1 20 144 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/c89ac283cca67c1d1891cadce5f43e34.pdf 7497b1a142a2ee74e689488a2bfa234a PDF Text Text Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 �134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- �Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear �136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the �Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a �138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the �Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- �140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary �Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear �142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his �Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. �144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community �Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. �146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) �Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a �148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) �Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present �150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower �Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's �152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and �Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is �154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in �Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast �156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will �Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future �158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- �Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring �160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person �Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. �162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the �Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy �164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy �Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- �166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of �Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. �168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, �Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) �170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's �Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion �172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, �Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: �174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable �Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: �176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. �Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- �178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. �Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Biographical Text test Text Any textual data included in the document Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear 136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- 140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear 142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. 144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. 146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a 148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present 150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's 152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is 154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast 156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future 158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring 160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. 162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy 164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- 166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. 168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) 170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion 172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: 174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: 176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- 178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear energy and obligations to the future Type The nature or genre of the resource Journal Article Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">R. Routley</a> V. Routley Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource January 1, 1978 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/1a6f9df968598ef8d62edae0aa4919b3.pdf 14219e5a05ca328939e6d5788eb441bf PDF Text Text IS THERE A NEED FOR A NEW, AN ENVIRONMENTAL, ETHIC? Richard Routley (Australia) § 1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environ­ ment, in Leopold’s words ‘an ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' (| 1], p. 238). It is not of course that old and prevaling ethics do not deal with man’s relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as ‘Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees’ are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects.1 It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take ex­ ception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself-explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. ‘A farmer who clears the woods ofTa 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society.’ (UJ), p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such traditionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure.2 Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn’t a 1 A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits 2 To the consternation nodoubt of Quineans But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeterminate 205 �single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilisation: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women’s rights and drugs, there are competing sets of prin­ ciples. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [21) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man’s relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfcctor. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth’s surface should be preserv­ ed from substantial human interference, whether of the “improving” sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth’s land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and com­ fortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man’s proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect nature — all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man’s role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use,implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used3 for human ends, “humanized”. As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assump­ tion). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer’s polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The posi­ tion may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situa­ tion excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted. 2. -A^ we noticed-(an) ethic is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster.4 An ethical system S 3 If ‘use’ is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature 4 A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions 206 �'^"es - a( SeS’a,Pr0pos^r th«>ry whlch in. is, near enough, a proposit1or ., ~"f'm (1.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which in--.:ludes ( like individuals of a th• . a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set ° of general or to‘other he^er conduct. to verselytypically to its of thers obligatory, or isonf ? applypermissible n’ untableand wrong, what concern,n~ evaluativeOnjudgements of what are rights, what is valued, and !>O forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems S, and S2 contain _different principles, then they are different systems. It follows that any en\llnnmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreover if environmental ethic5 lifTer from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then ,hese systems differ from the Western super ethic (assurring, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed t!ien a new ethic is wanted It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental count,·r examples to 1t. It 1s commonly assumed that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems. principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Ruk I w ,des one example. Directly relevant here. as a good stab at a core principle. is the com111unli, formulated liberal principle 0f the moqified flominan"-,~siti on..A recent for-""•..._ ,/c,.,.M,....,,, ~ lo/,'/ mulation~ runs a, follows ( 131, p. 58}: 'The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, providing ( I) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not hkel 1 to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this prmciple basic (/Funan) chauvinism - because under it humans, or people, come fir~t and everything else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives perm1ss10n to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which mess up the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is wortti remarking that harming others in the restriction is narrower than a rc,tnction tu the I usual) interests of others; it is not enough that 1t is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being anywa~ because 1t does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to e~actly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the pnnciple is so far obscure because 'other' ma~ be filled out in significantly diffen:nt 11, ays. it makes a difference to the e,itent, and pri, ilege, of the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to ·other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other'peradequacy toCthe a ^t being'; and fnd uture k to 'other'sentient s^ed other as well thaut^ atter s it wmakes °u'd o nn re °difference "°w and^t °mpletel y “n-of the principle, and inson'it or versely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to Wor kable, Th^ atake future "ymakethe as count t0 others, Co m°St whether to P to remote future others or only to non-discountable present aspato asis well future e. whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely unand others, future It ysK" ^nled in des<gning anaJ ). "ple ™' last m,„ « u,,, ,k 1 -1/.'l;· nr semantical workable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. ,( ., ■ „di examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a It is taken for granted in designing counter ·~ .....-<;,_ semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations , ... ~#... ideal some in (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds situation, what is obligatory in every id.:al situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the mam point to grasp for the counter example\ that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over the class of ideal situations. -(i) The last man example. The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as a• the best abattoirs). What he doc~ 1s quite permissible according to ba 1c chauvinism, but on environmental ground~ what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr Last Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that raof corresponding in' advance dical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental usurne direction ’’ ^""oplos shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles}. (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rul!! out «rcorre p„ that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. the spossibility Otherwise one could as well 1..ons1der science fiction cases where peoole arrive at a new planet and »™ ^“xxi™r <"■■— ^.^ ^ sssh ss ±“ ™.™««. oS «’Srr "”'be “ ” “c,v A ™88eZ™1£„XXe°' rw S,SCUre ss?wX".“ . ,.. ___ X;»,XyrXt“ber ® S “ xxr •' xe xz^x z “:zz:::?“~ssss fgs 5 A related principle is that (m d11ieJ •,.., •.,r.i ..,, »c can operate "ith,n similar limits 207 207 WIMI iWlliMMW-l-i �destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an en­ vironmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wreck­ ed place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauvinism may conflict with stewardship or co­ operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps “for the best of reasons”, the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur’s behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being “better off’. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this ex­ ample to the industrial society example: the society looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic pic­ ture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may up­ set them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist: nor need whale hun­ ting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man’s activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whale^ to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably 6 along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable—if that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren’t en­ vironmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respected in dustrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading ac tivities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way ? No. what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remain­ ing blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a satisfactory 6 For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in 131 �2^°;™ pn"c,p e ls 3 morc d,flku11 matter. A tentative, but none too adequate beginning might be made by extending (2) to include harm to or interference with others who would be so affected by the action in question were they placed in the environment and (3) to exclude speciepide. It may be preferable, m view of the way the freedom principle sets the onus of proof, simply to scrap it altogether, and instead to specify classes of rights and permissible conduct, as in a bill of rights. rei2tsArhadRaJ change-ri" a ^eory some,,mcs forces changes in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which jects the Reference Theory tn 4 thoroughgoing way requires a modification of the usual metatheory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A somewhat similar phenomena seems to occur in the case of a meta-ethic adequate for an environmental ethic. Quite apart from introducing several environmen­ tally important notions, such as conservation, pollution, growth and preservation, for meta-ethical analysis, an environmental ethic compels re-examination and modified analyses of such characteristic actions as natural right, ground of right, and of the relations of obligation and per­ missibility to rights; it may well require re-assessment of traditional analyses of such notions as \alue and right, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions; and it forces the rejec­ tion of many of the more prominent meta-ethical positions. These points are illustrated by a verv brie! examination of accounts of natural right and then by a sketch of the species bias of some major positions,7 Hart (in |5|) accepts, subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant, the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, ‘any adult human ... capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons’. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights (though such a view is occasionally held, e.g. by pantheists. But pantheism is false since artefacts are not alive). For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., at least, whatever has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever has a right has in­ terests. Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights, and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. But persons can relate morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth, to practically anything at all. r J The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typica ly employ a single criterion p. such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of afTairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual prankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing P°’ntS arC deVdOped by thOSC protcstin« about human maltreatment of animals; see especially the essays �testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then ‘‘rational” economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on televi­ sion. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the ~^^base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some * v^gue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is (rough) justice. REFERENCES 1. A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac with other essays on Conservation. New York (1966). 2. J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). 3. P.W.Barkley and D.W.Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). 4. S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Animals, Men and Morals. An enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans, London (1971). 5. H.L.A.Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?’, reprinted in A.Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). �for < MC. fyjfot'''? ■tu / �v x .. 5^ ' A - ■. �3 7 • ... , ■ '-■ “"■'T �“"7— , O' .. / ... . t ■ �- _____ 5 11 I * �b. ■-^ ' ■ 1 ■■ ■:.,' ?• f ■ ■ '■ ■ \ • < ■- ■> ■ '■ ...:■■ ■■■ ■- k ..... £ • tOx ' A . ' ’ . ' -. . ........... ........ '■' •■■ ' - ■ ,. ; 1 L ___ SL&L___ ___------------------------------------- r.._ Ao ..... . ' ■ r - \ v * . . , ' ' ' . ... . ' . .■ . , '. - ■ A * O ' ' . ' , ' . . , , f . iK 4**«^ £' . ' •) ■ ; ‘ ' ' ' ' &-A. */- “S A r* - f’ ,Z ■ .. ��t u< lzJ*C C<& 'Co h* zLzx^ X CXA-a. 'tel Aj .. ‘ X .’ ■tzO .. i ’ ' \ u<J-A^LA ,. z^i*" V^o*4^ -^- -Oi--\z> f ■ ' ■ ti i .— 4 a. - ' ■v tO-- \. u> (.<■ •'■ * Z fi fl £/\-'-X n ’ ‘ ' UaJ-A^La I cJ <-X j <A 03 v. I*~c-%>a tu <*--a O•- V �— * ' . ? . . ____ ___ .-r.'^-—> .. .. . • Q :' -*• f■ V Jidk ■ ■ t :ygn. -A. < I- . k -V u i----- L u J ' . ... ______________ 2Zo.... ■ « tj- a. i €o _ZSt - 'w**sfe2______ i_X £I -sX ■ > ' C "■ ■’ . ' W:'^~ .■„... tC^L d ■ ■ J < ' ' . Opt*^ .>w^4Ua4t L. cU^fU^ �L �•<».. ., • >/»• ■ I P < •. V ho o- k . - ■ * •• j ■ \ aVumL. cAfth 7 - ; 4 / ( . > ■ ' ■ IX . c ' ■ ,v^_...... . JgLl . ‘ •■ lI.. I A ,__ y J^-xZs, vX>. ! V ' �■ ............ -.- C^> ^O-*—<" . U-^QU-^^ az^<^6*^....... ■ V �exp UrC 4- Cl J&, I—C^L-o—ti I i / c r ’ ■'X '■ . j£o - a~, -< JU-<9v-a --- * Izy, L cLa-^aJL *-L — • cC^c u-> 0 >—-» l|o-*—'-. Xa^ J •*’ X- <^» C"Q- . »-fe-, >1^ A U*--—-** t-v.^ X^LzO* U-1U— -J, xo. <xXo •&/ ,-tfJ. V) \. '< ' I i —x-> >» 'k -vjf eSt <>- fl o»-^e^ "KL^ X-t v-jlA~ a JL^> <a . A > -A ‘-V. <^y--- O^A^X C<J-’- X- -v<a ^>4jUl^ , *V r ~ w*<- *-Xa^jJL, ) K c¥- ctdL c^r\ -% . CA ■ -a-- --------------------- z>-*^ r V s/ <4* V^VA '✓*. x 'A p~* €z ;< ' y 'Cir> �i * f *7) A-0 >• a- <o o d <>• us \ > ~k QJ^ Cj. O- ft-Kfj xGv-y dx>- > p '*d £ ^su »X_ c c Jj CjC-»~-.r-< . ^=> Qo «AvA £>-* ....... (X- V**-CAz^ ) -aAjL^— ^~\_ cL>^^ < Aa_ A-t-HP * '+ aCv‘—*— Ao ZA_ V- f> A-*V-A (b-rvtU ■ >J£ T.T.C <*»»• V • ‘ \rfA-f'»~-*^AX VX*-^ V-U— X AAc-A ^1 J /*-•■••*•> «*Z> zi-v tajx4" vj-^-*-4“ . ‘r *3tx_^( uJ“—^''^-A OVsjI^ & * a v_-~—<o*—sw^ o^-»_ VjJLu- , c^<- -*A X< ztr^ /Ace. ^A- KT^-XXa -\ GO-ce^T F(Sb /'ik-ov^ “'-'■> O -V^ r~ ,5>^XC^'-'~'CC» • ''.'J * a ■> V, fc*-■■■&-'-") rtj.J /VO '-—*•• ■*■ t*A ‘—91 * * io -^22^ * 3 ' U- } -Cztxo^J-a A^^-U- a-xa uztt> (4 xtu AU-A y ^<*^CAvUr^ ub-^Lv A- cl*w. *%*x> X—7 &~t z\> a- ^Glx^ -^j—c r<XA^v<_ 4 &- txAuA^ id1'~- ' c* C~* * ~ "fc ^«Uf<-<-,ri • -< 'J a.X-^u . xJx C. . ’ , & '--^-C ,v> e^- o < •" •-'' '•>■>:.•■*'?: �V J Aj 3 .to XA 'v~, •n O -•.•> / / * t~ -* ” <• ^-^So Zo ) J^Xr*-^r-^ r^) A^V* kj^v—o Bu0 " bu- v>^c4- r- d Cy^>~e-~ ^v«-^-^vCc / i-^hx~K_-^<-A. <<> <-*—-V—>ttkA< J^O-U- |t-r-&Xxv— ^e^avX—( J /"tzO. r-U- u^rt«4~ *9 &A X-^JL zUU-< -z> -^Aa \n-*c • �4, r>v v-*^ o j£3jl f * s■ c o CC-^J| A. C-*^-y^'A-'» Co £^4-2- Z-CC V1" ZX) v^<.^J>rC r-O\ i^j-Ca. U-v_ ^V*-4^'r-^A~^-> A>U jXK ^-^-^jl _pL v^x-'JxClLa^ A—>—v<_ -*~-<_>JLv. .'CvAz^ £O^ AXzv^A. ♦ < — c+^ “/JU. “T^Gl 'Ao*- 0 -" —A^* <A*^Cg ^L xX*^ULt—□ iGs^G^ /i<>‘-*-c. '-C»— Ca^ a^Ll I VAaA >>An^ '-O-Qa*~t__ 4 > "^“*~^> V-'JK—A.'^C. Xg.^u^j c Ou%**j "’0^^ 55T *-<a ^~L ^to £)La-a?< H- G>' rG A? ^AQst^.... yO<*-w»»A . QkJLLl . Go^^-a^AA. ..... l^x>— !jC l*Jc — . .... ^n*w^^v&A. Va.^ cG*-? L& -^ >-***- u> C-tfktA^. _. -XSL( o-G_lX %^?yr r <j2^ z>tnC/X**-vjtX '***"■ z/V\z^^Ax ^*-*-^ £ -c<X *V~>~ ^wK>-‘\SwjLX Cczl XJbu-t A'>>~“ _ 'Yvv\U~’J—V (V^Ffr s r * /^v—4-V3 ^>r<. 1^'-*-* , "to _ 0a>-< 3> ^>i~x “ \> ■ k>*- -a^Xaa -•■• (k.c>^\ f //-V . ' / . <r" U<_ , !0'-^C_. <\b*-GA^x^ fiLMs-ut. p- -G— "**{1^-5 Cysut, >—oKxi^t k Tg ^^cJUc I x-v| , �■ IS THERE A NEED FOR A NEW, AN ENVIRONMENTAL, ETHIC? Richard Routley (Australia) § 1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environ­ ment, in Leopold's words ‘an ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it’ ([1], p. 238). It is not of course that old and prevaling ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as ‘Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees’ are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects.1 It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take ex­ ception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. ‘A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope,turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall,rocks, andsoil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society.’ ([1]), p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such traditionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure.2 Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn’t a 1 A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits 2 To the consternation .nodoubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeterminate 205 �is, near enough: ~ propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which includes ( like md1v1duals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative Ju~gements co~cermng conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong of_ what ~re rights, what _is valued, and so forth. A ~eneral or lawlike proposition of a system is ~ prmc1ple, and certainly 1f syst~ms S, and S2 contam different principles, then they are different systems. It foll?ws t~at any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreo~er 1f environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded m Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming wh~t _seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environm~ntai eth1_c 1s needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is com_monly assu_med that_ there are. what amount to, core principles of Western ethical ~ystems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed ~n the Golden Rule provides o~e example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, ts the . commonly formulated hberal pnnc1ple of the modified dominance position .. A recent for: · " • "'• ,;, /'' /,'. / ~·- - ·· ..._ mulation 5 runs as follows ( [ 3 I, p. 58): . 'The liberal philosophy of the Wes tern world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, prov1dmg ( 1) that he d0es not harm orhers and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism - because under it humans, or people. co_me_ first and everyt_hmg else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom pnnc1ple becaus~ 1t gives perm1ss1on to perform a wide range of actions (including actio.ns which mess_ up the ~nv1ronment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. In fact it tends to c_unn_mgly shift the onus of pro?fto others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restrict10n 1s narrower than a restnct1on to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my mterests, because. I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being anyway, because 1t does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or mter_ference. Mor~over the width of the principle is so far obscure because 'other' may be fill~d. out m s1gmficantly different ways: it makes a difference to the e~tent, and privilege, of the cha~vm1s~ whe~her '.other' _ex~ands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other'person or to _other sent1~nt be1~g ; and 1t mak~s a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic apphcab1hty, to which class of others it is intended to apply whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, a?d. whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely unworkable, and 1t 1s generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. ' //4-_ ItIt_ is taken for granted. in_ d_e_signing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a ....,. /..~..., . ( sem_antical analysis of perm1ss1b1hty and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations r.,.·-=-"'t.. :.;1 -c.: , · ~/:_ (".~-htch may be mcon:iplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some ideal ideal every in s1tuat10n, what 1s obl_1gato_ry in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded ~1tuat10n. But the_mam pomt to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles · t· 1f correct are umversal and are assessed over the class of I·deal s1tua ions. (') Th z collapse of the world system the 1 _survi~ing perso~) (or man e as_t ma~ e~a~ple. The last lays ~bout him, ehmmatmg, ~s far as he can, e~ery !tvmg th_mg, animal or plant (but painlessly if iou hke, a~ at the best abattoirs). What he does 1s qmte permissible according to basic chauvinism ut on envir?nmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be commit~ ~~d \o e~ot~nc values to regard M'.. Las_t Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that ra~cfa th mkmg a nd val~es have shifted m an environmental direction in advance of corresponding s .. 1 ts m the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). (u) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects h_a~~ blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out ~e pos~1b1hty that what these pe~ple d~ harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. therwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man's relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from substantial human interference, whether of the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable north-Europea n small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would reject, a 3 principle of total use,implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used for human ends, "humanized". As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforwa rd; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is riot always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assumption). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for m~ny thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted. a ~pecific ethic, /§ 2. -As. we noticed----(a~ ethic is ambi~uous, as bet_ween a specifi~ ethical system, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster.4 An ethical system S ./ 3 If 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use p1 inciple is tied to the resource view of nature 4-A meta-elhic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions 5 A related principle is that (modified) free c.1tcrprise can operate I il 11 ,·thi'n s· -1 1- • 1m1 ar 1m11s 207 �destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild ar,imal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all ~emaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an environmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined ·by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauvinism may conflict with stewardship or cooperation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving outpJt to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since h~ much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off'. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this example to the industrial society example: the society looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic picture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hunting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man's activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The l?ehaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accqrdingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whal~[~ to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental econo_mics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably 6 along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable-if that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment _is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren't environmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respe~ted industrialists fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of ;he sort described, in a morally impermissible way~ No, what these people do _is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For exampl_e, mso~ar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an mdustnal development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is _the slau~hter of the last_ remaining blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvm1sm as a satisfactory 6 For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [31 freedom principle is a more difficult matter. A tentative, but none too adequate beginning might be made by extending (2) to include harm to or interference with others who would be so affected by the action in question were they placed in the environment and (3) to exclude specieside. It may be preferable , in view of the way the freedom principle sets the onus of proof. simply to scrap it altogether, and instead to specify classes of rights and permissible conduct. as in a bill of rights. § 3. A radical change in a {eory sometimes forces changes in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way requires a modification of the usual metatheory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A somewhat similar phenomena seems to occur in the case of a meta-ethic adequate for an environmental ethic. Quite apart from introducing several environmentally important notions, such as conservation, pollu1io11, growth and presen•atio11,for meta-ethical analysis, an environmental ethic compels re-examination and modified analyses of such characteristic actions as na1ural right, ground of right, and of the relations of obligation and permissibility to rights: it may well require re-assessment of traditional analyses of such notions as i-alue and right, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions; and it forces the rejection o [ many of the more prominent meta-ethical positions. These points are illustrated by a very brief examination of accounts of natural right and then by a sketch of the species bias of some major positions. 7 Hart (in I 5]) accepts. subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant, the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which. among other things, 'any adult human . .. capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons'. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an em iron mental ethic rt::jects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the deflni1io11 of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right. a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with rcspc:ct to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that lon g ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights (though such a view is occa~ionally held, e.g. by pantheists. But pantheism is false since artefacts are not alive). For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right n_ot to _be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., at least, whatever has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever has a right has interests . Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights. and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. But persons can relate morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth. to practically anything at all. The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summ.um_ bonu_m; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps mcludmg future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, 6f the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual prankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either_ ~ire~tl~, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, asin rule-ut1lttanantsm, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embr~ce persons. or even some animals (at the cost. like that of including remotely future humans, of losing 1 Some of thes< points arc developed by those protesting about human maltreatment of animals; see especially the essays collec!ed in I 4 I 9 ~ iii 208 WJ 6 14 209 �testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then “rational” economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on televi­ sion. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the _base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some v v^gue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is (rough) justice. REFERENCES 1. A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac with other essays on Conservation. New York (1966). 2. J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). 3. P.W.Barkley and D.W.Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). 4. S. and R.Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), A nimals, Men and Morals. An enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans, London (1971). 5. H.L.A.Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?’, reprinted in A.Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). �C'/■ClUi/! n /t'v'Tl tf-t / ^■nt's 'z 0/7 /#£■* O/^Z ^rfscr . J*. B? c ey-rzZ^ft. Z ZZzztZszL. , tZ/at-e-Zf/^ ; /f ?Z Sl’lff/Z' A0S fe 3 /c^^Z Z,z ZzZ L^f-4- ) /-^ // -------- ----------- ;.. ^z t e-'T— /) <LSfC t-x. e *<~Z^<--~ -f &'? } e- Xa^C^Tl f fs>\ . Zc'T- /ZZr^. t c*/'d />t^r*-( x X-C- ct'Ze^ &a L '—4. HA- ZZ> / Z^S. Zt Z&-'■?■&■'£ -, 4^ t J&-*. ro �X, fle^ Si. ^ef/'Yrv Caf^ ---- )CS~ /pf" /J'ttx J 7 G-y 7 Jg; V JK-Ajtj <S\_Cc-O'/n--^> <2/- if y 1 ix j o vt/ hj ’ J) k t-C u, 1 <1 Sa-d- A ansi. OrttQ- &<v&tsx. J A Irt V- — 7 l>o!ri\f<i i&- ©a. * —, >1 /<^®./?v. /, z for * o^fh dUrl c^f'v^r *x 7&/I g fzZf c^e crftor. 'I ’rl^. s, r',\7 f\^e.d( c-^~ 77 r I 7/^t * 7fs7^ * /l/l f'cT" ffxCL^e/4^ c-x i t trv-e^ /t> e/kctp s i\tk for 'W’mH.- hu^^t) nn f& y e> k//A /&• ft 0 A dt^nc-f 3 7/dz- «Wzte>v a/C7 e/[e^ /~e'^~^ /7n^-J<- /fa f^7 7 �/A e>r-Mo-y kdd k<c by kud d ^of hdd.}ttpvtcrtiJiy n6t h<^/<Z j is Ctfu( tfia. nS f //e^- fry a^a-Cfe^ 4 4 £> Al *~ it'&M «J I ex i tr -p£ kh a. n. y CH a C6hti*fb&t'/ncrft&r, ^^<.{ t . it• s dv^rft.c.u.n Aa st K u- m a. drrk. dl bex n.p a I /HA. II KA o{ a xs as or amwk ct IA. j _f c>A 0— C>d AO ®f 1. ?’ , I*. ’ @sw( A&u A a. I it m « n s vai a/rcj^^c t/4— m cd(tS A-Cf&h"tHc.S part . ike. c Cn. S f~o ft a cL v p!^ fi^-O Aft &kic*> . fl *<£ ■• - -t'/iese- a.rt~l C-i pA. t»6 n. 3 i c^ch v rtes. tfa(L Xc^r-Mf />?«< /5C>- —“ c_C-j h lost- of « ) 0/ il ) I 'V chuxi'HAf ofe-sa/inAf A a CA- D F ( r IA . IV^K.'t' ) H ~ t'i^-f axtivitiOj clhl^ c-la<> i) y / A Ca u b$i^s l\j & ) i>»- r c> f' t</ 7>/«- o/ /^G't CfLLctpiL^^.1 CL s .1 focMUftU . OTWr X CCA is* a/£ CCKVirv n.neA.t*'! e-i/CA \t ' w-ru-C, faijict, Aorf SO)tyd 0 + ■X fti cUatiiU <’/Z<3r >^»n, , A<i^f "^“ to 0iOf? haul kt CMjiafa J «< ?/ ��t iViebl' I I no n - pn V I i / y (l/(cL ^€4 Of / L Ourx^^/cx^ C blZ/lQ. C^f //lwfc+'x t. c^a.*/ u . /\/f/c^ts/t f^r- t\ a^$_ ofac^t^ //1lM(^ z>r~ <*-*x AtZ. » ct/^rKb^f / // & d</r&S /A ff^f /f //4e ) ? fiC & ^r �c 1 7L. // -Z /t Vy^u �JBL ' /'JL '^'^“'*7't/ nT4 I c z\ rkQ—-v t-ATl 0 1-t'F ' li'sWet iwt y "V A_Arv [an^W^i.^r(u.t\ ko^-d^.\ i*~ zu* f A , |p \. kt were rfa^?</k \ 0^ Il £' centh’ki j . 7"tf a k U. »*i A A J i Y>y.^~^i)c(calces) e/- fa 6 . \ iW-6*//y .j r*- R-r ka.t)b c(i*scr i At i a a. "t io a. "Vkij Cut <z V) M i $ f H i i a. rt 't'<2-/- tA. sAo^3 W?£$far A Wo,3 14k t€S f O A ■Wio ift- . r-< A . \ ?"T, A K ^c> £>a__ q)kitk i 'lLt tS | k CK V e, > S£ Z8* �'</ (/ /-W, iS /tJt. } a^f yyx^f^tv' ^ft>eliitOKi at C4t4^S t PX l $ 4/t<LS £, ftQi / 1^,0- k 6- <_ f" er Q-Cc3~l\.ffl. t'' 'kh.j^t RA- only cCkC- If ‘H't<l*f . £ tme R. 5 U- 9 |w VO'/l ,. clrtist f i /y0^f tf <T A 2. ns oVcbf ar *ri*t p re-Feje/vceS ©t - + A,e- far — oTtva-r 'ortyevr-r o-H^-r* cr^tt O tor / ‘ , . t® n2 io(e-/-ATrt>rx ‘ — * ft, r 6 i cr iter i arx I o fiu cLo-fi respLoF J? j /s tta>eCiSSO>>.'t’<i.ty /n^cc.f'i'e.) ' priAcrple? z ©n 5*<c--A, °’ Kiir- ut>rtAi»hil^. j> conSi^l^h c^ a,{ -ft) rn/iind frtHyd/), 'J /€<L af/pctiMi&fcC A $u2fylj\t''O m'*U4H*(i?f7'+ if d / accost C-- t C'fC.t^-t CL-fCS | ere iAf^ 1 ; > ■Far . Ivunf*** 70 loanee-' If- 't'^iS b ttffl C-t fi-A't" if . entreat A ^rmrr//e; ft *j be ke I qI of' p | | mV* ? Cj nfi (2o.r n-ftok. e^-rjftJL <s I ^zjcf'Fjo'x !t(rf Jl Mj1 G.S Z.O W Si C^Lr £ F ioa. OX ■ l^> jJ t~o <?F Ct ^CL f Zt/f co^ce-rri- J / which tk(^ y to tl\^T trj W1M MQcfvm C. U aXum y> iv-/ 1 nto c*— v^o c ork bftAztv/du’r .flxrfnor h.UrflMX»j ot^4*r "Tor btkcjrl } (X. (Z (L^nCt/g, ‘ utt^e ) aejit tfi f oloes Ct l^'oxv r H- A/ O b !Ijdtio'if ^C'D^ni^d- to ix\\cL(U^i'^:'\ TotaiLCwc(^ ej'^M pryo,fly or rA»M^ 6-1^ /l-----------------—6jQ.AJl.fdli se fL £> Ft ) /^r 44^**^ (( tiTi/icr/on 44^4——dlfkO s z^ev c] of con^ici~Crcis2 JojlY" poirv-t- , tklS pl^c/io r^Ac^-S jjA^ - ^Ai7 r^y t'ko^ f ^Jcrbncg^ «s£ , it is p nG jka. 0" f~r 0 >v_ a, or- ■f' For pt a-f-ct-c-n. u«_ — Inin/p c>uez/itf<~— b£c*i« rcCtf/ZZ’tKZ- ^XcAr^«<<a. e4M«»-f.^X TnA" //4/a^, . ebr^n co-\\k\iiAti I T <L m f) IAk) pfG-TCj e. >\ c d~- — Aa m f* OJihe/LSZ I . Kn 1X' &»/f P / 1^7-^ j • ' io 7iCz irx >vi/A. ' 1>hj<’j itfr ynorntch (itj / r -Fr 4 yh g ot1 f vA_ Qiov\b2c. . / . Co fl-T < a (pfvt<(?'-'■ t( s C> inO't I 0£ a_ h rsipoS f*tpe.rcor (L r\te.t tox^ *®/ ' , . c >ni~i e*« c e__,_ c^>wZ /A / <2 // �r h. k tn I'M , ve^e. bttble. s ki<>h«A co. n_ Cf&DCt~m/e.S vyot _ i^k.) 1^ foroaX^/zp^^^ <k teveJn do J j e,j . zt £ ct ii\ . , a Aon/c_ / ■/-© &**C filo x / » • , fr z c/alf //c^ Lfi—- k Ct V 4 f J rh £u ol C. yy/fai b c CQ^tv I Af°*~ S Yc '~~ c f Xf 'i p( 6 e s - P^ 4 / c 'C^t^ f Q- >t LVi '/A.e. , c<-*yr& /^r Xa< C zn.^6 A& * A>> ^i> ?//<cn , c«*^’6,»i1Jp/’Xty. /n ) dt s p-rQ- a. a I ih<# ^1 — t* * Q-x-k&s'pCo.tl C-A n n <nit~ £ #xX fitnWj Iw/iy tn z>/C ol<~ve^foji me e>|(2/-1 rue/ e a / /j ■/^c zfi �Zz i's t k cc tr Und^ (X#l ct i Halt V T' <J 6n I •> vj (X11 c I?lo i lj at/on i Z "L To a s Piorftl "Iw-Xs <?/n<2-r Cc> KV t <s a- r a-f <^ crrv/y c^ct'^z-J z\ tS ^0 tz ——■ z zt /y i'k&t v lev zzLjUr J 'j k (l- a. UgsTma ku-w-tins C^vZ i4! o Act rGJ < Cg/- z/^/zj Aa c't'wJ #4^ (Xi h i i"u^i'u Lt-1 /zo Zte^ > 0- i . ■X c- a-rt-fW^ have. o^e- �7 �er o ’e £ PC- �1 in nmUCh at ,eaSt aS CrUSOe'S w-th —2£S^2SS SS=S=E-lg=:==ES maltreat the land, extract frontU>2 *"* 3 W,'dcrness',f taken to tnterfere with and does not rouse the moral indtgnL^n ofThey ’ C°ndUCt ” not Z^eyyero/ woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows intn rh»> •he „«k. „ SIi„ (ir otherwise dccenl) farmer who clears the <f^^- s a- z. // / A * /7~. z^r&sz A, / ' Z - — ^z4— C ��» Ci s t2"* 7^ ji /<t^/ <- f /'t ^ ~C ' f' /~ e^ttcfuc^ / /^b. f 0 /•> | it is none loo clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or al all well worked out. so that the application of identity criteria foi ethics may remain obscure. Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical sy stems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christen ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two,.other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethicszor that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the /?<rf fff /> (Het-//'s-j Ilk > Ct at— single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on ckd«°T^a *ssues such as infanticide, women’s rights and drugs, there are competing sets of prin S’ T. ? nCW e^h‘C and Prevai,ln8 ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity that prevathng ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. - r. . jM40/ Indeed Passmore (in |2|) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man’s relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views.-31 ' j i 7) el'f'r/rel-x rC-~ r* �A. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic^— Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removeej, eg. vv/zo is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with a ^environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth’s surface should be presen ed from substantial human interference, whether of the “improving” sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and com fortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man’s proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect galiye - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being ^usefulness for.human purposes: while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources./ '7Zu^ /fate- c.C^( 4c~S~ £^7 7c/<*-/'- /rw*. e-1 Cr*..s~y 7 7 , J - cvalua,,^. of an environmental ethic.oXs" coter^^ A t !(^ ; ^,l(he1SStmECXPa!’U"’g P?pula,ions eon,'^d ‘0 finite Indeeo these lesser traditions lead to what a thomnpho’ ‘dr‘”"lg anJ utl,izing ofall natural areas principle of total use,imping that every r-turJl X m ^v,ronmental othic would reject, a human ends, “humanized” ' area shou,d be ^‘^ted or otherw.se used 3 f v 3 rr • H use is extended, somewhat illicitly, to inciud. as regards its actual eftects. Note that the toU’ e •eSiCrVat‘<>n; thiS tOtal USe Princ‘P|c is rendered mocuous al least <»e pr , pie is tied to the resource view of nature , �such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or’romantic, would be new aljigjiu The matter is r straightforward: for the dominant.ethic has been substantial!v uuaiitle^y the n&er that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically int^Tes \0tn peers'. 7 > proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the Goiyuuterference assump­ tion). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position: and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further '* towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which, destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [31) that blends with the modified position; /hcrt/t f'cd c-Z^x . may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situa tion excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I ^vall A new ethic is wanted, aoh/ 1, /T-- < zfre^e^ 7y 7> j7**u\ �5 /g^7rc> e*- /5> g Zte-Z*-^ a-rfCsC , 'sCett /J /tr ! t>7 f rCL , ioG-j . c s f~CT /fc. /•J2 crt-cc^ a m 7 7/ s e fJ Ifc,'-* 7 ■ is, near‘enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which in dudes (like individuals of a theory > a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligators permissible and wrong.'x* ! of what are rights, what is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a \ principle; and certamlv if systems S, and S2contain different principles, then they are different systems. It follows that anv en onmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlin ed. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principlaJL embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming. I what seems to be so. that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic /s needed then a new- ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environ mental counter examples to it z , /3^'f> Ji^f^ yt �i« * Q-. V '5'" 7/ / Z/t-y -y ZLo c^-T V / C o-~f^ e o—•. /K^~ . are' w^at amount to, core principles of Western ethicaSR ? 1 7 accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed ' m the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core^&iple ' is the commonly formulated liberal principle ' / * ...2>^-.Yjr7 , /fol; >ws ( j 3J. p. 58): (D). The liberal philosophy of (he Western world holds that one should be able to d< □ what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm .himself jrreparablv.' ■ "Wf® /Ac7 7^— /zxc principle because it e.ves permission m st. some,im« the principle is haded as a freedom SESSSSSsasyr??”- •A?x chauvinism whether ‘other’ expands io ‘other h "* ' ■’ ' Ten' '° lhe c*Ient- antl Pn' 'lege, of the son* or toother sentient be.nXnd t makes aX" wh,chu’s t0° r^<ttive or Mother per verselj to its economic applicability to whieh I LrenrCe l.° the ar,e4uacy of the principle, and in future as well as present other" whether to r '55 ,° r°therS “? t0 ‘ w,lcther to future others, and whether to possible others Th -Th utur<J othefs or onl-v t0 non-discountable V and it is generally c /wf- e \ ��c) fff)Ct^ &J C'C. X ) 1. CAu^f ' b- / ^U4r<fc C 7 *4 & S f/'t J &&&!&&— ?£*~ ^KBMCfc. a/ fiU €t y^ < r- cC 7 ^C/>< Z__i___ �* sC I y/L j (ft) f . } /a fC*2— z’vz/XLt,/ /XL x« /'c-^ anaivjfe of permissibility; £ 7 Zcz2—z obhgatio/falementsjstretc^. out over ideal mInations• (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some idefl^fe situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal ' ■ situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over the class of ideal situations. ZSl ezn^Tfez- />?> b /> C&7 rr cX? eef ff (i) ’ The last man example. The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system Zo eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to f/)) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover pne d^gsjtot have to Ke commit ted to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly, (the reason l^eing^crhapsthatra dica! thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles)./^ f /U, Corf MG /<€ C ifZ (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be . to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and ft}) �destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, " and all remaining forests disappear in favour ofpatfuM or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an en­ vironmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; £ qfXL/ }r ex/ s* e< 9 they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wreck­ ed place. But this conduct may conform with the ’ CCW (£>) Ccf'tC I ^cZ /y //I- /IZPCC-X c'LjruZ^ ~Z / / s/y i ■ jr.ru effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps “for the best of reasons’", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being “better ofT’. 7 /<L. , /tMVbcr^r, Z^> /7^ cx-yr .1 , C< /ctj'/ //’fr ) 7(3 /&- cL C ^^T- �77 toe-^ g rXl-rr^ ^/y) <L c7t Qr<g,*y/i/& , M zrzreX e*i SKfX&d ft C^ g<c /&- ^<XaY£- 77 ^1 4rc7jW4— ) f re/nctd lb— /f ... --*^g*._ K on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may up set them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hun ting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue w'hale example are provided by cases where a speues is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man’s activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whale$ to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics I would; instead the market r ynuX InGswkblj C/bf £?3 ) tr^Cjec(j-ep-HtL- Cornnc nJ 7 Ct/on(j e(.&^ Ma Jt>«f Cu-Ort- wd ?a6 J w*v7YY w/cX<2- * //> /t * ■J <Y // / Ara /jo f cjff c c , 7 i- ft-T X_S>'C''lf X-S" c x c^r^r Ca— „v z Xc< ✓ » . J ♦ �4 �Zl. e/?o f M dyeeft (T& fd- Ci/c / Awl 7 ■J'yt jf vironmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respected in­ dustrialists, fishermen and farmers arc behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading ac tivities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a 5 greater or lesser extent eviitand hence in serious vases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primiioe peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and-^r* permissible, so also is the slaughter ol the last remain ing blue whale^for private profit,. , or fa & 1 j“'/z^4> i ■T.JS �(X. (t^o-r<- a~ ^~h%AJ2-A Au—4^-, -vGtt^y ^-■-? —j—G\A<?-‘-*-k Cj^ /^tc /&rf SV-ev*^. "* JLk^-A~A- ^aj-<j^_u-< ko <=jA- 6< ~34 '-£-^biA -uf-e^kCvjt^ JJv-a-oA CyyA -vo> u^Aj| pj-e-Aic^- £ lAxJ'iz-^-e. cAA fu-__~ ^-^k_k &$ -o-«- <-*■---- -C-^V A -c—_ AXq. cA>V JL&&U- {L&{- — ^Gg-O-i-- <xz.^ V/GA-C -"^o J e> cAM^t-K <_ kvj/l (co*.— yy-j^A , Afk-o -tedt^dA- -4-<--^»X. *~ <-<_>^>—/Y""k AJk-A AJU <-Avh v-J2X4- ^4 k’v-C Lv-\-^ Uu~e> z C v-—&_<k * j^jkjtxv^z jL C<_ ( kKu_k Q/<^-CAA) Cck^X^ a urAk ,^Ah—<4-x c< Aoi—-v c ca-£——-dL/b vz<,vn—v-k* -A £y< xj^—~ -A. -— cCj2_j2_A- o u—Cu-y V—C c Xx G.ZX-—^A Ou-A-^ «v '’4^c V-vA^ Cl~A k-% ^SSL- '-J- ^-~~ kk vr~v -~-e_ /yxxav^ oA c^ ^^r~ /t' ,-cA o<— _J—, ^Rjt^r r c--^--^ nouzfe^ O9e>yn^5 kA. Av—^>^,a»-A- Ak^-u-jy^ rtcr^ . _• ^/,G ftr»&'rt-£-e,43^. J -v—<x— ) Aik. ^L z^J klMmiL ^■‘-"-t-t-* tesr-e^ c^ Ak<A J? y. AA-A J-C t <V— <R_ v— c>j-ej-- u--o-k_N_<_ u^k-^-A ) :— v—e_ -VekjL 0-<X jz_>-e Ar -a_A c--> UZ^U-u-^-^A Afib( A*&( «n Zz7 Co—- '“Cy- <.<2^'1A < &*•>/'" ^r~ Ac^(/i^ f(Ci,f^C^^*- -Co ------- U~-<SX_u-----Y C-7 aJ-Ao-C /'aA^A? <S<—st-C Act ** ^-a2-x_d Z7/^ '7C‘<k YL<iT&rvtl GJk'—s ��23’. u>v 4^ ^r^2-^L ’I'*' C—^r-^-^' A^rtr4— £H 'Xf X ^-°^> C-C-CX-KcX > et4zU^ _ Jrfc^ ^uu. ;££L;k<_ wXo tlq. <_^ CD1-— i_rMl\. B CAC-yrV^ L -2X-C -C+^ 6^M"" -t-L ej" e^H? O £y-Q^-' 0>C-t-4- <c^3 a) ^sxv*^^v 0~“'—“’■ ’A ^—e— O^Lia^v'-a-^ k^-ZZ-ZUJ — .^>p-v^_gA-C -Anu---- ^r-e-ttu- -C-O^G-oXZc^ z z5 OdX^-i^x^ — ^te W-— <^- < *tj> - '-Vua^W- e— "VL«-e- ' ■■'■> ^js> £^J2-— v€ c<x\ ££jL^ c C> 'UC 4^V~ jtXK-sj- <£HL <Sj—<— # ALU- 4^>V ^CtSLu—> t>c—- ^K-’t' l^l \w6 6v_ O ._. <u>ce(jltv‘®— IU~ —v, fU^ar^^A ?n 'u~-Av c^u^laf^^ ,-^K t*^ ��to L- ‘0*^1- &—■*- _A^3L v— A,Z 1 ~ Iks, p. — I fi.tib'£ 6t> Ji.— A A aZ^S^-AJLA ZA CXUj" X----------- — -'-s V" <JL-~^(/^4^ — «XJ-— ��6l ) Ac,<3-^ 7^L^~ £-_ /-"^^ c^tu yte, ... ^iri^^f_____________________________________________ ■I ^)<L^)c.^\ cA^Vt^i)^ I(^y Alrlccj* (Jj<*~£^ r^/J>7 /M;-^ : z* --^///<2<r-> &-f f /^/^C 2Z cJ t X^ctML Ou /h^z*7vczy ; o-r e^ V'iAl<JL. 7^^ Xw// erf ty /irf&usC lrf~ AA^ £&2__/ati/ y^r t&AiJ'x CJL. /A<*% LT^A<JL.\ } njL^J: (c^A^A'/Vetr^ i/iUti^C Ay £ft<>AAiA JO rfA^ / ) // // <^zrx^>t /wz?/ ' /Jf/PfiM crduZ^ O^(//y W fA£^f A />*/ /c^ a fo jO'^A^r fed# £s.^A’ fr/K'r&SfJ ' �z/ .y it On. ^£>4X 6<1SA<_ a~m-A -Wv*------- ^IXS- �does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights is occasionally held, e.g. by pantheists. since artefacts are not alive). (though such a view But pantheism is false For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do^riot award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with,jmainstrean» theses according to which rights X coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concerns; i.e., at least, whatever, has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever^has a right has^interests st- <■ �J ? �j2_x>~«^-^—4“V- C>----- <~*'f~'^ < —r_>4 AN-^V5i „ /s i—^Jj-o- -gk, zLo jfe-f-4-^- c^-^a- c'k <j£—*A C. -in ^..Sj-oSL-U-^-^zf- ^LM. c_f-<_ C-O x_ C*"^——'p^^— ^ri»|^e>\A»tL' (o~— 1_ <"7 Qr*—S—Ic^-k^pj —.*—*L_ d /'—>-^—^- J &i $"'z'~1<— . — -^_T-Ca_Xa—<__ Aj<, J^«-------- .__><sxbV_ vyH-m <Ji J<$A_ Aal -n^tx/$J'_>~'lx<"c~j-^_<vj4-toA V 2 k^hssXkx^ Z 4----- ------------------- A-S <—<-^-^X_ rA-c____ cL<i—A, "t^-ajZavJ^v i^a--— (kx_A_—-C—, .O-JL '*-^>>J2—AziUAAA O^ . _ _ aAUL :A>=> v __ <=y- fcAlA- v-*o-aA c-» ^Sjhj /"Xr-j-«_ -t~s p-vvj-^MSV-s »_—c<-^»ji—, 'V—Ci.’V' c_r—4~ iUvagk-A-tar^ t (__r-i!e~-^~--> 3 ci r \ 'Wt or e_. fkftyt i‘n ■'—^££ -T©t? Zv€>v^_^ <_<_ x^-aZ-xA' 0 5 <3^ tX,L 4Z <^/ 4b»-ULk /h <-<&— e2 \> c-^^uuxxi ��78 t ��A__ -V �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document IS THERE A NEED FOR A NEW, AN ENVIRONMENTAL, ETHIC? Richard Routley (Australia) § 1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environ­ ment, in Leopold’s words ‘an ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' (| 1], p. 238). It is not of course that old and prevaling ethics do not deal with man’s relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as ‘Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees’ are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects.1 It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take ex­ ception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself-explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. ‘A farmer who clears the woods ofTa 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society.’ (UJ), p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such traditionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure.2 Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn’t a 1 A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits 2 To the consternation nodoubt of Quineans But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeterminate 205 single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilisation: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women’s rights and drugs, there are competing sets of prin­ ciples. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [21) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man’s relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfcctor. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth’s surface should be preserv­ ed from substantial human interference, whether of the “improving” sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth’s land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and com­ fortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man’s proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect nature — all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man’s role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use,implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used3 for human ends, “humanized”. As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assump­ tion). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer’s polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The posi­ tion may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situa­ tion excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted. 2. -A^ we noticed-(an) ethic is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster.4 An ethical system S 3 If ‘use’ is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature 4 A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions 206 '^"es - a( SeS’a,Pr0pos^r th«>ry whlch in. is, near enough, a proposit1or ., ~"f'm (1.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which in--.:ludes ( like individuals of a th• . a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set ° of general or to‘other he^er conduct. to verselytypically to its of thers obligatory, or isonf ? applypermissible n’ untableand wrong, what concern,n~ evaluativeOnjudgements of what are rights, what is valued, and !>O forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems S, and S2 contain _different principles, then they are different systems. It follows that any en\llnnmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreover if environmental ethic5 lifTer from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then ,hese systems differ from the Western super ethic (assurring, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed t!ien a new ethic is wanted It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental count,·r examples to 1t. It 1s commonly assumed that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems. principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Ruk I w ,des one example. Directly relevant here. as a good stab at a core principle. is the com111unli, formulated liberal principle 0f the moqified flominan"-,~siti on..A recent for-""•..._ ,/c,.,.M,....,,, ~ lo/,'/ mulation~ runs a, follows ( 131, p. 58}: 'The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, providing ( I) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not hkel 1 to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this prmciple basic (/Funan) chauvinism - because under it humans, or people, come fir~t and everything else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives perm1ss10n to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which mess up the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is wortti remarking that harming others in the restriction is narrower than a rc,tnction tu the I usual) interests of others; it is not enough that 1t is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being anywa~ because 1t does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to e~actly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the pnnciple is so far obscure because 'other' ma~ be filled out in significantly diffen:nt 11, ays. it makes a difference to the e,itent, and pri, ilege, of the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to ·other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other'peradequacy toCthe a ^t being'; and fnd uture k to 'other'sentient s^ed other as well thaut^ atter s it wmakes °u'd o nn re °difference "°w and^t °mpletel y “n-of the principle, and inson'it or versely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to Wor kable, Th^ atake future "ymakethe as count t0 others, Co m°St whether to P to remote future others or only to non-discountable present aspato asis well future e. whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely unand others, future It ysK" ^nled in des<gning anaJ ). "ple ™' last m,„ « u,,, ,k 1 -1/.'l;· nr semantical workable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. ,( ., ■ „di examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a It is taken for granted in designing counter ·~ .....-<;,_ semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations , ... ~#... ideal some in (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds situation, what is obligatory in every id.:al situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the mam point to grasp for the counter example\ that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over the class of ideal situations. -(i) The last man example. The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as a• the best abattoirs). What he doc~ 1s quite permissible according to ba 1c chauvinism, but on environmental ground~ what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr Last Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that raof corresponding in' advance dical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental usurne direction ’’ ^""oplos shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles}. (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rul!! out «rcorre p„ that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. the spossibility Otherwise one could as well 1..ons1der science fiction cases where peoole arrive at a new planet and »™ ^“xxi™r <"■■— ^.^ ^ sssh ss ±“ ™.™««. oS «’Srr "”'be “ ” “c,v A ™88eZ™1£„XXe°' rw S,SCUre ss?wX".“ . ,.. ___ X;»,XyrXt“ber ® S “ xxr •' xe xz^x z “:zz:::?“~ssss fgs 5 A related principle is that (m d11ieJ •,.., •.,r.i ..,, »c can operate "ith,n similar limits 207 207 WIMI iWlliMMW-l-i destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an en­ vironmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wreck­ ed place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauvinism may conflict with stewardship or co­ operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps “for the best of reasons”, the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur’s behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being “better off’. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this ex­ ample to the industrial society example: the society looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic pic­ ture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may up­ set them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist: nor need whale hun­ ting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man’s activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whale^ to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably 6 along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable—if that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren’t en­ vironmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respected in dustrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading ac tivities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way ? No. what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remain­ ing blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a satisfactory 6 For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in 131 2^°;™ pn"c,p e ls 3 morc d,flku11 matter. A tentative, but none too adequate beginning might be made by extending (2) to include harm to or interference with others who would be so affected by the action in question were they placed in the environment and (3) to exclude speciepide. It may be preferable, m view of the way the freedom principle sets the onus of proof, simply to scrap it altogether, and instead to specify classes of rights and permissible conduct, as in a bill of rights. rei2tsArhadRaJ change-ri" a ^eory some,,mcs forces changes in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which jects the Reference Theory tn 4 thoroughgoing way requires a modification of the usual metatheory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A somewhat similar phenomena seems to occur in the case of a meta-ethic adequate for an environmental ethic. Quite apart from introducing several environmen­ tally important notions, such as conservation, pollution, growth and preservation, for meta-ethical analysis, an environmental ethic compels re-examination and modified analyses of such characteristic actions as natural right, ground of right, and of the relations of obligation and per­ missibility to rights; it may well require re-assessment of traditional analyses of such notions as \alue and right, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions; and it forces the rejec­ tion of many of the more prominent meta-ethical positions. These points are illustrated by a verv brie! examination of accounts of natural right and then by a sketch of the species bias of some major positions,7 Hart (in |5|) accepts, subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant, the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, ‘any adult human ... capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons’. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights (though such a view is occasionally held, e.g. by pantheists. But pantheism is false since artefacts are not alive). For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., at least, whatever has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever has a right has in­ terests. Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights, and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. But persons can relate morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth, to practically anything at all. r J The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typica ly employ a single criterion p. such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of afTairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual prankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing P°’ntS arC deVdOped by thOSC protcstin« about human maltreatment of animals; see especially the essays testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then ‘‘rational” economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on televi­ sion. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the ~^^base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some * v^gue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is (rough) justice. REFERENCES 1. A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac with other essays on Conservation. New York (1966). 