peter Singer coined ‘speciesism’. This is where, hierarchically, we place the worth of humans above all else in nature, as if the latter is solely at our beck and call. This anthropocentric favouring of ourselves is, I suggest, arbitrary and too narrow. The bias is also arguably misguided, especially if it disregards other species — depriving them of autonomy and inherent rights — irrespective of the sophistication of their consciousness. To this point, the 18th/19th-century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham asserted, ‘Can [animals] feel? If they can, then they deserve moral consideration’.

Assuredly, human beings are endowed with cognition that’s in many ways vastly more sophisticated than that of other species. Yet, without lapsing into speciesism, there seem to be distinct limits to the comparison, to avoid committing what’s referred to as a ‘category mistake’ — in this instance, assigning qualities to species (from orangutans and porpoises to snails and amoebas) that belong only to humans. In other words, an overwrought egalitarianism. Importantly, however, that’s not the be-all of the issue. Our planet is teeming not just with life, but with other features — from mountains to oceans to rainforest — that are arguably more than mere accouterments for simply enriching our existence. Such features have ‘intrinsic’ or inherent value — that is, they have independent value, apart from the utilitarianism of satisfying our needs and wants.

For perspective, perhaps it would be better to regard humans as nodes in what we consider a complex ‘bionet’. We are integral to nature; nature is integral to us; in their entirety, the two are indissoluble. Hence, while skirting implications of panpsychism — where everything material is thought to have at least an element of consciousness — there should be prima facie respect for all creation: from animate to inanimate. These elements have more than just the ‘instrumental’ value of satisfying the purposes of humans; all of nature is itself intrinsically the ends, not merely the means. Considerations of aesthetics, culture, and science, though important and necessary, aren’t sufficient.

As such, there is an intrinsic moral imperative not only to preserve Earth, but for it and us jointly to flourish — per Aristotle’s notion of ‘virtue’, with respect and care, including for the natural world. It’s a holistic view that concedes, on both the utilitarian and intrinsic sides of the moral equation, mutually serving roles. This position accordingly pushes back against the hubristic idea that human-centricism makes sense if the rest of nature collectively amounts only to a backstage for our purposes. That is, a backstage that provides us with a handy venue where we act out our roles, whose circumstances we try to manage (sometimes ham-fistedly) for self-satisfying purposes, where we tinker ostensibly to improve, and whose worth (virtue) we believe we’re in a position to judge rationally and bias-free.

It’s worth reflecting on a thought experiment, dubbed ‘the last man’, that the Australian philosopher Richard Routley introduced in the 1970s. He envisioned a single person surviving ‘the collapse of the world system’, choosing to go about eliminating ‘every living thing, animal and plant’, knowing that there’s no other person alive to be affected. Routley concluded that ‘one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly’. Whether Last Man was, or wasn’t, behaving unethically goes to the heart of intrinsic versus utilitarian values regarding nature —and presumptions about human supremacy in that larger calculus.

Groups like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have laid down markers as to tipping points beyond which extreme weather events might lead to disastrously runaway effects on the environment and humanity. Instincts related to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ — where people rapaciously consume natural resources and pollute, disregarding the good of humanity at large — have not yet been surmounted. That some other person, or other community, or other country will shoulder accountability for turning back the wave of environmental destruction and the upward-spiking curve of climate extremes has hampered the adequacy of attempted progress. Nature has thrown down the gauntlet. Will humanity pick it up in time?

A Modest Proposal for Science

Posted by Andrew Porter

For several centuries, modern science has banked on and prided itself in ‘the scientific method’. This scheme of hypothesis and experiment has been useful and effective in countering superstition. Discoveries of all sorts have been made and verified, from the circumference of orbits to the range of elements to the function of organelles and proteins in a cell. Confirmation from experiment seems like a clear way to separate fact from fiction. But it is crucial to note that the scientific method also fails.

Recent conundrums of physicality, consciousness, entanglement, dark matter, and the nature of natural laws have spurred many to rethink assumptions and even findings. Our search for what is real and natural needs a new method, one that is in keeping with the natural facts themselves – natural facts not as reduced or squeezed or contorted by the scientific method, but as their own holistic selves. The method of approach and apprehending that seems to offer the most promising advance is that which consists of a whole person in a whole natural environment.

Why do I emphasise wholeness? Because facts shrink away at the first sign of partiality or limited agenda. Truth, conversely, tends to open itself to an apt seeker, to a method that goes whole at a host of levels. Nature tends to recognise her own, it seems.