2. J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). 3. P.W.Barkley and D.W.Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). 4. S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Animals, Men and Morals. An enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans, London (1971). 5. H.L.A.Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?’, reprinted in A.Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). for < MC. fyjfot'''? ■tu / v x .. 5^ ' A - ■. 3 7 • ... , ■ '-■ “"■'T “"7— , O' .. / ... . t ■ - _____ 5 11 I * b. ■-^ ' ■ 1 ■■ ■:.,' ?• f ■ ■ '■ ■ \ • < ■- ■> ■ '■ ...:■■ ■■■ ■- k ..... £ • tOx ' A . ' ’ . ' -. . ........... ........ '■' •■■ ' - ■ ,. ; 1 L ___ SL&L___ ___------------------------------------- r.._ Ao ..... . ' ■ r - \ v * . . , ' ' ' . ... . ' . .■ . , '. - ■ A * O ' ' . ' , ' . . , , f . iK 4**«^ £' . ' •) ■ ; ‘ ' ' ' ' &-A. */- “S A r* - f’ ,Z ■ .. t u< lzJ*C C<& 'Co h* zLzx^ X CXA-a. 'tel Aj .. ‘ X .’ ■tzO .. i ’ ' \ u<J-A^LA ,. z^i*" V^o*4^ -^- -Oi--\z> f ■ ' ■ ti i .— 4 a. - ' ■v tO-- \. u> (.<■ •'■ * Z fi fl £/\-'-X n ’ ‘ ' UaJ-A^La I cJ <-X j <A 03 v. I*~c-%>a tu <*--a O•- V — * ' . ? . . ____ ___ .-r.'^-—> .. .. . • Q :' -*• f■ V Jidk ■ ■ t :ygn. -A. < I- . k -V u i----- L u J ' . ... ______________ 2Zo.... ■ « tj- a. i €o _ZSt - 'w**sfe2______ i_X £I -sX ■ > ' C "■ ■’ . ' W:'^~ .■„... tC^L d ■ ■ J < ' ' . Opt*^ .>w^4Ua4t L. cU^fU^ L •<».. ., • >/»• ■ I P < •. V ho o- k . - ■ * •• j ■ \ aVumL. cAfth 7 - ; 4 / ( . > ■ ' ■ IX . c ' ■ ,v^_...... . JgLl . ‘ •■ lI.. I A ,__ y J^-xZs, vX>. ! V ' ■ ............ -.- C^> ^O-*—<" . U-^QU-^^ az^<^6*^....... ■ V exp UrC 4- Cl J&, I—C^L-o—ti I i / c r ’ ■'X '■ . j£o - a~, -< JU-<9v-a --- * Izy, L cLa-^aJL *-L — • cC^c u-> 0 >—-» l|o-*—'-. Xa^ J •*’ X- <^» C"Q- . »-fe-, >1^ A U*--—-** t-v.^ X^LzO* U-1U— -J, xo. <xXo •&/ ,-tfJ. V) \. '< ' I i —x-> >» 'k -vjf eSt <>- fl o»-^e^ "KL^ X-t v-jlA~ a JL^> <a . A > -A ‘-V. <^y--- O^A^X C<J-’- X- -v<a ^>4jUl^ , *V r ~ w*<- *-Xa^jJL, ) K c¥- ctdL c^r\ -% . CA ■ -a-- --------------------- z>-*^ r V s/ <4* V^VA '✓*. x 'A p~* €z ;< ' y 'Cir> i * f *7) A-0 >• a- <o o d <>• us \ > ~k QJ^ Cj. O- ft-Kfj xGv-y dx>- > p '*d £ ^su »X_ c c Jj CjC-»~-.r-< . ^=> Qo «AvA £>-* ....... (X- V**-CAz^ ) -aAjL^— ^~\_ cL>^^ < Aa_ A-t-HP * '+ aCv‘—*— Ao ZA_ V- f> A-*V-A (b-rvtU ■ >J£ T.T.C <*»»• V • ‘ \rfA-f'»~-*^AX VX*-^ V-U— X AAc-A ^1 J /*-•■••*•> «*Z> zi-v tajx4" vj-^-*-4“ . ‘r *3tx_^( uJ“—^''^-A OVsjI^ & * a v_-~—<o*—sw^ o^-»_ VjJLu- , c^<- -*A X< ztr^ /Ace. ^A- KT^-XXa -\ GO-ce^T F(Sb /'ik-ov^ “'-'■> O -V^ r~ ,5>^XC^'-'~'CC» • ''.'J * a ■> V, fc*-■■■&-'-") rtj.J /VO '-—*•• ■*■ t*A ‘—91 * * io -^22^ * 3 ' U- } -Cztxo^J-a A^^-U- a-xa uztt> (4 xtu AU-A y ^<*^CAvUr^ ub-^Lv A- cl*w. *%*x> X—7 &~t z\> a- ^Glx^ -^j—c r<XA^v<_ 4 &- txAuA^ id1'~- ' c* C~* * ~ "fc ^«Uf<-<-,ri • -< 'J a.X-^u . xJx C. . ’ , & '--^-C ,v> e^- o < •" •-'' '•>■>:.•■*'?: V J Aj 3 .to XA 'v~, •n O -•.•> / / * t~ -* ” <• ^-^So Zo ) J^Xr*-^r-^ r^) A^V* kj^v—o Bu0 " bu- v>^c4- r- d Cy^>~e-~ ^v«-^-^vCc / i-^hx~K_-^<-A. <<> <-*—-V—>ttkA< J^O-U- |t-r-&Xxv— ^e^avX—( J /"tzO. r-U- u^rt«4~ *9 &A X-^JL zUU-< -z> -^Aa \n-*c • 4, r>v v-*^ o j£3jl f * s■ c o CC-^J| A. C-*^-y^'A-'» Co £^4-2- Z-CC V1" ZX) v^<.^J>rC r-O\ i^j-Ca. U-v_ ^V*-4^'r-^A~^-> A>U jXK ^-^-^jl _pL v^x-'JxClLa^ A—>—v<_ -*~-<_>JLv. .'CvAz^ £O^ AXzv^A. ♦ < — c+^ “/JU. “T^Gl 'Ao*- 0 -" —A^* <A*^Cg ^L xX*^ULt—□ iGs^G^ /i<>‘-*-c. '-C»— Ca^ a^Ll I VAaA >>An^ '-O-Qa*~t__ 4 > "^“*~^> V-'JK—A.'^C. Xg.^u^j c Ou%**j "’0^^ 55T *-<a ^~L ^to £)La-a?< H- G>' rG A? ^AQst^.... yO<*-w»»A . QkJLLl . Go^^-a^AA. ..... l^x>— !jC l*Jc — . .... ^n*w^^v&A. Va.^ cG*-? L& -^ >-***- u> C-tfktA^. _. -XSL( o-G_lX %^?yr r <j2^ z>tnC/X**-vjtX '***"■ z/V\z^^Ax ^*-*-^ £ -c<X *V~>~ ^wK>-‘\SwjLX Cczl XJbu-t A'>>~“ _ 'Yvv\U~’J—V (V^Ffr s r * /^v—4-V3 ^>r<. 1^'-*-* , "to _ 0a>-< 3> ^>i~x “ \> ■ k>*- -a^Xaa -•■• (k.c>^\ f //-V . ' / . <r" U<_ , !0'-^C_. <\b*-GA^x^ fiLMs-ut. p- -G— "**{1^-5 Cysut, >—oKxi^t k Tg ^^cJUc I x-v| , ■ IS THERE A NEED FOR A NEW, AN ENVIRONMENTAL, ETHIC? Richard Routley (Australia) § 1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environ­ ment, in Leopold's words ‘an ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it’ ([1], p. 238). It is not of course that old and prevaling ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as ‘Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees’ are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects.1 It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take ex­ ception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. ‘A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope,turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall,rocks, andsoil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society.’ ([1]), p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such traditionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure.2 Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn’t a 1 A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits 2 To the consternation .nodoubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeterminate 205 is, near enough: ~ propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which includes ( like md1v1duals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative Ju~gements co~cermng conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong of_ what ~re rights, what _is valued, and so forth. A ~eneral or lawlike proposition of a system is ~ prmc1ple, and certainly 1f syst~ms S, and S2 contam different principles, then they are different systems. It foll?ws t~at any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreo~er 1f environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded m Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming wh~t _seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environm~ntai eth1_c 1s needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is com_monly assu_med that_ there are. what amount to, core principles of Western ethical ~ystems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed ~n the Golden Rule provides o~e example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, ts the . commonly formulated hberal pnnc1ple of the modified dominance position .. A recent for: · " • "'• ,;, /'' /,'. / ~·- - ·· ..._ mulation 5 runs as follows ( [ 3 I, p. 58): . 'The liberal philosophy of the Wes tern world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, prov1dmg ( 1) that he d0es not harm orhers and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism - because under it humans, or people. co_me_ first and everyt_hmg else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom pnnc1ple becaus~ 1t gives perm1ss1on to perform a wide range of actions (including actio.ns which mess_ up the ~nv1ronment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. In fact it tends to c_unn_mgly shift the onus of pro?fto others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restrict10n 1s narrower than a restnct1on to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my mterests, because. I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being anyway, because 1t does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or mter_ference. Mor~over the width of the principle is so far obscure because 'other' may be fill~d. out m s1gmficantly different ways: it makes a difference to the e~tent, and privilege, of the cha~vm1s~ whe~her '.other' _ex~ands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other'person or to _other sent1~nt be1~g ; and 1t mak~s a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic apphcab1hty, to which class of others it is intended to apply whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, a?d. whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely unworkable, and 1t 1s generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. ' //4-_ ItIt_ is taken for granted. in_ d_e_signing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a ....,. /..~..., . ( sem_antical analysis of perm1ss1b1hty and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations r.,.·-=-"'t.. :.;1 -c.: , · ~/:_ (".~-htch may be mcon:iplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some ideal ideal every in s1tuat10n, what 1s obl_1gato_ry in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded ~1tuat10n. But the_mam pomt to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles · t· 1f correct are umversal and are assessed over the class of I·deal s1tua ions. (') Th z collapse of the world system the 1 _survi~ing perso~) (or man e as_t ma~ e~a~ple. The last lays ~bout him, ehmmatmg, ~s far as he can, e~ery !tvmg th_mg, animal or plant (but painlessly if iou hke, a~ at the best abattoirs). What he does 1s qmte permissible according to basic chauvinism ut on envir?nmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be commit~ ~~d \o e~ot~nc values to regard M'.. Las_t Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that ra~cfa th mkmg a nd val~es have shifted m an environmental direction in advance of corresponding s .. 1 ts m the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). (u) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects h_a~~ blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out ~e pos~1b1hty that what these pe~ple d~ harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. therwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man's relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from substantial human interference, whether of the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable north-Europea n small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would reject, a 3 principle of total use,implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used for human ends, "humanized". As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforwa rd; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is riot always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assumption). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for m~ny thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted. a ~pecific ethic, /§ 2. -As. we noticed----(a~ ethic is ambi~uous, as bet_ween a specifi~ ethical system, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster.4 An ethical system S ./ 3 If 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use p1 inciple is tied to the resource view of nature 4-A meta-elhic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions 5 A related principle is that (modified) free c.1tcrprise can operate I il 11 ,·thi'n s· -1 1- • 1m1 ar 1m11s 207 destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild ar,imal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all ~emaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an environmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined ·by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauvinism may conflict with stewardship or cooperation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving outpJt to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since h~ much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off'. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this example to the industrial society example: the society looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic picture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hunting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man's activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The l?ehaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accqrdingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whal~[~ to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental econo_mics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably 6 along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable-if that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment _is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren't environmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respe~ted industrialists fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of ;he sort described, in a morally impermissible way~ No, what these people do _is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For exampl_e, mso~ar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an mdustnal development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is _the slau~hter of the last_ remaining blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvm1sm as a satisfactory 6 For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [31 freedom principle is a more difficult matter. A tentative, but none too adequate beginning might be made by extending (2) to include harm to or interference with others who would be so affected by the action in question were they placed in the environment and (3) to exclude specieside. It may be preferable , in view of the way the freedom principle sets the onus of proof. simply to scrap it altogether, and instead to specify classes of rights and permissible conduct. as in a bill of rights. § 3. A radical change in a {eory sometimes forces changes in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way requires a modification of the usual metatheory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A somewhat similar phenomena seems to occur in the case of a meta-ethic adequate for an environmental ethic. Quite apart from introducing several environmentally important notions, such as conservation, pollu1io11, growth and presen•atio11,for meta-ethical analysis, an environmental ethic compels re-examination and modified analyses of such characteristic actions as na1ural right, ground of right, and of the relations of obligation and permissibility to rights: it may well require re-assessment of traditional analyses of such notions as i-alue and right, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions; and it forces the rejection o [ many of the more prominent meta-ethical positions. These points are illustrated by a very brief examination of accounts of natural right and then by a sketch of the species bias of some major positions. 7 Hart (in I 5]) accepts. subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant, the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which. among other things, 'any adult human . .. capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons'. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an em iron mental ethic rt::jects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the deflni1io11 of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right. a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with rcspc:ct to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that lon g ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights (though such a view is occa~ionally held, e.g. by pantheists. But pantheism is false since artefacts are not alive). For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right n_ot to _be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., at least, whatever has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever has a right has interests . Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights. and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. But persons can relate morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth. to practically anything at all. The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summ.um_ bonu_m; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps mcludmg future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, 6f the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual prankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either_ ~ire~tl~, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, asin rule-ut1lttanantsm, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embr~ce persons. or even some animals (at the cost. like that of including remotely future humans, of losing 1 Some of thes< points arc developed by those protesting about human maltreatment of animals; see especially the essays collec!ed in I 4 I 9 ~ iii 208 WJ 6 14 209 testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then “rational” economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on televi­ sion. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the _base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some v v^gue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is (rough) justice. REFERENCES 1. A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac with other essays on Conservation. New York (1966). 2. J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). 3. P.W.Barkley and D.W.Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). 4. S. and R.Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), A nimals, Men and Morals. An enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans, London (1971). 5. H.L.A.Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?’, reprinted in A.Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). C'/■ClUi/! n /t'v'Tl tf-t / ^■nt's 'z 0/7 /#£■* O/^Z ^rfscr . J*. B? c ey-rzZ^ft. Z ZZzztZszL. , tZ/at-e-Zf/^ ; /f ?Z Sl’lff/Z' A0S fe 3 /c^^Z Z,z ZzZ L^f-4- ) /-^ // -------- ----------- ;.. ^z t e-'T— /) <LSfC t-x. e *<~Z^<--~ -f &'? } e- Xa^C^Tl f fs>\ . Zc'T- /ZZr^. t c*/'d />t^r*-( x X-C- ct'Ze^ &a L '—4. HA- ZZ> / Z^S. Zt Z&-'■?■&■'£ -, 4^ t J&-*. ro X, fle^ Si. ^ef/'Yrv Caf^ ---- )CS~ /pf" /J'ttx J 7 G-y 7 Jg; V JK-Ajtj <S\_Cc-O'/n--^> <2/- if y 1 ix j o vt/ hj ’ J) k t-C u, 1 <1 Sa-d- A ansi. OrttQ- &<v&tsx. J A Irt V- — 7 l>o!ri\f<i i&- ©a. * —, >1 /<^®./?v. /, z for * o^fh dUrl c^f'v^r *x 7&/I g fzZf c^e crftor. 'I ’rl^. s, r',\7 f\^e.d( c-^~ 77 r I 7/^t * 7fs7^ * /l/l f'cT" ffxCL^e/4^ c-x i t trv-e^ /t> e/kctp s i\tk for 'W’mH.- hu^^t) nn f& y e> k//A /&• ft 0 A dt^nc-f 3 7/dz- «Wzte>v a/C7 e/[e^ /~e'^~^ /7n^-J<- /fa f^7 7 /A e>r-Mo-y kdd k<c by kud d ^of hdd.}ttpvtcrtiJiy n6t h<^/<Z j is Ctfu( tfia. nS f //e^- fry a^a-Cfe^ 4 4 £> Al *~ it'&M «J I ex i tr -p£ kh a. n. y CH a C6hti*fb&t'/ncrft&r, ^^<.{ t . it• s dv^rft.c.u.n Aa st K u- m a. drrk. dl bex n.p a I /HA. II KA o{ a xs as or amwk ct IA. j _f c>A 0— C>d AO ®f 1. ?’ , I*. ’ @sw( A&u A a. I it m « n s vai a/rcj^^c t/4— m cd(tS A-Cf&h"tHc.S part . ike. c Cn. S f~o ft a cL v p!^ fi^-O Aft &kic*> . fl *<£ ■• - -t'/iese- a.rt~l C-i pA. t»6 n. 3 i c^ch v rtes. tfa(L Xc^r-Mf />?«< /5C>- —“ c_C-j h lost- of « ) 0/ il ) I 'V chuxi'HAf ofe-sa/inAf A a CA- D F ( r IA . IV^K.'t' ) H ~ t'i^-f axtivitiOj clhl^ c-la<> i) y / A Ca u b$i^s l\j & ) i>»- r c> f' t</ 7>/«- o/ /^G't CfLLctpiL^^.1 CL s .1 focMUftU . OTWr X CCA is* a/£ CCKVirv n.neA.t*'! e-i/CA \t ' w-ru-C, faijict, Aorf SO)tyd 0 + ■X fti cUatiiU <’/Z<3r >^»n, , A<i^f "^“ to 0iOf? haul kt CMjiafa J «< ?/ t iViebl' I I no n - pn V I i / y (l/(cL ^€4 Of / L Ourx^^/cx^ C blZ/lQ. C^f //lwfc+'x t. c^a.*/ u . /\/f/c^ts/t f^r- t\ a^$_ ofac^t^ //1lM(^ z>r~ <*-*x AtZ. » ct/^rKb^f / // & d</r&S /A ff^f /f //4e ) ? fiC & ^r c 1 7L. // -Z /t Vy^u JBL ' /'JL '^'^“'*7't/ nT4 I c z\ rkQ—-v t-ATl 0 1-t'F ' li'sWet iwt y "V A_Arv [an^W^i.^r(u.t\ ko^-d^.\ i*~ zu* f A , |p \. kt were rfa^?</k \ 0^ Il £' centh’ki j . 7"tf a k U. »*i A A J i Y>y.^~^i)c(calces) e/- fa 6 . \ iW-6*//y .j r*- R-r ka.t)b c(i*scr i At i a a. "t io a. "Vkij Cut <z V) M i $ f H i i a. rt 't'<2-/- tA. sAo^3 W?£$far A Wo,3 14k t€S f O A ■Wio ift- . r-< A . \ ?"T, A K ^c> £>a__ q)kitk i 'lLt tS | k CK V e, > S£ Z8* '</ (/ /-W, iS /tJt. } a^f yyx^f^tv' ^ft>eliitOKi at C4t4^S t PX l $ 4/t<LS £, ftQi / 1^,0- k 6- <_ f" er Q-Cc3~l\.ffl. t'' 'kh.j^t RA- only cCkC- If ‘H't<l*f . £ tme R. 5 U- 9 |w VO'/l ,. clrtist f i /y0^f tf <T A 2. ns oVcbf ar *ri*t p re-Feje/vceS ©t - + A,e- far — oTtva-r 'ortyevr-r o-H^-r* cr^tt O tor / ‘ , . t® n2 io(e-/-ATrt>rx ‘ — * ft, r 6 i cr iter i arx I o fiu cLo-fi respLoF J? j /s tta>eCiSSO>>.'t’<i.ty /n^cc.f'i'e.) ' priAcrple? z ©n 5*<c--A, °’ Kiir- ut>rtAi»hil^. j> conSi^l^h c^ a,{ -ft) rn/iind frtHyd/), 'J /€<L af/pctiMi&fcC A $u2fylj\t''O m'*U4H*(i?f7'+ if d / accost C-- t C'fC.t^-t CL-fCS | ere iAf^ 1 ; > ■Far . Ivunf*** 70 loanee-' If- 't'^iS b ttffl C-t fi-A't" if . entreat A ^rmrr//e; ft *j be ke I qI of' p | | mV* ? Cj nfi (2o.r n-ftok. e^-rjftJL <s I ^zjcf'Fjo'x !t(rf Jl Mj1 G.S Z.O W Si C^Lr £ F ioa. OX ■ l^> jJ t~o <?F Ct ^CL f Zt/f co^ce-rri- J / which tk(^ y to tl\^T trj W1M MQcfvm C. U aXum y> iv-/ 1 nto c*— v^o c ork bftAztv/du’r .flxrfnor h.UrflMX»j ot^4*r "Tor btkcjrl } (X. (Z (L^nCt/g, ‘ utt^e ) aejit tfi f oloes Ct l^'oxv r H- A/ O b !Ijdtio'if ^C'D^ni^d- to ix\\cL(U^i'^:'\ TotaiLCwc(^ ej'^M pryo,fly or rA»M^ 6-1^ /l-----------------—6jQ.AJl.fdli se fL £> Ft ) /^r 44^**^ (( tiTi/icr/on 44^4——dlfkO s z^ev c] of con^ici~Crcis2 JojlY" poirv-t- , tklS pl^c/io r^Ac^-S jjA^ - ^Ai7 r^y t'ko^ f ^Jcrbncg^ «s£ , it is p nG jka. 0" f~r 0 >v_ a, or- ■f' For pt a-f-ct-c-n. u«_ — Inin/p c>uez/itf<~— b£c*i« rcCtf/ZZ’tKZ- ^XcAr^«<<a. e4M«»-f.^X TnA" //4/a^, . ebr^n co-\\k\iiAti I T <L m f) IAk) pfG-TCj e. >\ c d~- — Aa m f* OJihe/LSZ I . Kn 1X' &»/f P / 1^7-^ j • ' io 7iCz irx >vi/A. ' 1>hj<’j itfr ynorntch (itj / r -Fr 4 yh g ot1 f vA_ Qiov\b2c. . / . Co fl-T < a (pfvt<(?'-'■ t( s C> inO't I 0£ a_ h rsipoS f*tpe.rcor (L r\te.t tox^ *®/ ' , . c >ni~i e*« c e__,_ c^>wZ /A / <2 // r h. k tn I'M , ve^e. bttble. s ki<>h«A co. n_ Cf&DCt~m/e.S vyot _ i^k.) 1^ foroaX^/zp^^^ <k teveJn do J j e,j . zt £ ct ii\ . , a Aon/c_ / ■/-© &**C filo x / » • , fr z c/alf //c^ Lfi—- k Ct V 4 f J rh £u ol C. yy/fai b c CQ^tv I Af°*~ S Yc '~~ c f Xf 'i p( 6 e s - P^ 4 / c 'C^t^ f Q- >t LVi '/A.e. , c<-*yr& /^r Xa< C zn.^6 A& * A>> ^i> ?//<cn , c«*^’6,»i1Jp/’Xty. /n ) dt s p-rQ- a. a I ih<# ^1 — t* * Q-x-k&s'pCo.tl C-A n n <nit~ £ #xX fitnWj Iw/iy tn z>/C ol<~ve^foji me e>|(2/-1 rue/ e a / /j ■/^c zfi Zz i's t k cc tr Und^ (X#l ct i Halt V T' <J 6n I •> vj (X11 c I?lo i lj at/on i Z "L To a s Piorftl "Iw-Xs <?/n<2-r Cc> KV t <s a- r a-f <^ crrv/y c^ct'^z-J z\ tS ^0 tz ——■ z zt /y i'k&t v lev zzLjUr J 'j k (l- a. UgsTma ku-w-tins C^vZ i4! o Act rGJ < Cg/- z/^/zj Aa c't'wJ #4^ (Xi h i i"u^i'u Lt-1 /zo Zte^ > 0- i . ■X c- a-rt-fW^ have. o^e- 7 er o ’e £ PC- 1 in nmUCh at ,eaSt aS CrUSOe'S w-th —2£S^2SS SS=S=E-lg=:==ES maltreat the land, extract frontU>2 *"* 3 W,'dcrness',f taken to tnterfere with and does not rouse the moral indtgnL^n ofThey ’ C°ndUCt ” not Z^eyyero/ woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows intn rh»> •he „«k. „ SIi„ (ir otherwise dccenl) farmer who clears the <f^^- s a- z. // / A * /7~. z^r&sz A, / ' Z - — ^z4— C » Ci s t2"* 7^ ji /<t^/ <- f /'t ^ ~C ' f' /~ e^ttcfuc^ / /^b. f 0 /•> | it is none loo clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or al all well worked out. so that the application of identity criteria foi ethics may remain obscure. Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical sy stems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christen ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two,.other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethicszor that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the /?<rf fff /> (Het-//'s-j Ilk > Ct at— single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on ckd«°T^a *ssues such as infanticide, women’s rights and drugs, there are competing sets of prin S’ T. ? nCW e^h‘C and Prevai,ln8 ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity that prevathng ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. - r. . jM40/ Indeed Passmore (in |2|) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man’s relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views.-31 ' j i 7) el'f'r/rel-x rC-~ r* A. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic^— Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removeej, eg. vv/zo is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with a ^environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth’s surface should be presen ed from substantial human interference, whether of the “improving” sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and com fortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man’s proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect galiye - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being ^usefulness for.human purposes: while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources./ '7Zu^ /fate- c.C^( 4c~S~ £^7 7c/<*-/'- /rw*. e-1 Cr*..s~y 7 7 , J - cvalua,,^. of an environmental ethic.oXs" coter^^ A t !(^ ; ^,l(he1SStmECXPa!’U"’g P?pula,ions eon,'^d ‘0 finite Indeeo these lesser traditions lead to what a thomnpho’ ‘dr‘”"lg anJ utl,izing ofall natural areas principle of total use,imping that every r-turJl X m ^v,ronmental othic would reject, a human ends, “humanized” ' area shou,d be ^‘^ted or otherw.se used 3 f v 3 rr • H use is extended, somewhat illicitly, to inciud. as regards its actual eftects. Note that the toU’ e •eSiCrVat‘<>n; thiS tOtal USe Princ‘P|c is rendered mocuous al least <»e pr , pie is tied to the resource view of nature , such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or’romantic, would be new aljigjiu The matter is r straightforward: for the dominant.ethic has been substantial!v uuaiitle^y the n&er that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically int^Tes \0tn peers'. 7 > proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the Goiyuuterference assump­ tion). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position: and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further '* towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which, destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [31) that blends with the modified position; /hcrt/t f'cd c-Z^x . may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situa tion excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I ^vall A new ethic is wanted, aoh/ 1, /T-- < zfre^e^ 7y 7> j7**u\ 5 /g^7rc> e*- /5> g Zte-Z*-^ a-rfCsC , 'sCett /J /tr ! t>7 f rCL , ioG-j . c s f~CT /fc. /•J2 crt-cc^ a m 7 7/ s e fJ Ifc,'-* 7 ■ is, near‘enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which in dudes (like individuals of a theory > a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligators permissible and wrong.'x* ! of what are rights, what is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a \ principle; and certamlv if systems S, and S2contain different principles, then they are different systems. It follows that anv en onmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlin ed. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principlaJL embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming. I what seems to be so. that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic /s needed then a new- ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environ mental counter examples to it z , /3^'f> Ji^f^ yt i« * Q-. V '5'" 7/ / Z/t-y -y ZLo c^-T V / C o-~f^ e o—•. /K^~ . are' w^at amount to, core principles of Western ethicaSR ? 1 7 accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed ' m the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core^&iple ' is the commonly formulated liberal principle ' / * ...2>^-.Yjr7 , /fol; >ws ( j 3J. p. 58): (D). The liberal philosophy of (he Western world holds that one should be able to d< □ what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm .himself jrreparablv.' ■ "Wf® /Ac7 7^— /zxc principle because it e.ves permission m st. some,im« the principle is haded as a freedom SESSSSSsasyr??”- •A?x chauvinism whether ‘other’ expands io ‘other h "* ' ■’ ' Ten' '° lhe c*Ient- antl Pn' 'lege, of the son* or toother sentient be.nXnd t makes aX" wh,chu’s t0° r^<ttive or Mother per verselj to its economic applicability to whieh I LrenrCe l.° the ar,e4uacy of the principle, and in future as well as present other" whether to r '55 ,° r°therS “? t0 ‘ w,lcther to future others, and whether to possible others Th -Th utur<J othefs or onl-v t0 non-discountable V and it is generally c /wf- e \ c) fff)Ct^ &J C'C. X ) 1. CAu^f ' b- / ^U4r<fc C 7 *4 & S f/'t J &&&!&&— ?£*~ ^KBMCfc. a/ fiU €t y^ < r- cC 7 ^C/>< Z__i___ * sC I y/L j (ft) f . } /a fC*2— z’vz/XLt,/ /XL x« /'c-^ anaivjfe of permissibility; £ 7 Zcz2—z obhgatio/falementsjstretc^. out over ideal mInations• (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some idefl^fe situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal ' ■ situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over the class of ideal situations. ZSl ezn^Tfez- />?> b /> C&7 rr cX? eef ff (i) ’ The last man example. The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system Zo eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to f/)) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover pne d^gsjtot have to Ke commit ted to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly, (the reason l^eing^crhapsthatra dica! thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles)./^ f /U, Corf MG /<€ C ifZ (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be . to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and ft}) destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, " and all remaining forests disappear in favour ofpatfuM or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an en­ vironmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; £ qfXL/ }r ex/ s* e< 9 they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wreck­ ed place. But this conduct may conform with the ’ CCW (£>) Ccf'tC I ^cZ /y //I- /IZPCC-X c'LjruZ^ ~Z / / s/y i ■ jr.ru effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps “for the best of reasons’", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being “better ofT’. 7 /<L. , /tMVbcr^r, Z^> /7^ cx-yr .1 , C< /ctj'/ //’fr ) 7(3 /&- cL C ^^T- 77 toe-^ g rXl-rr^ ^/y) <L c7t Qr<g,*y/i/& , M zrzreX e*i SKfX&d ft C^ g<c /&- ^<XaY£- 77 ^1 4rc7jW4— ) f re/nctd lb— /f ... --*^g*._ K on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may up set them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hun ting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue w'hale example are provided by cases where a speues is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man’s activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whale$ to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics I would; instead the market r ynuX InGswkblj C/bf £?3 ) tr^Cjec(j-ep-HtL- Cornnc nJ 7 Ct/on(j e(.&^ Ma Jt>«f Cu-Ort- wd ?a6 J w*v7YY w/cX<2- * //> /t * ■J <Y // / Ara /jo f cjff c c , 7 i- ft-T X_S>'C''lf X-S" c x c^r^r Ca— „v z Xc< ✓ » . J ♦ 4 Zl. e/?o f M dyeeft (T& fd- Ci/c / Awl 7 ■J'yt jf vironmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respected in­ dustrialists, fishermen and farmers arc behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading ac tivities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a 5 greater or lesser extent eviitand hence in serious vases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primiioe peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and-^r* permissible, so also is the slaughter ol the last remain ing blue whale^for private profit,. , or fa & 1 j“'/z^4> i ■T.JS (X. (t^o-r<- a~ ^~h%AJ2-A Au—4^-, -vGtt^y ^-■-? —j—G\A<?-‘-*-k Cj^ /^tc /&rf SV-ev*^. "* JLk^-A~A- ^aj-<j^_u-< ko <=jA- 6< ~34 '-£-^biA -uf-e^kCvjt^ JJv-a-oA CyyA -vo> u^Aj| pj-e-Aic^- £ lAxJ'iz-^-e. cAA fu-__~ ^-^k_k &$ -o-«- <-*■---- -C-^V A -c—_ AXq. cA>V JL&&U- {L&{- — ^Gg-O-i-- <xz.^ V/GA-C -"^o J e> cAM^t-K <_ kvj/l (co*.— yy-j^A , Afk-o -tedt^dA- -4-<--^»X. *~ <-<_>^>—/Y""k AJk-A AJU <-Avh v-J2X4- ^4 k’v-C Lv-\-^ Uu~e> z C v-—&_<k * j^jkjtxv^z jL C<_ ( kKu_k Q/<^-CAA) Cck^X^ a urAk ,^Ah—<4-x c< Aoi—-v c ca-£——-dL/b vz<,vn—v-k* -A £y< xj^—~ -A. -— cCj2_j2_A- o u—Cu-y V—C c Xx G.ZX-—^A Ou-A-^ «v '’4^c V-vA^ Cl~A k-% ^SSL- '-J- ^-~~ kk vr~v -~-e_ /yxxav^ oA c^ ^^r~ /t' ,-cA o<— _J—, ^Rjt^r r c--^--^ nouzfe^ O9e>yn^5 kA. Av—^>^,a»-A- Ak^-u-jy^ rtcr^ . _• ^/,G ftr»&'rt-£-e,43^. J -v—<x— ) Aik. ^L z^J klMmiL ^■‘-"-t-t-* tesr-e^ c^ Ak<A J? y. AA-A J-C t <V— <R_ v— c>j-ej-- u--o-k_N_<_ u^k-^-A ) :— v—e_ -VekjL 0-<X jz_>-e Ar -a_A c--> UZ^U-u-^-^A Afib( A*&( «n Zz7 Co—- '“Cy- <.<2^'1A < &*•>/'" ^r~ Ac^(/i^ f(Ci,f^C^^*- -Co ------- U~-<SX_u-----Y C-7 aJ-Ao-C /'aA^A? <S<—st-C Act ** ^-a2-x_d Z7/^ '7C‘<k YL<iT&rvtl GJk'—s 23’. u>v 4^ ^r^2-^L ’I'*' C—^r-^-^' A^rtr4— £H 'Xf X ^-°^> C-C-CX-KcX > et4zU^ _ Jrfc^ ^uu. ;££L;k<_ wXo tlq. <_^ CD1-— i_rMl\. B CAC-yrV^ L -2X-C -C+^ 6^M"" -t-L ej" e^H? O £y-Q^-' 0>C-t-4- <c^3 a) ^sxv*^^v 0~“'—“’■ ’A ^—e— O^Lia^v'-a-^ k^-ZZ-ZUJ — .^>p-v^_gA-C -Anu---- ^r-e-ttu- -C-O^G-oXZc^ z z5 OdX^-i^x^ — ^te W-— <^- < *tj> - '-Vua^W- e— "VL«-e- ' ■■'■> ^js> £^J2-— v€ c<x\ ££jL^ c C> 'UC 4^V~ jtXK-sj- <£HL <Sj—<— # ALU- 4^>V ^CtSLu—> t>c—- ^K-’t' l^l \w6 6v_ O ._. <u>ce(jltv‘®— IU~ —v, fU^ar^^A ?n 'u~-Av c^u^laf^^ ,-^K t*^ to L- ‘0*^1- &—■*- _A^3L v— A,Z 1 ~ Iks, p. — I fi.tib'£ 6t> Ji.— A A aZ^S^-AJLA ZA CXUj" X----------- — -'-s V" <JL-~^(/^4^ — «XJ-— 6l ) Ac,<3-^ 7^L^~ £-_ /-"^^ c^tu yte, ... ^iri^^f_____________________________________________ ■I ^)<L^)c.^\ cA^Vt^i)^ I(^y Alrlccj* (Jj<*~£^ r^/J>7 /M;-^ : z* --^///<2<r-> &-f f /^/^C 2Z cJ t X^ctML Ou /h^z*7vczy ; o-r e^ V'iAl<JL. 7^^ Xw// erf ty /irf&usC lrf~ AA^ £&2__/ati/ y^r t&AiJ'x CJL. /A<*% LT^A<JL.\ } njL^J: (c^A^A'/Vetr^ i/iUti^C Ay £ft<>AAiA JO rfA^ / ) // // <^zrx^>t /wz?/ ' /Jf/PfiM crduZ^ O^(//y W fA£^f A />*/ /c^ a fo jO'^A^r fed# £s.^A’ fr/K'r&SfJ ' z/ .y it On. ^£>4X 6<1SA<_ a~m-A -Wv*------- ^IXS- does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights is occasionally held, e.g. by pantheists. since artefacts are not alive). (though such a view But pantheism is false For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do^riot award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with,jmainstrean» theses according to which rights X coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concerns; i.e., at least, whatever, has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever^has a right has^interests st- <■ J ? j2_x>~«^-^—4“V- C>----- <~*'f~'^ < —r_>4 AN-^V5i „ /s i—^Jj-o- -gk, zLo jfe-f-4-^- c^-^a- c'k <j£—*A C. -in ^..Sj-oSL-U-^-^zf- ^LM. c_f-<_ C-O x_ C*"^——'p^^— ^ri»|^e>\A»tL' (o~— 1_ <"7 Qr*—S—Ic^-k^pj —.*—*L_ d /'—>-^—^- J &i $"'z'~1<— . — -^_T-Ca_Xa—<__ Aj<, J^«-------- .__><sxbV_ vyH-m <Ji J<$A_ Aal -n^tx/$J'_>~'lx<"c~j-^_<vj4-toA V 2 k^hssXkx^ Z 4----- ------------------- A-S <—<-^-^X_ rA-c____ cL<i—A, "t^-ajZavJ^v i^a--— (kx_A_—-C—, .O-JL '*-^>>J2—AziUAAA O^ . _ _ aAUL :A>=> v __ <=y- fcAlA- v-*o-aA c-» ^Sjhj /"Xr-j-«_ -t~s p-vvj-^MSV-s »_—c<-^»ji—, 'V—Ci.’V' c_r—4~ iUvagk-A-tar^ t (__r-i!e~-^~--> 3 ci r \ 'Wt or e_. fkftyt i‘n ■'—^££ -T©t? Zv€>v^_^ <_<_ x^-aZ-xA' 0 5 <3^ tX,L 4Z <^/ 4b»-ULk /h <-<&— e2 \> c-^^uuxxi 78 t A__ -V  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 15, item 1721: Notes and cuttings on environmental ethics Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Subject The topic of the resource Handwritten notes and annotated photocopy (2 copies) of Routley R (1973) 'Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic?', Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy, 1:205-210. Description An account of the resource Title in collection finding aid: Blue Folder containing more of the same . Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span><span>,</span> Box 15, item 1721 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [68] leaves. 62.47 MB. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:62d159c" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:62d159c</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Second Bookcase > Third Shelf > Second Pile Box 15: Green Projects in Progress https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/4495525491cdad380d51db6c4168e929.pdf 411c2a0db2f12cd20bea776c91ffe49d PDF Text Text CASE DISSOLVED: critique of argumentsto and for the State Over the centuries that humans have been stuck with states, many different attempts to justify them, as in some way necessary or desirable (as more than an unfortunate accident of history), have been attempted. None pf these arguments succeed (as much would perhaps be quite widely conceded^). / / There are various wayjs of showing that the arguments fail. One powerful way deploys, indicates or develops, counterexamples; for instance modelling social arrangements without states. Another more pedestrian but essential way consists in direct examination of the arguments, not merely some of them or various classes of them, but, for completeness, each and every one of them. Ultimately that calls for, what is attempted first in a first attempt fashion, an exhaustive classification of the arguments „ A preliminary classification of these arguments can take the following form: 1. //i-yfonc or <?Ma,s7-/H,s'f(9rzc. These arguments divide in tum into two principal subclasses: 1.1 Daycrzpnve.* /b/Zacy o/TAo quo. A first group of arguments^justification of the state, try to take advantage of the descriptive features that states are entrenched almost everywhere as the dominant feature of the political landscape. Helpful as it may be having states in avoiding hypothetical in injecting a heavy element of realism oLesdisn, nonetheless fact is not per se justification: what is often X ought not to be. Bank robbers and robber barons are justified by their mere existence There are similar problems<dth the argument from tradition. If some principle, practice or theory stood for a good while it had something going for it. Some such consideration lies at the basis of precedence in law; the idea of tradition as encapsulating past wisdom - or past folly. Among the problems are that with authoritarian institutions come their antitheses, with the state the anti-state. Many practices like barbarism and racism have stood for a very long tirne,^ many organisations like mafia have been airound for a long time, so they have something going for them? Such troubles, the evident gap between descriptive and normative, are among those that plague In s^prt without utterly questionable connecting assumptions, such as that what is is necessary (a modal fallacy) or that what is is right (a deontic fallacyi), such arguments fail to afford justification. There are some important JMbtypes of descriptive (or quasi-descriptive) arguments, namely * 1 arguments. The state is not only established, it works. Immediate difficulties This fallacy, heavily utilized by Hegel, is critically examined in NNL. X �0 V-v L^ /]/ t 4^c AA-<s A ^^7*. JA^? (^A t ACA C.^y1k Av �2.2- 1 t.. z^ z^pr p^r- *-y^2^— ��2 with such arguments are obvious. The Mafia too/is well-established. It too works, often in opposition the the State (as a sort of negative opposite, like the Devil to God). What sort of standards of is working intended to meet? All sorts of awful political arrangements have "worked", at least in persisting for as long as statist arrangements: despotisms, dictatorships, tyrannies, ... . Still as pragmatic arguments enjoy considerable popularity, especially in North America, they will have to be considered in more detail (than they deserve). * arguments. The state has evolved through a long sequence of political forms. It is tried and tested, and now selected, selected as best available. Such arguments afford scientific clothing for the appalling Hegelian "what is is right". For what has evolved is selected thereby as best, and what is selected as best is no doubt right (by a familiar utilitarian deontic reduction). Slather evidently such arguments prove too much. Any form that in fact emerges, no matter how achieved, though what dusta^dly Machievellian deeds, no matter how awful, is thereby justified: empires and dictatorships of the worst sort, fa^ist and totalitarian states, one and all, are justified, provided only they are established.^ this only for climax states, where some sort of evolutionary plutoniums have been achieved have been achieved (otherwise bad means to select evolutionary ends may temporarily prevail). But where is the evidence that the State is not another transitional stage, like feudalism before it? As an evolutionary form it is very recent, and fortunately not yet established in evolutionary time. 1.2 AfoK-J&pcripf/ve. Difficulties with descriptive arguments, including prescriptive fallacies (deriving presciptive or evaluative conclusions from purely descriptive premisses), are evaded/idealisation arguments, which include These are genetic in justificatory character, relating the mythological "historical" development of the State from an imaginary pre-state situation.^ These arguments are not sharply^p^rated from * fdea/ /n,yfory arguments. * MMagmary and ideal reconjfrMcrfoK arguments. For the transactions, such as an originating social contract, may be presented in a quasi-historic form. This important class of arguments is broader than contractual arrangements, including all the following sorts of imaginary transactions: negotiating, bargaining, experimenting, etc., in given (idealised) conditions, perhaps issuing in an arrangement, agreement, contract, etc. One preliminary That contemporary exponents and practitioniers of state craft are inclined to accept these^orts of considerations, and to recognise any region that has gained (short-term) control over a territory and its administration, does nothing for the considerations^ What it reveals rather is the moral sickness of contemporary real-politics. They include (as opposed to relocation arguments, where a group ("voting with its feet ) relocates and forms a state (except of course these gorups, when there was room for them, tended to aim for new societies, not states). These arguments form a bridge between descriptive and ntunative. While voluntary contract arguments are descripively implausible, voluntary relocation has, or did have, a little descriptive �3 classification of these arguments divides them into natural quasi-theological, legalistic invisible hand evolutionary consensual or equivalent. artificial, The most notorious of these reconstructions, or political thought-experiments, are the social contract theories whereby individual members of a society fictitiously enter into an enforceable contract, inescapable for themselves and all their descendants, setting up the state, primarily as a security arrangement. In later versions which may involve other legalistic forms than contracts, such as pa^cts, trusts, etc., there is much negotiating and bargaining in contrived situations, where humans lose many of their distinctive features and accoutrements (in a effort to ensure some initial fairness). A variant on contract theories, which justify some sort of state arrangements Z/* they arose in an ideal way, is retrojustification of the state as naturally arising, as a sort of super­ insurance agency, from pre-state arrangements. For example, the minimal state evolves from a competing set of state-like security agencies one of which somehow gains a monopoly, and is retrojustified through insurance arguments (concerning risk and compensation). Such arguments are sometimes presented as replacing overall contractual arrangements (through minor arrangements undoubtedly enter) with invisible hand mechanisms. Whereas contractual arguments take the general segmented shape: INITIAL STATE: INPUT INTERMEDIATE STATES prestate negotiation followed by situation: draft contrad, assessment "state of nature" FINAL STATE: OUTPUT state established situation followed by contract adoption ^in invisible hand arguments the intermediate steps, on route to the state, consist in formation of organisations and their progressive amalgatiation to provide finally a state. For example, in Nozick these organisations are taken to comprise protective agencies (though that is only one statist function), and to ensure legitimacy for the final object, it is contended that each intermediate state derives from the proceeding in a morally permissible way, namely preserves % selected rights. Such arguments fail for two main classes of reasons: inadequacy in the derivations of late and final stages from earlier ones, and unsatisfactoriness over the initial state (in particular, what is assumed in it, such as proprietorial rights, and what is excluded, i$ the way of more satisfactory alternatives). In these forms the State arises through voZimfary actions and transactions. Whereas anarchists and many socialists see anarchism as a post-state state, these transaction arguments often assume anarchism, in very motly forms, as pre-state states. People voluntarily elect to escape those pre-state form, "rushing" into the jaws of the State. But there are, as well, versions, where the State is established through legalistic or religious means, natural religion or the like. For example, the details of State organisation, or a recipe or �4 commandments therefore, are received by or given to some powerful religious personage, who implements the organisation under religious authority. The legalistic equivalent came about through implementation, not of religious dictates, but what may be very similar in practical affect and detail, natural law. Normally this law will be "seen", for, by some powerful personages, who are in a position to convey, and have put into effect, their illumination. With the decline of religion these sorts of arguments have lost much of their general appeal (they should never have enjoyed much credibility). But many relics of these shattered arguments remain, to be removed. A critical point is that such arguments should not gain independent standing. Most law is mfra-state, state manufactured and state serving. What is independent of states has to answer to standards, moral standards especially, that are independently justified. Similarly for religious commandments. As a result, these arguments collapse back to arguments for the State. Now modern states did not arise in any such "natural" or contractual way. Often they were imposed by conquest or through colonialisation, and with a few exceptions, using military means rather than offering much sweetness and light and choice. There are a notable discrepancies between typical justifications of the state (in which much is sweetness and light, though it is far from a pareto-optimal object) and common explanations of the role of the state (in which much is obviousness and intrigue). Nor do the ideal constructions or histories offer much justification for these resulting state power configurations. For the states so delivered are very different from those most people presently toil under. In any case, the arguments involved do not succeed. They are extraordinarily gappy by contemporary logical standards. They depend upon some utterly implausible assumptions, for example as to how vile conditions are^n extra^state situations. These changes are easily illustrated, and will be.) small immediate)^eana&14 example. Underlying several of the imaginary transaction arguments to the state, are various c/zofcg arguments of a thought-experiment cast. Commonly such arguments ambitiously aim to show that * the state is necessary, and that * the state is superior to its absence. But such arguments.like those embedcTin confracf arguments .are little better than con jobs.as are presented depend upon a false choice. For only two options are considered: H, a horrible Hobbesian "state of nature" and S, a well-ordered (contructually-reached) Hobbesian state. The argument, appealing to the vices of H and the virtues of S, has little trouble in concluding * * S is better than H (or similarly, rational agents would select S over H, etc.) other options, such as anarchist ones. Why should anarchists want to line up with S? They can agree with proposition * *. They might also want The choice conveniently leaves to assert that anarchistic arrangements Z are superior to S. Whereupon it is evident that neither * nor * follows. For necessity all accessible alternatives have to be considered (by the �semantics of That has not been done. For superiority, the superiority of S to Z and other alternatives has to be taken into account. That has not been done. — , ----------------------- alternative i^\Carter^^(?c^ry^which produces The kind of individuals who have strongly internalized values and can live cooperatively and freely without the threat of force ...\ i^)(p.25).4 6V1C- No doubt some of the gaps in the arguments could be plugged by further, further contestable, assumptions, but such analytic work remains to be attempted and assessed, after two millennia of such arguments. In fact it was long ago realised that such arguments exhibit unlikely and even paradoxical features. For example, in consenting to a state for security purposes, participants to the state contract proceed to establish an institution which is far more dangerous to them than the power of others taken distributively. It would seem that those smart enough to enter into a social contract for a state would be smart enough to foresee the problems of hiring a monster, and to avoid the state and steer along without it. In establishing a state, inhabitants set up an institution that is far more powerful and dangerous to them than the power of other inhabitants taken singly or in groups. This is to think that Men are so fulish that they tak care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done then by PoZe-caM, or but are contra^ f^ay think it Safety, to be devoured by AZo/asA These arguments, like others to follow, even if somehow repaired, would not establish an institution with anything approaching the power and complexity of the modern state. Arguments to the state typically establish, at best, only a rather minimal state, with certain protective and regulatory powers. Such minimal states would not deliver many of the goods economists, still less socialists, have come to expect of the state. The arguments certainly do not establish anything like the oppressive paternal state with a panoply of powers that many citizens are forceably subject to, power states have accumulated by their own unjustified predatory activity. In this respect too, arguments to the state resemble arguments to God. Deistic arguments characteristically establish (insofar as they establish anything) only a quite minimal rAar w/zZc/t, a first cause, some existent, a most perfect object, a universal designer, clockmaker or the like. They do nothing to establish many of the powers or properties asciibed to God. There is yet another resemblance a surplus of attributes are regularly ascribed to Gock so much power, knowledge, andj^^like^that paradoxes of omnipotence, omniscience, and jimilar, are quickly engendereb^aradoxes that a lesser God that merely satisized on virtue (and could tolerate some production of evil) could easily escape)^ So too a surplus of power is conceded to the State. The state carries ^far more power than is required for collective organisation, a large "political surphis" which should be relinquished. /4 ^ reversmg Hobbes' argument,pottom halfl really a cranking. $ Locke p.372. ——^Lesser Gods encounter ^other difficulties: their plurality, the fact that they can be exceeded by other greater Gods, and their upstaging by ontological arguments. �6 2(-l*) S*y^7?zayic. These arguments divide again into two principal subclasses, namely 2.1 Ana/yac and 2.2 M?K#K(2/y%c. Further both subclasses may be subdivided in tum into individualistic and holistic subclasses, for instance 2.1 into 2.1.1 Indiviualistic and 2.1.2 Non-individualistic. Most recent investigation has been concentrated within subdivision 2.1.^1, upon game-theoretic justifications of the State. Indeed, given prevailing methodological individualism, which almost invariably takes analytic form, all acceptable justification reuced to this subdivision? Certainly other systematic ways of endeavouring to justify the state tent z to have fallen by the wayside or been abandoned. However it is worth listing two further forms, one of which remains significant: * Holistic/brz/t considerations. The State is presented as the form, or even spirit, of Society, much as the mind is the form of the corresponding body. Insofar as there is an argument, it is analogical, from an increasingly dubious basis. Contemporary up-dating of the torm'ideas would no doubt have the State as - what is even less plausible - the program, or the software, of a corresponding Society. * Mora/ considerations. But there is little good reason to embrace individualism, methodological or other, because many sorts of wholes, beginning with ^bstra&i, do not come down to individuals; it is poor methodology to try to proceed as if they do. More on individualism elsewhere. See aM JB �3VHATEVER3 2. Arguments in a game theory setting: Prrhners' Diiemma games and supergames. What is widely regarded as the most persuasive justification of the state [is] "the argument that, without the state, people would not voluntarily cooperate to provide themselves with certain public goods... ". This argument, which is quite popular with contemporary academics, suggests that, without the state, people would not be able to "act so as to realise their interests."* . So far, hewexEr, we have not encountered^an argument, but simply a very large claim. The argument itself^is remarkably circuitous, circuiting through a range of examples drawn from game theory, and, so it will emerge, as yet quite indecisive. Obtaining a view, a clear view, of the whole argument, or rather the spectrum of potential arguments, matters for anarchism. For that will help considerably in dispelling the myth that here, partly hidden, is a powerful P3p*x argument against A The argument takes the form of a modal syllogism: * The state is necessary for the optimal, or adequate, provision of collective (i.e. public) goody (zzm/or premiss), of* ' * Collective goods are necessary for a satisfactory social life, (J%7M% premiss) . the state is necessary for a satisfactory social life./Moreover, given that the latter, a satisfactory social life (in a given region), is a certain desiderata, the state is to that extent necessary (a necessity is (^bolutized). While the big argument takes thatybrm, it is subject to variation. Furthermore, some variation is essential, else it, and one of the chief forms incorporated, is invalid. For the argument displayed has a different, and an ambiguous, middle term. For requisite uniformity, and validity, the middle term has to be either a) adequate provision of colective goods, or o) optimal provision of collective goods. While little supporting argument get lavished on the minor premiss, it being assumed obvious, that obviousness selected. For a satisfactory social life may result when when term o) is than optimal provisioning of collective goods occurs. Adequate lives only require adequate goods, perhaps even a modest supply of goods for less consumptive societies, not optimal or maximal levels. There is/a significant skating about, of justificatory relevance, in the "most persuasive justification of the state", as normally slackly presented^between (as in o), nomally explicated in terms of maximization; erms of satisization); of provisioning: opPma/ (as in a), have construed int (unspecified, as in the quote above, or perhaps specified as in Hobbes, e.g. defence and security of property). Unfortunately for the argument, all that the game-theoretic arguments for the major 1 2 Grofman 80, p.108, quoting Taylor. For another similar statement, qualified to members of a large public, see Taylor 82, p.53. Thus, basic collective goods for a basic social life, as for instance in subsistence lifestyles. ��' ' ' ' / premiss typically establish at best is failure of optima^ or certain large prov^pning, without the state. They do not show failure to provision at all without the state, or failure to achieve "basic" provision, or even adequate provisioning. Now anarchism can^granF that certain large provisioning is improbable without the state; for example^ntercoiynental nuclear missiles, or large output nuclear power plants. 3 But i^hardly matters! f&r such state-posessed goods are? arguably antithetical to satisfactory social life. Nor need anarchism accede Rr optimality requirements, thereby destroying usual game-theoretic arguments. For these arguments usually show that more would be obtained under certain counter-individualistic cooperative strategies than would otherwise be obtained, not that some or basic levels would not be achieved. To put it bluntly, satisizing anarchists can throw out the challenge: what does it matter if a few state prisoners defect (i.e. there are some not fully-paid-up rider^so long as enough goods are still delivered? That challenge has not been met, even implicitly, as will appear. 5? It is unreasonable, in any case, to demand optimal levels from non-statist societies, because no extant stat^ measure up to such excessive requirements. Indeed most staites do ... ........................................... , . bd not even meet utterly basic demands. Henceforth we shall be looking for leads, which %?.yo /hero cover basic demands. The argument for the critical major premiss takes the following sort of route, involving these components: 1. Assimilation of the problem of provision of collective goods (in the light of the minor premiss it can be cast as a problem) to paradigmatic problems in game theory, initially the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD for short). No doubt efforts at provision of public goods commonly result in arrangements that can be represented formally as Prisoners' Dilemmas. But it is sometimes claimed, what will be repudiated subsequently, that all such efforts result in PD situations, that is that there is a universal linkage. Two connections are regularly assumed: a universal representation of problems in game theory, and a more plausible less ambitious connection with PD games. That is: * all provisioning problems can be represented within game theory. ** these problems^requently)takePD form. . The first assumption, of game theory representation, is^severe. Each problem is transformed into a game, with n independent players, normally individuals or individual units (such as an "individual" family or firm in economics^)/ These players characteristically possess but limited information, and almost invariably are allowed only extraordinarily narrow motivations and objectives, am) as maximizing their own interests or pay-offs, in a rigid setting with fixed predetermined moves.$ According to the more plausible, less ambitious collections, 3 4 5 So much is argued elsewhere (nuclear wo^k). While in many politically relevant applications, such as the "tragedy of the common^' game,the players may bedndividuals, in other applications the players may be communities, societies, or even states, e.g\mtemational traaR and war games. It is this sort of rigidity and limitation that/make^ parts of game-theory automatically tractable. <?; �3 * provisioning of public goods frequently yields prisoners' dilemma situations, Ahat is the problem involved can be transformed into a typical PD game, comprising a perhaps interated games among a public of n individuals. 2. Sometimes these games yield unfavourable results, that is not enough individuals cooperate but instead defect, so the good in question will not be delivered. 3. On/y by intervention pf the state can cooperation be obtained, by coercion of individuals? other devices, such a; of the market, will notsucceed. �4 3. THE CASE AGAINST REPLACEMENT FROM PRISONERS' DILEMMA SITUATIONS AND THE buttress the State status quc^are based on variants of the prisoners' Dilemma, to the effect that there are imporran? cases where individuals will not agree^ or co-operate to provide them­ selves with (or to maintain) collective goods without coercion, such as on/y the State can furnish? In such 'dilemma' situations each individual will hope to gain advantage, without contributing (or exercising restraint), from others' contributions (or restraint), by freeloading on others (or profiting from others' restraint). The claim is that only the State with its backing of force can resolve such situations: anarchistic replacement cannot succeed. In short,'certain individual choice cannot replace state-covered choice. important cases, coo< There are (as the bracketed clauses indicate) two main types of case, those where people do not conrri&M&.to themselves with, or with optimum quantities of, a "collective good", and those where people do not themselves to or maintain optimum quantities of, some already available "collective good". The first type of case is taken to include such traditional and modern concerns of the state and its subsidiary institutions as order, security, defence, and perhaps private property, as well as sewerage schemes, water supplies, waste services, public health, social security, etc. The second case is supposed to include, as well as village commons, newer enviromental concerns such as clean air, unpolluted streams and beaches, parks, rainforests, wilderness, whales, etc. But there is no sharp division between the cases (security or parks could be of either type depending on the status quo), and The case broken-backed right here: because if we don't ^o this^not going to agree to social contract — which allegedly implies these things — either. Similarly, jocia/ contract theory &ro&cn-&ac%cJ. The Tragedy of the Commons is set up so as to assume no collective methods have been developed or can be developed without coercion. (Roberts). The point of coercion is to retain the privatised individual. For the factor of coercion makes it in intrests of private individual. So coercion makes the effect of relations to be got without exceeding provatised individual picture. Coercion substitutes for relations in the context of privatised individuals. Privatised individuals are, of course, products, in large part, of the operation (and enforcement and entrenchment) of a particular social theory, or ra/Zzcr jar/ ofsocial theory. Arguments of this type are sometimes said to represent 'the strongest case that can be made for the desirability of the State* (M. Taylor, Anarc/ty anJ Coap^raZiaa, Wiley, London, 1976, p.9). To cover all arguments of the type, and to avoid repetition of the phrase 'variants of and disputes as to whether certain arguments such as those of Hume and of Olson involve Prisoners' Dilemma situations, 'Prisoner's Dilemma' is used in a wide sense to include not merely single nperson Prisoners' Dilemma games, but, for example, games where the payoffs are not merely egoistic (as with both Hobbes and Hume) and where such games are iterated. As the bracketed clauses in the text indicate, there are two types of case, not sharply separated and both the jawt^ Zagica/ /oral — those where people do not to themselves with, or with 'optimum' quantities of, a 'collective good' (e.g. security, order, sewage), and those where people do not refrain themselves to wainfam, or maintain 'optimum' quantities of, some alrca< available 'collective good' (e.g. commons, unpolluted streams, whales, wilderness). That received arguments of all these types involves Prisoners? Dilemma situations (in the wide sense) is argued in effect, in Taylor, op.cif. and elsewhere. An easier introduction to the material covered by Taylor, which also surveys other important literature, is given in the final chapter of R. Abrams, FoaaJan'aaj o/Po/aica/ Aaa/y^, Columbia University press, New York, 1980. Z y �5 as arguments for state institution both have the same logical form, that of a Prisoners' Dilemma or some finite sequence of Prisoners' Dilemma games (what are called Prisoners' Dilemma &%?