Kristin Coyne, in an article called ‘Science on the Edge’ in the February 17, 2017 issue of the magazine, Fields: Science, Discovery & Magnetism, writes:

‘At the dividing line between two things, there’s often no hard line at all. Rather, there’s a system, phenomenon or region rich in diversity or novel behavior – something entirely different from the two things that created it.’

She offers various examples of the same: fringe physics, borderline biology, and crossover chemistry. Such ‘science on the edge’ is one aspect of the changes typical science is undergoing. Other researchers in areas such as telepathy and theoretical physics are pushing the bounds of science while arguing that it certainly is science, just a deeper form.

This suggested new method, that would largely overturn contemporary science, would measure, as it were, by that of nature’s measurements: it is anti-reductionist; it is synthetic more than analytic. As we are learning, it may not be too much to say that one has to be the facts to know the facts, to be a synergy of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’ at all levels. The knowledge gleaned from wholeness is like a star’s heat and light understood, not just the hydrogen and helium involved.

This idea of the ‘scientist’ in tune with nature in a thorough way would be the human equivalent of a goshawk whose instincts are a portion of Earth-wide wildness. No disjunct with results that turn self-referential and untrue. If one is studying an ecosystem, for instance, he or she, or his or her team, must, by the requirements of nature, be of the same stuff and of the same conceptions as the individualities, relations, and wholes of that ecosystem. So much more of the actuality reveals itself to the sympathetic, of-a-piece ‘observer’. If we ignore or shunt aside the question of what is a whole person, how can we ever expect to discern the deeper reality of nature?

It seems to hold true that the more receptive the subject is to the essence and character of the object, the better it is understood. Who knows one’s dog better: a sympathetic owner or an objective voice? If the dog is sick, perhaps the latter, but all the time the dog is exuberantly healthy, the former is the one who comprehends.

The goal, of course, is to elucidate facts, to unite in some meaningful way with reality. Delusion is all too easy, and partial truths sustain centuries of institutions, positions, governments, and cultures. Modern science started out as reactionary in the sense of being hostile to things like superstition or intuition or revelation. It substituted experiment and observation, keeping the studied apart from those who studied. This is fine for shallow comprehension, but it only gets you so far. It obscures another possibility, that is somewhat similar to the communion and connection between the quantum realm and the macro world.

I suggest that deep facts only reveal themselves to a person metamorphosed, as it were, into ways of being in keeping with the parts or portions of nature studied. All nature may be of this type, open to human comprehension only as that comprehension is within a whole person. What a complete person is and what a fullness of nature is might not only be a philosopher’s job, but the focus of science itself, re-trained to benefit from its transformed method.

The hint in current puzzlements is that science in the 21st century and beyond may benefit significantly by re-crafting itself. A transformed method might yield deeper or actual knowledge. That is, knowing as opposed to seeming to know, may require a new approach.

Jacob Needleman and David Applebaum wrote, ‘Unless scientific progress is balanced by another kind of enquiry, it will inevitably become an instrument of self-destruction.’

The ‘objective’ revolution need not be the last. In today’s world, we have the ball-and-chain of modern scientific ways and even scientism weighting our thinking; it would be good to free ourselves from this. But we are confused. About what of objectivity is liberating or limiting, and what of subjectivity is useful or obfuscatory.

Picture Post #52 - The Township

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Hastily boarded-up window 
at New Rest, in South Africa's Eastern Cape

It is hard to know where to begin, describing the township here.

Many houses, the doors or windows have been taken. Including the neighbour's, twice. Severely damaged through crime, he put in reinforced concrete frames. It did no good. They made off with his ceiling, plumbing, and much of the plaster, too. Every second house, broken glass is replaced with broken boards, carpet tiles, plastic.

A resident came round yesterday. Someone tried to batter down his door, he said, when he was in bed. The door was ruined, but they didn't get in. He armed himself. Then a sergeant came round. If they found someone dead on his floor, he said, he would go straight to jail. My host sleeps with a loaded rifle next to his bed.

A few nights ago, criminals mounted a vast raid on a group of townships, including this one. I had two locks on my car damaged. A friend had a window smashed, too. The same day, in front of me, a man flew off a pickup truck which swerved recklessly to avoid potholes, and those are filled with water from broken pipes. He hit the tar at speed, and lay motionless in a storm gutter. I was the only one to help him, and was astonished that he could (slowly) get up, although he was bloodied all over.

Plastic waste tumbles down the hillsides, and recently carved ravines scar the earth. People are gaunt, their teeth are out, their clothes are ragged. Even the neighbour came begging for bread.