^rgames). The arguments are not mere exercises in game theory since it is through arguments of this type that political theorists such as Hobbes and Hume have attempted to demonstrate the necessity of the State, so it is sometimes claimed (e.g. by Taylor). Furthermore, it is with arguments of the same^form, the "Tragedy of the Commons", that Hardin and others have tried to show that extensive, indeed draconian, state powers are required to resolve environmental problems; without such powers no exploiter or polluter will exercise restraint, ra c . Consider the single Prisoners' Dilemma game where each player, or prisoner, is assumed, as is usual in these things, to be egoistic (sometime equated with "being rational"), to seek just maximisation of his own private payoff, in the special case where there are just two players. (The special case illustrates all the main points except one, the c/size in making a case for the state.) < . A basic ingredient^a.considerable variety of argumentfof this type, including Hobbes' andlTragedy of the Commons' argument, and recent economic arguments for State intervention to secure collective goods, i^/tne single prisoners' Dilemma game with just two players.s Two prisoners, 1 and 2, taken to be accomplices in a crime, have been separately imprisoned. A State representative makes the following offers separately to each: if the prisoner confesses and becomes a State's witness while his or her accomplice remains silent, he or she will be released at once while the accomplice gets 8 years. 3t so happens that if both prisoners remain silent the State has only enough evidence to impose a 1 year sentence. But if both confess they would each receive 4 years. The 'game' can be summarised in the following 'payoff' matrix: Prisoner 1 Strategies S(ilence) C(onfess) S -1,-1 -8,0 C 0, -8 -4, -4 '— Prisoner 2 The game is not intended to present a moral ^ilemma, that each can only go free at the cost of the others' freedom, but the following dilemma: It is in each prisoner's private interest to An important matter the two player game does not illustrate is the relevance of populations size in the arguments for the State. But size is not decisive (see, e.g., Taylor, chapter 2), and the issue can be avoided (or relocated) by organisation into smaller communities. The figures given in the matrix are illustrative only; for inequalities which suffice for a Dilemma situation, see Tayor, p.5. �6 choose strategy C no matter what the other does: strategy C is, in the jargon, each players' 'dominant' strategy (and also in fact a minimax strategy). For if 2, for example, remains silent, the%l goes free by confessing, while if 2 confesses, then 1 halves his or her sentence by if both prisoners choose their dominant strategy they obtain an outcome to that which would have resulted by what is tendentiously called 'co-operating', by confessing. their both remaining silent. 3.1 FOILING THE PRISONERS' DILEMMA ARGUMENT. It is bizarre that a dilemma alleged to show the necessity of the State — which is supposed to intervene, forcibly if required, to ensure that the prisoners 'co-operate' to obtain an optimal outcome — should be set up by the State's own operative.^ The case looks like an inside job; and it M, though neither the operative, nor for that matter the prisoners on their own, continue to play an essential role. The prisoners, in any finite number, can be members of a community and payoffs quantities of some collective good. The claim is, that without intervention (by the State), the community will only chase a subotimal quantity of the good if any. Some features of the prisoners' relations are assumed to transfer however. Of course the State's presence in arranging (of accentuating) such dilemmas is inessential, as is much else from the example. But some features of the Prisoner's relations are isolated, and so have no opportunity to communicate or r^aZZy co-operate. Similarly, in the more general argument a privatisation assumption is smuggled in in the way the dilemma is formulated, that we are dealing with self contained individuals who, like the prisoners, act only in their own narrowly construed private interests and whose interests are opposed. The applicability of the dilemma to the human condition is accordingly seriously limited, io A cursory aside is often added to the Prisoners' Dilemma to the effect that the segregation of the priisoners makes no real difference. It is claimed that even if the prisoners could meet and discuss and even agreed to co-operate, that would make no difference, since neither could trust (the sincerity) of the other (Abrams, p.193), 'neither has an incentive to keep the agreement' (Taylor, p.5). Experimental and historical evidence indicates that this is very often no so — and in a more co-operative social setting than currently encouraged privatisation of life, the extent of co-operation and trust would undoubtedly be much higher n The argument has to depend crucially then on substantially mistaken assumptions about human propensities It is similarly bizarre that there should be outcomes that the State alone is said to be able to arrange, but not mere social cooperation, when the State rv (as on many theories) the result of reflection of social cooperation. This important point is much elaborated in V. and R. Routley, &?cmZ 77^or^.y, S^Zf aztrZ Envirownf/tfaZ Pro&Zewty in Environmental Philosophy (edited D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian national University, 1980. As a result of G. Hardin's Tragedy CoHWHonj, historical evidence has been assembled which reveals how far Hardin's 'Commons' diverges from historic commons; see, inparticular, A. Roberts, 77^ S^Zf-Managing Allison & Busby, London, 1979, chapter 10, but also Routley, op.cir., p.285 and ppp.329-332. Similar points apply as regards many other Dilemma situations. Tn the experimental studies of the prisoner's dilemma game approximately half of the participants choose a cooperative strategy even when they know for certain that the other player will cooperate'. Abrams, op.ciz., p.308. �7 in various settings, e.g. that purely egoistic interests are always pursued, backed up by a large measure of scepticism about the reliability of other people (but if people were Jia? unreliable and devious, many State arrangements involved in providing public goods would not succeed either). That such assumptions are operating can be seen by elaborating the situation; e.g. to bring out the first, suppose the prisoners have a common bond, e.g. they are friends or they are political prisoners with a shared social commitment, or they are neighbours and face a future in the same community; to bring out the philosophical scepticism involved, suppose the prisoner with a tarnished record offers the other security against default, and so on. The question of the character of human interests and preferences %/iJ the extent of their determination by the social context in which they occur is/MKJcwtcnhJ to the whole question of social economic arrangements, and also accordingly to arguments for the State on the basis of human propensities. A major assumption underlying prevailing (non-Marxist) economics and associated political theory, is that the interests and preferences, as summed up in a preference ranking or utility function, of each human that is taken to count is an mJcpcnJcnr parameter, which depends neither on the preference rankings of other nor on the social context in which that human operates. Wh8ile the individuals and firms of mainstream economic theory do, by definition, satisfy the independence requirements, and while there is very substantial cultural pressure on consumers to conform (through advertising, education, popular media), vc/y many Jo /io? cozi/briH, and the extent of cultural pressure towards privatisation itself belies the naturalness of this independence. And having sufficiently many interest-interdependent people in a small community (which is not thoroughly impoverished) is normally enough, given their social influence, to avoid or resolve by co-operation the types of Prisoners' Dilemma situations that appear to count in favour of the State. 3.2 Why the dilemma arguments cannot succeed. What the Dilemma-based case for the State has to show — what never has been shown — is that there are outstanding Dilemma situations which are relevant, important, and also damaging if unresolved, and that they are resolvable by State intervention, and only so (optimally) resolvable. Finally it has to be shown that in the course of so resolving these Dilemma situations, worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These complex conditions cannot be satisfied, if they can be satisfied at all, in a way that is not question begging. For several of the conditions are value dependent (e.g. what is important, damaging, optimal, worse) and involve considerations about which resonable parties can differ. The selection of Dilemmas itself provides an example of value dependence: after all there are many such Dilemmas (e.g. as to environmental degradation, of over-exploitation, of family violence or fueds) which are considered beyond the sphere of the State or not worthy of State attention. There are now grounds for concluding that the conditions cannot be satisfied at all. For 12 Cf. the disucssion in Taylor, op.ci/., p.93. �8 many of the arguments using Prisoners' Dilemma games, Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State and Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' for instance, turn out when to consist not just of a single game but of a sequence of such games, to be more adequately represented by what is called a But in many such sequential Prisoners' Dilemma games, rational 'co-operation' can occur, even assuming separated players with purely egoistic interests. 13 For what sequential games permit that isolated games exclude, is that players' actions may be dependent upon past performance of other players. This dependence effectively removes one extremely unrealistic self-containment assumption from Dilemma situations, that individuals act in totally isolated ways, not learning from past social interaction. In such sueprgames then, no intervention is required. Undoubtedly some Dilemmas are resolved by 'intervention', e.g. by allowing the prisoners to get in touch so that they find they are neighbours or that they can really co-operate. Euqally important, and equally independent of the State, is the matter of breaking down the adverary, or game, situation so the prisoners do not act as competitors but are prepared to co­ operate.^ Informational input may also be important, e.g. news that each prisoner has a good record of adhering to agreement, or if not is prepared to stake collateral, etc. Nor is force or threat of force required as an incentive to guarantee optimal strategies: a range of other inducements and incentives is known (shuld they be required in recalcitrant cases), and is used even by the State, e.g. gifts, deprivation, social pressure, etc. But at no stage is the State required to make these arrangements: much as some real Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved by work of Amnesty International, so voluntary organisations can be formed to detect and deal with Prisoners' Dilemma situations where they are not already catered for. And in fact communal and co-operative organisation did resolve Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations historically, for example in the case of the Commons. In sum, here also replacement works. There are no important Dilemma situations, it seems, where the State is essential. The State has been thought to be essential because of certain influential flase dichotomies; for example, that all behaviour that is not egoistic is altruistic (but altruistic behaviour is uncommon, and 'irrational'), that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets — which tend to deal abysmally with collective goods — is through State control.^ But it is quite evident that there are methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, through traditional markets, based on supply costs) and social (e.g. by co-operatives, clubs). Lastly, introduction of the State to resolve 13 14 15 Dilemma situations has very extensive This important result is established in Taylor, op. ctf., for a number of critical cases, though not generally; see, e.g. p.32 but especially chapter 5. Such moves have proved valuable in reducing the State's role in legal prosecution, and in eliminating courtroom procedures, including cases where the State is one of the 'adversaries'. Both the false dichotomies cited are common-place, not to say rife, in modem economic and political theorising. Both are to be found in Abram's final chapter, for example, and the first (with an attempt to plaster over the gap with a definition) in Taylor. For a further criticism of such false dichotomies, see Routley, op.cit., pp.250./ff �9 effects, *6 many of them negative, so that the gains made, if any, in so resolving Dilemma situations, appear to be substantially outweighted by the costs involved. For there are the many evil aspects of the typical State to put in the balance. As regards Dilemma situations, entry of the State with its authority showing may not help but may worsen some situations, and morre important, new Dilemmas may be initiated by State activity, as in the case of the prisoners, or differently with the State as a further player (since the State may engage in whaling, have access to a commons, etc.). These points lead also to further arguments against the State. Suppose, to see the impact of the first reason for the failure of independence, the prisoners are friends and their common interest is to be together. Then, if they are given the opportunity to co-operate, and independence is not enforced by separation, they will, quite rationally, choose a joint optimal strategy, and there is no dilemma. Since the same considerations will not apply where large numbers of strangers are involved, the question arises as the extent and severity of Dilemma situations. The question is complicated by the second double-edged reason for the failure of independence, namely that statist political arrangements undoubtedly accentuate the extent and severity of Dilemma situations by discouraging (providing negative incentives) for genuinely co-operative behaviour and mutual aid. This is another respect in which statist arrangements (like some subclimax biological communities) tend to be self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Accordingly, what arguments for the State on such bases as Prisoners' Dilemma situations have to show is not merely 1) that state coercion does suffice to resolve (sufficiently) many such (damaging) Dilemmas, but also 2) that such coercion is the on/y way of doing so, and 3) that in doing so worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These things have never been shown: nor can they be shown definitively, since firstly there are various nonstatist arrangements for resolving wehat are taken to be damaging Dilemmas, and secondly the overall assessment of what Dilemmas are and what costs are worf/t incurring in resolving them are ultimately evaluative and go back to rival, and presumably coherent, value systems. Hence, when all this is spelled out, the irrefutability of anarchism. To get some feel for the complexity of the issue and for the extent to which evaluative matters do enter, several points relevant to 1) - 3) should be introduced. Firstly, there are many Dilemma situations into which the State puts little or no effort and many others which are, or were, considered as beyond the sphere of influence of the State or as not worthy of State attention, for instance, cases of environmental degradation, overexploitation of a "resource", personal or family fueds, etc., several of them aggravated by State arrangments such as To take one lesser example, State intrusion often induces a certain social escapism: one escapes one's social roles and is enabled to concentrate on private affairs or just to laze. Or so it may appear: for in reality anyone who works, works long and often alientated hours to pay for this apparent escapism and to cover the high costs of frequently inadequate State activity. �10 excessive privatisation of resources (e.g. enclosure of the commons). (7/* such Dilemmas can be downgraded in importance to suit the Statist case so can other Dilemmas apparently favouring State intervention.) Many of these cases would not be helped at all by the entry of the State or its representatives with their authority duly showing (thugh they might be assisted by sensitive mediation, which does not call for a State, only rudiments of a society). Secondly, introduction of the State to resolve Prisoners' Dilemma situations is not without wide-ranging effects, many of them negative, so that the gains made, if any, in so resolving Dilemma situations have to be weighed against costs involved in achieving these gains. Among the costs are new Dilemmas, such as the very example considered in illustrating prisoner Dilemma games which was initiated by State activity. Differently, new Dilemmas will result with the state as a further player (since the State may have access to the commons, engage in whaling, etc.). Some of these situations are interesting in theat they may lead to litigation and decision-making outside of or largely independent of the State, the results of which the State is supposed to enforce though it may be against its interests. But what ensures that if sticks to the findings. Nothing does: it is simply assumed that the State will adhere to its role. But if that assumption is valid with respect to the State (not known for its reliability) then it is good also for various other parties. In short, agreement or decisions can be reached and adhered to without need for State enforcement. So coercion is not always required. Are there important Dilemmas where use the authority of the State is the (?H/y way? Often behind the claim that is is, is a false (but very influential) dichotomy, that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets which may deal abysmally with collective goods, is through state control. But it is quite evident that there are other methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, based on costs involved) and social (e.g. club, co­ operatives). [And a mixture of these methods can be applied to resolve any Prisoners' Dilemma that matters, i.e. here too replacement works. An important initial move is, as was seen, to put the prisoners in touch, so that they could cooperate: equally important is breaking down the ...] Such organisations would not have nearly so much to do as statists would like us to believe, especially once co-operative ways of doing things and mutual aid had become established ways in contrast to competitive and privatised ways. For the extent of simple Prisoners' Dilemma situations calling for intervention (of some sort) has been exaggerated and many, probably, very many, of those that have been thought to require intervention do not because the players (are prepared to) "cooperate" anyway. There are importantly different reasons why the latter can happen:- Firstly, enough players operate with motives which are not purely privatised for a sufficiently optimal outcome to result. This does not imply that these players have altruistic motives: their interests may depend on those of other players in a range of nonaltruistic ways. Secondly, many cases presented as if they were simple Prisoner's Dilemma games turn out when properly analysed, in particular when time is duly taken account of, to be Prisoners' Dilemma super-games. Such, for instance, is the positions with the �11 arguments of Hobbes, Hume and Hardin. But in such supergames rational "cooperation" often occurs even assuming the players have the worst of privatised motives. In short, where the correct analysis of a Prisoner's Dilemma game is as a supergame, statists are often beaten at their own game. [Detail Taylor's partial results, anJ their problems.] �/AfJ^ Ji) /7!_^ A/^ ./ <. / "tv 7^-*^-^ �/ z7 /$CV^/^<^ /'J /^! ^7 </*<9 ^7^7" /^c / r 4& /d-^&V' f o j <. t/7^, c t_ , ^7 J* .X 6. <?^) /y . /^xv Jct/^^ JL �3. <%y4r-/^ ,X^7< .,;^;X 3 <X X?X" X)c. X /T^.X^ 4X3X*/- /X. y/^4. . / X X^X yXX s/ ^,/X-,^X^ Xy ^r y7^ Xox^Levc =-, <^- /, ^ / ^T^ — X? X" ^7^ ^X xx x^/^ <y A^rXXi/^ 6co /^4. /c<_ ^ / /X^cu— <^-^-^- ^4/ /*7^jC *- X^T Xt^/ / < ^Cv ^C A -C �<22^ 7^4 y dVf! ^-r- <^ -^* r^CL A-?f-? yj /K-*- ) ^-*^-^/7 Ar^- ^c/ 4-A A /7^^?7"J^ ^^^tr-t^c'-^/j; y>V w t^L y ^). /%4?/ e / J—, /7 ^^7< Z *- ^rt^ *— " Z^? C- /^L ^-7 -^7 ZL- < Z*^/ c-y 7 <^* z Ay /, ?/ y*^ <9 ' �J �w to be accomplices in a crime, have been separately imprisoned. A State represen­ tative makes the following offers separately to each: if the prisoner con­ fesses and becomes a State's witness while his or her accomplice remains silent, he or she will be released at once while the accomplice gets 8 years. It so happens that if both prisoners remain silent the State has only enough evidence to impose a 1 year sentence. But if both confess they would each receive 4 years. The 'game' can be summarised in the following 'payoff' matrix: Prisoner 1 Strategies S(ilence) C(onfess) S -1, -1 -8, 0 C 0, -8 -4, -4 Prisoner 2 3. T7/E C/1SE z1G.4/MSE AEFL.4 CEA^E^T ERCW ER/5CWERS' D/EEA7AE1 tS77X/?177CW5 E/7E E/AE. I he main arguments designed to rebut the replacement argument for anarchism and to buttress the State status quo, are based on variants of the Prisoners' Dilemma, to the effect that there are /wporftm/cases where individuals will not agree^-or co-operate to provide them­ selves with (or to maintain) collective goods without coercion, such as cw/y the State can furnish/ In such 'dilemma' situations each individual will hope to gain advantage, without contributing (or exercising restraint), from others' contri­ butions (or restraint), by freeloading on others (or profiting from others' restraint). The claim is that only the State with its backing of force can resolve such situations: anarchistic replacement cannot succeed^ A basic ingredient of a considerable variety of arguments of this type, in­ cluding Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State, the 'Tragedy of the Com­ mons' argument, and recent economic arguments for State intervention to secure collective goods, is the single Prisoners' Dilemma game with just two players/ Two prisoners, 1 and 2, taken The game^ is not intended to present a moral dilemma, that each can only go free at the cost of the others' freedom, but the following dilemma: It is in each prisoner's private interest to choose strategy C no matter what the other docs: strategy C is, in the jargon, each players' 'dominant' strategy (and also in fact a minimax strategy). For if 2, for ex­ ample, remains silent, then 1 goes free by confessing, while if 2 confesses, then 1 halves his or her sentence by confess­ ing. if both prisoners choose their dominant strategy they obtain an m/er/or outcome to that which would have resulted by what is tendentiously called 'co-operating', by their both remaining silent. ?./ It is bizarre that a dilemma alleged to show the necessity of the State — which is supposed to intervene, forcibly if re­ quired, to ensure that the prisoners 'co­ operate' to obtain an optimal outcome — should bg set up by the State's own operative.^Of course the State's presence in arranging (or accentuating) such dilemmas is inessential, as is much else from the example. But some features of the prisoner's relations are essential, in particular the separability assumption that the prisoners are isolated, and so have no opportunity to communicate or rec/Zy co-operate. Similarly, in the more general argument, a privatisation assumption is smuggled in in the way the dilemma is formulated, that we are dealing with self contained individuals who, like the prisoners, act only in their own narrowly construed private interests and whose interests are opposed. The applicability of the dilem- A 7 �ma to the human condition is accordingly seriously limited/ A cursory aside is often added to the Prisoners' Dilemma to the effect that the segregation of the prisoners makes no real difference. It is claimed that even if the prisoners could meet and discuss and even agreed to co-operate, that would make no difference, since neither could trust (the sincerity) of the other (Abrams, p.193), 'neither has an incen­ tive to keep the agreement' (Taylor, p.5). Experimental and historical evidence in­ dicates that this is very often not so — and in a more co-operative social setting than the currently encouraged privatisa­ tion of life, the extent of co-operation and trust would undoubtedly be much higher/ The argument has to depend crucially then on substantially mistaken assumptions about human propensities in various settings, e.g. that purely egoistic interests are always pursued, backed up by a large measure of scep­ ticism about the reliability of other peo­ ple (but if people were /Ar?/ unreliable and devious, many State arrangements involved in providing public goods would not succeed either). That such assumptionsareoperating can be seen by elaborating the situation; e.g. to bring out the first, suppose the prisoners have a common bond, e.g. they are friends or they are political prisoners with a shared social commitment, or they are neigh­ bours and face a future in the same com­ munity; to bring out the philosophical scepticism involved, suppose the prisoner with a tarnished record offers the other security against default, and so on. The question of the character of human interests and preferences the extent of their determination by the social context in which they occur is /MnrArznrvna/ to the whole question of social and economic arrangements, and also accordingly to arguments for the State on the basis of human propensities. A major assumption underlying prevail­ ing (non-Marxist) economics and associated political theory, is that the in­ terests and preferences, as summed up in a preference ranking or utility function, of each human that is taken to count is an mc/e/zenr/enf parameter, which depends neither on the preference rank­ ings of others nor on the social context in which that human operates. While the individuals and firms of mainstream economic theory do, by definition, satisfy the independence requirements, and while there is very substantial cultural pressure on consumers to con­ form (through advertising, education, popular media), wany <7o /?oz ccw/bfTn, and the extent of cultural pressure towards privatisation itself belies the naturalness of this indepen- sequential games permit that isolated games exclude, is that players' actions may be dependent upon past perfor­ mance of other players. This dependence effectively removes one extremely ....a major functmn of the state is unrealistic self-containment assumption to maintain and pohee inequitable from Dilemma situations, that in­ dividuals act in totally isolated ways, not distribution. learning from past social interaction. In such supergames then, no intervention is required. Undoubtedly some Dilemmas are Z/gtZ-f resolved by 'intervention', e.g. by allow­ dence. And having sufficiently many/ ing the prisoners to get in touch so that interest-interdependent people in a smali they find they are neighbours or that community (which is not thoroughly im­ they can really co-operate. Equally im­ poverished) is normally enough, given portant, and equally independent of the State, is the matter of breaking down the their social influence, to avoid or resolve adversary, or game, situation so the by co-operation the types of Prisoners' prisoners do not act as competitors but Dilemma situations that appear to count are prepared to co-operate/' Informa­ in favour of the State/ tional input may also be important, e.g. news that each prisoner has a good ff /yy 77/E /VLEA7A/.1 record of adhering to agreement, or if not is prepared to stake collateral, etc. Nor is force or threat of force required SC/CC777) as an incentive to guarantee optimal What the Dilemma-based case for the strategies: a range of other inducements State has to show — what never has been and incentives is known (should they be shown — is that there are outstanding required in recalcitrant cases), and is Dilemma situations which are relevant, used even by the State, e.g. gifts, important, and also damaging if deprivation, social pressure, etc. But at unresolved, and that they are resolvable no stage is the State required to make by State intervention, and only so (op­ these arrangements: much as some real timally) resolvable. Finally it has to be Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved by shown that in the course of so resolving work of Amnesty International, so these Dilemma situations, worse situa­ voluntary organisations can be formed tions than those that are resolved are not to detect and deal with Prisoners' Dilem­ thereby induced. These complex condi­ ma situations where they are not already tions cannot be satisfied, if they can be catered for. And in fact communal and satisfied at all, in a way that is not ques­ co-operative organisation did resolve tion begging. For several of the condi­ Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations tions are value dependent (e.g. what is historically, for example in the case of important, damaging, optional, worse) the Commons. In sum, here also replacement works. and involve considerations about which reasonable parties can differ. The selec­ There are no important Dilemma situa­ tion of Dilemmas itself provides an ex­ tions, it seems, where the State is essen­ ample of value dependence: after all tial. The State has been thought to be there are many such Dilemmas (e.g. as to essential because of certain influential environmental degradation, of over­ false dichotomies; for example, that all exploitation, of family fcuds/or^violencQ) behaviour that is not egoistic is altruistic which are considered beyond the sphere (but altruistic behaviour is uncommon, of the State or not worthy of State atten­ and 'irrational'), that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profittion. There are now grounds for concluding directed markets — which tend to deal that the conditions cannot be satisfied at abysmally with collective goods — is all. For many of the arguments using through State control.'^ But it is quite Prisoners' Dilemma games, Hobbes' evident that there are o/Aer methods of and Hume's arguments for the State and allocation, both economic (e.g. ex­ Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' for change, through traditional markets, instance, turn out when projver/y /or- based on supply costs) and social (e.g. by to consist not just of a single co-operatives, clubs). Lastly, introduction of the State to game but of a sequence of such games, to be more adequately represented by resolve so/ne Dilemma situations has what is called a But in many very extensive effects/ many of them such sequential Prisoners' Dilemma negative, so that the gains made, if any, games, rational 'co-operation' can oc­ in so resolving Dilemma situations, ap­ cur, even assuming separated players pear to be substantially outweighed by with purely egoistic interests.'" For what the costs involved. For there are the SOCIAL ALTERNA ! tVES Vet. 2 No. 3. )982 25 �many evi! aspects of the typicai State to put in the baiance. As regards Dilemma situations, entry of the State with its authority showing may not help but may worsen some situations, and more im­ portant, new Dilemmas may be initiated by State activity, as in the case of the prisoners, or differently with the State as a further player (since the State may engage in whaling, have access to a com­ mons, etc.). These points lead also to further arguments against the State. available 'collective good' (e.g. commons, un polluted streams, whales, wilderness). That received arguments of ail these types involves Prisoners' Dilemma situations (in the wide sense) is argued, in effect, in Taylor, op.cit. and etsewhere. An easier introduction to the material covered by Taylor, which also surveys other Important literature, is given in the final chapter of R Abrams, Foundations of Political Analysis, Columbia University Press, New York, 1980. 5. An important matter the two player game does not illustrate is the relevance of popula­ tion size in the arguments for the State. But size is not decisive (see, e.g., Taylor, chapter 2), and the issue can be avoided (or relocated) by organisation into smaller communities. The figures given in the matrix are illustrative only; for inequalities which suffice for a Dilemma situation, see Taylor, p.5. 6. It is similarly bizarre that there should be out­ comes that the State alone is said to be able to arrange, but not mere social cooperation, when the State zs (as on many theories) the result or reflection of social cooperation. 7. This important point is much elaborated in V. and R. Routley, Soc/af Theories, Se// Management, and T'n wronwm'a/ ProAferru in Environmental Philosophy (edited D Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. 9. 10. 11. 12. 4. Arguments of this type are sometimes said to represent 'the strongest case that can be made for the desirability of the State' (M. Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation, Wiley, London, 1976. p.9). To cover all arguments of the type, and to avoid repetition of the phrase 'variants of' and disputes as to whether cer­ tain arguments such as those of Hume and of Olson involve Prisoners' Diiernnta situations, Prisoner's Dilemma' is used in a wide sense to include not merely single n-person Prisoners' Dilemma games, but for example, games where the payoffs are not merely egoistic (as with both Hobbes and Hume) and where such games are iterated. As the bracketed clauses in the text indicate, there are two types of case, not sharply separated and both of the same /ogtcaZ/orm — those where people do not rwr/A/wfe to sup/r/y themselves with, or with 'optimum' quantities of, a 'collective good' (e.g. security, order, sewage), and those where people do not re.s/ram themselves to mam/am, or maintain 'optimum" quantities of, some already 13. As a result of G. Hardin's Tragerh' o/ rhe Commons, historical evidence has been assembled which reveals how far Hardin's 'Commons' diverges from historic commons; see, in particular, A. Roberts, 7'he Se/fManagmg TTiwonmenr, Allison & Busby. London, 1979, chapter 10, but also Routley, op.cit. p.285 and pp. 329-332. Similar points apply as regards many other Dilemma situa­ tions. 'In the experimental studies of the prisoner's dilemma game approxtmately half of the participants choose a cooperative strategy even when they know for certain that the other player will cooperate'. Abrams. op.cit., p.3O8. ' Cf. the discussion in Taylor, op.cit.. p.93. This important result is established in Taylor, op.cit, for a number of critical cases, though not generally; see, e.g. p.32 but especially chapter 5. Such moves have proved valuable in reducing the State's role in legal prosecution, and in eliminating courtroom procedures, including cases where the State is one of the 'adver­ saries'. Both the false dichotomies cited are common­ place, not to say rife, in modern economic and political theorising. Both are to be found in Abram's final chapter, for example, and the first (with an attempt to plaster over the gap with a definition) in Taylor. For a further criticism of such false dichotomies, see Routley, op.cit., pp.25O ff. To take one lesser example. State intrusion often induces a certain social escapism: one escapes one's social roles and is enabled to concentrate on private affairs or just to laze. Or so it may appear: for in reality anyone who works, works long and often alienated hours to pay for this apparent escapism and to cover the high costs of frequently inade­ quate State activity. �of course. ] 5^ The case if broken-backed right here: to agree because if we don't to this not goint/ to social contract - which allegedly implies these things - either. Similarly, the social contract theory is broken-backed. G5; . Alternative longer at this point in §3:- In shof^* in certain important cases, cooperative individual choice cannot replace state-covered choice. There are (as the bracketed clauses indicate) two main types of case, those where people do not contribute to supply themselves with, or with optimum quant­ ities of, a "collective good", and those where people do not restrain themselves to maintain, or maintain optimum quantities of, some already available "collective good". The first type of case is taken to include such traditional and modern concerns of the state and its subsidiary institutions as order, security, defence, and perhaps private property, as well as sewerage schemes, water supplies^.waste services, public health, social security, etc. The second case is supposed to include, as well as village commons, newer environmental concerns such as clean air, unpolluted streams and beaches, parks, rainforests, wilderness, wha les, etc. But there is no sharp division between the cases (security or parks could be of either type depending on the status quo), and as arguments for state institution both have the same logical form, that of a Prisoners' Dilemma or some finite sequence of Pri soners' Dilemma games (what are called Prisoners' Dilemma The arguments are not mere exercises in game theory since it is through arguments of this type that political theorists such as Hobbes and Hume have �5. attempted to demonstrate the necessity of the Stato4^ Furthermore, it is with arguments of the same form, the "Tragedy of the Commons", that Hardia and others have tried to show that extensive, indeed draconian, state powers are required to resolve environmental problems; without such powers no exploiter or polluter will exercise restraint. Consider the gj^le Prisoners' Dilemma game where each player, or prisoner, is assuined, as is usual in these things, to be egoistic (sometime equated with "being rational"), to seek just&axijnisation of his own private payoff, in the special case where there are just two players. (The special case illustrates all the main points except one, the importance of size in making a case for the state.) [Joins text again at fn.5 point.] /* 4. In §3:- The Trac^ec[y of the Commons is set up so as to assume no collective methods had [Teen developed or can be developed without coercion. (Roberts). The point of coercian is to ret^n the privatised individual. $ For the factor of coercion makes it in interests of private individualize coercion makes the effect of relations to be got without exceeding privatised individual picture. Coercion substitutes for relations in the context of privatised individuals. Privatised individuals are, of course, products, in large part, of the operation (and enforcement and entrenchment) of a particular social theory, or rather sort of social theory. ^5^ In §4:- The case looks like an inside job; and it is, though neither the operative, nor for that matter the prisoners ^n their own, essential role. play an The prisoners, in any finite number, can be members of a community and payoffs quantities of some collective good . The claim is, that without intervention (by thecate), the community will only corpse a subeyy^mo/ quantity of the good if any. Some features of the prisoners' relations are assumed to transfer however. Suppose, to see the impact of the first reason for the failure of independence, the prisoners are friends and their common interest is to �6. be together. Then, if they are given the opportunity to cooperate, and independ­ ence is not enforced by separation, they will, quite rationally, choose a joint optimal strategy,and there is no dilemma. Since the same considerations will not apply where large numbers of strangers are involved, the question arises as the extent and severity of Dilemma situations. The question is complicated by the second double-edged reason for the failure of independence, namely that statist political arrangements undoubtedly accentuate the extent and severity of Dilemma situations by discouraging (providing negative incentives) for genuinely cooper­ ative behaviour and nmttAcd aid. This is another respect in which statist arrangments (like some subclimax biological communities) tend to be self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. [Transfer some experimental material to here?] Accordingly, what arguments for the State on such b ases as Prisoners' Dilemma situations have to show is not merely 1) that state coercion does suffice to resolve (sufficiently^ many such (damaging) Dilemmas, but also 2) that such coercion is the only way of doing so, and 3) that in doing so worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These things have never been shown: nor can they be shown definitely, since firstly 4 there are various nonstatist arrangements for resolving what are taken to be damaging Dilemmas, and secondly the overall assessment of what Dilemmas are damaging and what costs are worth incurring in resolving them are ultimately evaluative and go back to rival, and presumably coherent, value systems. Hence, when all this is spelled out, the irrefutability of anarchism. To get some feel for the complexity of the issue and for the extent to evolutive matters do enter, several points relevant to l)-3) should be introduced. Firstly, there are many Dilemma situations into which the State puts little or no effort and many others which are, or were, considered as beyond the sphere of influence of the State or as not worthy of State attention, for instance, cases of �7. environmental degradation, overexploitation of a "resource", personal or family feuds, etc., several of them aggravated by State arrangements such as excessive privatisation of resources (e.g. enclosure of the commons). (If such Dilemmas can be downgraded in importance to suit the Statist case so can other Dilemmas appar­ ently favouring State intervention.) Many of these cases would not be helped at all by the entry of the State or its representatives with their authority duly showing (though they might be assisted by sensitive mediation, which does not call for a State, only rudiments Secondly, introduction of the State tof&yolve some Prisoners' of a society). Dilemma situations is not without wide-ranging effects, many of them negative, so that the gains made, if any, in so resolving Dilemma situations have to be weighed against costs involved in achieving these gains. Among the costs are new Dilemmas, such as the very example considered in illustrating Prisoner Dilemma games which was initiated by State activity. Differently, new Dilemmas will result with the state as a further player (since the State may have access to the commons, engage in whaling, etc.). Some of these situations are interesting in that they may lead to litigation and decision-making outside of or independ­ ent of the State, the resultgof which the State is supposed to enforce though it may be against its d Nothing does: interests. But what ensures that rt sticks to the findings. it is simply assumed that the State will adhere to its role. But if that assumption is valid with respect to the State (not known for its reliability) then it is good also for various other parties. In short,agreement or decision!* can be reached and adhered to without need for State enforcement. So coercion is not always required. Are there important Dilemmas where use the authority of the State is the only way? Often behind the claim that is is, is a false (but very influential) dichotomy, that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets which may deal abysmally with collective goods, is through state control^' �8. But it is quite evident that there are other methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, based on costs involved) and social (e.g. clubs, cooper­ [And a mixture of these methods can be applied to resolve any Prinsoners' atives). Dilemma that matters, i.e. here too replacement works. An important initial move is, as was seen, to put the prisoners in touch, so that they could cooperate: equally important is breaking down the ...] [Joins top of p.7] Such organisations would not have nearly so much to do as statists would like us to believe, especially once cooperative ways of doing things and mutual aid had become established ways in contrast to competitive and privatised ways. For the extent of simple Prisoners' Dilemma situations calling for intervention (o^ some sort) has been exaggerated and many, probably, very many, of those that have been thought to require intervention do not because the players (are prepared to) "cooperate" anyway. happen:- There are importantly different reasons why the latter can Firstly, enough players operate with motives which are not purely priv­ atised for a sufficiently optimal outcome to result. these players have altruistic motives: This does not imply that their interests may depend on those of other players in a range of nonaltruistic ways. Secondly, many cases presented as if they were simple Prisoner's Dilemma games turn out when properly analysed, in particular when time is duly taken account of, to be Prisoners' Dilemma supergames. Such, for instance, is the position with the arguments of Hobbes, Hume and Hardin. But in such supergames rational "cooperation" often occurs, even assuming the players have the worst of privatised correct analysis of a Prisoner's Dil&wima often beaten at their own game. problems.] motives. In short, where the game is as a supergame, statists are [Detail Taylor's partial results, and their �Chapter 3 Con,v7i^c%y^ /) CRITIQUE OF THE STATE 1. ARGUMENTS The main argument for anarchism can be concentrated in a detailed critique of the state. For therewith arguments against state-like institutions are also advanced. However further ado is no doubt required to remove all other (unexplified) alternatives to anarchism. A Anarchist critiques of the state advance the following themes: * States and state-like institutions are without satisfactory justification. * Such institutions are not required for organisational purposes. * Such institutions have most inharmonious consequences; they bring a whole series of social and environmental bungles or evils in their train. In brief, they are unnecessary unjustified evils. The anarchist critique does not end there, but typically includes, such further themes as : * States have excessive power, linkages to state power. * Societies are not inductably saddled with states. States can be displaced or even decay (though they are unlikely to just wither away). (9 �1 Chapter 3 : CRITIQUE OF THE STATE 1. ARGUMENTS The main argument for anarchism can be concentrated in a detailed critique of the state. For therewith arguments against state-like institutions are also advanced. However further ado is no doubt required to remove all other (unexplified) alternatives to anarchism. / Anarchist critiques of the state advance the following themes: * States and state-like institutions are without satisfactory justification. e Such institutions are not required for organisational purposes. Such institutions have most inharmonious consequences; they bring a whole series of social and environmental bungles or evils in their train. In brief, they are unnecessary unjustified evils. The anarchist critique does not end there, but typically includes, such further themes as : * States have excessive power. * States are devices for channelling privilege and wealth to certain minorities with inside linkages to state power. * Societies are not ineluctably saddled with states. States can be displaced or even decay (though they are unlikely to just wither away). 1. The state is an undesirable, or even downright evii, institution, for the following range of reasons:- * States entrench inequities, domination and exploitation. States are devices for the protection of wealth, property and privilege, and usually for the redistribution upwards, and often concentration, of wealth and privilege. A minor but popular illustration is offered by the expensive conferences and other junkets that state employees or party officials organise for themselves and manage to bill to state revenue, in turn sucked up from inequitable taxation. Certainly a main historical outcome of the state has been domination of exploitation of certain segments of society by others, and some see its main, and barely concealed, purpose as just that: domination and exploitation. * States are typically corrupt. For example, there are enquiries presently in train, or with follow-through activities yet to be duly completed, in many states in Australia, enquires which have revealed considerable corruption, and there are prima facie cases for similar enquiries in most of the remainder. Nor is this a new phenomenon: these revelations often resemble older or on-going scandals. * States are enormously expensive, and constitute a heavy drain upon regional resources, and accordingly on local environments. In poorer regions they are not merely a heavy burden, but �2 a main cause of impoverishment. One reason for their voracious appetite is an excess of over­ remunerated and often under-productive state employees. Another connected reason is that many state operations are far from lean and efficient, but incorporate many duplications, drag factors and dead weight. Under anarchisms, of all varieties, these heavy cost burdens, weighing down subservient populaces, would be shed. Costs of organisation would be very significantly reduced. * The state is an incubus. States are major impositions on everyday life. They are intrusive and demanding. Never has this been more forcefully expressed than in Proudhon's famous denouncement of state government: To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first world of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality (quoted in M p.6). As a result, there are constant demands for the reduction of the cancerous state, for removing parts of it through deregulation, selling off state enterprises and so on. There are two troubles with such demands from anarchist standpoints: they never go far enough, to the complete reduction of the state to zero, but characteristically retain parts supportive of or favourable to bigger business, and they proceed in the wrong way, stripping away social safety nets rather than ripping off business support nets (such as limited liability, strike limitation legislation, etc.). * States, for all that they have been promoted as delivering public goods, are mostly dismal news for environmental protection and health and for social justice. Furthermore they are liable to impose substantial hazards or risks upon subservient populations not merely through military and like activities but, more insidious, through support and promotion of dangerous industries, such as nuclear and giant chemical industries. * States usually exert a heavy pressure to uniformity, they tend to eliminate plurality and cultural differences. These pressures are exercised by a state in the alleged interests of national unity, and against its enemies, external and internal. Even the most liberal of states tend to give minorities more difficult lives in times of stress, such as war. They are always espousing national values, state interests, and commonly assimilation and adoption of state values (thus for example Canada, formerly and briefly a state toying with multiculturalism, now insistent upon "Canadian values"). Such exercises are conspicuous, not only in citizen ceremonies and other state rituals, such as national sporting and religious events, but more important are virtually ubiquitous in elementary education (down to deference to the flag, and �3 similar). * States are a major source of wars, and the major source of major wars, undoubted evils (however supposedly inevitable). They are major sources and suppliers of military technology and weapons, the means of war. Roughly, the more powerful and "advanced" a state, the further it is engaged in weapon production and export. Without states it is doubtful that there would be any nuclear weapons, and accordingly there would be no prospect of nuclear wars as there would be no weapons with which to fight them. * States are a serious drag on a more satisfactory international order. That there are not more, and more satisfactory, international regulatory organisations "is mainly a matter of the reluctance of nation states to surrender their powers and the dangers of their being dominated by very powerful states. If only nation states would be dissolved into specialized [departments] there is every reason to believe that most world problems could be handled by appropriate specialized [organisations]' (Bumheimp.221). * States have excessive power, and are even accumulating or trying to accumulate more, for instance through more centralization, further controls, additional licences, etc., etc. The excessive power of the state is exhibited not only in the treatment of its citizens and foreigners within its territory; it is exemplified also in its practices its territory, through such features as military pressures, including invasion, trade pressures, including sanitions, and in treatment of its citizens everywhere.! Obvious responses to excessive power are regionalization of powers, separation of powers, achieved by decoupling and some fragmentation, limitation of powers, and so on. * Present monolithic governments have assumed far too many roles, for many of which they are not competent, from some of which they are disqualified by other roles (e.g. as impartial referees by their business commitments). Because the centre tries to do and control foo much, as a consequence it does very much unsatisfactorily. Improved arrangements would separate these roles, deconcentrating and decentralizing power. States thus appear far from a good bargain on a preliminary consideration of costs, and very far from maximal or optimal. Especially bad states, the run of states, which engage in politically-motivated inclination or torture of their citizens, and so on. Where are the The issue tends to be avoided; it is contended that, contrary to appearances, we cannot get along without state cossetting: states are necessary. But, given that we can get along without them, would we really be significantly worse off without them? cfr . <r ,,^ven m thd better cases (not allowing for alternative nonstatist arrangements which states have precluded or systems they have usurped)? But arguments for states are not usually so directly utilitarian in character. Such arguments would make it look as if we might well opt out of state organisation, and often be better off doing so. 1 A recent shocking example concerns the attempt of Eire to prevent an Irish women having an abortion in England. �4 These considerations divide into two groups: features that are on normal, normally bad, operations of states, and features that are normic on institution and operation of states. The first group of criticisms are eliminated under good to ideal operation of states, what officiandos of states characteristically unwarr^ntedly make. For the evidence seems to be that in practice states will tend away from the ideal. There are arguments from low efficiencies of complex mechanical structures that can be adopted to lend support to what evidence reveals. Features that are normic, and perhaps inevitable upon institution of states do however yield arguments against states that do not depend on ym*e contingencies of most states, their and so on. / 2. Ways of demonstrating that the State is not Required: as for God and the Church, so for the State. There is a theological component in the presumption and theory of the State; that theological component and therewith of the argMmenfa/ foundations for the State should be fully exposed. By contrast, anarchism, ^ approached from an argument perspective, enjoys nn considerable strength requiring no leaps of faith. The State is like God: the anarchist is like the atheist in disbelief and nonrecognition of what is commonly assumed, mostly as a matter of faith, to be needed. The awn by Bakunin, has as well as considerable strength certain weaknesses. While the atheist believes that God does not exist, the anarchist does not believe that there are no states: on the contrary, there are all too many, though none are legitimate.^The important parallel is as to argM/n^n^. The agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the existence of God succeed, and so adopts a 'neutral' stance; similarly the State-agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the State work, and likewise tries to adopt a fence-sitting position. Soundly based atheism goes further than agnosticism, not only faulting the argumentybr, but taking it for granted that there are arguments, or at least solid considerations, <2g(?in.yL So it is with soundly based anarchism; it both faults arguments for the State, showing none are generally viable, and de ps an incisive case against the State. A more obvious comparison, appreciated from Reformation on and again emphasised by Bakunin,2 is that of State and Church. 'Of course Knever should have eventuated; several bad political turnings were taken in the modern period following the Renaissance, t In several respects the comparison is better than that of the State and God, since both belong to the same category, institutions. Thus too both have looked to some philosophers as human inventions or artifices, both have looked to others (reductionists) as objects that could be reduced to features of the individuals involved in their organisation (but it is hard to see why such fictions or logical constructions shuld be assigned the power and deference they are 2 Bakunin on Anap^hy-(gdited S. Dolgolff), Allen & Unwin, London, 1973, especially p.139. �5 accorded). This institutional comparison enables several relevant features of the State to be emphasised; for example, how, as the Church used to, the State assigns to itself many very extensive powers, such as a monopoly on the production and control of the main medium of exchange, currency, and an ultimate monopoly on organised violence, all other internal security arrangements being eventually answerable to its police, and thence to its officers and military; how it is of the same category as business organisations such as multinationals, which now to some extent threaten it but by and large collaborate with it; how, as again the Church used to, it has nominal support of most of its 'subjects', though many of them are little better than Sunday believers, and an increasing number have come to see the State as in many respects evil and inevitably corrupt, but as a necessary evil. It is easy now, in retrospect, to see how from being a compulsory feature of social life in many places, the Church has become a voluntary, and fragmented one; such a parallel desirable transformation of the State would eliminate it. Whether the State is inevitably evil or not, it is so it will be argued, in a way parallelling the famous Five Ways of Aquinas designed to prove that God exists. That is, much as there are several ways of arguing to the existence of God, assembled by Aquinas into the famous (but not exhaustive, and invariably invalid) Five Ways, as well as various less famous but also important arguments against the existence of God, so in a parallel fashion there are various arguments that the State is required, as well as, what comes later that is especially relevant for anarchism, several ways of arguing against the necessity and desirability of the State. Since the State is unnecessary, as well as costly and typically at least evil in many of its practices and in other respects, it should be superseded. And it can be succeeded, by alternative social arrangements. It can be superseded or replaced as the Churches to a .9*1 large extent been supeyuated or replaced in many places. Just as the power of the ChurchAas declined until it has lost its authority over parishioners, so authority of the State can be undermined, and it can lose recognition and its claim to sovereignty over those in its territory,/A But there is a crucial difference between State and Church: under those conditions the State vanishes; for authority backed by coercive power is essential to the State but not (any longer) to the Church. And where the State differs crucially from Society anarchistically organised is as to the matter of coercion and of authority back^by force, such a Society relying basically on voluntary cooperation where the State relies on authority backed by force. Furthermore, the Church is justified through a religious theory, and is backed up ultimately by appeal to God's authority. The modern secular State by contrast annexes itself authority (or has simply inherited it) and, though it may claim to be justified by some political theory which confers upon it legitimacy, makes no appeal back to a justifying or authorizing agent. So what justifies it? Briefly, nothing does. * The First Way of Showing that the State is not Required: t&e Argument. / �6 The core of the argument is simple and persuasive: everything in the collective interest accomplished by the State can equally be accomplished by alternative arrangements such as voluntary cooperation, the remainder of State activity being dispensed with. The argument is not a straight substitution argument, for it is not as if a rational person would want to have everything accomplished by the State replicated by alternative arrangements. There is much the State does or supports that is at best rather indifferent, for instance, sponsorship of pomp and ceremony and of junkets by VIP's; and a great deal of typical State activity is positively evil and not in the collective interest, for instance, graft, corruption, brutality, maintenance of inequitable distribution of wealth, land and other resources, and encouragement; of protection^ of polluting or qvironmentally destructive industries (e.g. without state sponsorship we should not be well embarked on a nuclear future, without state assistance and subsidization Australia would not be burdened with its extensive forest-destructive pine planting and woodchip projects). The modern State has however many other functions than repressive or damaging ones, functions of community welfare or of otherwise beneficial kind. This does not upset the replacement argument for anarchism. The argument, implicit in the works of the classical anarchists, goesjike this: The functions of the State can be divided into two types, those that are in the collective interest and generally beneficial such as community welfare and organisational functions, and those that are not (but are, presumably, in the interests of some of the powerful groups the State tends to serve). But as regards functions of the first type, the generally beneficial functions which are in the collecdve interest, no coercion is required. For why should people have to be coerced into carrying out functions which are in their collective interest? Such functions can be performed, and performed better, without the coercion which is the hallmark of the State, and without the accompanying tendency of the State to pervert such functions to the maintenance of privilege and inequality of power, and to remove power from those it 'serves'. The detailed argument that such functions can be performed takes a case-by-case form considering each function in turn.3 In each case the function is carried out through alternative arrangements, such as voluntary co-operation by the people directly concerned, which replace State arrangements. Consider, for example, the operation of mutual aid or self help medical services, or community access communications (e.g. radio), most of which are presently either starved of infrastucture or hindered by the State. Such beneficial services would in general be reorganised so that all the relevant infrastructure became communally held, and That is, proper elaboration of this argument takes each facet of generally beneficial state activity - there is only a (relatively small) finite number to consider - and shows how it can be replaced in one way or another. Replacement is not of course uniquely determined. Lines such replacements can take are indicated in much anarchist (and self-management) literature, consider especially, but no, uncritically, P. Kropootkin, MMfMai Aid, New York University Press 1972, and also his Fi^/dy, Faci<?rie.y and WorLyAo/w, second edition, Nelson, London, 1913, and 77te Con<?Me.yf o/Brgad. Chapman and Hall, London, 1913. �7 those wishing to arrange or use the service would manage the operation themselves, taking the operation into their own hands instead of being the passive recipients of favours meted out to them by professionals and powerful agencies. Coercion is unnecessary because, in more communal types of anarchism, the basic infrastructure and many resources (other than individual labour) are already held by the community, so there is no need to apply coercion to individuals to extract these resources needed for community welfare projects, as there is in the situation where wealth and resources are privatised and coercion is required to wrest resources from unwilling private individuals. As for the second type of functions, those which are no? in the collective interest, coercion will normally be required for the performance of functions, and is thus an essential part of the State's operation. But those functions are better dispensed with, since they are not in the collective interest. In this way, while the good part of the state's operation is retained and improved upon, the bad part — especially the evils of brutality, corruption and other abuses invariably associated with the coercive apparatus - is detached. State services that are concerned with orr/gr, in the general sense, may be similarly removed or replaced. These services, which include reduction of violence to persons and redress for such violence, quarantine services, security, orderly operation of traffic, and so on, have often been said to make for especial difficulties for anarchism, or even to refute it. They do not. Firstly, disputes can be settled and offences dealt with directly by communities themselves without intervention by the State. Secondly, a great many of these problems are created or enhanced by the State, e.g. violence of which the State is the main purveyor and which is often the outcome of the State's propping up of gross inequalitiesA A community which seriously limits (or dispenses with) the institution of private property and removes gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth thereby removes the need for many "welfare services and the basis for a great many offences involving violence: virtually all those involving violence to private property and many of those involving personal violence. Such a left-leaning anarchism is also quite invulnerable to further familiar, but ludicrous, arguments for the State, such as those based on the fairer distribution of land, property and wealth allegedly achieved by State enforcement of redistribution. As all too many people are aware, a major function of the State is to maintain and police inequitable distribution. This then is the main classical argument for anarchism. The argument has however been challenged, both by historical and more recent objections, which are designed to show that people cannot act in their collective interest without coercion. On these points see, e.g. 7?6wZMZz'a/zary Pawp/z/^tj (edited S. Baldwin), Kover Publications, New York, 1970, p.206ff.; also P.J. Proudhon, Cazz/e^jza/M' a/* a R^va/azza/zary. For recent discussion of, and practical examples of, replacements for arbitration and law court procedures (Zzaz for right-leaning anarchism), see C.D. Stone, Sawg <?H arhZzrazZag oar way ra anarcAy, Anarchism (reprint of Nomos XIX) New York University Press, 1978, pp.213- s �8 It is from the simulation argument, in particular, that the corollary of the q/ will follow? For, to overstate the case, anything the State can do that does reflect sought collective interests,, cooperation and other techniques can also achieve in the longer run, and mostly better. * The Second Way: The argument from problem recurrence. The solution by the State to problems of social organisation repeats or generates in more dangerous form the very real problems introduction of the State was designed to solve, including new Dilemmas. Suppose, for instance, the secular State really introduced in order to solve Prisoners' Dilemmas, then the array of States so resulting generates new Prisoners' Dilemmas (with States as 'prisoners'), which there is no Super-State to resolve by coercion. In fact, as opposed to State-justifying mythology, the modem secular State was not introduced (just as the original states were not initiated) for any such apparently intellectually reputable reasons, but was largely inherited from the religious State (and the Church) and maintained to prop up privilege and foster objectives that are not in its communities' interests. Or suppose, as the myth also has it, that the State really were introduced, or contracted, in the interest of order and stability and to curb violence; then the array of States resulting more than negates these advantages, with instability, disorder and violence (e.g. between States) on a grander scale than before the emergence of modern secular States? * The Third Way: The overshoot argument, from the inadequacy of institutional controls on state power. Having ceded a monopoly of power of the State in order to resolve some dilemmas, some of them arising from an inequitable distribution of power, what controls or balances the power of the State? A Super-State. And its power? There is a vicious infinite regress if the reply to the question 'What controls the controller?' is 'a further controller'? The only promising way of avoiding this problem — other routes lead (even more) directly to totalitarianism — is by having the first of these controllers, the State, answer back to those in whose interests it is allegedly established, those of the society or group of communities it controls. This implies democratic methods of some kind. Others go further: 'democracy [is] the only known means to achieve this control, the only known device by which we can try to The title of a joint paper upon which several of these sections draw^. The argument, to be found in Bakunin, is elaborated a little in Taylor, op cif, chapter 7. A related argument, also in Bakunin, is from the way in which emergence of the State compromises and even closes off nonstate solutions to problems of social organisation in adjoining regions. Several historical examples of this phenomenon are alluded to in M. Harris, and Ajngj, Collins, London. 1978, where it is also revealed how little the actual origin and rise of the State had to do with Dilemma situations, e.g. escaping a Hobbesian state of nature. Indeed, it was (j^th the advent and development of the State that life became for many what it had not apparently been in pre-State neolithic times, 'nasty, brutish and short'. The question is in effect Plato's question and the regress is reminiscent of his Third Man argument. �9 protect ourselves against the misuse of political power'.R In this event, control has mostly failed. Democracy is extremely attentuated, even in those states that claim to practice it. The exercise of power in modem 'democratic' states is often channelled through 'non-elected authority' and 'is not democratic in the traditional meaning of the term'.9 Moreover, the much increased power in the modern State, which reaches deep into people's lives, has passed, with no increase in legitimacy, to certain managerial elites who present the power as directed at the attainment of 'generally accepted' objectives such as economic growth (but through, e.g., increased military expenditure) or material 'progress' (but through, e.g., increased military expenditure) or material 'progress' (but through, e.g. subsidization of environmentally destructive enterprises of off-shore companies), though the acceptability of such particular objectives is never democratically tested. In any case, indirect democratic and other institutional checks are in as much as they depend ultimately on the toleration of those who have direct control of the forces of the State. Experience seems to show that such toleration will only be shown so long as democratic procedures deliver results that are not too disagreeable, that are broadly in accord iwth what those who control the coercive power are prepared to accept. (Toleration of such a tamed democracy then brings benefits to those who hold power, especially the cover of legitimation). But institutional checks which operate only insofar as a system acceptable to the powerholders is not seriously challenged, and which depend ultimately upon the toleration of those 'checked', are not really checks at all. The problem of controlling the power of the State and preventing the State once established from usurping further power and exceeding its mandate, is only solved by not ceding power to the State in the first place. The best way of avoiding the evils of accumulated power is the anarchist way, of blocking its accumulation. * The Fourth Way: The argument from freedom and autonomy. A person is responsible for actions deliberately undertaken. This premise can be derived, if need be, from the notion of a person as a moral agent. Taking responsibility for one's actions implies, among other things, making the final decision about what to do on each such occasion oneself; not acting on direction from outside, but determining how to act, what ought to be done, oneself; not handing that decision over to someone or something else. It implies, that is, moral autonomy. Autonomy in turn implies what responsibility requires, freedom. For the autonomous being, endorsing its own decisions and principles, is K.R. Popper, 77ie (?/?<?/i 5*<9c;'<?ry and Vol. II. Fourth edition (revised), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p.129 and p.127. The (overshoot) problem is, according to Popper 'the most fundamental problem of all politics: the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in teh State' 'upon which' Marxists never had 'any wellconsidered view' (p.129). V. Lauber, Eco/ogy, po/ZzZcj and Zz&emZ ^efwocracy, Government and Opposition, 13 (1978), 199-217: seep.209 and p.211. �10 not subject to the will of another. Even if it does what another directs, it is not another so directs. In being free, nof of constraints (both physical and self-determined), but of the constraints and will of others, an autonomous being is morally free. A necessary feature of the State is (XMf/ionry over those in its territory (under its de facto jurisdiction), the right to rule and impose its will uon them. Such authority backed by force is incompatible with moral autonomy and with freedom. An autonomous being, though it may act in accordance with some imperatives of the State, those it independently endorses, is bound to reject such (a claim to) authority, and therewith the State. In sum, being a person, as also being autonomous and being free, implies rejecting the authority of the State, and so not acknowledging the State; that is, each condition on personhood implies, if the argument is sound, anarchism, io It is possible to combine autonomy with an extremely attenuated 'State', one based on on-going unanimous direct democracy. But such a 'State', with no independent authority, is not really a state, since any participant can dissolve it at any time, and so constitutes no threat to anarchism. On the contrary, such direct democratic methods are part of the very stuff of anarchistic organisation. * The Fifth Way: The argument from anarchistic experience. The replacement argument enables construction of a model of a society functioning without the State, of a practically possible Stateless world; which shows that the State is not necessary. But it can always be - even if the claim can seldom or ever be made good - that the modelling leaves out some crucial feature of real world circumstances, rendering it inapplicable. The gap may be closed by appeal to the independently valuable argument from experience, that at various times and places anarchism has been tested and has rworked. Examples of such Stateless organisation suffice to show that crucial real world features have not been omitted. There are many examples of non-industrialised societies which were, or are, anarchistic, there is the rich experience of the Spanish collectives,n and there is much localised experience of self-management and small-scale anarchistic arrangements within the State structure. 12 The argument, outlined by Bakunin, is much elaborated, but in a very individualistic and Kantian fashion, in R.P. Wolff, 7% of A/iarc/H-sw, Harper & Row, New York, 1970. No argument is without assumptions, which are open to dispute. Wolffs argument, from which the argument in the text is adapted, has its pitfalls, and is, for example, disputed by G. Wall, P/uZo-yop/wcaZ revi\yg<7, Anarchism, op.cit. p.273ff. Documented in 77ze 1974. Co/Zecfiv&y (edited S. Dolgoff), Free Life Editions New York As B. Martin boldly asserts, 'The advantages of self-management and alternative lifestyles �11 The state is far from necessary and iacks adequate justification. The state is not a self-justifying object. But none of the justificatory arguments to the state are cogent. A familiar theme, conceding that the state is a problematic object, is that the state is a necessary evil. 13 But, to the contrary, states, though generally evil, are hardly necessary. It needs stressing, furthermore, how weak any necessity claimed has to be. For it is becoming increasingly easy, with the advances in logical modellings and computer simulations of other worlds, virtual states and the like, to envisage accessible worlds organised without modern states. As such worlds, inhabited by humans or human-like creatures are possible, states are not necessary. No doubt then, the necessity has to be of some more andpr^m^Jc sort, a "social human necessity" for example appealing to emergent features of humans, kinks of human nature, obtruding in unfavourable situations of high concentrations and extensive scarcity (situations that states themselves have, like many survival systems, helped contrive). Further the necessity has to be relative to certain organisational objectives, such as a particular state delivery of collective goods and services. Remarkably, none of the extant arguments to the state make it plain that such a weak pragmatic relative "necessity" is indicated, though they would hardly establish more, and though they Jo make strong (implausible) assumptions about the brutal situation outside states, in states-of-nature and so on, and about human motivation and practice, its utterly selfish, self-interested and acquisitive, and frequently debased character (i.e. what appears encouraged under economic rationalism, and pretty much what many have come to expect under conditions of advanced capitalism). Mostly no effort is made any longer, outside a few abstruse texts, to justify the state. Within contemporary institutional arrangement it is simply taken for granted (like Big Science), as axiomatic, as God was under medieval arrangements. But unlike God, who was good personified and therefore had a large problem with the extent of evil in the world, the state is acknowledged as problematic and far from unimplicated in the evil of the world (but directly engaged therein when the councils of the many Machievellis are heeded). Such a problematic object cannot stand up as merely postulated. Nor is there a corresponding ontological argument for the state, as that organisational structure than which nothing more are many and significant. And these alternatives are entirely feasible: there is plenty of evidence and experience to support their superiority over the present way society operates. The obstacles to self-management and alternative lifestyles are powerful vested interests and institutional resistance to change', C/zanging f/x? C<%f, Friends of the Earth, Canberra, 1979. p.6. 13 The theme, enunciated for instance by Popper, that * state power must always remain a dangerous though necessary evil' (II, p.30) is a commonplace one. �12 perfect can exist. Outside the flawed imagination of German idealists there is no such Super State; all actual states are manifestly highly imperfect, all humanly realisable ones are likely similar. As a result of the institutionalisation of the state itself, as a received and indeed central part of modern political arrangements, the onus of proof has become curiously inverted. Efforts to justify the state have become fairly ideal and academic, no longer a serious issue, and onus transferred to anarchists to demonstrate that human social life could proceed well and smoothly (as it now does, of course) without states. While anarchists are not absolved from offering some account of operations of good social lives without states (for, except in fairy tales, it does not all just emerge, unplanned, in the new stateless setting), neither are archists absolved from justification of de facto statist arrangements, beginning with the state itself. �4 a ARCrpM&^S-. The main argument for anarchism can be concentrated in a detailed critique of the state, therewithal state-like institutions a/t? %/ro /j /< 7 ) c /A—Zb n X! ct A<$ Anarchist critiques of the state advance the following themes: * States and state-like institutions are without satisfactory justification. * Such institutions are not required for organisational purposes. * Such institutions have most inharmonious consequences; they bring a whole series of social and environmental bungles or evils in their train. In brief, they are unnecessary unjustified evils The anarchist critique does not end there, but typically includes.'further themes/ such as : w States are devices for channelling privilege and wealth to certain minorities with inside , �The state is an undesirable, or even downright evii, institution, for the following range of reasons:- * States entrench inequities, domination and exploitation. States are devices for the protection of wealth, property and privilege, and usually for the redistribution upwards, and often concentration, of wealth and privilege. A minor but popular illustration is offered by the expensive conferences and other junkets that state employees or party officials organise for themselves and manage to bill to state revenue, in turn sucked up from inequitable taxation. Certainly a main historical outcome of the state has been domination of exploitation of certain segments of society by others, and some see its main, and barely concealed, purpose as just that: domination and exploitation. ) * States are typically corrupt. For example, there are enquiries presently in train, or with follow-through activities yet to be duly completed, in many states in Australia, enquires which have revealed considerable corruption, and there are prima facie cases for similar enquiries in most of the remainder. Nor is this a new phenomenon: these revelations often resemble older or on-going scandals. * States are enormously expensive, and constitute a heavy drain upon regional resources, and accordingly on local environments. In poorer regions they are not merely a heavy burden, but a main cause of impoverishment. One reason for their voracious appetite is an excess of over­ remunerated and often under-productive state employees. Another connected reason is that many state operations are far from lean and efficient, but incorporate many duplications, drag factors and dead weight. Under anarchisms, of all varieties, these heavy cost burdens, weighing down subservient populaces, would be shed. Costs of organisation would be very significantly reduced. * States are major impositions on everyday life. They are intrusive and demanding^. As a Never has this been more forcefully expressed than in Proudhon's famous denouncement of state government: ^1/7^ To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first world of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality (quoted in M p.6). �result, there are constant demands for the reduction of the cancerous state, for removing parts of it through deregulation, selling off state enterprises and so on. There are two troubles with such demands from anarchist standpoints: they never go far enough, to the complete reduction of the state to zero, but characteristically retain parts supportive of or favourable to bigger business, and they proceed in the wrong way, stripping away social safety nets rather than ripping off business support nets (such as limited liability, strike limitation legislation, etc.). * States, for all that they have been promoted as delivering public goods, are mostly dismal news for environmental protection and health and for social justice. Furthermore they are liable to impose substantial hazards or risks upon subservient populations not merely through military and like activities but, more insidious, through support and promotion of dangerous industries, such as nuclear and giant chemical industries. * Statetusually exert a heavy pressure to uniformity, they tend to eliminate plurality and cultural differences. These pressures are exercised by a state in the alleged interests of national unity, and against its enemies, external and internal. Even the most liberal of states tend to give minorities more difficult lives in times of stress, such as war. They are always espousing national values, state interests, and commonly assimilation and adoption of state values (thus for example Canada, formerly and briefly a state toying with multiculturalism, now insistent upon "Canadian values"). Such exercises are conspicuous, not only in citizen ceremonies and other state rituals, such as national sporting and religious events, but more important are virtually ubiquitous in elementary education (down to deference to the f la , and similar). * States are a major source of wars, and the major source of major wars, undoubted evils (however supposedly inevitable). They are major sources and suppliers of military technology and weapons, the means of war. Roughly, the more powerful and "advanced" a state, the further it is engaged in weapon production and export. Without states it is doubtful that there would be any nuclear weapons, and accordingly there would be no prospect of nuclear wars as there would be no weapons with which to fight them. * States are a serious drag on a more satisfactory international order. That there are not more, and more satisfactory, international regulatory organisations 'is mainly a matter of the reluctance of nation states to surrender their powers and the dangers of their being dominated by very powerful states. If only nation states would be dissolved into specialized [departments] there is every reason to believe that most world problems could be handled by appropriate specialized �[organisations]' (Burnheimp.221). * States have excessive power, and are even accumulating or trying to accumulate more, for (hT) instance through more centralization, further controls, additional licences, etc., etc. Obvious responses to excessive power are separation of powers, achieved by decoupling and some fragmentation, limitation of powers, and so on. States thus appear farTrom a good bargain on a preliminary consideration of costs, Especially bad states, the run of states, which engage in politically-motivated incun-ation or t.ifure of their citizens, and so on. Where are the compensating benefits?' yven that we can get along without them, would we really be significantly worse off without them? Even in the better cases (not allowing for alternative nonstatist arrangements which states have precluded or systems they have usurped)? But arguments for states are not usually so directly utilitarian in character. Such arguments would make it look as if we might well opt out of state organisation, and often be better off doing so. Mat it is contended that, contrary to appearances, we cannot get along without state cossetting: states are necessary. , *?: - Present monolithic governments have assumed far too many roles, for many of which they are not competent, from some of which they are disqualified by other roles (e.g. as impartial referees by their business commitments). Because the centre tries to do and control top much, as a consequence it does very much unsatisfactorily. Improved arrangements would separate these roles, deconcentrating and decentralizing power. wcef- �/%^2^ /\^^ 1 C 4 Z Z^-^7 �W GW, //?(? C/7//A /7, jWr f/7(? 3/(7/d The State is like God: the anarchist is like the atheist in disbelief and nonrecognition of what is commonly assumed, mostlv as a matter of faith, to be needed. T)ie pafatlel, BakummTtlibjat^weaknessessas well as Rs strengt%^.''^Vhiie the atheist believes that God does not exist, the anarchist does not believe that there are no states: on the contrary, there are all too many, though none are legitimate. The impor­ tant parallel is as to arguments. The agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the existence of God suc­ ceed, and so adopts a 'neutral' stance; similarly the State-agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the State work, and likewise tries to adopt a fence­ sitting position. Soundly based atheism goes further than agnosticism, not only faulting the argumentsybr, but takingdt for granted that there are arguments, or at least solid considerations, rzgm/ry/. So it is with soundly based anarchism; <t both fault) arguments for the r" 3tatuce- a case against the State. A more obvious comparison, ap­ preciated from Reformation on and again emphasised bvBakunin,' is that of State and Church^ This institutional comparison enables several relevant features of the State to be emphasised; for example, how, as the Church used to, the State assigns to itself many very extensive powers, such as a monopoly on the production and control of the main medium of exchange, currency, and an ultimate monopoly on organised violence, all other internal security arrangernggt^)eing eventually answerable to its pdhee and military^; how it is of the same category as business organisations such as multinationals, which now to some extent threaten it but by and large collaborate with it; how, as again the Church used to, it has nominal support of most of its 'subjects', though many of them are little better than Sunday believers, and an increasing number have come to see the State as in many This does not upset the replacement respects evil and inevitably corrupt, but argument for anarchism. The argument, as a necessary evil.^) implicit in the works of the classical Whether the State is inevitably evil or anarchists, goes like this: The functions not, it is M/mecas-wry, so it will be of the State can be divided into two argued, in a wav parallelling the famous types, those that are in the collective in­ jVquinas designed to prove terest and generally beneficial such as that God exi^&^Since the State is un­ community welfare and organisational necessary, as welt as costly and typically functions, and those that are not (but at leas! evil in many of its practices and are, presumably, in the interests of some undesirable in other respects, it should of the powerful groups the State tends to be superseded. And it can be succeeded, serve). by alternative social arrangements, But as regards functions of the first type, the generally beneficial functions gg 77^ /7r.v/ IWj Q/ SbotWg which are in the collective interest, no coercion is required. For why should /r7t?/ //?C S/t//^ Ay ,76)/ 7?^T//7W.' people have to be coerced into carrying //!f /?e/)GcT/77^?7/ WRM/W7/. out functions which are in their collec­ tive interest? Such functions can be per­ The core of the argument is simple formed, and performed better, without and persuasive: everything in the collec- the coercion which is the hallmark of the tive interest accomplished by the State State, and without the accompanying can equally be accomplished by alterna­ tendency of the State to pervert such tive arrangements such as voluntary co­ functions to the maintenance of privilege operation, the remainder of State activi­ and inequality of power, and to remove ty being dispensed with. The argument is power from those it 'serves'. The detail­ not a straight substitution argument, for ed argument that such functions can be it is not as if a rational person would performed takes a case by case form, want to have everything accomplished considering each function in turn7 In by the State replicated by alternative each case the function is carried out arrangements. There is much the State through alternative arrangements, such does or supports that is at best rather in­ different, ^"'sponsorship of pomp and as voluntary co-operation by the people directly concerned, which replace State ceremony and of junkets by VIPs; and a arrangements. Consider, for example, great deal of typical State activity is the operation of mutual aid or self help positively evil and not in the collective medical services or building programs, interest,'e^. gral^t, corruption, brutality, or self managed welfare, housing or en­ maintenance of inequitable distribution vironment services, or community access of wealth, land and other resources, and communications (e.g. radio), most of encouragement of protection of polluting or environmentally destructive industries (e.g. without state sponsorship we should not be well embarked on a nuclear future, without state assistance and subsidization Australia would not be burdened with its extensive forest­ destructive pine planting and woodchip projects). The modern State has however many other functions than repressive or damaging ones, functions of community welfare or of otherwise beneficial kind. �which are presently either starved of infrastructure or hindered by the State. Such beneficia! services would in genera! be reorganised so that ah the relevant infrastructure became communaHy heid, and those wishing to arrange or use the service wou!d manage the operation themselves, taking the operation into their own hands instead of being the passive recipients of favours meted out to them by professional and powerful agencies. Coercion is unnecessary because, in more communal types of anarcnism, the basic infrastructure and many resources (other than individual labour) are already held by the com­ munity, sdthereis no need to apply coer­ cion to individuals to extract these resources needed for community welfare projects, as there is in the situation where wealth and resources are privatis­ ed and coercion is required to wrest resources from unwilling private in­ dividuals. As for the second type of functions, those which are /tor in the collective in­ terest, coercion will normally be required for the performance of //tew functions, and is thus an essentia! part of the State's operation. But those functions are better dispensed with, since they are not in the coHective interest. !n this way, while the good part of the State's operation is re­ tained and improved upon, the bad part — especially the evils of brutality, corruption and other abuses invariabty associated with the coercive apparatus — is detached. State services that are concerned with orjpr, in the genera! sense, may be similarly removed or replaced. These services, which include reduction of violence to persons and redress for such violence, quarantine services, security, orderly operation of traffic, and so on, have often been said to make for especial difficulties for anarchism, or even to refute it. They do not. Firstly, disputes can be settled and offences dealt with directly by communities themselves without intervention by the State. Secondly, a great many of these pro­ blems are created or enhanced by the State, e.g. violence of which the State is the main purveyor and which is often the outcome of the State's propping up of gross inequalities? A community which seriously limits (or dispenses with) the in­ stitution of private property and removes gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth thereby removes the need for many 'welfare' services and the basis for a great many offences in­ volving violence: virtually ail those in­ volving violence to private property and many of those involving personal violence. Such a left-leaning anarchism is also quite invulnerable to further familiar, but ludicrous, arguments for the State, such as those based on the fairer distribution of land, property and wealth allegedly achieved by State en­ forcement of redistribution. As all too many people are aware, a major func­ tion of the State is to maintain and police inequitable distribution. This then is the main classical argu­ ment for anarchism. The argument has however been challenged, both by historical and more recent objections, which are designed to show that people cannot act in their collective interest without coercion. �7./ NOTES 14. [5. 16. oK !. Bakunin on Anarchy (edited S. Dolgofl), Allen & LJnwin, London, (973, especially p.139. Much else in this paper, eg. the distinction between the State and Society, also derives from Bakunin. 2. That is, proper elaboration of this argument takes each facet of generally beneficial state activity — there is only a (relatively small) finite number to consider — and shows how it can be replaced in one way or another. Replacement is not of course uniquely deter­ mined. Lines such replacements can take are indicated in much anarchist (and self management) literature, consider especially, but no/ uncritically, P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, New York University Press, 1972, and also his Fields. Factories and Workshops, second edition, Nelson, London, 1913, and the Conquest of Bread, Chapman and Hall, London, 1913. 3. On these points see, e.g. Kropotkin's Revolu­ tionary Pamphlets (edited S. Baldwin), Dover Publications, New York, 1970, p.206 ff.; also P.J. Proudhon, Confessions of a Revolu­ tionary. For recent discussion of, and practical examples of, replacements for arbitration and law court procedures (6td for right-leaning anarchism), see C D. Stone, Some re/?ec//on.s on o/Tn/rohng our way /o anarc/ty * Anarchism (reprint of Nomos XIX) New York University Press, 1978, pp.213^4. The argument, to be found in Bakunin, is elaborated a littic in Taylor, op.cit., chapter 7. A related argument, also in Bakunin, is from the way in which emergence of the State com promises and even closes off nonstate solu­ tions to problems of social organisation in ad­ joining regions. Several historical examples of this phenomenon are alluded to in M. Harris, Cannibals and Kings, Collins, London. 1978. where it is also revealed how little the actual origin and rise of the State had to do with Dilemma situations, e.g. escaping a Hobbesian state of nature. Indeed, it was with the advent and development of the State that life became for many what it had not apparently been in prc-State neolithic times, 'nasty, brutish and short'. The question is m effect Plato's question, and the regress is reminiscent of his Third Man argument. K.R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Yol.iL Fourth edition (revised), Routledge and Kegan Paul. London. 1962, p.129 and p.127. The (overshoot) problem ts. according to Popper 'the most fundamental problem of all politics: the control of the con­ troller. of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the State' 'upon which' Marxists never had view' (p. 129). 'any well-considered 17. V. Lauber. /co/o^y, po/t/tes an<7 hbera/ r/emocracv. Government and Opposition. 13 (1978), 199-217: see p.2O9 and p.211. 18. The argument, outlined by Bakunin, is much elaborated, but tn a very individualistic and Kantian fashion, tn R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, Harper & Row, New York. 1970. No argument is without assumptions, which are open to dispute. Wolff's argument, from which the argument in the text is adapted, has its pitfalls, and is, for example, disputed by G. Wall. P/b/o.sop/hca/ awc/n.sw re row/, Anarchism, op.cit. p.273ff. 19. Documented in The Anarchist Cotiectives (edited S. Dolgoff), Free Life Editions, New York. 1974. 20. As B. Martin boldly asserts, 'The advantages of self-management and alternative lifestyles are many and significant. And these alter­ natives are entirely feasible: there is plenty of evidence and experience to support their superiority over the present way society operates. The obstacles to self-management and alternative lifestyles are powerful vested interests and institutional resistance to change', ( hanging the Cogs, Friends of the Earth, Canberra, 1979, p.6. �ANARCHISM - ENLARGED j ____________ foundations* There is a theological component in the theory of the ^tate;.the weakness af^whieh should be brought out. A A By contrast, anarchism ^.s approached from an argument pe^p^ctive, of considerable streng strength^ Since the &tate is an imposed structure that induces considerable costs, the onus of proof is moreover on the State side. (The State versus states: r instantiate the universal.) 2. they Circled numbers hereafter refer to insert places in elder working version. In §1:- (^ In several respects the comparison is better than that of the State and God, since both belong to the same category, institutions. /cc Thus both have looked to some philosophers as human inventions or artifices, both have looked to others (reductionists) as objects that could be reduced to features of the individuals involved in their organisation (but it is hard to see why such fictions or logical constructions should be assigned the power and deference they are accorded). 0 It can be superseded, or replaced^ as the Church has to a large, ^in many places. extent been Just as the power of the Church has declined until it has lost its authority over parishioners, so authority of the State can be undermined, and it can lose recognition and its claim to jAu&h^rit^ over those in its territory. But there is a crucial difference between State and Church: under those condit­ ions the State vanishes, for authority backs!by coercive power is essential to the State but not (any longer) to the Church. from Society anarchistically organised And where the State differs crucially is as to the matter of coercion and of authority backed by force, such a society relying basically on voluntary cooper­ ation where the State relies on authority backed by force. Furthermore, the Church is justified through a religious theory, and is backed up ultimately by appeal to God's authority. The modern secular State by contrast annexes itself J �A 2. itself authority (or has simply inherited it) and, though it may claim to be justified by some political th(o^ry which confers upon it legitimacy, makes no appeal back to a justifying or authorizing <3<^e.nt. So what justifies it? 2^.^ These sorts of considerations prompt two connected complaints of the anarch- ist, which have never been satisfactorily met, the agnostic's complaint that the State has no adequate justification - the arguments for its imposition or certain action fail - and the stronger complaint that the State is not necessary at all. These complaints are backed by arguments and further arguments, namely an assess) ment of arguments. These arguments are important, not, or not merely, because they will show, if unsuccessful, that anarchism j^s irrefutable, but because they convey muqh information, e.g. as to the weak (to the point of vacuity) sense in which the State is "necessary", because they do much to determine the general 0^ logical shape of the anarchism that results, and because they indicate routes to anarchism, not merely why but, to some extent, how the State can be superseded by a Society anarchistically organised. t pfuch as there are several ways of arguing to the existence of God, assembled by Aquinas into the famous (but not exhaustive, and invariably invalid) Five Ways, and various less famous but also important arguments against the existence of God, apcni&Igs , (jAtb so there are various arguments that the State is required, and^ especially —-2 relevant for anarchism^, several ways of arguing against the necessity of the State. is from the simulation argument, in particular, that the irrefutibj.lity of Ai) anarchism will follow^ anything the State can do that does reflect the collective interests A/. A74 cooperation.can also do in the long-run, and mostly better. [Over- i ��g T7/E SECOAD X 777E /1RGGA7EATFROM PROEEEM RECGRREyVCE. The solution by the State to problems of social organisation repeats or generates in more dangerous form the very real problems introduction of the State was designed to solve, inciuding new Diiemmas. Suppose, for instance, the secular State realty were introduced in order to soive Prisoners' Dilemmas, then the array of States so resulting generates new Prisoners' Ditemmas (with States as 'prisoners'), which there is no Super-State to resotve by coercion. In fact, as opposed to State-justifying mythology, the modern secutar State was not introduced (just as the originat States were not initiated) for any such apparentty intellectually reputable reasons, but was targety inherited from che religious State (and the Church) and Jiaintained to prop up privitege and foster objectives that are not in its com­ munities' interests. Or suppose, as the myth atso has it, that the State reaity were introduced, or contracted, in the interest of order and stability and to curb violence; then the array of States resuming more than negates these advan­ tages, with instability, disorder and viotence (e.g. between States) on a grander scale than before the emergence of modern secutar States."* S 77/E 77//RD HA1 Y. RHE (9 YERSEOGE /IRGt/MEAE FROM EE/E /A/(/9E()G^CY GE /AF77EG77GA74E CGA7RGES GA A7MEE PG^ER Having ceded a monopoty of power J) the State in order to resotve some diiemmas, some of them arising from an inequitable distribution of power, what controts or batances the power of the State? A Super-State. And its power? There is a vicious infinite regress if the repty to the question 'What controts the controtter?' is 'a further controller'A The onty promising way of avoiding this problem — other routes tead (even 1 more) directty to totaiitarianism — is by having the first of these controllers, the State, answer back to those in whose in­ terests it is aitegediy estabtished, those of the society or group of communities it controts. This implies democratic methods of some kind. Others go fur­ ther: 'democracy (is] the onty known means to achieve this control, the onty known device by which we can try to protect oursetves against the misuse of pohtica! power'.'* In this event, control has mostty failed. Democracy is ex­ tremely attenuated, even in those states that claim to practice it. The exercise of power in modern 'democratic' states is often channelled through 'non-elected authority' and 'is not democratic in the traditional meaning of the term'E Moreover, the much increased power in the modern State, which reaches deep in­ to people's lives, has passed, with no in­ crease in legitimacy, to certain managerial elites who present the power as directed at the attainment of 'general­ ly accepted' objectives such as economic growth (but through, e.g.', increased military expenditure) or materia! 'pro­ gress' (but through, e.g. subsidization of environmentally destructive enterprises of off-shore companies), though the ac­ ceptability of such particular objectives is never democratically tested. In any case, indirect democratic and other institutional checks are /em/OMS in as much as they depend uttimately on the toleration of those who have direct con­ trol of the forces of the State. Experience seems to show that such toleration wit! only be shown so long as democratic procedures deliver results that are not too disagreeable, that are broadly in ac­ cord with what those who control the coercive power are prepared to accept. (Toleration of such a tamed democracy then brings benefits to those who hold power, especially the cover of legitima­ tion). But institutional checks which operate only insofar as a system accep­ table to the powerholders is not seriously challenged, and which depend ultimately upon the toleration of those 'checked', 39 EE/E FGGR 777 Y. EE/E ARGGMEA?^ FRGA7 EREEDGA7 ^lAD^l GEGAGAf Y. A person is responsible for actions deliberately undertaken. This premise can be derived, if need be, from the notion of a person as a moral agent. Taking responsiblity for one's actions implies, among other things, making the final decision about what to do on each such occasion oneself; not acting on direction from outside, but determin­ ing how to act, what ought to be done, oneself; not handing that decision over to someone or something else. It implies, that is, moral autonomy. Autonomy in turn implies, what responsibility re­ quires, freedom. For the autonomous being, endorsing its own decisions and principles, is not subject to the will of another. Even if it does what another directs, it is not /yeemzse another so directs. In being free, no/ of constraints (both physical and self-determined), but of the constraints and will of others, an autonomous being is morally free. A necesary feature of the State is <7H//io,7/y over those in its territory (under its de facto jurisdiction), the right to rule and impose its will upon them. Such authority backed by force is incom­ patible with moral autonomy and with freedom. An autonomous being, though it may act in accordance with some im­ peratives of the State, those it in­ dependently endorses, is bound to reject such (a claim to) authority, and therewith the State. In sum, being a per­ son, as also being autonomous and being free, implies rejecting the authority of the State, and so not acknowledging the State; that is, each condition on per­ sonhood implies, if the argument is sound, anarchism.'* It is possible to combine autonomy with an extremely attenuated 'State', one based on on-going unanimous direct democracy. But such a 'State', with no independent authority, is not really a state, since any participant can dissolve it at any time, and so constitutes no threat to anarchism. On the contrary, such direct democratic methods are part of the very stuff of anarchistic organisation. W E/7E E7E777 HA1Y. 777E are not really checks at ali. ^RGGMEAEFRGM The problem of controlling the power of the State and preventing the State M A91 RCA75&EAVER7EACE. once established from usurping further The replacement argument enables power and exceeding its mandate, is only construction of a model of a society w/cyAc/orr/y solved by not ceding power functioning without the State, of a prac­ to the State in the first place. The best tically possible Stateless world; which way of avoiding the evils of accumulated shows that the State is not necessary. But power is the anarchist way, of blocking it can always be c/c/wer/ — even if the its accumulation. claim can seldom or ever be made good — that the modelling leaves out some crucial feature of real world circum­ stances, rendering it inapplicable. The gap may be closed by appeal to the inde­ pendently valuable argument from ex­ perience, that at various times and places anarchism has been tested and has work­ ed. Examples of such Stateless organisa­ tion suffice to show that crucial real world features have not been omitted. ^Yiere are many examples of nontndustrialised socieities which were, or are, anarchistic, there is the rich experi­ ence of the Spanish collectives,'" and there is much localised experience of seif-management and small-scale anar chistic arrangements within the State structure?" �z e The state tacks adequate justification. The state is not a self-justifying object. But none of the justificatory arguments to the state are cogent. A familiar theme, conceding that the Al state is a problematic object, is that the state is a necessary evil. But, to the contrary, states, though generally evil, are hardly necessary^ It needs stressing, furthermore, how weak necessity claimed has to be. For it is becoming increasingly easy, with the advances in logical!^ modellings and computer simulations of other worlds, virtual states and the like, to envisage accessible worlds organised without modern states. No doubt then, the necessity has to be of some more pragmatic sort, a "social human necessity" for example appealing to emergent features of humans, kinks of human nature, obtruding in unfavourable situations of high concentrations and extensive scarcity (situations that states themselves have, like many survival systems, helped contrive).Remarkably, none of the extant arguments to the state make it plain that such a weak pragmatic "necessity" is intricated, though they would hardly establish more, and though they make strong (implausible) assumptions about the brutal situation outside states, in states-of-nature and so on, and about human motivation and practice, its utterly selfish, self-interested and acquisitive, and frequently debased character (i.e. what appears encouraged under economic rationalism, and pretty much what many have come to expect under conditions of advanced capitalism). Mostly no effort is made any longer, outside a few abstruse texts, to justify the state. Within contemporary institutional arrangement it is simply taken for granted (like Big Science), as axiomatic, as God was under medieval arrangements. But unlike God, who was good personified and therefore had a large problem with the extent of evil in the world, the state is acknowledged as problematic and far from unimplicated in the evil of the world (but directly engaged therein when the councils of the many Machievellis are heeded). Such a problematic Popper^s view that 'state power must always remain a dangerous though necess­ ary evil' (II, p.30) is a commonplace one. �object cannot stand up as merely postulated. Nor is there a corresponding ontological argument for the state, as that organisational structure than which nothing more perfect can exist. Outside the flawed imagination of German idealists there is no such Super State; all actual states are manifestly highly imperfect, all humanly realisable ones are likely similar. As a result of the institutionalisation of the state itself, as a received and indeed central part of modem political arrangements, the onus of proof has become curiously inverted. Efforts to justify the state have become fairly ideal and academic, no longer a serious issue, and onus transferred to anarchists to demonstrate that human social life could proceed well and smoothly (as it now does, of course) without states. While anarchists are not absolved from offering some account of operations of good social lives without states (for, except in fairy tales, it does not all just emerge, unplanned, in the new stateless setting), neither are statists absolved from justification of de facto statist arrangements, beginning with the state itself. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document CASE DISSOLVED: critique of argumentsto and for the State Over the centuries that humans have been stuck with states, many different attempts to justify them, as in some way necessary or desirable (as more than an unfortunate accident of history), have been attempted. None pf these arguments succeed (as much would perhaps be quite widely conceded^). / / There are various wayjs of showing that the arguments fail. One powerful way deploys, indicates or develops, counterexamples; for instance modelling social arrangements without states. Another more pedestrian but essential way consists in direct examination of the arguments, not merely some of them or various classes of them, but, for completeness, each and every one of them. Ultimately that calls for, what is attempted first in a first attempt fashion, an exhaustive classification of the arguments „ A preliminary classification of these arguments can take the following form: 1. //i-yfonc or <?Ma,s7-/H,s'f(9rzc. These arguments divide in tum into two principal subclasses: 1.1 Daycrzpnve.* /b/Zacy o/TAo quo. A first group of arguments^justification of the state, try to take advantage of the descriptive features that states are entrenched almost everywhere as the dominant feature of the political landscape. Helpful as it may be having states in avoiding hypothetical in injecting a heavy element of realism oLesdisn, nonetheless fact is not per se justification: what is often X ought not to be. Bank robbers and robber barons are justified by their mere existence There are similar problems<dth the argument from tradition. If some principle, practice or theory stood for a good while it had something going for it. Some such consideration lies at the basis of precedence in law; the idea of tradition as encapsulating past wisdom - or past folly. Among the problems are that with authoritarian institutions come their antitheses, with the state the anti-state. Many practices like barbarism and racism have stood for a very long tirne,^ many organisations like mafia have been airound for a long time, so they have something going for them? Such troubles, the evident gap between descriptive and normative, are among those that plague In s^prt without utterly questionable connecting assumptions, such as that what is is necessary (a modal fallacy) or that what is is right (a deontic fallacyi), such arguments fail to afford justification. There are some important JMbtypes of descriptive (or quasi-descriptive) arguments, namely * 1 arguments. The state is not only established, it works. Immediate difficulties This fallacy, heavily utilized by Hegel, is critically examined in NNL. X 0 V-v L^ /]/ t 4^c AA-<s A ^^7*. JA^? (^A t ACA C.^y1k Av 2.2- 1 t.. z^ z^pr p^r- *-y^2^— 2 with such arguments are obvious. The Mafia too/is well-established. It too works, often in opposition the the State (as a sort of negative opposite, like the Devil to God). What sort of standards of is working intended to meet? All sorts of awful political arrangements have "worked", at least in persisting for as long as statist arrangements: despotisms, dictatorships, tyrannies, ... . Still as pragmatic arguments enjoy considerable popularity, especially in North America, they will have to be considered in more detail (than they deserve). * arguments. The state has evolved through a long sequence of political forms. It is tried and tested, and now selected, selected as best available. Such arguments afford scientific clothing for the appalling Hegelian "what is is right". For what has evolved is selected thereby as best, and what is selected as best is no doubt right (by a familiar utilitarian deontic reduction). Slather evidently such arguments prove too much. Any form that in fact emerges, no matter how achieved, though what dusta^dly Machievellian deeds, no matter how awful, is thereby justified: empires and dictatorships of the worst sort, fa^ist and totalitarian states, one and all, are justified, provided only they are established.^ this only for climax states, where some sort of evolutionary plutoniums have been achieved have been achieved (otherwise bad means to select evolutionary ends may temporarily prevail). But where is the evidence that the State is not another transitional stage, like feudalism before it? As an evolutionary form it is very recent, and fortunately not yet established in evolutionary time. 1.2 AfoK-J&pcripf/ve. Difficulties with descriptive arguments, including prescriptive fallacies (deriving presciptive or evaluative conclusions from purely descriptive premisses), are evaded/idealisation arguments, which include These are genetic in justificatory character, relating the mythological "historical" development of the State from an imaginary pre-state situation.^ These arguments are not sharply^p^rated from * fdea/ /n,yfory arguments. * MMagmary and ideal reconjfrMcrfoK arguments. For the transactions, such as an originating social contract, may be presented in a quasi-historic form. This important class of arguments is broader than contractual arrangements, including all the following sorts of imaginary transactions: negotiating, bargaining, experimenting, etc., in given (idealised) conditions, perhaps issuing in an arrangement, agreement, contract, etc. One preliminary That contemporary exponents and practitioniers of state craft are inclined to accept these^orts of considerations, and to recognise any region that has gained (short-term) control over a territory and its administration, does nothing for the considerations^ What it reveals rather is the moral sickness of contemporary real-politics. They include (as opposed to relocation arguments, where a group ("voting with its feet ) relocates and forms a state (except of course these gorups, when there was room for them, tended to aim for new societies, not states). These arguments form a bridge between descriptive and ntunative. While voluntary contract arguments are descripively implausible, voluntary relocation has, or did have, a little descriptive 3 classification of these arguments divides them into natural quasi-theological, legalistic invisible hand evolutionary consensual or equivalent. artificial, The most notorious of these reconstructions, or political thought-experiments, are the social contract theories whereby individual members of a society fictitiously enter into an enforceable contract, inescapable for themselves and all their descendants, setting up the state, primarily as a security arrangement. In later versions which may involve other legalistic forms than contracts, such as pa^cts, trusts, etc., there is much negotiating and bargaining in contrived situations, where humans lose many of their distinctive features and accoutrements (in a effort to ensure some initial fairness). A variant on contract theories, which justify some sort of state arrangements Z/* they arose in an ideal way, is retrojustification of the state as naturally arising, as a sort of super­ insurance agency, from pre-state arrangements. For example, the minimal state evolves from a competing set of state-like security agencies one of which somehow gains a monopoly, and is retrojustified through insurance arguments (concerning risk and compensation). Such arguments are sometimes presented as replacing overall contractual arrangements (through minor arrangements undoubtedly enter) with invisible hand mechanisms. Whereas contractual arguments take the general segmented shape: INITIAL STATE: INPUT INTERMEDIATE STATES prestate negotiation followed by situation: draft contrad, assessment "state of nature" FINAL STATE: OUTPUT state established situation followed by contract adoption ^in invisible hand arguments the intermediate steps, on route to the state, consist in formation of organisations and their progressive amalgatiation to provide finally a state. For example, in Nozick these organisations are taken to comprise protective agencies (though that is only one statist function), and to ensure legitimacy for the final object, it is contended that each intermediate state derives from the proceeding in a morally permissible way, namely preserves % selected rights. Such arguments fail for two main classes of reasons: inadequacy in the derivations of late and final stages from earlier ones, and unsatisfactoriness over the initial state (in particular, what is assumed in it, such as proprietorial rights, and what is excluded, i$ the way of more satisfactory alternatives). In these forms the State arises through voZimfary actions and transactions. Whereas anarchists and many socialists see anarchism as a post-state state, these transaction arguments often assume anarchism, in very motly forms, as pre-state states. People voluntarily elect to escape those pre-state form, "rushing" into the jaws of the State. But there are, as well, versions, where the State is established through legalistic or religious means, natural religion or the like. For example, the details of State organisation, or a recipe or 4 commandments therefore, are received by or given to some powerful religious personage, who implements the organisation under religious authority. The legalistic equivalent came about through implementation, not of religious dictates, but what may be very similar in practical affect and detail, natural law. Normally this law will be "seen", for, by some powerful personages, who are in a position to convey, and have put into effect, their illumination. With the decline of religion these sorts of arguments have lost much of their general appeal (they should never have enjoyed much credibility). But many relics of these shattered arguments remain, to be removed. A critical point is that such arguments should not gain independent standing. Most law is mfra-state, state manufactured and state serving. What is independent of states has to answer to standards, moral standards especially, that are independently justified. Similarly for religious commandments. As a result, these arguments collapse back to arguments for the State. Now modern states did not arise in any such "natural" or contractual way. Often they were imposed by conquest or through colonialisation, and with a few exceptions, using military means rather than offering much sweetness and light and choice. There are a notable discrepancies between typical justifications of the state (in which much is sweetness and light, though it is far from a pareto-optimal object) and common explanations of the role of the state (in which much is obviousness and intrigue). Nor do the ideal constructions or histories offer much justification for these resulting state power configurations. For the states so delivered are very different from those most people presently toil under. In any case, the arguments involved do not succeed. They are extraordinarily gappy by contemporary logical standards. They depend upon some utterly implausible assumptions, for example as to how vile conditions are^n extra^state situations. These changes are easily illustrated, and will be.) small immediate)^eana&14 example. Underlying several of the imaginary transaction arguments to the state, are various c/zofcg arguments of a thought-experiment cast. Commonly such arguments ambitiously aim to show that * the state is necessary, and that * the state is superior to its absence. But such arguments.like those embedcTin confracf arguments .are little better than con jobs.as are presented depend upon a false choice. For only two options are considered: H, a horrible Hobbesian "state of nature" and S, a well-ordered (contructually-reached) Hobbesian state. The argument, appealing to the vices of H and the virtues of S, has little trouble in concluding * * S is better than H (or similarly, rational agents would select S over H, etc.) other options, such as anarchist ones. Why should anarchists want to line up with S? They can agree with proposition * *. They might also want The choice conveniently leaves to assert that anarchistic arrangements Z are superior to S. Whereupon it is evident that neither * nor * follows. For necessity all accessible alternatives have to be considered (by the semantics of That has not been done. For superiority, the superiority of S to Z and other alternatives has to be taken into account. That has not been done. — , ----------------------- alternative i^\Carter^^(?c^ry^which produces The kind of individuals who have strongly internalized values and can live cooperatively and freely without the threat of force ...\ i^)(p.25).4 6V1C- No doubt some of the gaps in the arguments could be plugged by further, further contestable, assumptions, but such analytic work remains to be attempted and assessed, after two millennia of such arguments. In fact it was long ago realised that such arguments exhibit unlikely and even paradoxical features. For example, in consenting to a state for security purposes, participants to the state contract proceed to establish an institution which is far more dangerous to them than the power of others taken distributively. It would seem that those smart enough to enter into a social contract for a state would be smart enough to foresee the problems of hiring a monster, and to avoid the state and steer along without it. In establishing a state, inhabitants set up an institution that is far more powerful and dangerous to them than the power of other inhabitants taken singly or in groups. This is to think that Men are so fulish that they tak care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done then by PoZe-caM, or but are contra^ f^ay think it Safety, to be devoured by AZo/asA These arguments, like others to follow, even if somehow repaired, would not establish an institution with anything approaching the power and complexity of the modern state. Arguments to the state typically establish, at best, only a rather minimal state, with certain protective and regulatory powers. Such minimal states would not deliver many of the goods economists, still less socialists, have come to expect of the state. The arguments certainly do not establish anything like the oppressive paternal state with a panoply of powers that many citizens are forceably subject to, power states have accumulated by their own unjustified predatory activity. In this respect too, arguments to the state resemble arguments to God. Deistic arguments characteristically establish (insofar as they establish anything) only a quite minimal rAar w/zZc/t, a first cause, some existent, a most perfect object, a universal designer, clockmaker or the like. They do nothing to establish many of the powers or properties asciibed to God. There is yet another resemblance a surplus of attributes are regularly ascribed to Gock so much power, knowledge, andj^^like^that paradoxes of omnipotence, omniscience, and jimilar, are quickly engendereb^aradoxes that a lesser God that merely satisized on virtue (and could tolerate some production of evil) could easily escape)^ So too a surplus of power is conceded to the State. The state carries ^far more power than is required for collective organisation, a large "political surphis" which should be relinquished. /4 ^ reversmg Hobbes' argument,pottom halfl really a cranking. $ Locke p.372. ——^Lesser Gods encounter ^other difficulties: their plurality, the fact that they can be exceeded by other greater Gods, and their upstaging by ontological arguments. 6 2(-l*) S*y^7?zayic. These arguments divide again into two principal subclasses, namely 2.1 Ana/yac and 2.2 M?K#K(2/y%c. Further both subclasses may be subdivided in tum into individualistic and holistic subclasses, for instance 2.1 into 2.1.1 Indiviualistic and 2.1.2 Non-individualistic. Most recent investigation has been concentrated within subdivision 2.1.^1, upon game-theoretic justifications of the State. Indeed, given prevailing methodological individualism, which almost invariably takes analytic form, all acceptable justification reuced to this subdivision? Certainly other systematic ways of endeavouring to justify the state tent z to have fallen by the wayside or been abandoned. However it is worth listing two further forms, one of which remains significant: * Holistic/brz/t considerations. The State is presented as the form, or even spirit, of Society, much as the mind is the form of the corresponding body. Insofar as there is an argument, it is analogical, from an increasingly dubious basis. Contemporary up-dating of the torm'ideas would no doubt have the State as - what is even less plausible - the program, or the software, of a corresponding Society. * Mora/ considerations. But there is little good reason to embrace individualism, methodological or other, because many sorts of wholes, beginning with ^bstra&i, do not come down to individuals; it is poor methodology to try to proceed as if they do. More on individualism elsewhere. See aM JB 3VHATEVER3 2. Arguments in a game theory setting: Prrhners' Diiemma games and supergames. What is widely regarded as the most persuasive justification of the state [is] "the argument that, without the state, people would not voluntarily cooperate to provide themselves with certain public goods... ". This argument, which is quite popular with contemporary academics, suggests that, without the state, people would not be able to "act so as to realise their interests."* . So far, hewexEr, we have not encountered^an argument, but simply a very large claim. The argument itself^is remarkably circuitous, circuiting through a range of examples drawn from game theory, and, so it will emerge, as yet quite indecisive. Obtaining a view, a clear view, of the whole argument, or rather the spectrum of potential arguments, matters for anarchism. For that will help considerably in dispelling the myth that here, partly hidden, is a powerful P3p*x argument against A The argument takes the form of a modal syllogism: * The state is necessary for the optimal, or adequate, provision of collective (i.e. public) goody (zzm/or premiss), of* ' * Collective goods are necessary for a satisfactory social life, (J%7M% premiss) . the state is necessary for a satisfactory social life./Moreover, given that the latter, a satisfactory social life (in a given region), is a certain desiderata, the state is to that extent necessary (a necessity is (^bolutized). While the big argument takes thatybrm, it is subject to variation. Furthermore, some variation is essential, else it, and one of the chief forms incorporated, is invalid. For the argument displayed has a different, and an ambiguous, middle term. For requisite uniformity, and validity, the middle term has to be either a) adequate provision of colective goods, or o) optimal provision of collective goods. While little supporting argument get lavished on the minor premiss, it being assumed obvious, that obviousness selected. For a satisfactory social life may result when when term o) is than optimal provisioning of collective goods occurs. Adequate lives only require adequate goods, perhaps even a modest supply of goods for less consumptive societies, not optimal or maximal levels. There is/a significant skating about, of justificatory relevance, in the "most persuasive justification of the state", as normally slackly presented^between (as in o), nomally explicated in terms of maximization; erms of satisization); of provisioning: opPma/ (as in a), have construed int (unspecified, as in the quote above, or perhaps specified as in Hobbes, e.g. defence and security of property). Unfortunately for the argument, all that the game-theoretic arguments for the major 1 2 Grofman 80, p.108, quoting Taylor. For another similar statement, qualified to members of a large public, see Taylor 82, p.53. Thus, basic collective goods for a basic social life, as for instance in subsistence lifestyles. ' ' ' ' / premiss typically establish at best is failure of optima^ or certain large prov^pning, without the state. They do not show failure to provision at all without the state, or failure to achieve "basic" provision, or even adequate provisioning. Now anarchism can^granF that certain large provisioning is improbable without the state; for example^ntercoiynental nuclear missiles, or large output nuclear power plants. 3 But i^hardly matters! f&r such state-posessed goods are? arguably antithetical to satisfactory social life. Nor need anarchism accede Rr optimality requirements, thereby destroying usual game-theoretic arguments. For these arguments usually show that more would be obtained under certain counter-individualistic cooperative strategies than would otherwise be obtained, not that some or basic levels would not be achieved. To put it bluntly, satisizing anarchists can throw out the challenge: what does it matter if a few state prisoners defect (i.e. there are some not fully-paid-up rider^so long as enough goods are still delivered? That challenge has not been met, even implicitly, as will appear. 5? It is unreasonable, in any case, to demand optimal levels from non-statist societies, because no extant stat^ measure up to such excessive requirements. Indeed most staites do ... ........................................... , . bd not even meet utterly basic demands. Henceforth we shall be looking for leads, which %?.yo /hero cover basic demands. The argument for the critical major premiss takes the following sort of route, involving these components: 1. Assimilation of the problem of provision of collective goods (in the light of the minor premiss it can be cast as a problem) to paradigmatic problems in game theory, initially the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD for short). No doubt efforts at provision of public goods commonly result in arrangements that can be represented formally as Prisoners' Dilemmas. But it is sometimes claimed, what will be repudiated subsequently, that all such efforts result in PD situations, that is that there is a universal linkage. Two connections are regularly assumed: a universal representation of problems in game theory, and a more plausible less ambitious connection with PD games. That is: * all provisioning problems can be represented within game theory. ** these problems^requently)takePD form. . The first assumption, of game theory representation, is^severe. Each problem is transformed into a game, with n independent players, normally individuals or individual units (such as an "individual" family or firm in economics^)/ These players characteristically possess but limited information, and almost invariably are allowed only extraordinarily narrow motivations and objectives, am) as maximizing their own interests or pay-offs, in a rigid setting with fixed predetermined moves.$ According to the more plausible, less ambitious collections, 3 4 5 So much is argued elsewhere (nuclear wo^k). While in many politically relevant applications, such as the "tragedy of the common^' game,the players may bedndividuals, in other applications the players may be communities, societies, or even states, e.g\mtemational traaR and war games. It is this sort of rigidity and limitation that/make^ parts of game-theory automatically tractable. <?; 3 * provisioning of public goods frequently yields prisoners' dilemma situations, Ahat is the problem involved can be transformed into a typical PD game, comprising a perhaps interated games among a public of n individuals. 2. Sometimes these games yield unfavourable results, that is not enough individuals cooperate but instead defect, so the good in question will not be delivered. 3. On/y by intervention pf the state can cooperation be obtained, by coercion of individuals? other devices, such a; of the market, will notsucceed. 4 3. THE CASE AGAINST REPLACEMENT FROM PRISONERS' DILEMMA SITUATIONS AND THE buttress the State status quc^are based on variants of the prisoners' Dilemma, to the effect that there are imporran? cases where individuals will not agree^ or co-operate to provide them­ selves with (or to maintain) collective goods without coercion, such as on/y the State can furnish? In such 'dilemma' situations each individual will hope to gain advantage, without contributing (or exercising restraint), from others' contributions (or restraint), by freeloading on others (or profiting from others' restraint). The claim is that only the State with its backing of force can resolve such situations: anarchistic replacement cannot succeed. In short,'certain individual choice cannot replace state-covered choice. important cases, coo< There are (as the bracketed clauses indicate) two main types of case, those where people do not conrri&M&.to themselves with, or with optimum quantities of, a "collective good", and those where people do not themselves to or maintain optimum quantities of, some already available "collective good". The first type of case is taken to include such traditional and modern concerns of the state and its subsidiary institutions as order, security, defence, and perhaps private property, as well as sewerage schemes, water supplies, waste services, public health, social security, etc. The second case is supposed to include, as well as village commons, newer enviromental concerns such as clean air, unpolluted streams and beaches, parks, rainforests, wilderness, whales, etc. But there is no sharp division between the cases (security or parks could be of either type depending on the status quo), and The case broken-backed right here: because if we don't ^o this^not going to agree to social contract — which allegedly implies these things — either. Similarly, jocia/ contract theory &ro&cn-&ac%cJ. The Tragedy of the Commons is set up so as to assume no collective methods have been developed or can be developed without coercion. (Roberts). The point of coercion is to retain the privatised individual. For the factor of coercion makes it in intrests of private individual. So coercion makes the effect of relations to be got without exceeding provatised individual picture. Coercion substitutes for relations in the context of privatised individuals. Privatised individuals are, of course, products, in large part, of the operation (and enforcement and entrenchment) of a particular social theory, or ra/Zzcr jar/ ofsocial theory. Arguments of this type are sometimes said to represent 'the strongest case that can be made for the desirability of the State* (M. Taylor, Anarc/ty anJ Coap^raZiaa, Wiley, London, 1976, p.9). To cover all arguments of the type, and to avoid repetition of the phrase 'variants of and disputes as to whether certain arguments such as those of Hume and of Olson involve Prisoners' Dilemma situations, 'Prisoner's Dilemma' is used in a wide sense to include not merely single nperson Prisoners' Dilemma games, but, for example, games where the payoffs are not merely egoistic (as with both Hobbes and Hume) and where such games are iterated. As the bracketed clauses in the text indicate, there are two types of case, not sharply separated and both the jawt^ Zagica/ /oral — those where people do not to themselves with, or with 'optimum' quantities of, a 'collective good' (e.g. security, order, sewage), and those where people do not refrain themselves to wainfam, or maintain 'optimum' quantities of, some alrca< available 'collective good' (e.g. commons, unpolluted streams, whales, wilderness). That received arguments of all these types involves Prisoners? Dilemma situations (in the wide sense) is argued in effect, in Taylor, op.cif. and elsewhere. An easier introduction to the material covered by Taylor, which also surveys other important literature, is given in the final chapter of R. Abrams, FoaaJan'aaj o/Po/aica/ Aaa/y^, Columbia University press, New York, 1980. Z y 5 as arguments for state institution both have the same logical form, that of a Prisoners' Dilemma or some finite sequence of Prisoners' Dilemma games (what are called Prisoners' Dilemma &%?^rgames). The arguments are not mere exercises in game theory since it is through arguments of this type that political theorists such as Hobbes and Hume have attempted to demonstrate the necessity of the State, so it is sometimes claimed (e.g. by Taylor). Furthermore, it is with arguments of the same^form, the "Tragedy of the Commons", that Hardin and others have tried to show that extensive, indeed draconian, state powers are required to resolve environmental problems; without such powers no exploiter or polluter will exercise restraint, ra c . Consider the single Prisoners' Dilemma game where each player, or prisoner, is assumed, as is usual in these things, to be egoistic (sometime equated with "being rational"), to seek just maximisation of his own private payoff, in the special case where there are just two players. (The special case illustrates all the main points except one, the c/size in making a case for the state.) < . A basic ingredient^a.considerable variety of argumentfof this type, including Hobbes' andlTragedy of the Commons' argument, and recent economic arguments for State intervention to secure collective goods, i^/tne single prisoners' Dilemma game with just two players.s Two prisoners, 1 and 2, taken to be accomplices in a crime, have been separately imprisoned. A State representative makes the following offers separately to each: if the prisoner confesses and becomes a State's witness while his or her accomplice remains silent, he or she will be released at once while the accomplice gets 8 years. 3t so happens that if both prisoners remain silent the State has only enough evidence to impose a 1 year sentence. But if both confess they would each receive 4 years. The 'game' can be summarised in the following 'payoff' matrix: Prisoner 1 Strategies S(ilence) C(onfess) S -1,-1 -8,0 C 0, -8 -4, -4 '— Prisoner 2 The game is not intended to present a moral ^ilemma, that each can only go free at the cost of the others' freedom, but the following dilemma: It is in each prisoner's private interest to An important matter the two player game does not illustrate is the relevance of populations size in the arguments for the State. But size is not decisive (see, e.g., Taylor, chapter 2), and the issue can be avoided (or relocated) by organisation into smaller communities. The figures given in the matrix are illustrative only; for inequalities which suffice for a Dilemma situation, see Tayor, p.5. 6 choose strategy C no matter what the other does: strategy C is, in the jargon, each players' 'dominant' strategy (and also in fact a minimax strategy). For if 2, for example, remains silent, the%l goes free by confessing, while if 2 confesses, then 1 halves his or her sentence by if both prisoners choose their dominant strategy they obtain an outcome to that which would have resulted by what is tendentiously called 'co-operating', by confessing. their both remaining silent. 3.1 FOILING THE PRISONERS' DILEMMA ARGUMENT. It is bizarre that a dilemma alleged to show the necessity of the State — which is supposed to intervene, forcibly if required, to ensure that the prisoners 'co-operate' to obtain an optimal outcome — should be set up by the State's own operative.^ The case looks like an inside job; and it M, though neither the operative, nor for that matter the prisoners on their own, continue to play an essential role. The prisoners, in any finite number, can be members of a community and payoffs quantities of some collective good. The claim is, that without intervention (by the State), the community will only chase a subotimal quantity of the good if any. Some features of the prisoners' relations are assumed to transfer however. Of course the State's presence in arranging (of accentuating) such dilemmas is inessential, as is much else from the example. But some features of the Prisoner's relations are isolated, and so have no opportunity to communicate or r^aZZy co-operate. Similarly, in the more general argument a privatisation assumption is smuggled in in the way the dilemma is formulated, that we are dealing with self contained individuals who, like the prisoners, act only in their own narrowly construed private interests and whose interests are opposed. The applicability of the dilemma to the human condition is accordingly seriously limited, io A cursory aside is often added to the Prisoners' Dilemma to the effect that the segregation of the priisoners makes no real difference. It is claimed that even if the prisoners could meet and discuss and even agreed to co-operate, that would make no difference, since neither could trust (the sincerity) of the other (Abrams, p.193), 'neither has an incentive to keep the agreement' (Taylor, p.5). Experimental and historical evidence indicates that this is very often no so — and in a more co-operative social setting than currently encouraged privatisation of life, the extent of co-operation and trust would undoubtedly be much higher n The argument has to depend crucially then on substantially mistaken assumptions about human propensities It is similarly bizarre that there should be outcomes that the State alone is said to be able to arrange, but not mere social cooperation, when the State rv (as on many theories) the result of reflection of social cooperation. This important point is much elaborated in V. and R. Routley, &?cmZ 77^or^.y, S^Zf aztrZ Envirownf/tfaZ Pro&Zewty in Environmental Philosophy (edited D. Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian national University, 1980. As a result of G. Hardin's Tragedy CoHWHonj, historical evidence has been assembled which reveals how far Hardin's 'Commons' diverges from historic commons; see, inparticular, A. Roberts, 77^ S^Zf-Managing Allison & Busby, London, 1979, chapter 10, but also Routley, op.cir., p.285 and ppp.329-332. Similar points apply as regards many other Dilemma situations. Tn the experimental studies of the prisoner's dilemma game approximately half of the participants choose a cooperative strategy even when they know for certain that the other player will cooperate'. Abrams, op.ciz., p.308. 7 in various settings, e.g. that purely egoistic interests are always pursued, backed up by a large measure of scepticism about the reliability of other people (but if people were Jia? unreliable and devious, many State arrangements involved in providing public goods would not succeed either). That such assumptions are operating can be seen by elaborating the situation; e.g. to bring out the first, suppose the prisoners have a common bond, e.g. they are friends or they are political prisoners with a shared social commitment, or they are neighbours and face a future in the same community; to bring out the philosophical scepticism involved, suppose the prisoner with a tarnished record offers the other security against default, and so on. The question of the character of human interests and preferences %/iJ the extent of their determination by the social context in which they occur is/MKJcwtcnhJ to the whole question of social economic arrangements, and also accordingly to arguments for the State on the basis of human propensities. A major assumption underlying prevailing (non-Marxist) economics and associated political theory, is that the interests and preferences, as summed up in a preference ranking or utility function, of each human that is taken to count is an mJcpcnJcnr parameter, which depends neither on the preference rankings of other nor on the social context in which that human operates. Wh8ile the individuals and firms of mainstream economic theory do, by definition, satisfy the independence requirements, and while there is very substantial cultural pressure on consumers to conform (through advertising, education, popular media), vc/y many Jo /io? cozi/briH, and the extent of cultural pressure towards privatisation itself belies the naturalness of this independence. And having sufficiently many interest-interdependent people in a small community (which is not thoroughly impoverished) is normally enough, given their social influence, to avoid or resolve by co-operation the types of Prisoners' Dilemma situations that appear to count in favour of the State. 3.2 Why the dilemma arguments cannot succeed. What the Dilemma-based case for the State has to show — what never has been shown — is that there are outstanding Dilemma situations which are relevant, important, and also damaging if unresolved, and that they are resolvable by State intervention, and only so (optimally) resolvable. Finally it has to be shown that in the course of so resolving these Dilemma situations, worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These complex conditions cannot be satisfied, if they can be satisfied at all, in a way that is not question begging. For several of the conditions are value dependent (e.g. what is important, damaging, optimal, worse) and involve considerations about which resonable parties can differ. The selection of Dilemmas itself provides an example of value dependence: after all there are many such Dilemmas (e.g. as to environmental degradation, of over-exploitation, of family violence or fueds) which are considered beyond the sphere of the State or not worthy of State attention. There are now grounds for concluding that the conditions cannot be satisfied at all. For 12 Cf. the disucssion in Taylor, op.ci/., p.93. 8 many of the arguments using Prisoners' Dilemma games, Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State and Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' for instance, turn out when to consist not just of a single game but of a sequence of such games, to be more adequately represented by what is called a But in many such sequential Prisoners' Dilemma games, rational 'co-operation' can occur, even assuming separated players with purely egoistic interests. 13 For what sequential games permit that isolated games exclude, is that players' actions may be dependent upon past performance of other players. This dependence effectively removes one extremely unrealistic self-containment assumption from Dilemma situations, that individuals act in totally isolated ways, not learning from past social interaction. In such sueprgames then, no intervention is required. Undoubtedly some Dilemmas are resolved by 'intervention', e.g. by allowing the prisoners to get in touch so that they find they are neighbours or that they can really co-operate. Euqally important, and equally independent of the State, is the matter of breaking down the adverary, or game, situation so the prisoners do not act as competitors but are prepared to co­ operate.^ Informational input may also be important, e.g. news that each prisoner has a good record of adhering to agreement, or if not is prepared to stake collateral, etc. Nor is force or threat of force required as an incentive to guarantee optimal strategies: a range of other inducements and incentives is known (shuld they be required in recalcitrant cases), and is used even by the State, e.g. gifts, deprivation, social pressure, etc. But at no stage is the State required to make these arrangements: much as some real Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved by work of Amnesty International, so voluntary organisations can be formed to detect and deal with Prisoners' Dilemma situations where they are not already catered for. And in fact communal and co-operative organisation did resolve Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations historically, for example in the case of the Commons. In sum, here also replacement works. There are no important Dilemma situations, it seems, where the State is essential. The State has been thought to be essential because of certain influential flase dichotomies; for example, that all behaviour that is not egoistic is altruistic (but altruistic behaviour is uncommon, and 'irrational'), that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets — which tend to deal abysmally with collective goods — is through State control.^ But it is quite evident that there are methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, through traditional markets, based on supply costs) and social (e.g. by co-operatives, clubs). Lastly, introduction of the State to resolve 13 14 15 Dilemma situations has very extensive This important result is established in Taylor, op. ctf., for a number of critical cases, though not generally; see, e.g. p.32 but especially chapter 5. Such moves have proved valuable in reducing the State's role in legal prosecution, and in eliminating courtroom procedures, including cases where the State is one of the 'adversaries'. Both the false dichotomies cited are common-place, not to say rife, in modem economic and political theorising. Both are to be found in Abram's final chapter, for example, and the first (with an attempt to plaster over the gap with a definition) in Taylor. For a further criticism of such false dichotomies, see Routley, op.cit., pp.250./ff 9 effects, *6 many of them negative, so that the gains made, if any, in so resolving Dilemma situations, appear to be substantially outweighted by the costs involved. For there are the many evil aspects of the typical State to put in the balance. As regards Dilemma situations, entry of the State with its authority showing may not help but may worsen some situations, and morre important, new Dilemmas may be initiated by State activity, as in the case of the prisoners, or differently with the State as a further player (since the State may engage in whaling, have access to a commons, etc.). These points lead also to further arguments against the State. Suppose, to see the impact of the first reason for the failure of independence, the prisoners are friends and their common interest is to be together. Then, if they are given the opportunity to co-operate, and independence is not enforced by separation, they will, quite rationally, choose a joint optimal strategy, and there is no dilemma. Since the same considerations will not apply where large numbers of strangers are involved, the question arises as the extent and severity of Dilemma situations. The question is complicated by the second double-edged reason for the failure of independence, namely that statist political arrangements undoubtedly accentuate the extent and severity of Dilemma situations by discouraging (providing negative incentives) for genuinely co-operative behaviour and mutual aid. This is another respect in which statist arrangements (like some subclimax biological communities) tend to be self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Accordingly, what arguments for the State on such bases as Prisoners' Dilemma situations have to show is not merely 1) that state coercion does suffice to resolve (sufficiently) many such (damaging) Dilemmas, but also 2) that such coercion is the on/y way of doing so, and 3) that in doing so worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These things have never been shown: nor can they be shown definitively, since firstly there are various nonstatist arrangements for resolving wehat are taken to be damaging Dilemmas, and secondly the overall assessment of what Dilemmas are and what costs are worf/t incurring in resolving them are ultimately evaluative and go back to rival, and presumably coherent, value systems. Hence, when all this is spelled out, the irrefutability of anarchism. To get some feel for the complexity of the issue and for the extent to which evaluative matters do enter, several points relevant to 1) - 3) should be introduced. Firstly, there are many Dilemma situations into which the State puts little or no effort and many others which are, or were, considered as beyond the sphere of influence of the State or as not worthy of State attention, for instance, cases of environmental degradation, overexploitation of a "resource", personal or family fueds, etc., several of them aggravated by State arrangments such as To take one lesser example, State intrusion often induces a certain social escapism: one escapes one's social roles and is enabled to concentrate on private affairs or just to laze. Or so it may appear: for in reality anyone who works, works long and often alientated hours to pay for this apparent escapism and to cover the high costs of frequently inadequate State activity. 10 excessive privatisation of resources (e.g. enclosure of the commons). (7/* such Dilemmas can be downgraded in importance to suit the Statist case so can other Dilemmas apparently favouring State intervention.) Many of these cases would not be helped at all by the entry of the State or its representatives with their authority duly showing (thugh they might be assisted by sensitive mediation, which does not call for a State, only rudiments of a society). Secondly, introduction of the State to resolve Prisoners' Dilemma situations is not without wide-ranging effects, many of them negative, so that the gains made, if any, in so resolving Dilemma situations have to be weighed against costs involved in achieving these gains. Among the costs are new Dilemmas, such as the very example considered in illustrating prisoner Dilemma games which was initiated by State activity. Differently, new Dilemmas will result with the state as a further player (since the State may have access to the commons, engage in whaling, etc.). Some of these situations are interesting in theat they may lead to litigation and decision-making outside of or largely independent of the State, the results of which the State is supposed to enforce though it may be against its interests. But what ensures that if sticks to the findings. Nothing does: it is simply assumed that the State will adhere to its role. But if that assumption is valid with respect to the State (not known for its reliability) then it is good also for various other parties. In short, agreement or decisions can be reached and adhered to without need for State enforcement. So coercion is not always required. Are there important Dilemmas where use the authority of the State is the (?H/y way? Often behind the claim that is is, is a false (but very influential) dichotomy, that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets which may deal abysmally with collective goods, is through state control. But it is quite evident that there are other methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, based on costs involved) and social (e.g. club, co­ operatives). [And a mixture of these methods can be applied to resolve any Prisoners' Dilemma that matters, i.e. here too replacement works. An important initial move is, as was seen, to put the prisoners in touch, so that they could cooperate: equally important is breaking down the ...] Such organisations would not have nearly so much to do as statists would like us to believe, especially once co-operative ways of doing things and mutual aid had become established ways in contrast to competitive and privatised ways. For the extent of simple Prisoners' Dilemma situations calling for intervention (of some sort) has been exaggerated and many, probably, very many, of those that have been thought to require intervention do not because the players (are prepared to) "cooperate" anyway. There are importantly different reasons why the latter can happen:- Firstly, enough players operate with motives which are not purely privatised for a sufficiently optimal outcome to result. This does not imply that these players have altruistic motives: their interests may depend on those of other players in a range of nonaltruistic ways. Secondly, many cases presented as if they were simple Prisoner's Dilemma games turn out when properly analysed, in particular when time is duly taken account of, to be Prisoners' Dilemma super-games. Such, for instance, is the positions with the 11 arguments of Hobbes, Hume and Hardin. But in such supergames rational "cooperation" often occurs even assuming the players have the worst of privatised motives. In short, where the correct analysis of a Prisoner's Dilemma game is as a supergame, statists are often beaten at their own game. [Detail Taylor's partial results, anJ their problems.] /AfJ^ Ji) /7!_^ A/^ ./ <. / "tv 7^-*^-^ / z7 /$CV^/^<^ /'J /^! ^7 </*<9 ^7^7" /^c / r 4& /d-^&V' f o j <. t/7^, c t_ , ^7 J* .X 6. <?^) /y . /^xv Jct/^^ JL 3. <%y4r-/^ ,X^7< .,;^;X 3 <X X?X" X)c. X /T^.X^ 4X3X*/- /X. y/^4. . / X X^X yXX s/ ^,/X-,^X^ Xy ^r y7^ Xox^Levc =-, <^- /, ^ / ^T^ — X? X" ^7^ ^X xx x^/^ <y A^rXXi/^ 6co /^4. /c<_ ^ / /X^cu— <^-^-^- ^4/ /*7^jC *- X^T Xt^/ / < ^Cv ^C A -C <22^ 7^4 y dVf! ^-r- <^ -^* r^CL A-?f-? yj /K-*- ) ^-*^-^/7 Ar^- ^c/ 4-A A /7^^?7"J^ ^^^tr-t^c'-^/j; y>V w t^L y ^). /%4?/ e / J—, /7 ^^7< Z *- ^rt^ *— " Z^? C- /^L ^-7 -^7 ZL- < Z*^/ c-y 7 <^* z Ay /, ?/ y*^ <9 ' J w to be accomplices in a crime, have been separately imprisoned. A State represen­ tative makes the following offers separately to each: if the prisoner con­ fesses and becomes a State's witness while his or her accomplice remains silent, he or she will be released at once while the accomplice gets 8 years. It so happens that if both prisoners remain silent the State has only enough evidence to impose a 1 year sentence. But if both confess they would each receive 4 years. The 'game' can be summarised in the following 'payoff' matrix: Prisoner 1 Strategies S(ilence) C(onfess) S -1, -1 -8, 0 C 0, -8 -4, -4 Prisoner 2 3. T7/E C/1SE z1G.4/MSE AEFL.4 CEA^E^T ERCW ER/5CWERS' D/EEA7AE1 tS77X/?177CW5 E/7E E/AE. I he main arguments designed to rebut the replacement argument for anarchism and to buttress the State status quo, are based on variants of the Prisoners' Dilemma, to the effect that there are /wporftm/cases where individuals will not agree^-or co-operate to provide them­ selves with (or to maintain) collective goods without coercion, such as cw/y the State can furnish/ In such 'dilemma' situations each individual will hope to gain advantage, without contributing (or exercising restraint), from others' contri­ butions (or restraint), by freeloading on others (or profiting from others' restraint). The claim is that only the State with its backing of force can resolve such situations: anarchistic replacement cannot succeed^ A basic ingredient of a considerable variety of arguments of this type, in­ cluding Hobbes' and Hume's arguments for the State, the 'Tragedy of the Com­ mons' argument, and recent economic arguments for State intervention to secure collective goods, is the single Prisoners' Dilemma game with just two players/ Two prisoners, 1 and 2, taken The game^ is not intended to present a moral dilemma, that each can only go free at the cost of the others' freedom, but the following dilemma: It is in each prisoner's private interest to choose strategy C no matter what the other docs: strategy C is, in the jargon, each players' 'dominant' strategy (and also in fact a minimax strategy). For if 2, for ex­ ample, remains silent, then 1 goes free by confessing, while if 2 confesses, then 1 halves his or her sentence by confess­ ing. if both prisoners choose their dominant strategy they obtain an m/er/or outcome to that which would have resulted by what is tendentiously called 'co-operating', by their both remaining silent. ?./ It is bizarre that a dilemma alleged to show the necessity of the State — which is supposed to intervene, forcibly if re­ quired, to ensure that the prisoners 'co­ operate' to obtain an optimal outcome — should bg set up by the State's own operative.^Of course the State's presence in arranging (or accentuating) such dilemmas is inessential, as is much else from the example. But some features of the prisoner's relations are essential, in particular the separability assumption that the prisoners are isolated, and so have no opportunity to communicate or rec/Zy co-operate. Similarly, in the more general argument, a privatisation assumption is smuggled in in the way the dilemma is formulated, that we are dealing with self contained individuals who, like the prisoners, act only in their own narrowly construed private interests and whose interests are opposed. The applicability of the dilem- A 7 ma to the human condition is accordingly seriously limited/ A cursory aside is often added to the Prisoners' Dilemma to the effect that the segregation of the prisoners makes no real difference. It is claimed that even if the prisoners could meet and discuss and even agreed to co-operate, that would make no difference, since neither could trust (the sincerity) of the other (Abrams, p.193), 'neither has an incen­ tive to keep the agreement' (Taylor, p.5). Experimental and historical evidence in­ dicates that this is very often not so — and in a more co-operative social setting than the currently encouraged privatisa­ tion of life, the extent of co-operation and trust would undoubtedly be much higher/ The argument has to depend crucially then on substantially mistaken assumptions about human propensities in various settings, e.g. that purely egoistic interests are always pursued, backed up by a large measure of scep­ ticism about the reliability of other peo­ ple (but if people were /Ar?/ unreliable and devious, many State arrangements involved in providing public goods would not succeed either). That such assumptionsareoperating can be seen by elaborating the situation; e.g. to bring out the first, suppose the prisoners have a common bond, e.g. they are friends or they are political prisoners with a shared social commitment, or they are neigh­ bours and face a future in the same com­ munity; to bring out the philosophical scepticism involved, suppose the prisoner with a tarnished record offers the other security against default, and so on. The question of the character of human interests and preferences the extent of their determination by the social context in which they occur is /MnrArznrvna/ to the whole question of social and economic arrangements, and also accordingly to arguments for the State on the basis of human propensities. A major assumption underlying prevail­ ing (non-Marxist) economics and associated political theory, is that the in­ terests and preferences, as summed up in a preference ranking or utility function, of each human that is taken to count is an mc/e/zenr/enf parameter, which depends neither on the preference rank­ ings of others nor on the social context in which that human operates. While the individuals and firms of mainstream economic theory do, by definition, satisfy the independence requirements, and while there is very substantial cultural pressure on consumers to con­ form (through advertising, education, popular media), wany <7o /?oz ccw/bfTn, and the extent of cultural pressure towards privatisation itself belies the naturalness of this indepen- sequential games permit that isolated games exclude, is that players' actions may be dependent upon past perfor­ mance of other players. This dependence effectively removes one extremely ....a major functmn of the state is unrealistic self-containment assumption to maintain and pohee inequitable from Dilemma situations, that in­ dividuals act in totally isolated ways, not distribution. learning from past social interaction. In such supergames then, no intervention is required. Undoubtedly some Dilemmas are Z/gtZ-f resolved by 'intervention', e.g. by allow­ dence. And having sufficiently many/ ing the prisoners to get in touch so that interest-interdependent people in a smali they find they are neighbours or that community (which is not thoroughly im­ they can really co-operate. Equally im­ poverished) is normally enough, given portant, and equally independent of the State, is the matter of breaking down the their social influence, to avoid or resolve adversary, or game, situation so the by co-operation the types of Prisoners' prisoners do not act as competitors but Dilemma situations that appear to count are prepared to co-operate/' Informa­ in favour of the State/ tional input may also be important, e.g. news that each prisoner has a good ff /yy 77/E /VLEA7A/.1 record of adhering to agreement, or if not is prepared to stake collateral, etc. Nor is force or threat of force required SC/CC777) as an incentive to guarantee optimal What the Dilemma-based case for the strategies: a range of other inducements State has to show — what never has been and incentives is known (should they be shown — is that there are outstanding required in recalcitrant cases), and is Dilemma situations which are relevant, used even by the State, e.g. gifts, important, and also damaging if deprivation, social pressure, etc. But at unresolved, and that they are resolvable no stage is the State required to make by State intervention, and only so (op­ these arrangements: much as some real timally) resolvable. Finally it has to be Prisoners' Dilemmas are resolved by shown that in the course of so resolving work of Amnesty International, so these Dilemma situations, worse situa­ voluntary organisations can be formed tions than those that are resolved are not to detect and deal with Prisoners' Dilem­ thereby induced. These complex condi­ ma situations where they are not already tions cannot be satisfied, if they can be catered for. And in fact communal and satisfied at all, in a way that is not ques­ co-operative organisation did resolve tion begging. For several of the condi­ Prisoners' Dilemma-type situations tions are value dependent (e.g. what is historically, for example in the case of important, damaging, optional, worse) the Commons. In sum, here also replacement works. and involve considerations about which reasonable parties can differ. The selec­ There are no important Dilemma situa­ tion of Dilemmas itself provides an ex­ tions, it seems, where the State is essen­ ample of value dependence: after all tial. The State has been thought to be there are many such Dilemmas (e.g. as to essential because of certain influential environmental degradation, of over­ false dichotomies; for example, that all exploitation, of family fcuds/or^violencQ) behaviour that is not egoistic is altruistic which are considered beyond the sphere (but altruistic behaviour is uncommon, of the State or not worthy of State atten­ and 'irrational'), that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profittion. There are now grounds for concluding directed markets — which tend to deal that the conditions cannot be satisfied at abysmally with collective goods — is all. For many of the arguments using through State control.'^ But it is quite Prisoners' Dilemma games, Hobbes' evident that there are o/Aer methods of and Hume's arguments for the State and allocation, both economic (e.g. ex­ Hardin's 'Tragedy of the Commons' for change, through traditional markets, instance, turn out when projver/y /or- based on supply costs) and social (e.g. by to consist not just of a single co-operatives, clubs). Lastly, introduction of the State to game but of a sequence of such games, to be more adequately represented by resolve so/ne Dilemma situations has what is called a But in many very extensive effects/ many of them such sequential Prisoners' Dilemma negative, so that the gains made, if any, games, rational 'co-operation' can oc­ in so resolving Dilemma situations, ap­ cur, even assuming separated players pear to be substantially outweighed by with purely egoistic interests.'" For what the costs involved. For there are the SOCIAL ALTERNA ! tVES Vet. 2 No. 3. )982 25 many evi! aspects of the typicai State to put in the baiance. As regards Dilemma situations, entry of the State with its authority showing may not help but may worsen some situations, and more im­ portant, new Dilemmas may be initiated by State activity, as in the case of the prisoners, or differently with the State as a further player (since the State may engage in whaling, have access to a com­ mons, etc.). These points lead also to further arguments against the State. available 'collective good' (e.g. commons, un polluted streams, whales, wilderness). That received arguments of ail these types involves Prisoners' Dilemma situations (in the wide sense) is argued, in effect, in Taylor, op.cit. and etsewhere. An easier introduction to the material covered by Taylor, which also surveys other Important literature, is given in the final chapter of R Abrams, Foundations of Political Analysis, Columbia University Press, New York, 1980. 5. An important matter the two player game does not illustrate is the relevance of popula­ tion size in the arguments for the State. But size is not decisive (see, e.g., Taylor, chapter 2), and the issue can be avoided (or relocated) by organisation into smaller communities. The figures given in the matrix are illustrative only; for inequalities which suffice for a Dilemma situation, see Taylor, p.5. 6. It is similarly bizarre that there should be out­ comes that the State alone is said to be able to arrange, but not mere social cooperation, when the State zs (as on many theories) the result or reflection of social cooperation. 7. This important point is much elaborated in V. and R. Routley, Soc/af Theories, Se// Management, and T'n wronwm'a/ ProAferru in Environmental Philosophy (edited D Mannison and others), RSSS, Australian National University, 1980. 9. 10. 11. 12. 4. Arguments of this type are sometimes said to represent 'the strongest case that can be made for the desirability of the State' (M. Taylor, Anarchy and Cooperation, Wiley, London, 1976. p.9). To cover all arguments of the type, and to avoid repetition of the phrase 'variants of' and disputes as to whether cer­ tain arguments such as those of Hume and of Olson involve Prisoners' Diiernnta situations, Prisoner's Dilemma' is used in a wide sense to include not merely single n-person Prisoners' Dilemma games, but for example, games where the payoffs are not merely egoistic (as with both Hobbes and Hume) and where such games are iterated. As the bracketed clauses in the text indicate, there are two types of case, not sharply separated and both of the same /ogtcaZ/orm — those where people do not rwr/A/wfe to sup/r/y themselves with, or with 'optimum' quantities of, a 'collective good' (e.g. security, order, sewage), and those where people do not re.s/ram themselves to mam/am, or maintain 'optimum" quantities of, some already 13. As a result of G. Hardin's Tragerh' o/ rhe Commons, historical evidence has been assembled which reveals how far Hardin's 'Commons' diverges from historic commons; see, in particular, A. Roberts, 7'he Se/fManagmg TTiwonmenr, Allison & Busby. London, 1979, chapter 10, but also Routley, op.cit. p.285 and pp. 329-332. Similar points apply as regards many other Dilemma situa­ tions. 'In the experimental studies of the prisoner's dilemma game approxtmately half of the participants choose a cooperative strategy even when they know for certain that the other player will cooperate'. Abrams. op.cit., p.3O8. ' Cf. the discussion in Taylor, op.cit.. p.93. This important result is established in Taylor, op.cit, for a number of critical cases, though not generally; see, e.g. p.32 but especially chapter 5. Such moves have proved valuable in reducing the State's role in legal prosecution, and in eliminating courtroom procedures, including cases where the State is one of the 'adver­ saries'. Both the false dichotomies cited are common­ place, not to say rife, in modern economic and political theorising. Both are to be found in Abram's final chapter, for example, and the first (with an attempt to plaster over the gap with a definition) in Taylor. For a further criticism of such false dichotomies, see Routley, op.cit., pp.25O ff. To take one lesser example. State intrusion often induces a certain social escapism: one escapes one's social roles and is enabled to concentrate on private affairs or just to laze. Or so it may appear: for in reality anyone who works, works long and often alienated hours to pay for this apparent escapism and to cover the high costs of frequently inade­ quate State activity. of course. ] 5^ The case if broken-backed right here: to agree because if we don't to this not goint/ to social contract - which allegedly implies these things - either. Similarly, the social contract theory is broken-backed. G5; . Alternative longer at this point in §3:- In shof^* in certain important cases, cooperative individual choice cannot replace state-covered choice. There are (as the bracketed clauses indicate) two main types of case, those where people do not contribute to supply themselves with, or with optimum quant­ ities of, a "collective good", and those where people do not restrain themselves to maintain, or maintain optimum quantities of, some already available "collective good". The first type of case is taken to include such traditional and modern concerns of the state and its subsidiary institutions as order, security, defence, and perhaps private property, as well as sewerage schemes, water supplies^.waste services, public health, social security, etc. The second case is supposed to include, as well as village commons, newer environmental concerns such as clean air, unpolluted streams and beaches, parks, rainforests, wilderness, wha les, etc. But there is no sharp division between the cases (security or parks could be of either type depending on the status quo), and as arguments for state institution both have the same logical form, that of a Prisoners' Dilemma or some finite sequence of Pri soners' Dilemma games (what are called Prisoners' Dilemma The arguments are not mere exercises in game theory since it is through arguments of this type that political theorists such as Hobbes and Hume have 5. attempted to demonstrate the necessity of the Stato4^ Furthermore, it is with arguments of the same form, the "Tragedy of the Commons", that Hardia and others have tried to show that extensive, indeed draconian, state powers are required to resolve environmental problems; without such powers no exploiter or polluter will exercise restraint. Consider the gj^le Prisoners' Dilemma game where each player, or prisoner, is assuined, as is usual in these things, to be egoistic (sometime equated with "being rational"), to seek just&axijnisation of his own private payoff, in the special case where there are just two players. (The special case illustrates all the main points except one, the importance of size in making a case for the state.) [Joins text again at fn.5 point.] /* 4. In §3:- The Trac^ec[y of the Commons is set up so as to assume no collective methods had [Teen developed or can be developed without coercion. (Roberts). The point of coercian is to ret^n the privatised individual. $ For the factor of coercion makes it in interests of private individualize coercion makes the effect of relations to be got without exceeding privatised individual picture. Coercion substitutes for relations in the context of privatised individuals. Privatised individuals are, of course, products, in large part, of the operation (and enforcement and entrenchment) of a particular social theory, or rather sort of social theory. ^5^ In §4:- The case looks like an inside job; and it is, though neither the operative, nor for that matter the prisoners ^n their own, essential role. play an The prisoners, in any finite number, can be members of a community and payoffs quantities of some collective good . The claim is, that without intervention (by thecate), the community will only corpse a subeyy^mo/ quantity of the good if any. Some features of the prisoners' relations are assumed to transfer however. Suppose, to see the impact of the first reason for the failure of independence, the prisoners are friends and their common interest is to 6. be together. Then, if they are given the opportunity to cooperate, and independ­ ence is not enforced by separation, they will, quite rationally, choose a joint optimal strategy,and there is no dilemma. Since the same considerations will not apply where large numbers of strangers are involved, the question arises as the extent and severity of Dilemma situations. The question is complicated by the second double-edged reason for the failure of independence, namely that statist political arrangements undoubtedly accentuate the extent and severity of Dilemma situations by discouraging (providing negative incentives) for genuinely cooper­ ative behaviour and nmttAcd aid. This is another respect in which statist arrangments (like some subclimax biological communities) tend to be self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. [Transfer some experimental material to here?] Accordingly, what arguments for the State on such b ases as Prisoners' Dilemma situations have to show is not merely 1) that state coercion does suffice to resolve (sufficiently^ many such (damaging) Dilemmas, but also 2) that such coercion is the only way of doing so, and 3) that in doing so worse situations than those that are resolved are not thereby induced. These things have never been shown: nor can they be shown definitely, since firstly 4 there are various nonstatist arrangements for resolving what are taken to be damaging Dilemmas, and secondly the overall assessment of what Dilemmas are damaging and what costs are worth incurring in resolving them are ultimately evaluative and go back to rival, and presumably coherent, value systems. Hence, when all this is spelled out, the irrefutability of anarchism. To get some feel for the complexity of the issue and for the extent to evolutive matters do enter, several points relevant to l)-3) should be introduced. Firstly, there are many Dilemma situations into which the State puts little or no effort and many others which are, or were, considered as beyond the sphere of influence of the State or as not worthy of State attention, for instance, cases of 7. environmental degradation, overexploitation of a "resource", personal or family feuds, etc., several of them aggravated by State arrangements such as excessive privatisation of resources (e.g. enclosure of the commons). (If such Dilemmas can be downgraded in importance to suit the Statist case so can other Dilemmas appar­ ently favouring State intervention.) Many of these cases would not be helped at all by the entry of the State or its representatives with their authority duly showing (though they might be assisted by sensitive mediation, which does not call for a State, only rudiments Secondly, introduction of the State tof&yolve some Prisoners' of a society). Dilemma situations is not without wide-ranging effects, many of them negative, so that the gains made, if any, in so resolving Dilemma situations have to be weighed against costs involved in achieving these gains. Among the costs are new Dilemmas, such as the very example considered in illustrating Prisoner Dilemma games which was initiated by State activity. Differently, new Dilemmas will result with the state as a further player (since the State may have access to the commons, engage in whaling, etc.). Some of these situations are interesting in that they may lead to litigation and decision-making outside of or independ­ ent of the State, the resultgof which the State is supposed to enforce though it may be against its d Nothing does: interests. But what ensures that rt sticks to the findings. it is simply assumed that the State will adhere to its role. But if that assumption is valid with respect to the State (not known for its reliability) then it is good also for various other parties. In short,agreement or decision!* can be reached and adhered to without need for State enforcement. So coercion is not always required. Are there important Dilemmas where use the authority of the State is the only way? Often behind the claim that is is, is a false (but very influential) dichotomy, that the only way of allocating goods, apart from profit-directed markets which may deal abysmally with collective goods, is through state control^' 8. But it is quite evident that there are other methods of allocation, both economic (e.g. exchange, based on costs involved) and social (e.g. clubs, cooper­ [And a mixture of these methods can be applied to resolve any Prinsoners' atives). Dilemma that matters, i.e. here too replacement works. An important initial move is, as was seen, to put the prisoners in touch, so that they could cooperate: equally important is breaking down the ...] [Joins top of p.7] Such organisations would not have nearly so much to do as statists would like us to believe, especially once cooperative ways of doing things and mutual aid had become established ways in contrast to competitive and privatised ways. For the extent of simple Prisoners' Dilemma situations calling for intervention (o^ some sort) has been exaggerated and many, probably, very many, of those that have been thought to require intervention do not because the players (are prepared to) "cooperate" anyway. happen:- There are importantly different reasons why the latter can Firstly, enough players operate with motives which are not purely priv­ atised for a sufficiently optimal outcome to result. these players have altruistic motives: This does not imply that their interests may depend on those of other players in a range of nonaltruistic ways. Secondly, many cases presented as if they were simple Prisoner's Dilemma games turn out when properly analysed, in particular when time is duly taken account of, to be Prisoners' Dilemma supergames. Such, for instance, is the position with the arguments of Hobbes, Hume and Hardin. But in such supergames rational "cooperation" often occurs, even assuming the players have the worst of privatised correct analysis of a Prisoner's Dil&wima often beaten at their own game. problems.] motives. In short, where the game is as a supergame, statists are [Detail Taylor's partial results, and their Chapter 3 Con,v7i^c%y^ /) CRITIQUE OF THE STATE 1. ARGUMENTS The main argument for anarchism can be concentrated in a detailed critique of the state. For therewith arguments against state-like institutions are also advanced. However further ado is no doubt required to remove all other (unexplified) alternatives to anarchism. A Anarchist critiques of the state advance the following themes: * States and state-like institutions are without satisfactory justification. * Such institutions are not required for organisational purposes. * Such institutions have most inharmonious consequences; they bring a whole series of social and environmental bungles or evils in their train. In brief, they are unnecessary unjustified evils. The anarchist critique does not end there, but typically includes, such further themes as : * States have excessive power, linkages to state power. * Societies are not inductably saddled with states. States can be displaced or even decay (though they are unlikely to just wither away). (9 1 Chapter 3 : CRITIQUE OF THE STATE 1. ARGUMENTS The main argument for anarchism can be concentrated in a detailed critique of the state. For therewith arguments against state-like institutions are also advanced. However further ado is no doubt required to remove all other (unexplified) alternatives to anarchism. / Anarchist critiques of the state advance the following themes: * States and state-like institutions are without satisfactory justification. e Such institutions are not required for organisational purposes. Such institutions have most inharmonious consequences; they bring a whole series of social and environmental bungles or evils in their train. In brief, they are unnecessary unjustified evils. The anarchist critique does not end there, but typically includes, such further themes as : * States have excessive power. * States are devices for channelling privilege and wealth to certain minorities with inside linkages to state power. * Societies are not ineluctably saddled with states. States can be displaced or even decay (though they are unlikely to just wither away). 1. The state is an undesirable, or even downright evii, institution, for the following range of reasons:- * States entrench inequities, domination and exploitation. States are devices for the protection of wealth, property and privilege, and usually for the redistribution upwards, and often concentration, of wealth and privilege. A minor but popular illustration is offered by the expensive conferences and other junkets that state employees or party officials organise for themselves and manage to bill to state revenue, in turn sucked up from inequitable taxation. Certainly a main historical outcome of the state has been domination of exploitation of certain segments of society by others, and some see its main, and barely concealed, purpose as just that: domination and exploitation. * States are typically corrupt. For example, there are enquiries presently in train, or with follow-through activities yet to be duly completed, in many states in Australia, enquires which have revealed considerable corruption, and there are prima facie cases for similar enquiries in most of the remainder. Nor is this a new phenomenon: these revelations often resemble older or on-going scandals. * States are enormously expensive, and constitute a heavy drain upon regional resources, and accordingly on local environments. In poorer regions they are not merely a heavy burden, but 2 a main cause of impoverishment. One reason for their voracious appetite is an excess of over­ remunerated and often under-productive state employees. Another connected reason is that many state operations are far from lean and efficient, but incorporate many duplications, drag factors and dead weight. Under anarchisms, of all varieties, these heavy cost burdens, weighing down subservient populaces, would be shed. Costs of organisation would be very significantly reduced. * The state is an incubus. States are major impositions on everyday life. They are intrusive and demanding. Never has this been more forcefully expressed than in Proudhon's famous denouncement of state government: To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first world of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality (quoted in M p.6). As a result, there are constant demands for the reduction of the cancerous state, for removing parts of it through deregulation, selling off state enterprises and so on. There are two troubles with such demands from anarchist standpoints: they never go far enough, to the complete reduction of the state to zero, but characteristically retain parts supportive of or favourable to bigger business, and they proceed in the wrong way, stripping away social safety nets rather than ripping off business support nets (such as limited liability, strike limitation legislation, etc.). * States, for all that they have been promoted as delivering public goods, are mostly dismal news for environmental protection and health and for social justice. Furthermore they are liable to impose substantial hazards or risks upon subservient populations not merely through military and like activities but, more insidious, through support and promotion of dangerous industries, such as nuclear and giant chemical industries. * States usually exert a heavy pressure to uniformity, they tend to eliminate plurality and cultural differences. These pressures are exercised by a state in the alleged interests of national unity, and against its enemies, external and internal. Even the most liberal of states tend to give minorities more difficult lives in times of stress, such as war. They are always espousing national values, state interests, and commonly assimilation and adoption of state values (thus for example Canada, formerly and briefly a state toying with multiculturalism, now insistent upon "Canadian values"). Such exercises are conspicuous, not only in citizen ceremonies and other state rituals, such as national sporting and religious events, but more important are virtually ubiquitous in elementary education (down to deference to the flag, and 3 similar). * States are a major source of wars, and the major source of major wars, undoubted evils (however supposedly inevitable). They are major sources and suppliers of military technology and weapons, the means of war. Roughly, the more powerful and "advanced" a state, the further it is engaged in weapon production and export. Without states it is doubtful that there would be any nuclear weapons, and accordingly there would be no prospect of nuclear wars as there would be no weapons with which to fight them. * States are a serious drag on a more satisfactory international order. That there are not more, and more satisfactory, international regulatory organisations "is mainly a matter of the reluctance of nation states to surrender their powers and the dangers of their being dominated by very powerful states. If only nation states would be dissolved into specialized [departments] there is every reason to believe that most world problems could be handled by appropriate specialized [organisations]' (Bumheimp.221). * States have excessive power, and are even accumulating or trying to accumulate more, for instance through more centralization, further controls, additional licences, etc., etc. The excessive power of the state is exhibited not only in the treatment of its citizens and foreigners within its territory; it is exemplified also in its practices its territory, through such features as military pressures, including invasion, trade pressures, including sanitions, and in treatment of its citizens everywhere.! Obvious responses to excessive power are regionalization of powers, separation of powers, achieved by decoupling and some fragmentation, limitation of powers, and so on. * Present monolithic governments have assumed far too many roles, for many of which they are not competent, from some of which they are disqualified by other roles (e.g. as impartial referees by their business commitments). Because the centre tries to do and control foo much, as a consequence it does very much unsatisfactorily. Improved arrangements would separate these roles, deconcentrating and decentralizing power. States thus appear far from a good bargain on a preliminary consideration of costs, and very far from maximal or optimal. Especially bad states, the run of states, which engage in politically-motivated inclination or torture of their citizens, and so on. Where are the The issue tends to be avoided; it is contended that, contrary to appearances, we cannot get along without state cossetting: states are necessary. But, given that we can get along without them, would we really be significantly worse off without them? cfr . <r ,,^ven m thd better cases (not allowing for alternative nonstatist arrangements which states have precluded or systems they have usurped)? But arguments for states are not usually so directly utilitarian in character. Such arguments would make it look as if we might well opt out of state organisation, and often be better off doing so. 1 A recent shocking example concerns the attempt of Eire to prevent an Irish women having an abortion in England. 4 These considerations divide into two groups: features that are on normal, normally bad, operations of states, and features that are normic on institution and operation of states. The first group of criticisms are eliminated under good to ideal operation of states, what officiandos of states characteristically unwarr^ntedly make. For the evidence seems to be that in practice states will tend away from the ideal. There are arguments from low efficiencies of complex mechanical structures that can be adopted to lend support to what evidence reveals. Features that are normic, and perhaps inevitable upon institution of states do however yield arguments against states that do not depend on ym*e contingencies of most states, their and so on. / 2. Ways of demonstrating that the State is not Required: as for God and the Church, so for the State. There is a theological component in the presumption and theory of the State; that theological component and therewith of the argMmenfa/ foundations for the State should be fully exposed. By contrast, anarchism, ^ approached from an argument perspective, enjoys nn considerable strength requiring no leaps of faith. The State is like God: the anarchist is like the atheist in disbelief and nonrecognition of what is commonly assumed, mostly as a matter of faith, to be needed. The awn by Bakunin, has as well as considerable strength certain weaknesses. While the atheist believes that God does not exist, the anarchist does not believe that there are no states: on the contrary, there are all too many, though none are legitimate.^The important parallel is as to argM/n^n^. The agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the existence of God succeed, and so adopts a 'neutral' stance; similarly the State-agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the State work, and likewise tries to adopt a fence-sitting position. Soundly based atheism goes further than agnosticism, not only faulting the argumentybr, but taking it for granted that there are arguments, or at least solid considerations, <2g(?in.yL So it is with soundly based anarchism; it both faults arguments for the State, showing none are generally viable, and de ps an incisive case against the State. A more obvious comparison, appreciated from Reformation on and again emphasised by Bakunin,2 is that of State and Church. 'Of course Knever should have eventuated; several bad political turnings were taken in the modern period following the Renaissance, t In several respects the comparison is better than that of the State and God, since both belong to the same category, institutions. Thus too both have looked to some philosophers as human inventions or artifices, both have looked to others (reductionists) as objects that could be reduced to features of the individuals involved in their organisation (but it is hard to see why such fictions or logical constructions shuld be assigned the power and deference they are 2 Bakunin on Anap^hy-(gdited S. Dolgolff), Allen & Unwin, London, 1973, especially p.139. 5 accorded). This institutional comparison enables several relevant features of the State to be emphasised; for example, how, as the Church used to, the State assigns to itself many very extensive powers, such as a monopoly on the production and control of the main medium of exchange, currency, and an ultimate monopoly on organised violence, all other internal security arrangements being eventually answerable to its police, and thence to its officers and military; how it is of the same category as business organisations such as multinationals, which now to some extent threaten it but by and large collaborate with it; how, as again the Church used to, it has nominal support of most of its 'subjects', though many of them are little better than Sunday believers, and an increasing number have come to see the State as in many respects evil and inevitably corrupt, but as a necessary evil. It is easy now, in retrospect, to see how from being a compulsory feature of social life in many places, the Church has become a voluntary, and fragmented one; such a parallel desirable transformation of the State would eliminate it. Whether the State is inevitably evil or not, it is so it will be argued, in a way parallelling the famous Five Ways of Aquinas designed to prove that God exists. That is, much as there are several ways of arguing to the existence of God, assembled by Aquinas into the famous (but not exhaustive, and invariably invalid) Five Ways, as well as various less famous but also important arguments against the existence of God, so in a parallel fashion there are various arguments that the State is required, as well as, what comes later that is especially relevant for anarchism, several ways of arguing against the necessity and desirability of the State. Since the State is unnecessary, as well as costly and typically at least evil in many of its practices and in other respects, it should be superseded. And it can be succeeded, by alternative social arrangements. It can be superseded or replaced as the Churches to a .9*1 large extent been supeyuated or replaced in many places. Just as the power of the ChurchAas declined until it has lost its authority over parishioners, so authority of the State can be undermined, and it can lose recognition and its claim to sovereignty over those in its territory,/A But there is a crucial difference between State and Church: under those conditions the State vanishes; for authority backed by coercive power is essential to the State but not (any longer) to the Church. And where the State differs crucially from Society anarchistically organised is as to the matter of coercion and of authority back^by force, such a Society relying basically on voluntary cooperation where the State relies on authority backed by force. Furthermore, the Church is justified through a religious theory, and is backed up ultimately by appeal to God's authority. The modern secular State by contrast annexes itself authority (or has simply inherited it) and, though it may claim to be justified by some political theory which confers upon it legitimacy, makes no appeal back to a justifying or authorizing agent. So what justifies it? Briefly, nothing does. * The First Way of Showing that the State is not Required: t&e Argument. / 6 The core of the argument is simple and persuasive: everything in the collective interest accomplished by the State can equally be accomplished by alternative arrangements such as voluntary cooperation, the remainder of State activity being dispensed with. The argument is not a straight substitution argument, for it is not as if a rational person would want to have everything accomplished by the State replicated by alternative arrangements. There is much the State does or supports that is at best rather indifferent, for instance, sponsorship of pomp and ceremony and of junkets by VIP's; and a great deal of typical State activity is positively evil and not in the collective interest, for instance, graft, corruption, brutality, maintenance of inequitable distribution of wealth, land and other resources, and encouragement; of protection^ of polluting or qvironmentally destructive industries (e.g. without state sponsorship we should not be well embarked on a nuclear future, without state assistance and subsidization Australia would not be burdened with its extensive forest-destructive pine planting and woodchip projects). The modern State has however many other functions than repressive or damaging ones, functions of community welfare or of otherwise beneficial kind. This does not upset the replacement argument for anarchism. The argument, implicit in the works of the classical anarchists, goesjike this: The functions of the State can be divided into two types, those that are in the collective interest and generally beneficial such as community welfare and organisational functions, and those that are not (but are, presumably, in the interests of some of the powerful groups the State tends to serve). But as regards functions of the first type, the generally beneficial functions which are in the collecdve interest, no coercion is required. For why should people have to be coerced into carrying out functions which are in their collective interest? Such functions can be performed, and performed better, without the coercion which is the hallmark of the State, and without the accompanying tendency of the State to pervert such functions to the maintenance of privilege and inequality of power, and to remove power from those it 'serves'. The detailed argument that such functions can be performed takes a case-by-case form considering each function in turn.3 In each case the function is carried out through alternative arrangements, such as voluntary co-operation by the people directly concerned, which replace State arrangements. Consider, for example, the operation of mutual aid or self help medical services, or community access communications (e.g. radio), most of which are presently either starved of infrastucture or hindered by the State. Such beneficial services would in general be reorganised so that all the relevant infrastructure became communally held, and That is, proper elaboration of this argument takes each facet of generally beneficial state activity - there is only a (relatively small) finite number to consider - and shows how it can be replaced in one way or another. Replacement is not of course uniquely determined. Lines such replacements can take are indicated in much anarchist (and self-management) literature, consider especially, but no, uncritically, P. Kropootkin, MMfMai Aid, New York University Press 1972, and also his Fi^/dy, Faci<?rie.y and WorLyAo/w, second edition, Nelson, London, 1913, and 77te Con<?Me.yf o/Brgad. Chapman and Hall, London, 1913. 7 those wishing to arrange or use the service would manage the operation themselves, taking the operation into their own hands instead of being the passive recipients of favours meted out to them by professionals and powerful agencies. Coercion is unnecessary because, in more communal types of anarchism, the basic infrastructure and many resources (other than individual labour) are already held by the community, so there is no need to apply coercion to individuals to extract these resources needed for community welfare projects, as there is in the situation where wealth and resources are privatised and coercion is required to wrest resources from unwilling private individuals. As for the second type of functions, those which are no? in the collective interest, coercion will normally be required for the performance of functions, and is thus an essential part of the State's operation. But those functions are better dispensed with, since they are not in the collective interest. In this way, while the good part of the state's operation is retained and improved upon, the bad part — especially the evils of brutality, corruption and other abuses invariably associated with the coercive apparatus - is detached. State services that are concerned with orr/gr, in the general sense, may be similarly removed or replaced. These services, which include reduction of violence to persons and redress for such violence, quarantine services, security, orderly operation of traffic, and so on, have often been said to make for especial difficulties for anarchism, or even to refute it. They do not. Firstly, disputes can be settled and offences dealt with directly by communities themselves without intervention by the State. Secondly, a great many of these problems are created or enhanced by the State, e.g. violence of which the State is the main purveyor and which is often the outcome of the State's propping up of gross inequalitiesA A community which seriously limits (or dispenses with) the institution of private property and removes gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth thereby removes the need for many "welfare services and the basis for a great many offences involving violence: virtually all those involving violence to private property and many of those involving personal violence. Such a left-leaning anarchism is also quite invulnerable to further familiar, but ludicrous, arguments for the State, such as those based on the fairer distribution of land, property and wealth allegedly achieved by State enforcement of redistribution. As all too many people are aware, a major function of the State is to maintain and police inequitable distribution. This then is the main classical argument for anarchism. The argument has however been challenged, both by historical and more recent objections, which are designed to show that people cannot act in their collective interest without coercion. On these points see, e.g. 7?6wZMZz'a/zary Pawp/z/^tj (edited S. Baldwin), Kover Publications, New York, 1970, p.206ff.; also P.J. Proudhon, Cazz/e^jza/M' a/* a R^va/azza/zary. For recent discussion of, and practical examples of, replacements for arbitration and law court procedures (Zzaz for right-leaning anarchism), see C.D. Stone, Sawg <?H arhZzrazZag oar way ra anarcAy, Anarchism (reprint of Nomos XIX) New York University Press, 1978, pp.213- s 8 It is from the simulation argument, in particular, that the corollary of the q/ will follow? For, to overstate the case, anything the State can do that does reflect sought collective interests,, cooperation and other techniques can also achieve in the longer run, and mostly better. * The Second Way: The argument from problem recurrence. The solution by the State to problems of social organisation repeats or generates in more dangerous form the very real problems introduction of the State was designed to solve, including new Dilemmas. Suppose, for instance, the secular State really introduced in order to solve Prisoners' Dilemmas, then the array of States so resulting generates new Prisoners' Dilemmas (with States as 'prisoners'), which there is no Super-State to resolve by coercion. In fact, as opposed to State-justifying mythology, the modem secular State was not introduced (just as the original states were not initiated) for any such apparently intellectually reputable reasons, but was largely inherited from the religious State (and the Church) and maintained to prop up privilege and foster objectives that are not in its communities' interests. Or suppose, as the myth also has it, that the State really were introduced, or contracted, in the interest of order and stability and to curb violence; then the array of States resulting more than negates these advantages, with instability, disorder and violence (e.g. between States) on a grander scale than before the emergence of modern secular States? * The Third Way: The overshoot argument, from the inadequacy of institutional controls on state power. Having ceded a monopoly of power of the State in order to resolve some dilemmas, some of them arising from an inequitable distribution of power, what controls or balances the power of the State? A Super-State. And its power? There is a vicious infinite regress if the reply to the question 'What controls the controller?' is 'a further controller'? The only promising way of avoiding this problem — other routes lead (even more) directly to totalitarianism — is by having the first of these controllers, the State, answer back to those in whose interests it is allegedly established, those of the society or group of communities it controls. This implies democratic methods of some kind. Others go further: 'democracy [is] the only known means to achieve this control, the only known device by which we can try to The title of a joint paper upon which several of these sections draw^. The argument, to be found in Bakunin, is elaborated a little in Taylor, op cif, chapter 7. A related argument, also in Bakunin, is from the way in which emergence of the State compromises and even closes off nonstate solutions to problems of social organisation in adjoining regions. Several historical examples of this phenomenon are alluded to in M. Harris, and Ajngj, Collins, London. 1978, where it is also revealed how little the actual origin and rise of the State had to do with Dilemma situations, e.g. escaping a Hobbesian state of nature. Indeed, it was (j^th the advent and development of the State that life became for many what it had not apparently been in pre-State neolithic times, 'nasty, brutish and short'. The question is in effect Plato's question and the regress is reminiscent of his Third Man argument. 9 protect ourselves against the misuse of political power'.R In this event, control has mostly failed. Democracy is extremely attentuated, even in those states that claim to practice it. The exercise of power in modem 'democratic' states is often channelled through 'non-elected authority' and 'is not democratic in the traditional meaning of the term'.9 Moreover, the much increased power in the modern State, which reaches deep into people's lives, has passed, with no increase in legitimacy, to certain managerial elites who present the power as directed at the attainment of 'generally accepted' objectives such as economic growth (but through, e.g., increased military expenditure) or material 'progress' (but through, e.g., increased military expenditure) or material 'progress' (but through, e.g. subsidization of environmentally destructive enterprises of off-shore companies), though the acceptability of such particular objectives is never democratically tested. In any case, indirect democratic and other institutional checks are in as much as they depend ultimately on the toleration of those who have direct control of the forces of the State. Experience seems to show that such toleration will only be shown so long as democratic procedures deliver results that are not too disagreeable, that are broadly in accord iwth what those who control the coercive power are prepared to accept. (Toleration of such a tamed democracy then brings benefits to those who hold power, especially the cover of legitimation). But institutional checks which operate only insofar as a system acceptable to the powerholders is not seriously challenged, and which depend ultimately upon the toleration of those 'checked', are not really checks at all. The problem of controlling the power of the State and preventing the State once established from usurping further power and exceeding its mandate, is only solved by not ceding power to the State in the first place. The best way of avoiding the evils of accumulated power is the anarchist way, of blocking its accumulation. * The Fourth Way: The argument from freedom and autonomy. A person is responsible for actions deliberately undertaken. This premise can be derived, if need be, from the notion of a person as a moral agent. Taking responsibility for one's actions implies, among other things, making the final decision about what to do on each such occasion oneself; not acting on direction from outside, but determining how to act, what ought to be done, oneself; not handing that decision over to someone or something else. It implies, that is, moral autonomy. Autonomy in turn implies what responsibility requires, freedom. For the autonomous being, endorsing its own decisions and principles, is K.R. Popper, 77ie (?/?<?/i 5*<9c;'<?ry and Vol. II. Fourth edition (revised), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962, p.129 and p.127. The (overshoot) problem is, according to Popper 'the most fundamental problem of all politics: the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in teh State' 'upon which' Marxists never had 'any wellconsidered view' (p.129). V. Lauber, Eco/ogy, po/ZzZcj and Zz&emZ ^efwocracy, Government and Opposition, 13 (1978), 199-217: seep.209 and p.211. 10 not subject to the will of another. Even if it does what another directs, it is not another so directs. In being free, nof of constraints (both physical and self-determined), but of the constraints and will of others, an autonomous being is morally free. A necessary feature of the State is (XMf/ionry over those in its territory (under its de facto jurisdiction), the right to rule and impose its will uon them. Such authority backed by force is incompatible with moral autonomy and with freedom. An autonomous being, though it may act in accordance with some imperatives of the State, those it independently endorses, is bound to reject such (a claim to) authority, and therewith the State. In sum, being a person, as also being autonomous and being free, implies rejecting the authority of the State, and so not acknowledging the State; that is, each condition on personhood implies, if the argument is sound, anarchism, io It is possible to combine autonomy with an extremely attenuated 'State', one based on on-going unanimous direct democracy. But such a 'State', with no independent authority, is not really a state, since any participant can dissolve it at any time, and so constitutes no threat to anarchism. On the contrary, such direct democratic methods are part of the very stuff of anarchistic organisation. * The Fifth Way: The argument from anarchistic experience. The replacement argument enables construction of a model of a society functioning without the State, of a practically possible Stateless world; which shows that the State is not necessary. But it can always be - even if the claim can seldom or ever be made good - that the modelling leaves out some crucial feature of real world circumstances, rendering it inapplicable. The gap may be closed by appeal to the independently valuable argument from experience, that at various times and places anarchism has been tested and has rworked. Examples of such Stateless organisation suffice to show that crucial real world features have not been omitted. There are many examples of non-industrialised societies which were, or are, anarchistic, there is the rich experience of the Spanish collectives,n and there is much localised experience of self-management and small-scale anarchistic arrangements within the State structure. 12 The argument, outlined by Bakunin, is much elaborated, but in a very individualistic and Kantian fashion, in R.P. Wolff, 7% of A/iarc/H-sw, Harper & Row, New York, 1970. No argument is without assumptions, which are open to dispute. Wolffs argument, from which the argument in the text is adapted, has its pitfalls, and is, for example, disputed by G. Wall, P/uZo-yop/wcaZ revi\yg<7, Anarchism, op.cit. p.273ff. Documented in 77ze 1974. Co/Zecfiv&y (edited S. Dolgoff), Free Life Editions New York As B. Martin boldly asserts, 'The advantages of self-management and alternative lifestyles 11 The state is far from necessary and iacks adequate justification. The state is not a self-justifying object. But none of the justificatory arguments to the state are cogent. A familiar theme, conceding that the state is a problematic object, is that the state is a necessary evil. 13 But, to the contrary, states, though generally evil, are hardly necessary. It needs stressing, furthermore, how weak any necessity claimed has to be. For it is becoming increasingly easy, with the advances in logical modellings and computer simulations of other worlds, virtual states and the like, to envisage accessible worlds organised without modern states. As such worlds, inhabited by humans or human-like creatures are possible, states are not necessary. No doubt then, the necessity has to be of some more andpr^m^Jc sort, a "social human necessity" for example appealing to emergent features of humans, kinks of human nature, obtruding in unfavourable situations of high concentrations and extensive scarcity (situations that states themselves have, like many survival systems, helped contrive). Further the necessity has to be relative to certain organisational objectives, such as a particular state delivery of collective goods and services. Remarkably, none of the extant arguments to the state make it plain that such a weak pragmatic relative "necessity" is indicated, though they would hardly establish more, and though they Jo make strong (implausible) assumptions about the brutal situation outside states, in states-of-nature and so on, and about human motivation and practice, its utterly selfish, self-interested and acquisitive, and frequently debased character (i.e. what appears encouraged under economic rationalism, and pretty much what many have come to expect under conditions of advanced capitalism). Mostly no effort is made any longer, outside a few abstruse texts, to justify the state. Within contemporary institutional arrangement it is simply taken for granted (like Big Science), as axiomatic, as God was under medieval arrangements. But unlike God, who was good personified and therefore had a large problem with the extent of evil in the world, the state is acknowledged as problematic and far from unimplicated in the evil of the world (but directly engaged therein when the councils of the many Machievellis are heeded). Such a problematic object cannot stand up as merely postulated. Nor is there a corresponding ontological argument for the state, as that organisational structure than which nothing more are many and significant. And these alternatives are entirely feasible: there is plenty of evidence and experience to support their superiority over the present way society operates. The obstacles to self-management and alternative lifestyles are powerful vested interests and institutional resistance to change', C/zanging f/x? C<%f, Friends of the Earth, Canberra, 1979. p.6. 13 The theme, enunciated for instance by Popper, that * state power must always remain a dangerous though necessary evil' (II, p.30) is a commonplace one. 12 perfect can exist. Outside the flawed imagination of German idealists there is no such Super State; all actual states are manifestly highly imperfect, all humanly realisable ones are likely similar. As a result of the institutionalisation of the state itself, as a received and indeed central part of modern political arrangements, the onus of proof has become curiously inverted. Efforts to justify the state have become fairly ideal and academic, no longer a serious issue, and onus transferred to anarchists to demonstrate that human social life could proceed well and smoothly (as it now does, of course) without states. While anarchists are not absolved from offering some account of operations of good social lives without states (for, except in fairy tales, it does not all just emerge, unplanned, in the new stateless setting), neither are archists absolved from justification of de facto statist arrangements, beginning with the state itself. 4 a ARCrpM&^S-. The main argument for anarchism can be concentrated in a detailed critique of the state, therewithal state-like institutions a/t? %/ro /j /< 7 ) c /A—Zb n X! ct A<$ Anarchist critiques of the state advance the following themes: * States and state-like institutions are without satisfactory justification. * Such institutions are not required for organisational purposes. * Such institutions have most inharmonious consequences; they bring a whole series of social and environmental bungles or evils in their train. In brief, they are unnecessary unjustified evils The anarchist critique does not end there, but typically includes.'further themes/ such as : w States are devices for channelling privilege and wealth to certain minorities with inside , The state is an undesirable, or even downright evii, institution, for the following range of reasons:- * States entrench inequities, domination and exploitation. States are devices for the protection of wealth, property and privilege, and usually for the redistribution upwards, and often concentration, of wealth and privilege. A minor but popular illustration is offered by the expensive conferences and other junkets that state employees or party officials organise for themselves and manage to bill to state revenue, in turn sucked up from inequitable taxation. Certainly a main historical outcome of the state has been domination of exploitation of certain segments of society by others, and some see its main, and barely concealed, purpose as just that: domination and exploitation. ) * States are typically corrupt. For example, there are enquiries presently in train, or with follow-through activities yet to be duly completed, in many states in Australia, enquires which have revealed considerable corruption, and there are prima facie cases for similar enquiries in most of the remainder. Nor is this a new phenomenon: these revelations often resemble older or on-going scandals. * States are enormously expensive, and constitute a heavy drain upon regional resources, and accordingly on local environments. In poorer regions they are not merely a heavy burden, but a main cause of impoverishment. One reason for their voracious appetite is an excess of over­ remunerated and often under-productive state employees. Another connected reason is that many state operations are far from lean and efficient, but incorporate many duplications, drag factors and dead weight. Under anarchisms, of all varieties, these heavy cost burdens, weighing down subservient populaces, would be shed. Costs of organisation would be very significantly reduced. * States are major impositions on everyday life. They are intrusive and demanding^. As a Never has this been more forcefully expressed than in Proudhon's famous denouncement of state government: ^1/7^ To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first world of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality (quoted in M p.6). result, there are constant demands for the reduction of the cancerous state, for removing parts of it through deregulation, selling off state enterprises and so on. There are two troubles with such demands from anarchist standpoints: they never go far enough, to the complete reduction of the state to zero, but characteristically retain parts supportive of or favourable to bigger business, and they proceed in the wrong way, stripping away social safety nets rather than ripping off business support nets (such as limited liability, strike limitation legislation, etc.). * States, for all that they have been promoted as delivering public goods, are mostly dismal news for environmental protection and health and for social justice. Furthermore they are liable to impose substantial hazards or risks upon subservient populations not merely through military and like activities but, more insidious, through support and promotion of dangerous industries, such as nuclear and giant chemical industries. * Statetusually exert a heavy pressure to uniformity, they tend to eliminate plurality and cultural differences. These pressures are exercised by a state in the alleged interests of national unity, and against its enemies, external and internal. Even the most liberal of states tend to give minorities more difficult lives in times of stress, such as war. They are always espousing national values, state interests, and commonly assimilation and adoption of state values (thus for example Canada, formerly and briefly a state toying with multiculturalism, now insistent upon "Canadian values"). Such exercises are conspicuous, not only in citizen ceremonies and other state rituals, such as national sporting and religious events, but more important are virtually ubiquitous in elementary education (down to deference to the f la , and similar). * States are a major source of wars, and the major source of major wars, undoubted evils (however supposedly inevitable). They are major sources and suppliers of military technology and weapons, the means of war. Roughly, the more powerful and "advanced" a state, the further it is engaged in weapon production and export. Without states it is doubtful that there would be any nuclear weapons, and accordingly there would be no prospect of nuclear wars as there would be no weapons with which to fight them. * States are a serious drag on a more satisfactory international order. That there are not more, and more satisfactory, international regulatory organisations 'is mainly a matter of the reluctance of nation states to surrender their powers and the dangers of their being dominated by very powerful states. If only nation states would be dissolved into specialized [departments] there is every reason to believe that most world problems could be handled by appropriate specialized [organisations]' (Burnheimp.221). * States have excessive power, and are even accumulating or trying to accumulate more, for (hT) instance through more centralization, further controls, additional licences, etc., etc. Obvious responses to excessive power are separation of powers, achieved by decoupling and some fragmentation, limitation of powers, and so on. States thus appear farTrom a good bargain on a preliminary consideration of costs, Especially bad states, the run of states, which engage in politically-motivated incun-ation or t.ifure of their citizens, and so on. Where are the compensating benefits?' yven that we can get along without them, would we really be significantly worse off without them? Even in the better cases (not allowing for alternative nonstatist arrangements which states have precluded or systems they have usurped)? But arguments for states are not usually so directly utilitarian in character. Such arguments would make it look as if we might well opt out of state organisation, and often be better off doing so. Mat it is contended that, contrary to appearances, we cannot get along without state cossetting: states are necessary. , *?: - Present monolithic governments have assumed far too many roles, for many of which they are not competent, from some of which they are disqualified by other roles (e.g. as impartial referees by their business commitments). Because the centre tries to do and control top much, as a consequence it does very much unsatisfactorily. Improved arrangements would separate these roles, deconcentrating and decentralizing power. wcef- /%^2^ /\^^ 1 C 4 Z Z^-^7 W GW, //?(? C/7//A /7, jWr f/7(? 3/(7/d The State is like God: the anarchist is like the atheist in disbelief and nonrecognition of what is commonly assumed, mostlv as a matter of faith, to be needed. T)ie pafatlel, BakummTtlibjat^weaknessessas well as Rs strengt%^.''^Vhiie the atheist believes that God does not exist, the anarchist does not believe that there are no states: on the contrary, there are all too many, though none are legitimate. The impor­ tant parallel is as to arguments. The agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the existence of God suc­ ceed, and so adopts a 'neutral' stance; similarly the State-agnostic does not believe that the arguments for the State work, and likewise tries to adopt a fence­ sitting position. Soundly based atheism goes further than agnosticism, not only faulting the argumentsybr, but takingdt for granted that there are arguments, or at least solid considerations, rzgm/ry/. So it is with soundly based anarchism; <t both fault) arguments for the r" 3tatuce- a case against the State. A more obvious comparison, ap­ preciated from Reformation on and again emphasised bvBakunin,' is that of State and Church^ This institutional comparison enables several relevant features of the State to be emphasised; for example, how, as the Church used to, the State assigns to itself many very extensive powers, such as a monopoly on the production and control of the main medium of exchange, currency, and an ultimate monopoly on organised violence, all other internal security arrangernggt^)eing eventually answerable to its pdhee and military^; how it is of the same category as business organisations such as multinationals, which now to some extent threaten it but by and large collaborate with it; how, as again the Church used to, it has nominal support of most of its 'subjects', though many of them are little better than Sunday believers, and an increasing number have come to see the State as in many This does not upset the replacement respects evil and inevitably corrupt, but argument for anarchism. The argument, as a necessary evil.^) implicit in the works of the classical Whether the State is inevitably evil or anarchists, goes like this: The functions not, it is M/mecas-wry, so it will be of the State can be divided into two argued, in a wav parallelling the famous types, those that are in the collective in­ jVquinas designed to prove terest and generally beneficial such as that God exi^&^Since the State is un­ community welfare and organisational necessary, as welt as costly and typically functions, and those that are not (but at leas! evil in many of its practices and are, presumably, in the interests of some undesirable in other respects, it should of the powerful groups the State tends to be superseded. And it can be succeeded, serve). by alternative social arrangements, But as regards functions of the first type, the generally beneficial functions gg 77^ /7r.v/ IWj Q/ SbotWg which are in the collective interest, no coercion is required. For why should /r7t?/ //?C S/t//^ Ay ,76)/ 7?^T//7W.' people have to be coerced into carrying //!f /?e/)GcT/77^?7/ WRM/W7/. out functions which are in their collec­ tive interest? Such functions can be per­ The core of the argument is simple formed, and performed better, without and persuasive: everything in the collec- the coercion which is the hallmark of the tive interest accomplished by the State State, and without the accompanying can equally be accomplished by alterna­ tendency of the State to pervert such tive arrangements such as voluntary co­ functions to the maintenance of privilege operation, the remainder of State activi­ and inequality of power, and to remove ty being dispensed with. The argument is power from those it 'serves'. The detail­ not a straight substitution argument, for ed argument that such functions can be it is not as if a rational person would performed takes a case by case form, want to have everything accomplished considering each function in turn7 In by the State replicated by alternative each case the function is carried out arrangements. There is much the State through alternative arrangements, such does or supports that is at best rather in­ different, ^"'sponsorship of pomp and as voluntary co-operation by the people directly concerned, which replace State ceremony and of junkets by VIPs; and a arrangements. Consider, for example, great deal of typical State activity is the operation of mutual aid or self help positively evil and not in the collective medical services or building programs, interest,'e^. gral^t, corruption, brutality, or self managed welfare, housing or en­ maintenance of inequitable distribution vironment services, or community access of wealth, land and other resources, and communications (e.g. radio), most of encouragement of protection of polluting or environmentally destructive industries (e.g. without state sponsorship we should not be well embarked on a nuclear future, without state assistance and subsidization Australia would not be burdened with its extensive forest­ destructive pine planting and woodchip projects). The modern State has however many other functions than repressive or damaging ones, functions of community welfare or of otherwise beneficial kind. which are presently either starved of infrastructure or hindered by the State. Such beneficia! services would in genera! be reorganised so that ah the relevant infrastructure became communaHy heid, and those wishing to arrange or use the service wou!d manage the operation themselves, taking the operation into their own hands instead of being the passive recipients of favours meted out to them by professional and powerful agencies. Coercion is unnecessary because, in more communal types of anarcnism, the basic infrastructure and many resources (other than individual labour) are already held by the com­ munity, sdthereis no need to apply coer­ cion to individuals to extract these resources needed for community welfare projects, as there is in the situation where wealth and resources are privatis­ ed and coercion is required to wrest resources from unwilling private in­ dividuals. As for the second type of functions, those which are /tor in the collective in­ terest, coercion will normally be required for the performance of //tew functions, and is thus an essentia! part of the State's operation. But those functions are better dispensed with, since they are not in the coHective interest. !n this way, while the good part of the State's operation is re­ tained and improved upon, the bad part — especially the evils of brutality, corruption and other abuses invariabty associated with the coercive apparatus — is detached. State services that are concerned with orjpr, in the genera! sense, may be similarly removed or replaced. These services, which include reduction of violence to persons and redress for such violence, quarantine services, security, orderly operation of traffic, and so on, have often been said to make for especial difficulties for anarchism, or even to refute it. They do not. Firstly, disputes can be settled and offences dealt with directly by communities themselves without intervention by the State. Secondly, a great many of these pro­ blems are created or enhanced by the State, e.g. violence of which the State is the main purveyor and which is often the outcome of the State's propping up of gross inequalities? A community which seriously limits (or dispenses with) the in­ stitution of private property and removes gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth thereby removes the need for many 'welfare' services and the basis for a great many offences in­ volving violence: virtually ail those in­ volving violence to private property and many of those involving personal violence. Such a left-leaning anarchism is also quite invulnerable to further familiar, but ludicrous, arguments for the State, such as those based on the fairer distribution of land, property and wealth allegedly achieved by State en­ forcement of redistribution. As all too many people are aware, a major func­ tion of the State is to maintain and police inequitable distribution. This then is the main classical argu­ ment for anarchism. The argument has however been challenged, both by historical and more recent objections, which are designed to show that people cannot act in their collective interest without coercion. 7./ NOTES 14. [5. 16. oK !. Bakunin on Anarchy (edited S. Dolgofl), Allen & LJnwin, London, (973, especially p.139. Much else in this paper, eg. the distinction between the State and Society, also derives from Bakunin. 2. That is, proper elaboration of this argument takes each facet of generally beneficial state activity — there is only a (relatively small) finite number to consider — and shows how it can be replaced in one way or another. Replacement is not of course uniquely deter­ mined. Lines such replacements can take are indicated in much anarchist (and self management) literature, consider especially, but no/ uncritically, P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, New York University Press, 1972, and also his Fields. Factories and Workshops, second edition, Nelson, London, 1913, and the Conquest of Bread, Chapman and Hall, London, 1913. 3. On these points see, e.g. Kropotkin's Revolu­ tionary Pamphlets (edited S. Baldwin), Dover Publications, New York, 1970, p.206 ff.; also P.J. Proudhon, Confessions of a Revolu­ tionary. For recent discussion of, and practical examples of, replacements for arbitration and law court procedures (6td for right-leaning anarchism), see C D. Stone, Some re/?ec//on.s on o/Tn/rohng our way /o anarc/ty * Anarchism (reprint of Nomos XIX) New York University Press, 1978, pp.213^4. The argument, to be found in Bakunin, is elaborated a littic in Taylor, op.cit., chapter 7. A related argument, also in Bakunin, is from the way in which emergence of the State com promises and even closes off nonstate solu­ tions to problems of social organisation in ad­ joining regions. Several historical examples of this phenomenon are alluded to in M. Harris, Cannibals and Kings, Collins, London. 1978. where it is also revealed how little the actual origin and rise of the State had to do with Dilemma situations, e.g. escaping a Hobbesian state of nature. Indeed, it was with the advent and development of the State that life became for many what it had not apparently been in prc-State neolithic times, 'nasty, brutish and short'. The question is m effect Plato's question, and the regress is reminiscent of his Third Man argument. K.R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Yol.iL Fourth edition (revised), Routledge and Kegan Paul. London. 1962, p.129 and p.127. The (overshoot) problem ts. according to Popper 'the most fundamental problem of all politics: the control of the con­ troller. of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the State' 'upon which' Marxists never had view' (p. 129). 'any well-considered 17. V. Lauber. /co/o^y, po/t/tes an<7 hbera/ r/emocracv. Government and Opposition. 13 (1978), 199-217: see p.2O9 and p.211. 18. The argument, outlined by Bakunin, is much elaborated, but tn a very individualistic and Kantian fashion, tn R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, Harper & Row, New York. 1970. No argument is without assumptions, which are open to dispute. Wolff's argument, from which the argument in the text is adapted, has its pitfalls, and is, for example, disputed by G. Wall. P/b/o.sop/hca/ awc/n.sw re row/, Anarchism, op.cit. p.273ff. 19. Documented in The Anarchist Cotiectives (edited S. Dolgoff), Free Life Editions, New York. 1974. 20. As B. Martin boldly asserts, 'The advantages of self-management and alternative lifestyles are many and significant. And these alter­ natives are entirely feasible: there is plenty of evidence and experience to support their superiority over the present way society operates. The obstacles to self-management and alternative lifestyles are powerful vested interests and institutional resistance to change', ( hanging the Cogs, Friends of the Earth, Canberra, 1979, p.6. ANARCHISM - ENLARGED j ____________ foundations* There is a theological component in the theory of the ^tate;.the weakness af^whieh should be brought out. A A By contrast, anarchism ^.s approached from an argument pe^p^ctive, of considerable streng strength^ Since the &tate is an imposed structure that induces considerable costs, the onus of proof is moreover on the State side. (The State versus states: r instantiate the universal.) 2. they Circled numbers hereafter refer to insert places in elder working version. In §1:- (^ In several respects the comparison is better than that of the State and God, since both belong to the same category, institutions. /cc Thus both have looked to some philosophers as human inventions or artifices, both have looked to others (reductionists) as objects that could be reduced to features of the individuals involved in their organisation (but it is hard to see why such fictions or logical constructions should be assigned the power and deference they are accorded). 0 It can be superseded, or replaced^ as the Church has to a large, ^in many places. extent been Just as the power of the Church has declined until it has lost its authority over parishioners, so authority of the State can be undermined, and it can lose recognition and its claim to jAu&h^rit^ over those in its territory. But there is a crucial difference between State and Church: under those condit­ ions the State vanishes, for authority backs!by coercive power is essential to the State but not (any longer) to the Church. from Society anarchistically organised And where the State differs crucially is as to the matter of coercion and of authority backed by force, such a society relying basically on voluntary cooper­ ation where the State relies on authority backed by force. Furthermore, the Church is justified through a religious theory, and is backed up ultimately by appeal to God's authority. The modern secular State by contrast annexes itself J A 2. itself authority (or has simply inherited it) and, though it may claim to be justified by some political th(o^ry which confers upon it legitimacy, makes no appeal back to a justifying or authorizing <3<^e.nt. So what justifies it? 2^.^ These sorts of considerations prompt two connected complaints of the anarch- ist, which have never been satisfactorily met, the agnostic's complaint that the State has no adequate justification - the arguments for its imposition or certain action fail - and the stronger complaint that the State is not necessary at all. These complaints are backed by arguments and further arguments, namely an assess) ment of arguments. These arguments are important, not, or not merely, because they will show, if unsuccessful, that anarchism j^s irrefutable, but because they convey muqh information, e.g. as to the weak (to the point of vacuity) sense in which the State is "necessary", because they do much to determine the general 0^ logical shape of the anarchism that results, and because they indicate routes to anarchism, not merely why but, to some extent, how the State can be superseded by a Society anarchistically organised. t pfuch as there are several ways of arguing to the existence of God, assembled by Aquinas into the famous (but not exhaustive, and invariably invalid) Five Ways, and various less famous but also important arguments against the existence of God, apcni&Igs , (jAtb so there are various arguments that the State is required, and^ especially —-2 relevant for anarchism^, several ways of arguing against the necessity of the State. is from the simulation argument, in particular, that the irrefutibj.lity of Ai) anarchism will follow^ anything the State can do that does reflect the collective interests A/. A74 cooperation.can also do in the long-run, and mostly better. [Over- i g T7/E SECOAD X 777E /1RGGA7EATFROM PROEEEM RECGRREyVCE. The solution by the State to problems of social organisation repeats or generates in more dangerous form the very real problems introduction of the State was designed to solve, inciuding new Diiemmas. Suppose, for instance, the secular State realty were introduced in order to soive Prisoners' Dilemmas, then the array of States so resulting generates new Prisoners' Ditemmas (with States as 'prisoners'), which there is no Super-State to resotve by coercion. In fact, as opposed to State-justifying mythology, the modern secutar State was not introduced (just as the originat States were not initiated) for any such apparentty intellectually reputable reasons, but was targety inherited from che religious State (and the Church) and Jiaintained to prop up privitege and foster objectives that are not in its com­ munities' interests. Or suppose, as the myth atso has it, that the State reaity were introduced, or contracted, in the interest of order and stability and to curb violence; then the array of States resuming more than negates these advan­ tages, with instability, disorder and viotence (e.g. between States) on a grander scale than before the emergence of modern secutar States."* S 77/E 77//RD HA1 Y. RHE (9 YERSEOGE /IRGt/MEAE FROM EE/E /A/(/9E()G^CY GE /AF77EG77GA74E CGA7RGES GA A7MEE PG^ER Having ceded a monopoty of power J) the State in order to resotve some diiemmas, some of them arising from an inequitable distribution of power, what controts or batances the power of the State? A Super-State. And its power? There is a vicious infinite regress if the repty to the question 'What controts the controtter?' is 'a further controller'A The onty promising way of avoiding this problem — other routes tead (even 1 more) directty to totaiitarianism — is by having the first of these controllers, the State, answer back to those in whose in­ terests it is aitegediy estabtished, those of the society or group of communities it controts. This implies democratic methods of some kind. Others go fur­ ther: 'democracy (is] the onty known means to achieve this control, the onty known device by which we can try to protect oursetves against the misuse of pohtica! power'.'* In this event, control has mostty failed. Democracy is ex­ tremely attenuated, even in those states that claim to practice it. The exercise of power in modern 'democratic' states is often channelled through 'non-elected authority' and 'is not democratic in the traditional meaning of the term'E Moreover, the much increased power in the modern State, which reaches deep in­ to people's lives, has passed, with no in­ crease in legitimacy, to certain managerial elites who present the power as directed at the attainment of 'general­ ly accepted' objectives such as economic growth (but through, e.g.', increased military expenditure) or materia! 'pro­ gress' (but through, e.g. subsidization of environmentally destructive enterprises of off-shore companies), though the ac­ ceptability of such particular objectives is never democratically tested. In any case, indirect democratic and other institutional checks are /em/OMS in as much as they depend uttimately on the toleration of those who have direct con­ trol of the forces of the State. Experience seems to show that such toleration wit! only be shown so long as democratic procedures deliver results that are not too disagreeable, that are broadly in ac­ cord with what those who control the coercive power are prepared to accept. (Toleration of such a tamed democracy then brings benefits to those who hold power, especially the cover of legitima­ tion). But institutional checks which operate only insofar as a system accep­ table to the powerholders is not seriously challenged, and which depend ultimately upon the toleration of those 'checked', 39 EE/E FGGR 777 Y. EE/E ARGGMEA?^ FRGA7 EREEDGA7 ^lAD^l GEGAGAf Y. A person is responsible for actions deliberately undertaken. This premise can be derived, if need be, from the notion of a person as a moral agent. Taking responsiblity for one's actions implies, among other things, making the final decision about what to do on each such occasion oneself; not acting on direction from outside, but determin­ ing how to act, what ought to be done, oneself; not handing that decision over to someone or something else. It implies, that is, moral autonomy. Autonomy in turn implies, what responsibility re­ quires, freedom. For the autonomous being, endorsing its own decisions and principles, is not subject to the will of another. Even if it does what another directs, it is not /yeemzse another so directs. In being free, no/ of constraints (both physical and self-determined), but of the constraints and will of others, an autonomous being is morally free. A necesary feature of the State is <7H//io,7/y over those in its territory (under its de facto jurisdiction), the right to rule and impose its will upon them. Such authority backed by force is incom­ patible with moral autonomy and with freedom. An autonomous being, though it may act in accordance with some im­ peratives of the State, those it in­ dependently endorses, is bound to reject such (a claim to) authority, and therewith the State. In sum, being a per­ son, as also being autonomous and being free, implies rejecting the authority of the State, and so not acknowledging the State; that is, each condition on per­ sonhood implies, if the argument is sound, anarchism.'* It is possible to combine autonomy with an extremely attenuated 'State', one based on on-going unanimous direct democracy. But such a 'State', with no independent authority, is not really a state, since any participant can dissolve it at any time, and so constitutes no threat to anarchism. On the contrary, such direct democratic methods are part of the very stuff of anarchistic organisation. W E/7E E7E777 HA1Y. 777E are not really checks at ali. ^RGGMEAEFRGM The problem of controlling the power of the State and preventing the State M A91 RCA75&EAVER7EACE. once established from usurping further The replacement argument enables power and exceeding its mandate, is only construction of a model of a society w/cyAc/orr/y solved by not ceding power functioning without the State, of a prac­ to the State in the first place. The best tically possible Stateless world; which way of avoiding the evils of accumulated shows that the State is not necessary. But power is the anarchist way, of blocking it can always be c/c/wer/ — even if the its accumulation. claim can seldom or ever be made good — that the modelling leaves out some crucial feature of real world circum­ stances, rendering it inapplicable. The gap may be closed by appeal to the inde­ pendently valuable argument from ex­ perience, that at various times and places anarchism has been tested and has work­ ed. Examples of such Stateless organisa­ tion suffice to show that crucial real world features have not been omitted. ^Yiere are many examples of nontndustrialised socieities which were, or are, anarchistic, there is the rich experi­ ence of the Spanish collectives,'" and there is much localised experience of seif-management and small-scale anar chistic arrangements within the State structure?" z e The state tacks adequate justification. The state is not a self-justifying object. But none of the justificatory arguments to the state are cogent. A familiar theme, conceding that the Al state is a problematic object, is that the state is a necessary evil. But, to the contrary, states, though generally evil, are hardly necessary^ It needs stressing, furthermore, how weak necessity claimed has to be. For it is becoming increasingly easy, with the advances in logical!^ modellings and computer simulations of other worlds, virtual states and the like, to envisage accessible worlds organised without modern states. No doubt then, the necessity has to be of some more pragmatic sort, a "social human necessity" for example appealing to emergent features of humans, kinks of human nature, obtruding in unfavourable situations of high concentrations and extensive scarcity (situations that states themselves have, like many survival systems, helped contrive).Remarkably, none of the extant arguments to the state make it plain that such a weak pragmatic "necessity" is intricated, though they would hardly establish more, and though they make strong (implausible) assumptions about the brutal situation outside states, in states-of-nature and so on, and about human motivation and practice, its utterly selfish, self-interested and acquisitive, and frequently debased character (i.e. what appears encouraged under economic rationalism, and pretty much what many have come to expect under conditions of advanced capitalism). Mostly no effort is made any longer, outside a few abstruse texts, to justify the state. Within contemporary institutional arrangement it is simply taken for granted (like Big Science), as axiomatic, as God was under medieval arrangements. But unlike God, who was good personified and therefore had a large problem with the extent of evil in the world, the state is acknowledged as problematic and far from unimplicated in the evil of the world (but directly engaged therein when the councils of the many Machievellis are heeded). Such a problematic Popper^s view that 'state power must always remain a dangerous though necess­ ary evil' (II, p.30) is a commonplace one. object cannot stand up as merely postulated. Nor is there a corresponding ontological argument for the state, as that organisational structure than which nothing more perfect can exist. Outside the flawed imagination of German idealists there is no such Super State; all actual states are manifestly highly imperfect, all humanly realisable ones are likely similar. As a result of the institutionalisation of the state itself, as a received and indeed central part of modem political arrangements, the onus of proof has become curiously inverted. Efforts to justify the state have become fairly ideal and academic, no longer a serious issue, and onus transferred to anarchists to demonstrate that human social life could proceed well and smoothly (as it now does, of course) without states. While anarchists are not absolved from offering some account of operations of good social lives without states (for, except in fairy tales, it does not all just emerge, unplanned, in the new stateless setting), neither are statists absolved from justification of de facto statist arrangements, beginning with the state itself.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 13, item 996: Draft chapters 1 to 4 on anarchism, for correction Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Description An account of the resource Typescripts and handwritten chapters, with handwritten emendations and annotations. Title in collection finding aid: Blue folder: Anarkism - For Correction - chapters 1-4. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span><span>,</span> Box 13, item 996 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [60] leaves. 137.3 MB. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9ab5607" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9ab5607</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/e8f40bdcc644ad46c5a77df4b8940142.pdf 2b370a7c388f901ab1a9176c90205ab4 PDF Text Text Richapd'Sylvan /> << Ji 197d p. I WHAT IS WRONG WITH APPLIED ETHICS Richard Sylvan There is much that is wrong with and in applied ethics. Specifically, there are three comprehensive counts where things are wrong with the commodity concerned, applied ethics, that is with applied ethics so economically viewed.1 Namely on the following three counts: • extraneous, with the supply, delivery, consumption, and the like of applied ethics, AE. The category prominently includes the delivery of applied ethics: what is done, taught and learnt, by whom, and how qualified (e.g. whether taught by professionals, professional ethicists or philosophers in particular). That has tended to presume that the commodity itself is more or less in order, though the presumption lacks good pedigree, delivery of defective goods being almost as ubiquitous as business enterprise. The present focus is not however upon the delivery, or other features of the production and consumption, packaging and marketing of the goods, but on features of the commodity itself, applied ethics itself. Thus • intraneous counts, concerning the commodity itself, where a further two things are wrong: •• the applied idea, and ••• what the application is presumed to be made to, established - or, should it be, establishment - ethics. Because an implicit premiss in organising the Philosophy and Applied Ethics Re-examined1 Conference seems to have been that the issues to be addressed are predominantly extraneous, and because most of the papers actually relevant to the Conference topic appear to focus on extraneous issues, the present exercise, by contrast, concentrates upon intraneous problems, especially the third: radical deficiencies in what is supposed to be applied, prevailing ethics, and some extensive repairs thereto. 1. The applied count To begin with, there is something decidedly3 odd, not to say radically unsatisfactory, about the very idea of applied ethics. To bring out the oddness, the conceptual inadequacy, it helps to consider the dictionary senses and established usage of applied. The term in the only relevant sense (the other obsolete sense is that offolded) means: ‘put to practical use; practical as distinguished from abstract or theoretical' (OED, similarly Concise English). Relevant examples cited are: ‘the applied sciences’ (from Babbage 1832), ‘applied logic (as distinguished from pure)’ (from Thomson 1806).4 It may appear then, that "applied ethics" amounts to pleonasm, a popular tautology (and "pure ethics" correspondingly to an oxymoron), because ethics itself is already practical, for instance much or all of it being concerned with practical action and its qualities (such is Maclver s assumption: moral philosophy is practical - in a way in which other branches of philosophy are not’, p.206). In this respect "applied ethics", even more "applied morals", is rather like "applied motoring", "applied nursing" or "applied housekeeping". Conceptual confusion would be considerably reduced by removing the modifier ‘applied .5 Such a charge of confusion can however be mitigated by properly I7 �18 What is wrong with applied ethics distinguishing ethics, which includes philosophy and theory of morality, from morals, thereby revealing, perhaps, elements of some theory apt for application. No doubt something like this is the presupposition of those who preach or profit from practical ethics (similarly practical economics, but doubtfully practical housekeeping): that standing in contrast is a suitably established theoretical ethics (could it perchance be utilitarianism?) which can rather uncontroversiarbe used to guide practice. But is there such a theory, apt for application, for translation into practice? To appreciate what is required for adequacy, consider successful applied subjects. Let us compare "applied ethics" with^long established applied discipline, namely applied mathematics, which often boasts a separate department in universities (a discipline I was obliged to study as an undergraduate in order to proceed further in pure mathematics). In the first place, applied mathematics contrasts with pure mathematics, applied logic with pure. Where, a naive outsider may ask, is pure ethics that similarly stands in contrast with applied ethics? Could there decently be separate departments of pure and of applied ethics? For the most part, applied mathematics applies to practice, in some wide sense, a body of pure mathematics that is more or less correct, at least within the assumption framework and contextual settings where it is applied. (The qualified formulation is given for pluralistic reasons; given the dominant paradigm, the pure mathematics that is applied is correct without further qualification, correct period.) A body of substantially correct theory ready for application is then the first of several pertinent features of that relational object, applied mathematics, the first of several dubiously matchable by "applied ethics". The proviso ‘for the most part’ (introducing the paragraph) signals another discrepancy. There is a, presumably derivative, part of applied mathematics that investigates, in essentially the manner of pure mathematics, theories, algebras, spaces and similar, selected through postulates, principles or equational sets drawn from standard applied mathematics (thus e.g. Newtonian theories where classical force laws are satisfied, Hilbert and phase spaces, and so on).6 Such derivative applied mathematics need not compromise at all normal methodological requirements (such as they are) of pure mathematics, for rigour, exactness, and similar. Ordinary applied mathematics, in its quest, even haste, for practical results, does compromise, or violate, pure mathematical methodology. For example, shortcuts are taken, simplifications made, information shed, figures rounded, approximations adopted, and so. Science veers towards art. From a pure perspective, dreadful things are often done to data or mathematical transformations of data. Skilled practitioners tend to appreciate what they can get away with in this sort of regard. Again, none of this, neither the body of information nor the kinds of skills, is really matched in ethics, in putting ethical theory to practical work. Next, the mathematics that is applied, a body of pure mathematics, is not thoroughly contested. Ethics however is. There is nothing in ethics like arithmetic or elementary mechanics; the nearest thing ethics can offer is some controversial development along axiomatic geometric lines. Mathematics has its critics, both inside (e.g. intuitionists) and out (e.g., cultural relativists), but none (hard core sceptics excepted) suggest changing all of it or tampering with most of what is applied. By contrast, in ethics, there continues to be an array of competing theories, none of which has managed to win broad allegiance. What pure theory is there to apply, to do dreadful things to? It might be said in response: whichever of them is adopted! Even that, a hollow compromise will not stand up for long. For deeper environmental ethics challenge a broad range of pure theory that is alleged to be applied! What challenges a whole subject, that would change it, can hardly be an application of it. The rise of such environmental ethics is one reason why the modifier applied is a misnomer. For deeper environmental ethics is not any sort of / �Richard Sylvan 19 application of ethics; it instead challenges prevailing ethics. Nor is it, like stock "applied ethics", an adaptation of ethics within an environmental context. The label applied is substantially, if not entirely, a misnomer. Adjectives in modifier or attributive roles, in the combination adjective-noun phrase, often enough do not signify application. The assumption that all modification is application invokes a dubious, presumably false, theory of adjectival attribution. Consider a few examples involving a relevant adjective, ‘medical’. Combinations such as ‘medical student’, ‘medical book’, ‘medical trial’ do not signify applications. A medical s is not normally an application of s to medical matters (of books or students in this fashion); normally it is a type (an m type) of s.7 There are occasional exceptions, in which case compounds are liable to be recorded in dictionaries, as with medical jurisprudence which is not a type of jurisprudence, but ‘the legal knowledge required of a doctor’. There is good reason to think that ethics induces no exception, that medical ethics, and similarly business ethics, follow the normal pattern. Thus business ethics is a type of ethics, namely ethics within a specifically business setting, and accordingly adapted thereto. Observe that such a preliminary account incorporates automatically (what gives the applied presumption some problemsj^sce-^ppendix T) allowance for variations in standards, that business corporations for example should not be expected to measure up to standards set up for ordinary persons (any more than they should iw»t be expected to pay the same levels of taxes)! Given the manifold inadequacies of the label applied, amendment of terminology appears warranted. Amendment, not abandonment. After all, what ‘applied ethics’ is supposed to comprehend, such as medical ethics, business ethics, even environmental ethics, are not themselves in court, but presently taken as viable fields. A superior label is field, for field-defined or field-restricted; another is type, for type-delimited, another domain. Where others speak of "applied ethics", let us discourse about field ethics. Investment ethics, for instance, is a field ethic, with field investment. An "institute for applied ethics concentrating upon applications to business" is an institute for field ethics with main field business. The "applied ethics" movement becomes effectively a field ethics movement. Observe that professional ethics are field ethics, with the field in each case the profession concerned. But professional ethics in sum form a quite proper subclass of field ethics; bio-ethics and ecological ethics are plainly not professional ethics. Less obviously, more importantly, field ethics differs from practical ethics (as usually poorly defined), with which "applied ethics" is regularly conflated. For, on the one side, ordinary living and daily life, central to practical ethics, are not fields. On the other, field ethics are not confined to practice, but may involve considerable theoretical material, particularly from the fields concerned. 2. The ethics count Not only is the applied operation in trouble, ethics also is in deep trouble. Indeed, in a way, the main problem lies here. There is not a fit, properly satisfactory subject, for some significant applications. For some "applications" have to change and develop the subject! But, the problems do not vanish when the amendment to field ethics is made. Satisfactory fieldwork, satisfactory outcomes in field ethics are seriously hampered by long-standing troubles in ethics. For as field ethics involve ethics, whatever is wrong with ethics affects field ethics. To glimpse these troubles, consider recent ambivalence towards ethics. Is ethics even a good good. There is a most curious contrast in later 20th century attitudes towards ethics. On the one side, there are great expectations, for instance for what ethics can contribute, to social and professional lite �20 What is -wrong with applied ethics especially; but on the other there is serious disquiet, occasionally verging upon despair and into nihilism, as to ethics, and its role. Virtually the whole spectrum from great expectations through no expectations to substantial forebodings is selectively represented. A few examples: • Great expectations for ethics, beginning to re-emerge these days, tend to come from outside professional philosophical ranks, from scientists and social scientists.8 Ethics is seen as taking up again its grand legitimization and critical roles. It can indeed be used in this respect as regards to a wide variety of practices, such as in business, economics, government, scientific experimentation, and so on. Of course it cannot always succeed, because one ethics can be pitted against another, and each and all challenged. ( p-— These expectations, a bit surprising after the drab days of analytic moral philosophy (where I philosophy could express no interesting moral opinions), contrast sharply with ' /•—• heavy disquiet or worse as to present ethics. A recent example is afforded by z MacIntyre’s disturbing introduction to After Virtue', that ‘we have - very largely, if not entirely - lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical of morality’ (p.2). Some, like MacIntyre, promise a happy, even a great, outcome, should we return to proper paths, to a virtue ethic in the tradition of Aristotle. Others are not so sanguine; , there is 1 • no hope for ethics. There are divergent routes here. Either it can play no relevant , role any longer, or it can play only a negative or damaging role (thus e.g. Hinckfuss). Though both these routes lead badly astray, present (merely classificatory) objectives do not include showing as much.9 There is, furthermore, reason for at least serious disquiet. Should we care to look closely at, and try to assess, the total ethical heritage, then what we find is not very promising. • What is on offer is mostly extremely sketchy and very piecemeal, much of it a hotchpotch. There are extraordinarily few well-worked out and detailed ethics. Spinoza’s Ethics is perhaps one rare example. • Most of what is on offer is seriously biassed or prejudiced, indeed from a deep environmental perspective even unethical. Prime examples include • religious bias, heavily constraining or distorting creatures’ lives, and putting them to work to serve imagined religious objectives. • spiritualistic distortion. Even where an explicit religion does not feature, as in Platonism and neo-Platonism and in edified Buddhism, the whole of life may be distorted through promise of an after-life or successor life or extra-material life, where furthermore some system of rewards or punishments may be dished out for previous performance. No doubt such biasses help in conferring upon ethics authority, unwarranted authority (fulfil duties or be dammed, etc.). • humanistic distortion, summed up as human chauvinism. It is upon this prejudice, critical for environmental ethics, that we concentrate. A main matter that is wrong with ethics, and ipso facto its practice and its belated appearance in many professional settings (when it$ should have been in evidence long ago), is its anthropic bias, its considerable prejudice in favour of (present) humans.10 The matter is highly material in several fields, most obviously in environmental ethics, but also in medical ethics, bio-ethics, agricultural and vefinarian ethics, and similar. It is widely assumed, however, that ethics is inevitably human biassed, that it has to be anthropocentric. That is not so. Ethics can be repaired. So much is the substance of ethics without humans. Both morals and ethics can be characterised, in substantially reportive ways, so as to free �Richard Sylvan 21 them of anthropocentrism and the like.11 Furthermore, the whole superstructural theory can be developed in a fashion that makes no essential reference to humans or any other biological species.12 These repairs represent, however, only the beginning of adjustment and change - of many changes if a satisfactory deep-green ethics is to be reached. When repairing goods, there often comes a stage, increasingly rapidly encountered those days, when it becomes a more attractive proposition to acquire new items than to persist with repairs. So it may be, it is now suggested, with ethics. So increasingly it has been suggested this century, with demands for new ethics, new moral philosophies. Those making such proposals include Schweitzer, Maclver, Leopold, along with many others.13 Suppose we should arrive, through addressing different or new fields, at what amounts to a new ethics, as many think we do (thus Maclver, p. 179 and many ecocentric philosophers). Then what emerges is no "application" of a standard ethics, but something different, not an applied standard ethics at all. Now something similar may appear to occur for normal applied subjects. A newly encountered group of physical phenomena, for instance, leads not to the elevation of some dusty mathematical theory buried in archives, what is mostly the case, but to elaboration of a new mathematical theory. Normally in this event, the main body of pure mathematics would remain untouched; a new annex or suburb would simply be added to it.14 With ethics, however, things are different. There are grounds for contending that the green (environmental) revolution has shaken ethics to its (dubious) foundations and core, and, as coupled with associated non domination themes (as emphasised especially in ecofeminism), has left comparatively little untouched. The standard city of ethics is not left alone, unscathed. Much the same sort of points can be presented in the form of a dilemma, for standard ethics and a proposed field, such as environmental issues. Either standard ethics will not cover the field (or cannot be extended to do so because it (or its extension) does not apply, or through being forced upon the field it twists or damages the data, for instance leaves an indelible anthropic bias. A homely carpentry analogy may help: there is some cabinet work where delicate hammering would be appropriate, but the only tool we have is a sledgehammer.15 Likewise, a standard chauvinistic ethic is the wrong tool to try to use or extend for deeper environmental work. Unremarkably, the three options emerging, namely (inappropriate) application, extension or adjustment, and fashioning of something new or different, correspond more or less to the now familiar threefold division of environmental positions, into shallow, intermediate and deep.16 As before, deep ethics are not "applications", but near ethics. 3. Extraneous issues Among the many extraneous issues concerning field ethics, those that have come to exercise philosophers do look distinctly partisan:17 namely, the role of philosophers, especially professionals; the place of philosophy in field ethics; and the poor practice of these ethics, particularly from a professional philosophical perspective. Here the main thesis to be advanced inclines towards these professionally unsympathetic lines: insofar as these matters, philosophical extranalities, are of negatixe impact for philosophy, philosophers have largely themselves to blame, for they are largely of their own making (or, to sheet some of the responsibility more accurately, of the controlling power elite of the profession}.18 Let us investigate some of the extraneous issues seriatim. Because a field ethics concerns the field as well as (relevant parts of) ethics, its investigation, practice and teaching, requires an intersection of capacities and skills, drawn from both ethics and the field. �n What is wrong with applied ethics This simple observation enables an immediate response to such questions as: if not philosophers, then who is to investigate, and teach, field ethics? That response is: those from one area or the other who have acquired requisite knowledge and technique in the other, or less promising, those from outside (but with some appropriate informational background) who acquire these prerequisites in both. In medical ethics, where there is perhaps a larger pool of information concerning the field than there is regarding ethics, a moral philosopher untrained in medicine may have more to learn than a medical doctor unversed in ethics and lacking philosophical skills. (Really, neither should be let loose on students before they are duly prepared in the intersection.) It is evident, then, that philosophy enjoys no natural monopoly in field ethics. The place of philosophy is less exalted, and certainly is not dominant - still less given recent proposed (but hardly well justified) decoupling of ethics from philosophy.19 There are corollaries regarding the roles of philosophers on committees relating to field ethics, in decision-making and so on on these topics. Philosophers do not have an automatic place. Unless they are well-informed as to ethics (many philosophers are not) and as to the field, they do not deserve a place at all (of course they still may gain a role for want of any better placed). Ousting of under-informed or unenergetic philosophers is not always such a bad thing. While the informational situation is now significantly better than in 1945 when Maclver was agonising over the predicament of moral philosophy, it is still true that ‘academic moral philosophers are not using ‘every opportunity to make themselves acquainted, so far as possible, with the real difficulties of those [not merely present humans] who need the help of moral philosophy most... I ... confess that I myself lack the factual knowledge which would be required to do this work well. I suspect that many ethic philosophers are in the same position ...20 One of the reasons why philosophy has lost prestige in recent years is that it has not kept pace’ (pp.204-205). One example Maclver incisively develops concerns ‘discoveries associated with the name of Freud. The behaviour of philosophers in this connection is particularly hard to excuse. At first they flatly denied the reality of the alleged discoveries - maintained that the notion of "unconscious mind" was self contradictory, and so forth. But all this has now been given up. ... Philosophers no longer dispute ... details of the Freudian system - but disregard them. If they mention them at all, they talk as if they somehow concerned none but medical men - as if the same propositions could be sene in medicine and false outside it. In the light of the recognition of unconscious motives the whole traditional theory of moral responsibility needs overhauling, but no moral philosopher undertakes this’ (p.205). The reason why the corresponding philosophical debate (about whether unconscious desires are sometimes evil, whether relevant moral predicates are restricted to conscious motives, and so forth) had not "by 1945, after 40 years of exposure to Freudian issues, Maclver attributed to the mass of psychological literature which philosophers have not read and would have to read, reading that is obligatory if moral philosophy is to be made ‘the subject which it ought to be’ (p.206). There has been disappointment among some professional philosophers, those with expansionist . instin^tions, that field ethics has not turned out to be quite the bonanza anticipated, that the expected / boom in new opportunities and positions began to dissipate as field practitioners started to supply their own "field ethicists".21 None of this should have been surprising, for broad inductive reasons. Philosophy had long shed subjects and fields of overlap; and those professionals who have hung in have become something different (economists instead of social philosophers, computer scientists instead of logicians22) Nor have philosophers, especially those who have not changed or reskilled, all the virtues assumed by professionals; e.g. they have little or no theory, they are too fuzzy, they are indecisive, or vacillate, etc. (remember the sophists; these provide some of the reasons too why philosophers are often not welcome on committees). ( �Richard Sylvan 23 Some outside inputs into ethics, such as field studies or field workers may supply, would not go astray. For there is theoretically little that is new or interesting on the standard ethics scene. Much of it is 19th century revival, refinement of utilitarianism or Kantianism, and ornate additions (with bells and whistles). One of the few "new" offerings is the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics! Nothing, however, stops outside inputs. Anyone is free to attempt philosophy. Professionals have no exclusive rights over philosophy, still less over ethics; nor should they. There is a case for widening practice of philosophy, and encouraging paraphilosophers. For critical problems emerging are not so much those of philosophy itself (which could be very different from the way it is practised and professionalised), but of philosophy as professionalised and as conducted. The immediate future does not bode well for change in the latter, for several reasons; the prevailing materialistic technological ethos (which dev^lyes pure intellectual activity), the consequent marginalisation of subjects like philosophy and continuing narrowness of dominant philosophical activity. Nor, moreover, have philosophers proceeded well, particularly in the Antipodes, in training and "^pp^ing students who can readily adapt to become field ethicists. Philosophy has never been strongly employment-market driven (but has tended to rely on a version of Say’s flawed law); indeed there are features intrinsic to philosophy, such as its contemplative character, that renders it antithetical to the veiy idea of responding to markets at all. There are other regional features that compound this sort of problem: the conservative, and class, bias of philosophy (inherited from similar British arrangements), which has meant that Australian philosophy has not been innovative in adapting its topics and emphases to changing circumstances;23 and the heavy concentration, as in British empiricism (still dominant in Australia), upon epistemology, with ethics and what went into moral sciences and social philosophy still regarded as second class arenas and not what philosophy was really about or what first class chaps would mainly concern themselves. These are major reasons why philosophy lost out, and Reserved to lose. It is for those latter sorts of reasons in particular, that environmental ethics and environmental philosophy have been unable to gain more than occasional marginal status in philosophy curricula in Australian universities. Fuller accounts of the predicament of environmental philosophy have been given elsewhere.24 Its predicament tends to illustrate a general problem for field ethics, with bioethics (with its own institutional settings) the only partial exception. Now that field ethics is being lost to the fields in many cases, there are complaints about the calibre of what is done and taught, the quality of the investigators and teachers, and so on. No doubt much of this criticism is warranted; some similar criticism of ethics within philosophy would also be warranted. Among the justified criticisms are these: • that field ethics as done from the field is divorced from ethical theory (from what theory has so far been developed). Too much comprises mere case studies, as with business MBAs. • that the field practitioners are not trained in ethical theory, and are often ill-informed ethically and lacking in analytic and critical skills crucial for satisfactory philosophy. A different complaint, of importance, concerns the poor ethical practice, even the unethical practice in some of the fields, despite the development of field ethics. Such a problem is particularly conspicuous in the field of business.25 But this has been a long-standing problem for ethics itself; how to get people to behave as they ought? Teaching agents ethics can certainly enable, and encourage, them to be moral: but it cannot make them moral. Nor would it be proper for it to do so. The field ethics movement, successor to the late AE movement, is both important and timely, especially as regards getting ethics and axiology back into many fields that hard tried, erroneously it now appears, to eliminate them. The movement will have to be carefully orchestrated however to \ I 1 �24 What is wrong with applied ethics avoid capture by the very power structures and disciplinary paradigms that it should transform. These are certainly grounds for some cynicism about such movements: that they are easy targets for co-option, that they can bemused to cover up abuses by power structures, and to authorise dubious procedures, or worse,^with a rubber stamp of ethical approval from appropriate ethics’ committees and inquiries. Such grounds for cynicism can be reasoned, however, and new hope inaugurated, given more adequate formulation and development of relevant field ethics (exercises including considerable theoretical work), along with independent and impartial administration of emerging codes and decision methods, and with appropriate openness of the formerly abused procedures they are intended to regulate fairly. REFERENCES Callicott, J.B., In Defense of the Land Ethic, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1989. Edwards, J.C., Ethics without Philosophy, University Presses of Florida, Tampa, 1982. Engel, J.R., Ethics of Environment and Development, Belhaven Press, 1990. Hinkfuss, I., The Moral Society: Its Structure and Effects, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, no. 16, The Australian National University, 1987. Leopold, A., A Sand Country Almanac, Oxford University Press, New York, 1949. MacIntyre, A., After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1981. Maclver, A.M., "Towards anew moral philosophy", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, no. 46 (1945-6): 179-206. Sylvan, R. "Prospects for regional philosophy in Australasia", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1986. Sylvan, R., From Wisdom to Wowserism, typescript, 1991. Sylvan, R., Deep-Green Ethics, typescript, 1993. i Sylvan, R. and Bennett, H., The Greening of Ethics, White Horse Press, Cambridge, 199^. Wilson, E.O. (ed.), Biodiversity, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1988. NOTES 1. For such a treatment of items like ethics, as economic goods, see further Greening of Ethics. 2. The Conference, organised by the University of Newcastle in August 1993, where this paper was presented. 3. Ethical theory has tended to borrow classifications from elsewhere, from apparently more successful enterprises. Thus, for instance, the (normative) ethics/meta-ethics distinction lifted, none too adeptly, �25 Richard Sylvan from logical theory. Thus too the present pure/applied distinction, also purloined. By no means everything that intelligent agents dream up and promote is entirely in order. Rather uncontroversially colourless green ideas is one such combination, more controversially human nature, deep ecology and post-modernism are such. Applied ethics appears to belong to this not-in-satisfactory-order or out-of-order bunch. 4. ‘Applied. Practical, put to practical use. Applied science. Science of which the abstract principles are put to practical use in the arts’ (Concise English'). ‘2. Put to practical use; practical as distinguished from abstract or theoretical’ (OED). Though we persevere with these dictionary explications, there are grounds for complaint; there are neglected nuances. For example, the practical/theoretical contrast (just one of the muddy contrasts with practical) differs from an applied/pure contrast. A theory can in principle be applied (a plying to, i.e., a mapping) in a non practical, or impractical, field. Different again is that concrete/abstract contrast. And what exactly is practical? 5. The advance notices for the Conference (which look pretty confused, even mumbo jumbo), well they add insult to injury by invoking talk of a theory of applied ethics. There is said to ‘appear to be a significant gap between the theory of applied ethics and its practice’; this is said to be why ‘disillusionment has set in’ now. While there may be a theory of applications, talk of a "theory of applied ethics" heaps confusion (‘theory of) upon confusion (‘applied ethics’). As for gaps (really, between the theory and practice of ethics), there are two, as we shall see; there is an ambiguity in ‘gap’As for mumbo jumbo, try the following sentence: ‘The teaching and practice of applied ethics has grown rapidly and in an unruly manner across many disciplines, with many practitioners now not possessing any depth of philosophical knowledge and expertise and, because of difficulties experienced with the theory and practice given, in some cases deciding that same is relevant.’ Its sequel is easily unscrambled: ‘We wish to hold a conference to explore this issue for the Australian community and its practical consequences.’ 6. Thus, too, there is a two way process. Application feeds back to inform theory and to enrich the pure subject. With ethics, as we shall see, something similar or more dramatic happens. Field developments not merely may inform and enlarge the ethical theory; some may alter it irrevocably. 7. Of course not all adjectives function in this way. butTor. instance without types of responded s. Thus, e.g. possible, probable, alleged, putative,etc. I 8. Examples include Wilson in Biodiversity, Engel. 9. We try to show as much elsewherey-Routley and HTIF. 10. This is by no means all that is wrong with standard ethics. Another, important for field ethics, is the lack of an adequate theory of ethical dilemmas, confronting which is a main engine of progress in ethics. 11. See Greening of Ethics', also ‘Ethics without humans. Philosophy without humans', Observe that ^repairs are not unique. <y : » 12. As to how this is accomplished, see the annular theory, reiterated in Greening'. X �26 What is wrong with applied ethics 13. Maclver suggests ‘that all the old codes are out of date and a satisfactory new one has still to be discovered. A lost moral code cannot be recovered, and a new one obtained, simply for the asking’ (p.201). 14. Nothing, no paradigm shift as revolution has effected the whole citadel of mathematics; none is likely to (even dialethism, more threatening than much else, because central areas can be protected by /w roj due qualification). 15. A different example: an isolated person has an extensive weeding tool in a weed invaded forest, with the only techniques availabe a broad-acre chemical defoliant. 16. For a classification of environmental positions along the lines of the three options, see Callicott Introduction, where attention is also drawn to shortcomings in the applied idea. 17. On extraneous issues in ethics, including especially field ethics such as environmental ethics, see for a detailed treatment Greening of Ethics, part II/. JJ 18. Among other things, philosophers did not act, did not respond to incipient demand, fast enough in organising appropriate structures for delivery of field ethics. <5? 19. See esp. Edwards, plhieswilhourPhilosophy^ 20. Maclver continues ‘and for this reason this conception of the task of moral philosophy is unlikely to be popular in the profession.’ There are two troubles with the tack: firstly, field ethics do not should not - exhaust ethics; secondly, field ethics are enjoying some popularity. 21. The proposition, from the circulated Conference announcement, that field ethics might rejuvenate a flagging philosophy, that they had ‘given philosophy a rebirth’ can hardly be taken seriously (for all that they may have given jaded philosophy departments a fillip). Concrete working examples and dilemmas might stimulate ethical investigation, but would only exceptionally impact an ethical theory, and moreover ethics itself has but rarely been a source of growth and development in philosophy. Field practitioners, who often have their own expansionist and imperialist ambitions and programs, are unlikely to let a service subject be supplied from elsewhere unless they cannot yet manage the subject themselves and then only so long as times are good so they do not need the jobs and can avoid chores involved. 22. Interestingly there has been no similar fuss from professionals regarding the attrition of logicians within philosophy (for which some of them have responsibility), or the on-going loss of logic to computing science and mathematics. 23. It is for this sort of reason that philosophy in Australia, unlike that in parts of USA^,missed the field van. 24. See Sylvan 1986, The Greening of Ethics, From Wisdom to Wowserism. iSrn- 25. A problem in fact exacerbated under prominent ethical positions, e.g., crude utilitarian fostering "greed is good" notions, most social Darwinism encouraging cut-throat competition. I' � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Richapd'Sylvan /> << Ji 197d p. I WHAT IS WRONG WITH APPLIED ETHICS Richard Sylvan There is much that is wrong with and in applied ethics. Specifically, there are three comprehensive counts where things are wrong with the commodity concerned, applied ethics, that is with applied ethics so economically viewed.1 Namely on the following three counts: • extraneous, with the supply, delivery, consumption, and the like of applied ethics, AE. The category prominently includes the delivery of applied ethics: what is done, taught and learnt, by whom, and how qualified (e.g. whether taught by professionals, professional ethicists or philosophers in particular). That has tended to presume that the commodity itself is more or less in order, though the presumption lacks good pedigree, delivery of defective goods being almost as ubiquitous as business enterprise. The present focus is not however upon the delivery, or other features of the production and consumption, packaging and marketing of the goods, but on features of the commodity itself, applied ethics itself. Thus • intraneous counts, concerning the commodity itself, where a further two things are wrong: •• the applied idea, and ••• what the application is presumed to be made to, established - or, should it be, establishment - ethics. Because an implicit premiss in organising the Philosophy and Applied Ethics Re-examined1 Conference seems to have been that the issues to be addressed are predominantly extraneous, and because most of the papers actually relevant to the Conference topic appear to focus on extraneous issues, the present exercise, by contrast, concentrates upon intraneous problems, especially the third: radical deficiencies in what is supposed to be applied, prevailing ethics, and some extensive repairs thereto. 1. The applied count To begin with, there is something decidedly3 odd, not to say radically unsatisfactory, about the very idea of applied ethics. To bring out the oddness, the conceptual inadequacy, it helps to consider the dictionary senses and established usage of applied. The term in the only relevant sense (the other obsolete sense is that offolded) means: ‘put to practical use; practical as distinguished from abstract or theoretical' (OED, similarly Concise English). Relevant examples cited are: ‘the applied sciences’ (from Babbage 1832), ‘applied logic (as distinguished from pure)’ (from Thomson 1806).4 It may appear then, that "applied ethics" amounts to pleonasm, a popular tautology (and "pure ethics" correspondingly to an oxymoron), because ethics itself is already practical, for instance much or all of it being concerned with practical action and its qualities (such is Maclver s assumption: moral philosophy is practical - in a way in which other branches of philosophy are not’, p.206). In this respect "applied ethics", even more "applied morals", is rather like "applied motoring", "applied nursing" or "applied housekeeping". Conceptual confusion would be considerably reduced by removing the modifier ‘applied .5 Such a charge of confusion can however be mitigated by properly I7 18 What is wrong with applied ethics distinguishing ethics, which includes philosophy and theory of morality, from morals, thereby revealing, perhaps, elements of some theory apt for application. No doubt something like this is the presupposition of those who preach or profit from practical ethics (similarly practical economics, but doubtfully practical housekeeping): that standing in contrast is a suitably established theoretical ethics (could it perchance be utilitarianism?) which can rather uncontroversiarbe used to guide practice. But is there such a theory, apt for application, for translation into practice? To appreciate what is required for adequacy, consider successful applied subjects. Let us compare "applied ethics" with^long established applied discipline, namely applied mathematics, which often boasts a separate department in universities (a discipline I was obliged to study as an undergraduate in order to proceed further in pure mathematics). In the first place, applied mathematics contrasts with pure mathematics, applied logic with pure. Where, a naive outsider may ask, is pure ethics that similarly stands in contrast with applied ethics? Could there decently be separate departments of pure and of applied ethics? For the most part, applied mathematics applies to practice, in some wide sense, a body of pure mathematics that is more or less correct, at least within the assumption framework and contextual settings where it is applied. (The qualified formulation is given for pluralistic reasons; given the dominant paradigm, the pure mathematics that is applied is correct without further qualification, correct period.) A body of substantially correct theory ready for application is then the first of several pertinent features of that relational object, applied mathematics, the first of several dubiously matchable by "applied ethics". The proviso ‘for the most part’ (introducing the paragraph) signals another discrepancy. There is a, presumably derivative, part of applied mathematics that investigates, in essentially the manner of pure mathematics, theories, algebras, spaces and similar, selected through postulates, principles or equational sets drawn from standard applied mathematics (thus e.g. Newtonian theories where classical force laws are satisfied, Hilbert and phase spaces, and so on).6 Such derivative applied mathematics need not compromise at all normal methodological requirements (such as they are) of pure mathematics, for rigour, exactness, and similar. Ordinary applied mathematics, in its quest, even haste, for practical results, does compromise, or violate, pure mathematical methodology. For example, shortcuts are taken, simplifications made, information shed, figures rounded, approximations adopted, and so. Science veers towards art. From a pure perspective, dreadful things are often done to data or mathematical transformations of data. Skilled practitioners tend to appreciate what they can get away with in this sort of regard. Again, none of this, neither the body of information nor the kinds of skills, is really matched in ethics, in putting ethical theory to practical work. Next, the mathematics that is applied, a body of pure mathematics, is not thoroughly contested. Ethics however is. There is nothing in ethics like arithmetic or elementary mechanics; the nearest thing ethics can offer is some controversial development along axiomatic geometric lines. Mathematics has its critics, both inside (e.g. intuitionists) and out (e.g., cultural relativists), but none (hard core sceptics excepted) suggest changing all of it or tampering with most of what is applied. By contrast, in ethics, there continues to be an array of competing theories, none of which has managed to win broad allegiance. What pure theory is there to apply, to do dreadful things to? It might be said in response: whichever of them is adopted! Even that, a hollow compromise will not stand up for long. For deeper environmental ethics challenge a broad range of pure theory that is alleged to be applied! What challenges a whole subject, that would change it, can hardly be an application of it. The rise of such environmental ethics is one reason why the modifier applied is a misnomer. For deeper environmental ethics is not any sort of / Richard Sylvan 19 application of ethics; it instead challenges prevailing ethics. Nor is it, like stock "applied ethics", an adaptation of ethics within an environmental context. The label applied is substantially, if not entirely, a misnomer. Adjectives in modifier or attributive roles, in the combination adjective-noun phrase, often enough do not signify application. The assumption that all modification is application invokes a dubious, presumably false, theory of adjectival attribution. Consider a few examples involving a relevant adjective, ‘medical’. Combinations such as ‘medical student’, ‘medical book’, ‘medical trial’ do not signify applications. A medical s is not normally an application of s to medical matters (of books or students in this fashion); normally it is a type (an m type) of s.7 There are occasional exceptions, in which case compounds are liable to be recorded in dictionaries, as with medical jurisprudence which is not a type of jurisprudence, but ‘the legal knowledge required of a doctor’. There is good reason to think that ethics induces no exception, that medical ethics, and similarly business ethics, follow the normal pattern. Thus business ethics is a type of ethics, namely ethics within a specifically business setting, and accordingly adapted thereto. Observe that such a preliminary account incorporates automatically (what gives the applied presumption some problemsj^sce-^ppendix T) allowance for variations in standards, that business corporations for example should not be expected to measure up to standards set up for ordinary persons (any more than they should iw»t be expected to pay the same levels of taxes)! Given the manifold inadequacies of the label applied, amendment of terminology appears warranted. Amendment, not abandonment. After all, what ‘applied ethics’ is supposed to comprehend, such as medical ethics, business ethics, even environmental ethics, are not themselves in court, but presently taken as viable fields. A superior label is field, for field-defined or field-restricted; another is type, for type-delimited, another domain. Where others speak of "applied ethics", let us discourse about field ethics. Investment ethics, for instance, is a field ethic, with field investment. An "institute for applied ethics concentrating upon applications to business" is an institute for field ethics with main field business. The "applied ethics" movement becomes effectively a field ethics movement. Observe that professional ethics are field ethics, with the field in each case the profession concerned. But professional ethics in sum form a quite proper subclass of field ethics; bio-ethics and ecological ethics are plainly not professional ethics. Less obviously, more importantly, field ethics differs from practical ethics (as usually poorly defined), with which "applied ethics" is regularly conflated. For, on the one side, ordinary living and daily life, central to practical ethics, are not fields. On the other, field ethics are not confined to practice, but may involve considerable theoretical material, particularly from the fields concerned. 2. The ethics count Not only is the applied operation in trouble, ethics also is in deep trouble. Indeed, in a way, the main problem lies here. There is not a fit, properly satisfactory subject, for some significant applications. For some "applications" have to change and develop the subject! But, the problems do not vanish when the amendment to field ethics is made. Satisfactory fieldwork, satisfactory outcomes in field ethics are seriously hampered by long-standing troubles in ethics. For as field ethics involve ethics, whatever is wrong with ethics affects field ethics. To glimpse these troubles, consider recent ambivalence towards ethics. Is ethics even a good good. There is a most curious contrast in later 20th century attitudes towards ethics. On the one side, there are great expectations, for instance for what ethics can contribute, to social and professional lite 20 What is -wrong with applied ethics especially; but on the other there is serious disquiet, occasionally verging upon despair and into nihilism, as to ethics, and its role. Virtually the whole spectrum from great expectations through no expectations to substantial forebodings is selectively represented. A few examples: • Great expectations for ethics, beginning to re-emerge these days, tend to come from outside professional philosophical ranks, from scientists and social scientists.8 Ethics is seen as taking up again its grand legitimization and critical roles. It can indeed be used in this respect as regards to a wide variety of practices, such as in business, economics, government, scientific experimentation, and so on. Of course it cannot always succeed, because one ethics can be pitted against another, and each and all challenged. ( p-— These expectations, a bit surprising after the drab days of analytic moral philosophy (where I philosophy could express no interesting moral opinions), contrast sharply with ' /•—• heavy disquiet or worse as to present ethics. A recent example is afforded by z MacIntyre’s disturbing introduction to After Virtue', that ‘we have - very largely, if not entirely - lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical of morality’ (p.2). Some, like MacIntyre, promise a happy, even a great, outcome, should we return to proper paths, to a virtue ethic in the tradition of Aristotle. Others are not so sanguine; , there is 1 • no hope for ethics. There are divergent routes here. Either it can play no relevant , role any longer, or it can play only a negative or damaging role (thus e.g. Hinckfuss). Though both these routes lead badly astray, present (merely classificatory) objectives do not include showing as much.9 There is, furthermore, reason for at least serious disquiet. Should we care to look closely at, and try to assess, the total ethical heritage, then what we find is not very promising. • What is on offer is mostly extremely sketchy and very piecemeal, much of it a hotchpotch. There are extraordinarily few well-worked out and detailed ethics. Spinoza’s Ethics is perhaps one rare example. • Most of what is on offer is seriously biassed or prejudiced, indeed from a deep environmental perspective even unethical. Prime examples include • religious bias, heavily constraining or distorting creatures’ lives, and putting them to work to serve imagined religious objectives. • spiritualistic distortion. Even where an explicit religion does not feature, as in Platonism and neo-Platonism and in edified Buddhism, the whole of life may be distorted through promise of an after-life or successor life or extra-material life, where furthermore some system of rewards or punishments may be dished out for previous performance. No doubt such biasses help in conferring upon ethics authority, unwarranted authority (fulfil duties or be dammed, etc.). • humanistic distortion, summed up as human chauvinism. It is upon this prejudice, critical for environmental ethics, that we concentrate. A main matter that is wrong with ethics, and ipso facto its practice and its belated appearance in many professional settings (when it$ should have been in evidence long ago), is its anthropic bias, its considerable prejudice in favour of (present) humans.10 The matter is highly material in several fields, most obviously in environmental ethics, but also in medical ethics, bio-ethics, agricultural and vefinarian ethics, and similar. It is widely assumed, however, that ethics is inevitably human biassed, that it has to be anthropocentric. That is not so. Ethics can be repaired. So much is the substance of ethics without humans. Both morals and ethics can be characterised, in substantially reportive ways, so as to free Richard Sylvan 21 them of anthropocentrism and the like.11 Furthermore, the whole superstructural theory can be developed in a fashion that makes no essential reference to humans or any other biological species.12 These repairs represent, however, only the beginning of adjustment and change - of many changes if a satisfactory deep-green ethics is to be reached. When repairing goods, there often comes a stage, increasingly rapidly encountered those days, when it becomes a more attractive proposition to acquire new items than to persist with repairs. So it may be, it is now suggested, with ethics. So increasingly it has been suggested this century, with demands for new ethics, new moral philosophies. Those making such proposals include Schweitzer, Maclver, Leopold, along with many others.13 Suppose we should arrive, through addressing different or new fields, at what amounts to a new ethics, as many think we do (thus Maclver, p. 179 and many ecocentric philosophers). Then what emerges is no "application" of a standard ethics, but something different, not an applied standard ethics at all. Now something similar may appear to occur for normal applied subjects. A newly encountered group of physical phenomena, for instance, leads not to the elevation of some dusty mathematical theory buried in archives, what is mostly the case, but to elaboration of a new mathematical theory. Normally in this event, the main body of pure mathematics would remain untouched; a new annex or suburb would simply be added to it.14 With ethics, however, things are different. There are grounds for contending that the green (environmental) revolution has shaken ethics to its (dubious) foundations and core, and, as coupled with associated non domination themes (as emphasised especially in ecofeminism), has left comparatively little untouched. The standard city of ethics is not left alone, unscathed. Much the same sort of points can be presented in the form of a dilemma, for standard ethics and a proposed field, such as environmental issues. Either standard ethics will not cover the field (or cannot be extended to do so because it (or its extension) does not apply, or through being forced upon the field it twists or damages the data, for instance leaves an indelible anthropic bias. A homely carpentry analogy may help: there is some cabinet work where delicate hammering would be appropriate, but the only tool we have is a sledgehammer.15 Likewise, a standard chauvinistic ethic is the wrong tool to try to use or extend for deeper environmental work. Unremarkably, the three options emerging, namely (inappropriate) application, extension or adjustment, and fashioning of something new or different, correspond more or less to the now familiar threefold division of environmental positions, into shallow, intermediate and deep.16 As before, deep ethics are not "applications", but near ethics. 3. Extraneous issues Among the many extraneous issues concerning field ethics, those that have come to exercise philosophers do look distinctly partisan:17 namely, the role of philosophers, especially professionals; the place of philosophy in field ethics; and the poor practice of these ethics, particularly from a professional philosophical perspective. Here the main thesis to be advanced inclines towards these professionally unsympathetic lines: insofar as these matters, philosophical extranalities, are of negatixe impact for philosophy, philosophers have largely themselves to blame, for they are largely of their own making (or, to sheet some of the responsibility more accurately, of the controlling power elite of the profession}.18 Let us investigate some of the extraneous issues seriatim. Because a field ethics concerns the field as well as (relevant parts of) ethics, its investigation, practice and teaching, requires an intersection of capacities and skills, drawn from both ethics and the field. n What is wrong with applied ethics This simple observation enables an immediate response to such questions as: if not philosophers, then who is to investigate, and teach, field ethics? That response is: those from one area or the other who have acquired requisite knowledge and technique in the other, or less promising, those from outside (but with some appropriate informational background) who acquire these prerequisites in both. In medical ethics, where there is perhaps a larger pool of information concerning the field than there is regarding ethics, a moral philosopher untrained in medicine may have more to learn than a medical doctor unversed in ethics and lacking philosophical skills. (Really, neither should be let loose on students before they are duly prepared in the intersection.) It is evident, then, that philosophy enjoys no natural monopoly in field ethics. The place of philosophy is less exalted, and certainly is not dominant - still less given recent proposed (but hardly well justified) decoupling of ethics from philosophy.19 There are corollaries regarding the roles of philosophers on committees relating to field ethics, in decision-making and so on on these topics. Philosophers do not have an automatic place. Unless they are well-informed as to ethics (many philosophers are not) and as to the field, they do not deserve a place at all (of course they still may gain a role for want of any better placed). Ousting of under-informed or unenergetic philosophers is not always such a bad thing. While the informational situation is now significantly better than in 1945 when Maclver was agonising over the predicament of moral philosophy, it is still true that ‘academic moral philosophers are not using ‘every opportunity to make themselves acquainted, so far as possible, with the real difficulties of those [not merely present humans] who need the help of moral philosophy most... I ... confess that I myself lack the factual knowledge which would be required to do this work well. I suspect that many ethic philosophers are in the same position ...20 One of the reasons why philosophy has lost prestige in recent years is that it has not kept pace’ (pp.204-205). One example Maclver incisively develops concerns ‘discoveries associated with the name of Freud. The behaviour of philosophers in this connection is particularly hard to excuse. At first they flatly denied the reality of the alleged discoveries - maintained that the notion of "unconscious mind" was self contradictory, and so forth. But all this has now been given up. ... Philosophers no longer dispute ... details of the Freudian system - but disregard them. If they mention them at all, they talk as if they somehow concerned none but medical men - as if the same propositions could be sene in medicine and false outside it. In the light of the recognition of unconscious motives the whole traditional theory of moral responsibility needs overhauling, but no moral philosopher undertakes this’ (p.205). The reason why the corresponding philosophical debate (about whether unconscious desires are sometimes evil, whether relevant moral predicates are restricted to conscious motives, and so forth) had not "by 1945, after 40 years of exposure to Freudian issues, Maclver attributed to the mass of psychological literature which philosophers have not read and would have to read, reading that is obligatory if moral philosophy is to be made ‘the subject which it ought to be’ (p.206). There has been disappointment among some professional philosophers, those with expansionist . instin^tions, that field ethics has not turned out to be quite the bonanza anticipated, that the expected / boom in new opportunities and positions began to dissipate as field practitioners started to supply their own "field ethicists".21 None of this should have been surprising, for broad inductive reasons. Philosophy had long shed subjects and fields of overlap; and those professionals who have hung in have become something different (economists instead of social philosophers, computer scientists instead of logicians22) Nor have philosophers, especially those who have not changed or reskilled, all the virtues assumed by professionals; e.g. they have little or no theory, they are too fuzzy, they are indecisive, or vacillate, etc. (remember the sophists; these provide some of the reasons too why philosophers are often not welcome on committees). ( Richard Sylvan 23 Some outside inputs into ethics, such as field studies or field workers may supply, would not go astray. For there is theoretically little that is new or interesting on the standard ethics scene. Much of it is 19th century revival, refinement of utilitarianism or Kantianism, and ornate additions (with bells and whistles). One of the few "new" offerings is the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics! Nothing, however, stops outside inputs. Anyone is free to attempt philosophy. Professionals have no exclusive rights over philosophy, still less over ethics; nor should they. There is a case for widening practice of philosophy, and encouraging paraphilosophers. For critical problems emerging are not so much those of philosophy itself (which could be very different from the way it is practised and professionalised), but of philosophy as professionalised and as conducted. The immediate future does not bode well for change in the latter, for several reasons; the prevailing materialistic technological ethos (which dev^lyes pure intellectual activity), the consequent marginalisation of subjects like philosophy and continuing narrowness of dominant philosophical activity. Nor, moreover, have philosophers proceeded well, particularly in the Antipodes, in training and "^pp^ing students who can readily adapt to become field ethicists. Philosophy has never been strongly employment-market driven (but has tended to rely on a version of Say’s flawed law); indeed there are features intrinsic to philosophy, such as its contemplative character, that renders it antithetical to the veiy idea of responding to markets at all. There are other regional features that compound this sort of problem: the conservative, and class, bias of philosophy (inherited from similar British arrangements), which has meant that Australian philosophy has not been innovative in adapting its topics and emphases to changing circumstances;23 and the heavy concentration, as in British empiricism (still dominant in Australia), upon epistemology, with ethics and what went into moral sciences and social philosophy still regarded as second class arenas and not what philosophy was really about or what first class chaps would mainly concern themselves. These are major reasons why philosophy lost out, and Reserved to lose. It is for those latter sorts of reasons in particular, that environmental ethics and environmental philosophy have been unable to gain more than occasional marginal status in philosophy curricula in Australian universities. Fuller accounts of the predicament of environmental philosophy have been given elsewhere.24 Its predicament tends to illustrate a general problem for field ethics, with bioethics (with its own institutional settings) the only partial exception. Now that field ethics is being lost to the fields in many cases, there are complaints about the calibre of what is done and taught, the quality of the investigators and teachers, and so on. No doubt much of this criticism is warranted; some similar criticism of ethics within philosophy would also be warranted. Among the justified criticisms are these: • that field ethics as done from the field is divorced from ethical theory (from what theory has so far been developed). Too much comprises mere case studies, as with business MBAs. • that the field practitioners are not trained in ethical theory, and are often ill-informed ethically and lacking in analytic and critical skills crucial for satisfactory philosophy. A different complaint, of importance, concerns the poor ethical practice, even the unethical practice in some of the fields, despite the development of field ethics. Such a problem is particularly conspicuous in the field of business.25 But this has been a long-standing problem for ethics itself; how to get people to behave as they ought? Teaching agents ethics can certainly enable, and encourage, them to be moral: but it cannot make them moral. Nor would it be proper for it to do so. The field ethics movement, successor to the late AE movement, is both important and timely, especially as regards getting ethics and axiology back into many fields that hard tried, erroneously it now appears, to eliminate them. The movement will have to be carefully orchestrated however to \ I 1 24 What is wrong with applied ethics avoid capture by the very power structures and disciplinary paradigms that it should transform. These are certainly grounds for some cynicism about such movements: that they are easy targets for co-option, that they can bemused to cover up abuses by power structures, and to authorise dubious procedures, or worse,^with a rubber stamp of ethical approval from appropriate ethics’ committees and inquiries. Such grounds for cynicism can be reasoned, however, and new hope inaugurated, given more adequate formulation and development of relevant field ethics (exercises including considerable theoretical work), along with independent and impartial administration of emerging codes and decision methods, and with appropriate openness of the formerly abused procedures they are intended to regulate fairly. REFERENCES Callicott, J.B., In Defense of the Land Ethic, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1989. Edwards, J.C., Ethics without Philosophy, University Presses of Florida, Tampa, 1982. Engel, J.R., Ethics of Environment and Development, Belhaven Press, 1990. Hinkfuss, I., The Moral Society: Its Structure and Effects, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy, no. 16, The Australian National University, 1987. Leopold, A., A Sand Country Almanac, Oxford University Press, New York, 1949. MacIntyre, A., After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1981. Maclver, A.M., "Towards anew moral philosophy", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, no. 46 (1945-6): 179-206. Sylvan, R. "Prospects for regional philosophy in Australasia", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 1986. Sylvan, R., From Wisdom to Wowserism, typescript, 1991. Sylvan, R., Deep-Green Ethics, typescript, 1993. i Sylvan, R. and Bennett, H., The Greening of Ethics, White Horse Press, Cambridge, 199^. Wilson, E.O. (ed.), Biodiversity, National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1988. NOTES 1. For such a treatment of items like ethics, as economic goods, see further Greening of Ethics. 2. The Conference, organised by the University of Newcastle in August 1993, where this paper was presented. 3. Ethical theory has tended to borrow classifications from elsewhere, from apparently more successful enterprises. Thus, for instance, the (normative) ethics/meta-ethics distinction lifted, none too adeptly, 25 Richard Sylvan from logical theory. Thus too the present pure/applied distinction, also purloined. By no means everything that intelligent agents dream up and promote is entirely in order. Rather uncontroversially colourless green ideas is one such combination, more controversially human nature, deep ecology and post-modernism are such. Applied ethics appears to belong to this not-in-satisfactory-order or out-of-order bunch. 4. ‘Applied. Practical, put to practical use. Applied science. Science of which the abstract principles are put to practical use in the arts’ (Concise English'). ‘2. Put to practical use; practical as distinguished from abstract or theoretical’ (OED). Though we persevere with these dictionary explications, there are grounds for complaint; there are neglected nuances. For example, the practical/theoretical contrast (just one of the muddy contrasts with practical) differs from an applied/pure contrast. A theory can in principle be applied (a plying to, i.e., a mapping) in a non practical, or impractical, field. Different again is that concrete/abstract contrast. And what exactly is practical? 5. The advance notices for the Conference (which look pretty confused, even mumbo jumbo), well they add insult to injury by invoking talk of a theory of applied ethics. There is said to ‘appear to be a significant gap between the theory of applied ethics and its practice’; this is said to be why ‘disillusionment has set in’ now. While there may be a theory of applications, talk of a "theory of applied ethics" heaps confusion (‘theory of) upon confusion (‘applied ethics’). As for gaps (really, between the theory and practice of ethics), there are two, as we shall see; there is an ambiguity in ‘gap’As for mumbo jumbo, try the following sentence: ‘The teaching and practice of applied ethics has grown rapidly and in an unruly manner across many disciplines, with many practitioners now not possessing any depth of philosophical knowledge and expertise and, because of difficulties experienced with the theory and practice given, in some cases deciding that same is relevant.’ Its sequel is easily unscrambled: ‘We wish to hold a conference to explore this issue for the Australian community and its practical consequences.’ 6. Thus, too, there is a two way process. Application feeds back to inform theory and to enrich the pure subject. With ethics, as we shall see, something similar or more dramatic happens. Field developments not merely may inform and enlarge the ethical theory; some may alter it irrevocably. 7. Of course not all adjectives function in this way. butTor. instance without types of responded s. Thus, e.g. possible, probable, alleged, putative,etc. I 8. Examples include Wilson in Biodiversity, Engel. 9. We try to show as much elsewherey-Routley and HTIF. 10. This is by no means all that is wrong with standard ethics. Another, important for field ethics, is the lack of an adequate theory of ethical dilemmas, confronting which is a main engine of progress in ethics. 11. See Greening of Ethics', also ‘Ethics without humans. Philosophy without humans', Observe that ^repairs are not unique. <y : » 12. As to how this is accomplished, see the annular theory, reiterated in Greening'. X 26 What is wrong with applied ethics 13. Maclver suggests ‘that all the old codes are out of date and a satisfactory new one has still to be discovered. A lost moral code cannot be recovered, and a new one obtained, simply for the asking’ (p.201). 14. Nothing, no paradigm shift as revolution has effected the whole citadel of mathematics; none is likely to (even dialethism, more threatening than much else, because central areas can be protected by /w roj due qualification). 15. A different example: an isolated person has an extensive weeding tool in a weed invaded forest, with the only techniques availabe a broad-acre chemical defoliant. 16. For a classification of environmental positions along the lines of the three options, see Callicott Introduction, where attention is also drawn to shortcomings in the applied idea. 17. On extraneous issues in ethics, including especially field ethics such as environmental ethics, see for a detailed treatment Greening of Ethics, part II/. JJ 18. Among other things, philosophers did not act, did not respond to incipient demand, fast enough in organising appropriate structures for delivery of field ethics. <5? 19. See esp. Edwards, plhieswilhourPhilosophy^ 20. Maclver continues ‘and for this reason this conception of the task of moral philosophy is unlikely to be popular in the profession.’ There are two troubles with the tack: firstly, field ethics do not should not - exhaust ethics; secondly, field ethics are enjoying some popularity. 21. The proposition, from the circulated Conference announcement, that field ethics might rejuvenate a flagging philosophy, that they had ‘given philosophy a rebirth’ can hardly be taken seriously (for all that they may have given jaded philosophy departments a fillip). Concrete working examples and dilemmas might stimulate ethical investigation, but would only exceptionally impact an ethical theory, and moreover ethics itself has but rarely been a source of growth and development in philosophy. Field practitioners, who often have their own expansionist and imperialist ambitions and programs, are unlikely to let a service subject be supplied from elsewhere unless they cannot yet manage the subject themselves and then only so long as times are good so they do not need the jobs and can avoid chores involved. 22. Interestingly there has been no similar fuss from professionals regarding the attrition of logicians within philosophy (for which some of them have responsibility), or the on-going loss of logic to computing science and mathematics. 23. It is for this sort of reason that philosophy in Australia, unlike that in parts of USA^,missed the field van. 24. See Sylvan 1986, The Greening of Ethics, From Wisdom to Wowserism. iSrn- 25. A problem in fact exacerbated under prominent ethical positions, e.g., crude utilitarian fostering "greed is good" notions, most social Darwinism encouraging cut-throat competition. I'  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 14, item 1978: What is wrong with applied ethics Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Description An account of the resource Typescript with handwritten emendations and annotations. Paper presented at the 1993 Philosophy and applied ethics re-examined conference. [10] leaves. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span><span>,</span> Box 14, item 1978 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:5bcffeb">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:5bcffeb</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [10] leaves. 8.49 MB. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - [Unlisted in Error Likely 2nd Drawer] Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > [Unlisted in Error Likely 2nd Drawer] Box 14: Green Projects in Progress https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/adac1ea1e18dbc6bbd0afb6f54567c38.pdf 1f9efcf459d357d53c0fc4e0007d46a2 PDF Text Text �/Zr ? . —p ~r \? ^,rr C-dcOf' ’ Z/ <7 *" IT /r V *- / V-; *V / $ 7&L zz '//L Q^^^ziztix ’ / u/~ * Z ____________________________ _.__ __ i__ /LXiX^ caX /"&w€ < ��0 0 C2--7 > * # cJZZ ;/r<UL^ 7 /Uaf OL y^&J t^—-^ c / A. jfl-JZ- r^ Z< /& C^4 ydctu^ ■ /* ) ^o . t X Ifaj&S CZ--~~ f^.<..,r~.^ J* - t-*-—/'"ZO C'--' /Ah C cr^ %&x c + (J/U-'Z) So ^a, \.c^aQ^^-^- h -f^-. Al<^i & <c^e . /?7_7 ^Succx’ G f f C ’ ^lA y rw''-t/{-<-y ic^^> y i^~ re^td 7«Sc^ J Co-1 e-^--^ ) Z*! ff’zv-^- "f^ * — *—*. "fc-s £-?1'i cxj/ui&t^-r a-^f^~~ 0»c<ZJ-1 U-X-A *U \ i f-^ \ O/£ !~ -farf > /aVZ /(nJ/ ftc. Cc ~ v/Z 6__-7 <rvt-/>^-«^- /f /r/$6 , e^jLj ^r~ tc-tX. * / , /t-c-h^/J-C / /'■ ‘5-’-x ' r-v^ S- k /^^z'-s-^- . �1. 2, />31 c Aon^ 3^cucr-^tA ^\> . [C*Z^ l^tr^rfL. &- keJfcZr I v c^~ Z«cvC^<- C ^^^7 i /o rvt t &Sta<^- C-A Q"^Z Cy-<^K-X /^XLZ^ /fa o/f c ?/t«X <-4>*-x y /L^ j. st-e^Q- 7^~ <**£ — /i^ r C'rfZ'-r-e. c^r — r £^y—~ S'.-cr-J tc & i s-zas-qs , X^z £&~-^ J ^~^tr * �/ft- 2 A&- -I c \ fr d z^e>o /^OT'ta j£_.. ! /) /v~^ MG _ * £-3 Cjy^L—^ -—y Cjl^/~~~ cr-tza/ G-^ 7^tA/<L i z j^yZs: Ar- ��y£/7* rAcZo< 4 x/f y c\) &l/—-r <) 4> ~r &-s-^ I f_7? jy>Crr&<^ c2s^r o f^.^7 C9h / x/~^ ' /A '<2^yr < e&y<z~ y jr^/a -r /Q^r- fAt / s-yL^ ^-r °y-^ ), Jt /f/o£ &S&4T ���/ /— .J / A!v C' V~^ bA Q a <f f • Ct//< I J * G t ' ~^ 'C ' y/ yzC ’ / -/> £^v<^7 eA u— « o~v AX-£ C »-^ jF /£)>v'^ �����.//■ Tkefie /? zz /j ZCt't-X 6-<f\ C{/~P-C‘ Q^777l_ U^rfs-sK ^s&TftL^t c<rtfi( *7/7 < U,f (,fe~^ '^T^cTT/vt^} . ’/T'e^TT^'C'^f J -f7\7 ft-/1 c7 fC c& ne7 &p '7^ d/L'l7?) /7 I*A 0.77^ tyt^fOl C^-y /A'! 6l^ ^.- f&ttdT' <-^- t^sl_ fr&7 Ctd#' /o 77jl. 7&i /Ttr&'i Ct-^>7 c r\f7 e&'CT^Tt q^j^cC''^'^^7 c^^-^7. ’y^ 77j2^'i£~— tc J cf Oyf/Tl/rfd^ ; 4xwZ Cott^v7(2y<2^o^/t/^ 7cr^2-/77^~-f- c^ty C/ / 7c/>\ //~o~rj7I^/77 , 'Ycr’rt^—^f 7t> />.c^ /\t>777'^ r f-^-a 71/-VC/~ &A />Clf *-S o^^/c7e7cTt-^ cCcf J 7?S /uy t77LT~ e7^-^r c^y^r ry^c7^ Ci^>t^/l(>i /^-^rv-/&--Z . a-^'e'C <2_^z, j Q-^C— <2^7^x-e_ *-x cu 7^ sfct-'y Cc-rt7 ctr<?'£7' O^i I/^TvC^y c^~ ^-t<--^ > /z7^jC7ccr»^ / 07^ <n-Tt'o=/~ <2-^-x t P 7<^/jCn ) 7T&. 7/^-Z i 77n.(7f^7<c'^ </&— a^-y 77'tc7 It a^C ('~7 /f 0L^7c^r^_ eJ^TCT^ ft 7cf ii^7f z»^7 Jt&OK f f f / X (a- r/<2^C-^-cC^ 77j2_ > c/c'^e_ C{^~f(L/\ 7/j2_ CL-^f /ti c///^/'(^ *'CC-- Ct cofd- /z^-ZZ (£-}~y /L«fc^Z>^e_y oZ1 C A' Ccr-z^yf (L Ctrt><?77 t LU-O&? tf^a^. c^ Zx / cXJ cu / C l<7 fC 7Z<* ^t?ZZ?Zv >^_-/ Q-yn cr~t-^f' C^>\( J Cr-f\ J (~7<&-/->^. 7^2- fc'ft-c^~7c^-^<j /mc^r e^a t^- cTs. r^)<i7'f c 7^e~<s^c^7ce--^-. 7'nJO I'C />C T~— « (,-ry^u^ /f ,7 Xy-e c/fr'cZ r , £z£Ez4*z <, / JMTaT's'p i*ia^ fe TiaTur^ / 7 *k <^ ^z?y/ZC’/ixA^ /ci>< * Z &XGc^ Ct' *' X rcr>t>^- s-<rf/<7^ f 6^7/Zk X' e> 7 /X O-r-^C- ci.WLtS //&- ,j e/Z </, tZ^Z /C( Al <Z“ (j&7 l/f/vft M. •'X / * e>^- <51 O'Z J«> 77 if OML. £Sy. /eccd/f' * •y *£^ [~c-< -£y- <5l ^2‘( ^A'77^'^ *-A'-'r\ X/<s Pc^/fc>^7 *x C^0t'(X-4'-t-' f j"/ X//Os/<^) c-XX^^-Ttcr/^^ �-125 TABLE 2. Populations of Australia at 2040 under various assumptions as to population at 2000 and various growth rates. Population in Hypothesis as Population in millions at 2000 to growth rate millions at 2040 more \ likely) •' range /' 17-3 1.1% from 1970 26.8 17.8 1.2% from 1970 28.7 18.9 1.1% from 2000 29.2 18.9 1.2% from 2000 30.4 20.0 1.1% from 2000 30.9 20.0 1.2% from 2000 32.2 21.0 1.1% from 2000 32.5 21.0 1.2% from 2000 33.8 21.0 1.4% from 2000 36.6 22.0 1.7% from 2000 38.2 22.0 1.5% from 2000 39.6 22.4 1.87% from 2000 46.99 probable range �C C~ ^) ^co — fVX (f J) V /P' ~~ S^^C /1/^oa^ A X ex A . eu /^. C- t fdL <^2^^Z222 d^£ZZZ. *~^ <^tJO- Z^//9^ 7 s' ^y, J //t,i-rr-f (&df ) ■“?il/< ^' \<_2 TK / cz-v^ 4 - • ( Guy <k_-< Z'-X' —* t A'-r^ cr \ JQ v~<M ) W ' , 7 ����h t/Jo— i-v—^ f / 77 ! C ) 7 * —-z *- //7’Z. /£■ • Vr/(i7 .^r 6(Jo~-, Z<— /)L^i rMs. /?7/. X <sil<y/ t !A) ■ (aJ - * /?7 /f C tf btot . aJ 2-<~ LAtJ - -t)£^ < * ft /? ( C< J-lJL a. ** * i. r f y-y—7 f y-« ft ’ />>Zu4^ <^»%x /iXt+J A J £ VL^vCtf nn--^ A/ kJ»J^fceg. * ""/ 0 <<,_____ M<X f �_ �z. 4 <fTb WhSAIttAf ■ A-3 ^~\—yX y^~- L-C^— yV S —, MZa5 / Za-^c^gx ^Zg^Cg^ z £ jC z~ A- + AC //cr.&r ■ CL7K ,j> <-n /^-^c-t A^-S )LA ** G/4 A * (r A-txvj? /^c- aa y. t ox X-^-l^I. �3. *-^. xV- /^X^C-tA^, . . " Z-cx6<^-^— . • Xax^—^X-fc«2--- Z^72 • <>—•* —* - ^S>-^-^--»<-<--^-<--^- —— fiyz-- LAu) */"/. < 7 AA^C L/^u) Hl-L. bC' f. f /i4jZ. ■^/ / <f-^ h-eJz^ s4- 1>. ^- ■ ^ ■ tA-^ -<-^ ,/^«^?* —* -J^^~ i-'' Att^y X. 'ITI- : - ' /J. ^/. , _ z A. ■? 1 / t. ———— L />l^^-p^- - rf7(. cJs~^ k-<-~^ k^tjL 7~^-A. a -^l. Z/72- — ^3hx7. �&TH 77- Ml Mo.f. rfc 7f£r . C7</ A- *- 6/4-c. ~7^- Zf . z>6r * £/?£ /Vd 7?. Pff ■ bCr �5\ i^jLt M. _____ £ (/I -7^^ ■ S1L- fJ.T., !^^^/J^.t /?7±^ z /O&?, /4 at </7 • Hz.f C- . /?7U a a^3,Z t 7f~i>—e-^-^y t •2:^7/ 3t Aj. /7'. //7-Z-. -€_-<t-^£), o-^-JL —-&-- J- ~ * <^- ? -^*-/ -Z-V«—!— / ■* ’ T£ C** &' ** La ^71.. l—<-*. -A- -~^_, /Vo. 1 A. H>^ .^-^t �Z>Z_-/_</j/'Z— . Zd~ *« /u^~^<-, ' Tl^ C^—zZ *-^ ?7vz) O£ . Z ‘5^ *-' 2) —- Z if-4/^. C<^V ZZtM—>«_LZZ«_J XZt-^Z-'Zt——»->—ZL /y/J<r 7/er ■Q 77 Crz> / * > z5 ?£> // r Al. 14 ■ ^C<Z>-x^ C Z-tLc /L-Z-Z-^ Z^->—^U<ZZ<^, //7 2- . % £■ <-4 -■-t>-<-^<-c-<^<—. J A /■Ic ly'.zr .Parf ^'7/. ., /-/ 2) 3 /??/. o^i>^ JLj/■■y �7. *3&-4 t-^/b (4J//y. £ * Oz ^Cff^4.7-t4-^ ? y ■ —>'— uJ^-j ^c/cXtJ yd^^x-. c^—cj'P <-4-4 7 / (./) - /3J~ CS^-C /??,). / &-O\^f &7 73 ><-C^ *Uy Z*/ . Z ^7 / . 6^7 -L- uJ^-7 — f"l— {)—&*<-. /■ '5, < £-4- ■ (J,3,^, /f73. �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Letter, Dick Coutinho, Royal Vangorcum to Dr Richard Routley, Australian National University, 1974? re Routhley's manuscript on environmental ethics. (1 leaf) �u*^ •f-— Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic? §1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environment, in Leopold's words 'an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' ([1], p.238). It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as 'Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, It is to this, to the values and evaluations moral objects. * of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral crit­ icism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases,to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. 'A * A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits. �2 farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if other­ wise decent) a respected member of society.' ([1], p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such trad­ itionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing of the argument. it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain * obscure. Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn't a single ethical system uniquely assumed in * To the consternation no doubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeter­ minate . �3. Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man's relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environ­ mental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic can * not be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from substantial human interference, whether of �4. the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying that every natural area should be culti­ vated or otherwise used * for human ends, "humanized". As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was * If 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature. �simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assumption). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified posi­ tion can undoubtedly go much further towards an environ­ mental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall A new ethic is wanted. e As we noticed (an) ethic is ambiguous, as between try to show. §2. a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster. * An ethical system S is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evalu­ ative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights^what * A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions. �6. is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems S| and S2 contain different principles then they are different systems. It follows that any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is commonly assumed that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fair- ness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of 4- A'/Z the modified dominance position:. A recent formulation * runs as follows ([3], p.58): 'The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishesproviding (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism -because under it humans, or people, come first and everything else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which mess up the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm * A related principle is that (modified) can operate within similar limits. t X /< > /Cy , .... r -r- free enterprise 'i- �others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure because 'other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent, and privilege, of the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient -hv being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, and whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely unworkable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others, 7/v It is taken for granted in designing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even incon­ sistent) , so that what is permissible holds in some ideal situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are �assessed over the class of ideal situations. (i) The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every The last man example. living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs) . What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esot­ eric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild �9. animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an environmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauv­ inism may conflict with stewardship or co-operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he �10. proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and product­ ivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this example to the industrial society example: looks rather like Civ) the society ours. The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic picture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hunting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the �11. blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruc­ tion of its habitat by man's activity or the activ­ ities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains- dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible - at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whalers to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environ­ mental economics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably * along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable - if ’r < that point has not already been passed. 7/7 / (U• ‘ In sum' class of permissible actions that /rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren't environmentalists going too far in claim­ ing that these people, those of the examples and respected industrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? these people do is No, what to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remaining blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a * For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [3] . �13. /•~i'<'-^\,< /a. Z\z i>'"<’- • > Gf * —‘<-r ^~i ♦ <"- capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no oblig­ ation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons'. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic �14. morally, through obligations practically anything at all. The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typ­ ically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happi­ ness, as a summum banum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual p rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule­ utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism; namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes' behaviour, ive then by the Pareto ranking test the collect/ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (hori­ zontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing J �15. private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then "rational" economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position.which has some vogue-obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill- disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them; that is (rough) justice. R. Routley Australian National University �REFERENCES [1] A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almenac with other essays on Conservation, [2] J. Passmore, New York (196 6) . Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). [3] P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). [4] S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Men and Morals. hon-humans, [5] Animals, An enquiry into the maltreatment of London (1971). H.L.A. Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in A. Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). ����The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Letter, S. I. Benn, Acting Head of Department of Philosophy to Dr. R. Rosenkrantz, Department of Philosophy, University of South Caroline, 6 Sep 1973 re fellowship at the Research School of Social Sciences, supervised by Richard Routley. (3 pages) �A < wx ^S> eJ *-X (J J *~7f^ ^2 /^t)A / ' / �T L64'«-' *■■ J *e7^ 7' ** 44/ I { MorV 7^ c c *■/' /-X /_ ZMZL4ixO Z-/>< a>% , ... --------------- M-i-J ^1.___ /L (? k c 7 )------ 3o^> X^> £ i �Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic? §1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environment, in Leopold’s words ’an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' ([1], p.238). It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. such as Thus assertions Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, It is to this, to the values and evaluations moral oojects. * of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral crit­ icism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases,to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. 'A * A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house * spirits. �2. fanner who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if other­ wise decent) a respected member of society.' ([1], p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such trad­ itionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the fanner subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain * obscure. Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn't a single ethical system uniquely assumed in * To the consternation no doubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeter­ minate . �3. Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man's relation to nature? a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant^ and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, ■ and tne co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environ­ mental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases, it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic can­ not be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved * rom substantial human interference, whether of �4. the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying that every natural area should be culti­ vated or otherwise used * for human ends, "humanized". As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright, h// The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was * If 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature. �simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assumption). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified posi tion can undoubtedly go much further towards an environ­ mental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of(j[3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nonetheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted. §2. As we noticed (an) ethic is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster. * An ethical system S is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evalu­ ative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rightsr what * A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions. �6. is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems Sj and S2 contain different principles then they are different systems. It follows that any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is commonly assumed that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fair­ ness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified dominance position. A recent formulation * runs as follows ([3], p.58): K^> AACC C-aU tv/' i^/' of O'f speA SPcP yvxo &"( The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism - because jlfjA-aw itUU* under it humans, or people, come first and everything else a $4vM« *h bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives permission to perform a d(L<- tic. tic. Cl-IK Cl-ik i/Au*/ �7. others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in £my interests, because I detest you?, that you stop breathing « I- you are free to breathe , for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure because ’other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent, and privilege, of the chauvinism • t. whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too ^1- -fL 3^ - WAa-Zm lullu rfy - Ah. I W-tc restrictive - <or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, and whether to possible others, The latter would make the principle completely unworkable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. It is taken for granted in designing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even incon­ sistent) , so that what is permissible holds in some ideal situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are �8. assessed over the class of ideal situations. The last man example. (1) The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays . . --------.................................... I about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly i you like, as at the best abattoirs) . What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, ) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to eso values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving I badly (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking ‘r- l C-a values have shifted in an environ-nt.l direction h- ■ eric '°f -^responding shifts in the formulation fundamental evaluative principles). The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One const ers the last people in order to rule out the posslbt 1 y that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruit.u or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild 4 �v)O^ <? > J'" J fi. t(r JJj, /A h 9- ‘s, L . it ilr ll' ^onJk ^cU-i /6 U' , zcrta srS o/J oa­ animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various V, familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an environmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and KfalltL largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon bean ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform witlCthe^basic chauvinist principle, and as well with jltZ - /W's the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is foz‘ QC Ko^r‘ because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauv­ 1 ft/qh'a»4. inism may conflict with stewardship or co-operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, b’J to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy^ 4^fV Vl to- A, (. ^,kJ ; 7 brovj^ rsuei jUj^^-° £o loot e^> K'oV«f^arjJ< (lii) ? But as_____________ the last people do not natural resources. --------------------------------------------- -------- —..... — xO°V ' ! J destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the the variant is still environmentallW^,^ best of reasons", inadequate. The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3) . The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant, S.sau<i */>'»' \ v#' rei complex of automated factories and farms which he - <r> I01" ’• I Z/ "11 *-)- LJ ° V / f O XI �10. proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. A Of coarse he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare CHvc since he much prefers increased output and product­ ka L■/ l^,(- if- A> p^i^ /? * ’ gUV* k' I */t^> pQ (J ivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western J ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonlyj'bovtW', thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this C^S/XU-i example to the industrial society example: looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. (, J X «< T 7/ vr u*fl ^4/ ’“fa *• TafeTT lQ w the society Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic picture. The J— ' blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of X his qualities as a private good, as a source of valu- able oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, 7 though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hunting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect rf the "C V '•S M 'n �11. blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruc— tion of its habitat by man's activity or the activ­ ities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plainsdwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible — at least according to basic chauvinism. L-iUl il~ Wk & But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whalers to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environ mental economics would; instead the market model will HL ui 7?I grind inexorably * along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable - if a n a 2^ o>^.‘ I, fisKis that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that Ola rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren't environmentalists going too far in claim­ ing that these people, those of the examples and respected industrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remaining blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a * For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [ 3 ] . �0 n ‘s ■UjK , i 111 „lth ... „„ r .=... .J- extending (2) to rnclu .,question were they placed in would be so affected by the action in It may be preferand (3) to exclude speciej&de. the environment in vieW of the way the freedom “J ab le, imply to scrap it altogether, and mate proof, s of rights and permissible conduct, as in a b classes theory sometimes forces changes §3 a radical change in a rejects the Reference in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which a modification of the Theory in a Reference Theory and usual -ta-tdef-eh^also^aeee Jat simllt pheno^nCseens to occur in the case of a neta- A somewhat s nxl P ethlc. Quite apart from ethl°de’“ several environmentally important notions, such as introducing several meta— n 4.4™ arowth and preservation, for mec» conservation, pollut^COTp^e-examinatlon I ethical analysis, an ,< of such characteristic(actions) as natural and modified analyses 3 of obligation and round of right, and of the relations right■ may well require re-assessment of permissibility to rights; it notions as value and right, espectraditional analyses of such on chauvinist assumptions; and it ially where these are based of the more prominent meta-ethical forces the rejection of many illustrated by a very brief exam­ positions. These points are then by a sketch of the ination of accounts of nature^ right an speciess bias of some major positions. * positions. to defeating conditions Hart (in [5]) accepts, subject doctrine of natural rights here irrelevant, the classical which are 'anv adult human ■.• to which, among other things, according are developed by those protesting about points are oevei p especially the essay s Some of these ltreatment of animals; see especial y human ma collected in [4] . �9 /z O /< A, °uf 13. a i, g>OT' ° >f 1 capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no oblig­ ation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons'. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect .. to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees^have rights (though such a view is occasionally held, e.g. by partheists. since artefacts are not alive). But p^/theism is false For moral prohibitions forbidding certairTactions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., has a right also has responsibilities and thereat least , whatever____________ 'J fore obligations, and whatever has a right has interests, Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights, and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. r \fhO< * But persons can relate AT ***. A- */Z /» A '^s" fa . ... 8(^ �14. morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth, to practically anything at all. The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typ­ ically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happi­ ness, as a summum bgnum; characteristically each individual of soine base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual p rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule­ utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to The species bias is transparent from the the collective ranking. selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism; namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, ive then by the Pareto ranking test the collect/ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (hori­ zontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing * �b'v d(k^ V10'" hU •x'5 5 15. oP , X» private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to kr^ow that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then "rational" economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of .the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some vogue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill- disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is R. Routley (rough) justice. Australian National University �REFERENCES [1] A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almenac with other essays on Conservation, New York (1966) . [2] J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). [3] P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, Environmental Decay. New York (1972). [4] The Solution becomes the Problem, S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Men and Morals. hon-humans, [5] Economic Growth and H.L.A. Hart, An enquiry into the maltreatment of London (1971) . 'Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in A. Quinton (editor), Oxford (1967). Animals, Political Philosophy, �The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, Of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual prankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that-the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then “rational” economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on televi­ sion. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not aione in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some vigue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is (rough) justice. / REFERENCES 1. A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac with other essays on Conservation. New York (1966). 2. J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). 3. P.W.Barkley and D.W.Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). 4. S. and R.Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Animals, Men and Morals. An enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans, London (1971). 5. H.L.A.Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?’, reprinted in A.Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). �§ 3. A radical change in a teory sometimes forces changes in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way requires a modification of the usual metatheory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A somewhat similar phenomena seems to occur in the case of a meta-ethic adequate for an environmental ethic. Quite apart from introducing several environmen­ tally important notions, such as conservation, pollution, growth and preservation,for meta-ethical analysis, an environmental ethic compels re-examination and modified analyses of such characteristic actions as natural right, ground of right, and of the relations of obligation and permissibility to rights; it may well require re-assessment of traditional analyses of such notions as XT value and right, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions; and it forces the rejec­ tion of many of the more prominent meta-ethical positions. These points are illustrated by a very brief examination of accounts of natural right and then by a sketch of the species bias of some * 6 major positions.7 A Hart (in [5]) accepts, subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant, the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, ‘any adult human . . . capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons’. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes * the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a farzfrom straight forward matter now that human rights with' respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights (though such a view is occasionally held, e.g. by pantheists. But pantheism is false since artefacts are not alive). For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., at least, whatever has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever has a right has in­ terests. Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights, and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. But persons can relate morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth, to practically anything at all. H Some of these points are developed by those protesting about human maltreatment of animals; see especially the essays collected in [4] �/§ 2. As we noticed (an) ethic is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster.4 An ethical system S 3 If ‘use’ is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature 4 A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which in­ cludes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights, what is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems Sj and S2contain different principles, then they are different systems. It follows that any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlin­ ed. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) — in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is commonly assumed that there are. what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified dominance position. A recent for­ mulation5 runs as follows ( [31, p. 58): ’The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.’ Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism - because under it humans, or people, come first and everything else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which mess up the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restric­ tion is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being t anywav, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure because ‘other’ may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent, and privilege, of the chauvinism whethe^ ‘other’ expands to ‘other human’ - which is too restrictive - or to ‘other’person’ or to ‘other’seritient being’; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and in­ versely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, and whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely un­ workable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. It is taken for granted in designing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations * (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some ideal situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over the class of ideal situations. (i) The last man example. The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be commit­ ted to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that ra­ dical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where peonle arrive at a new planet and 5 A related principle is that (modified) free enterprise can operate v. ithin similar limits �destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an en­ vironmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wreck­ ed place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauvinism may conflict with stewardship or co­ operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps “for the best of reasons”, the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur’s behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being “better off’. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this ex­ ample to the Industrial society example: the society looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic pic­ ture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may up­ set them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hun­ ting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man’s activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whalep to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably 6 along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable-if that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren’t en­ vironmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respected in­ dustrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading ac­ tivities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remain­ ing blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a satisfactory 6 For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [3] freedom principle is a more difficult matter. A tentative, but none too adequate beginning might be made by extending (2) to include harm to or interference with others who would be so affected by the action in question were they placed in the environment and (3) to exclude specieside. It may be preferable, in view of the way the freedom principle sets the onus of proof, simply to scrap it altogether, and instead to specify classes of rights and permissible conduct, as in a bill of rights. �CJ\^<. & ’ �§ 1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people’s relations to the natural environ­ ment, in Leopold’s words ‘an ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it’ ([1], p. 238). It is not of course that old and prevaling ethics do not deal with man’s relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as ‘Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees’ are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe’s actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects.1 It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take ex­ ception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. ‘A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope,turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall,rocks, andsoil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society.’ ([1]), p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such traditionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure.2 Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn’t a 1 A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits - To the consternation modoubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeterminate 205 �single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women’s rights and drugs, there are competing sets of prin­ ciples. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man’s relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserv­ ed from substantial human interference, whether of the “improving” sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth’s land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and com­ fortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man’s role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that wiil deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use,implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used3 for human ends, “humanized”. As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assump­ tion). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer’s polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The posi­ tion may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situa­ tion excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document /Zr ? . —p ~r \? ^,rr C-dcOf' ’ Z/ <7 *" IT /r V *- / V-; *V / $ 7&L zz '//L Q^^^ziztix ’ / u/~ * Z ____________________________ _.__ __ i__ /LXiX^ caX /"&w€ < 0 0 C2--7 > * # cJZZ ;/r<UL^ 7 /Uaf OL y^&J t^—-^ c / A. jfl-JZ- r^ Z< /& C^4 ydctu^ ■ /* ) ^o . t X Ifaj&S CZ--~~ f^.<..,r~.^ J* - t-*-—/'"ZO C'--' /Ah C cr^ %&x c + (J/U-'Z) So ^a, \.c^aQ^^-^- h -f^-. Al<^i & <c^e . /?7_7 ^Succx’ G f f C ’ ^lA y rw''-t/{-<-y ic^^> y i^~ re^td 7«Sc^ J Co-1 e-^--^ ) Z*! ff’zv-^- "f^ * — *—*. "fc-s £-?1'i cxj/ui&t^-r a-^f^~~ 0»c<ZJ-1 U-X-A *U \ i f-^ \ O/£ !~ -farf > /aVZ /(nJ/ ftc. Cc ~ v/Z 6__-7 <rvt-/>^-«^- /f /r/$6 , e^jLj ^r~ tc-tX. * / , /t-c-h^/J-C / /'■ ‘5-’-x ' r-v^ S- k /^^z'-s-^- . 1. 2, />31 c Aon^ 3^cucr-^tA ^\> . [C*Z^ l^tr^rfL. &- keJfcZr I v c^~ Z«cvC^<- C ^^^7 i /o rvt t &Sta<^- C-A Q"^Z Cy-<^K-X /^XLZ^ /fa o/f c ?/t«X <-4>*-x y /L^ j. st-e^Q- 7^~ <**£ — /i^ r C'rfZ'-r-e. c^r — r £^y—~ S'.-cr-J tc & i s-zas-qs , X^z £&~-^ J ^~^tr * /ft- 2 A&- -I c \ fr d z^e>o /^OT'ta j£_.. ! /) /v~^ MG _ * £-3 Cjy^L—^ -—y Cjl^/~~~ cr-tza/ G-^ 7^tA/<L i z j^yZs: Ar- y£/7* rAcZo< 4 x/f y c\) &l/—-r <) 4> ~r &-s-^ I f_7? jy>Crr&<^ c2s^r o f^.^7 C9h / x/~^ ' /A '<2^yr < e&y<z~ y jr^/a -r /Q^r- fAt / s-yL^ ^-r °y-^ ), Jt /f/o£ &S&4T / /— .J / A!v C' V~^ bA Q a <f f • Ct//< I J * G t ' ~^ 'C ' y/ yzC ’ / -/> £^v<^7 eA u— « o~v AX-£ C »-^ jF /£)>v'^ .//■ Tkefie /? zz /j ZCt't-X 6-<f\ C{/~P-C‘ Q^777l_ U^rfs-sK ^s&TftL^t c<rtfi( *7/7 < U,f (,fe~^ '^T^cTT/vt^} . ’/T'e^TT^'C'^f J -f7\7 ft-/1 c7 fC c& ne7 &p '7^ d/L'l7?) /7 I*A 0.77^ tyt^fOl C^-y /A'! 6l^ ^.- f&ttdT' <-^- t^sl_ fr&7 Ctd#' /o 77jl. 7&i /Ttr&'i Ct-^>7 c r\f7 e&'CT^Tt q^j^cC''^'^^7 c^^-^7. ’y^ 77j2^'i£~— tc J cf Oyf/Tl/rfd^ ; 4xwZ Cott^v7(2y<2^o^/t/^ 7cr^2-/77^~-f- c^ty C/ / 7c/>\ //~o~rj7I^/77 , 'Ycr’rt^—^f 7t> />.c^ /\t>777'^ r f-^-a 71/-VC/~ &A />Clf *-S o^^/c7e7cTt-^ cCcf J 7?S /uy t77LT~ e7^-^r c^y^r ry^c7^ Ci^>t^/l(>i /^-^rv-/&--Z . a-^'e'C <2_^z, j Q-^C— <2^7^x-e_ *-x cu 7^ sfct-'y Cc-rt7 ctr<?'£7' O^i I/^TvC^y c^~ ^-t<--^ > /z7^jC7ccr»^ / 07^ <n-Tt'o=/~ <2-^-x t P 7<^/jCn ) 7T&. 7/^-Z i 77n.(7f^7<c'^ </&— a^-y 77'tc7 It a^C ('~7 /f 0L^7c^r^_ eJ^TCT^ ft 7cf ii^7f z»^7 Jt&OK f f f / X (a- r/<2^C-^-cC^ 77j2_ > c/c'^e_ C{^~f(L/\ 7/j2_ CL-^f /ti c///^/'(^ *'CC-- Ct cofd- /z^-ZZ (£-}~y /L«fc^Z>^e_y oZ1 C A' Ccr-z^yf (L Ctrt><?77 t LU-O&? tf^a^. c^ Zx / cXJ cu / C l<7 fC 7Z<* ^t?ZZ?Zv >^_-/ Q-yn cr~t-^f' C^>\( J Cr-f\ J (~7<&-/->^. 7^2- fc'ft-c^~7c^-^<j /mc^r e^a t^- cTs. r^)<i7'f c 7^e~<s^c^7ce--^-. 7'nJO I'C />C T~— « (,-ry^u^ /f ,7 Xy-e c/fr'cZ r , £z£Ez4*z <, / JMTaT's'p i*ia^ fe TiaTur^ / 7 *k <^ ^z?y/ZC’/ixA^ /ci>< * Z &XGc^ Ct' *' X rcr>t>^- s-<rf/<7^ f 6^7/Zk X' e> 7 /X O-r-^C- ci.WLtS //&- ,j e/Z </, tZ^Z /C( Al <Z“ (j&7 l/f/vft M. •'X / * e>^- <51 O'Z J«> 77 if OML. £Sy. /eccd/f' * •y *£^ [~c-< -£y- <5l ^2‘( ^A'77^'^ *-A'-'r\ X/<s Pc^/fc>^7 *x C^0t'(X-4'-t-' f j"/ X//Os/<^) c-XX^^-Ttcr/^^ -125 TABLE 2. Populations of Australia at 2040 under various assumptions as to population at 2000 and various growth rates. Population in Hypothesis as Population in millions at 2000 to growth rate millions at 2040 more \ likely) •' range /' 17-3 1.1% from 1970 26.8 17.8 1.2% from 1970 28.7 18.9 1.1% from 2000 29.2 18.9 1.2% from 2000 30.4 20.0 1.1% from 2000 30.9 20.0 1.2% from 2000 32.2 21.0 1.1% from 2000 32.5 21.0 1.2% from 2000 33.8 21.0 1.4% from 2000 36.6 22.0 1.7% from 2000 38.2 22.0 1.5% from 2000 39.6 22.4 1.87% from 2000 46.99 probable range C C~ ^) ^co — fVX (f J) V /P' ~~ S^^C /1/^oa^ A X ex A . eu /^. C- t fdL <^2^^Z222 d^£ZZZ. *~^ <^tJO- Z^//9^ 7 s' ^y, J //t,i-rr-f (&df ) ■“?il/< ^' \<_2 TK / cz-v^ 4 - • ( Guy <k_-< Z'-X' —* t A'-r^ cr \ JQ v~<M ) W ' , 7 h t/Jo— i-v—^ f / 77 ! C ) 7 * —-z *- //7’Z. /£■ • Vr/(i7 .^r 6(Jo~-, Z<— /)L^i rMs. /?7/. X <sil<y/ t !A) ■ (aJ - * /?7 /f C tf btot . aJ 2-<~ LAtJ - -t)£^ < * ft /? ( C< J-lJL a. ** * i. r f y-y—7 f y-« ft ’ />>Zu4^ <^»%x /iXt+J A J £ VL^vCtf nn--^ A/ kJ»J^fceg. * ""/ 0 <<,_____ M<X f _ z. 4 <fTb WhSAIttAf ■ A-3 ^~\—yX y^~- L-C^— yV S —, MZa5 / Za-^c^gx ^Zg^Cg^ z £ jC z~ A- + AC //cr.&r ■ CL7K ,j> <-n /^-^c-t A^-S )LA ** G/4 A * (r A-txvj? /^c- aa y. t ox X-^-l^I. 3. *-^. xV- /^X^C-tA^, . . " Z-cx6<^-^— . • Xax^—^X-fc«2--- Z^72 • <>—•* —* - ^S>-^-^--»<-<--^-<--^- —— fiyz-- LAu) */"/. < 7 AA^C L/^u) Hl-L. bC' f. f /i4jZ. ■^/ / <f-^ h-eJz^ s4- 1>. ^- ■ ^ ■ tA-^ -<-^ ,/^«^?* —* -J^^~ i-'' Att^y X. 'ITI- : - ' /J. ^/. , _ z A. ■? 1 / t. ———— L />l^^-p^- - rf7(. cJs~^ k-<-~^ k^tjL 7~^-A. a -^l. Z/72- — ^3hx7. &TH 77- Ml Mo.f. rfc 7f£r . C7</ A- *- 6/4-c. ~7^- Zf . z>6r * £/?£ /Vd 7?. Pff ■ bCr 5\ i^jLt M. _____ £ (/I -7^^ ■ S1L- fJ.T., !^^^/J^.t /?7±^ z /O&?, /4 at </7 • Hz.f C- . /?7U a a^3,Z t 7f~i>—e-^-^y t •2:^7/ 3t Aj. /7'. //7-Z-. -€_-<t-^£), o-^-JL —-&-- J- ~ * <^- ? -^*-/ -Z-V«—!— / ■* ’ T£ C** &' ** La ^71.. l—<-*. -A- -~^_, /Vo. 1 A. H>^ .^-^t Z>Z_-/_</j/'Z— . Zd~ *« /u^~^<-, ' Tl^ C^—zZ *-^ ?7vz) O£ . Z ‘5^ *-' 2) —- Z if-4/^. C<^V ZZtM—>«_LZZ«_J XZt-^Z-'Zt——»->—ZL /y/J<r 7/er ■Q 77 Crz> / * > z5 ?£> // r Al. 14 ■ ^C<Z>-x^ C Z-tLc /L-Z-Z-^ Z^->—^U<ZZ<^, //7 2- . % £■ <-4 -■-t>-<-^<-c-<^<—. J A /■Ic ly'.zr .Parf ^'7/. ., /-/ 2) 3 /??/. o^i>^ JLj/■■y 7. *3&-4 t-^/b (4J//y. £ * Oz ^Cff^4.7-t4-^ ? y ■ —>'— uJ^-j ^c/cXtJ yd^^x-. c^—cj'P <-4-4 7 / (./) - /3J~ CS^-C /??,). / &-O\^f &7 73 ><-C^ *Uy Z*/ . Z ^7 / . 6^7 -L- uJ^-7 — f"l— {)—&*<-. /■ '5, < £-4- ■ (J,3,^, /f73. The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Letter, Dick Coutinho, Royal Vangorcum to Dr Richard Routley, Australian National University, 1974? re Routhley's manuscript on environmental ethics. (1 leaf) u*^ •f-— Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic? §1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environment, in Leopold's words 'an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' ([1], p.238). It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as 'Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, It is to this, to the values and evaluations moral objects. * of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral crit­ icism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases,to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. 'A * A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits. 2 farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if other­ wise decent) a respected member of society.' ([1], p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such trad­ itionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing of the argument. it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain * obscure. Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn't a single ethical system uniquely assumed in * To the consternation no doubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeter­ minate . 3. Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man's relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environ­ mental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic can * not be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved from substantial human interference, whether of 4. the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying that every natural area should be culti­ vated or otherwise used * for human ends, "humanized". As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was * If 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature. simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assumption). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified posi­ tion can undoubtedly go much further towards an environ­ mental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall A new ethic is wanted. e As we noticed (an) ethic is ambiguous, as between try to show. §2. a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster. * An ethical system S is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evalu­ ative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights^what * A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions. 6. is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems S| and S2 contain different principles then they are different systems. It follows that any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is commonly assumed that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fair- ness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of 4- A'/Z the modified dominance position:. A recent formulation * runs as follows ([3], p.58): 'The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishesproviding (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism -because under it humans, or people, come first and everything else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which mess up the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm * A related principle is that (modified) can operate within similar limits. t X /< > /Cy , .... r -r- free enterprise 'i- others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure because 'other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent, and privilege, of the chauvinism whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too restrictive - or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient -hv being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, and whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely unworkable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others, 7/v It is taken for granted in designing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even incon­ sistent) , so that what is permissible holds in some ideal situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over the class of ideal situations. (i) The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every The last man example. living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs) . What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to esot­ eric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild 9. animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an environmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauv­ inism may conflict with stewardship or co-operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the best of reasons", the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he 10. proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and product­ ivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this example to the industrial society example: looks rather like Civ) the society ours. The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic picture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hunting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the 11. blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruc­ tion of its habitat by man's activity or the activ­ ities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains- dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible - at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whalers to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environ­ mental economics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably * along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable - if ’r < that point has not already been passed. 7/7 / (U• ‘ In sum' class of permissible actions that /rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren't environmentalists going too far in claim­ ing that these people, those of the examples and respected industrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? these people do is No, what to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remaining blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a * For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [3] . 13. /•~i'<'-^\,< /a. Z\z i>'"<’- • > Gf * —‘<-r ^~i ♦ <"- capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no oblig­ ation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons'. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic 14. morally, through obligations practically anything at all. The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typ­ ically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happi­ ness, as a summum banum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual p rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule­ utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism; namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes' behaviour, ive then by the Pareto ranking test the collect/ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (hori­ zontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing J 15. private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then "rational" economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position.which has some vogue-obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill- disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them; that is (rough) justice. R. Routley Australian National University REFERENCES [1] A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almenac with other essays on Conservation, [2] J. Passmore, New York (196 6) . Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). [3] P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). [4] S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Men and Morals. hon-humans, [5] Animals, An enquiry into the maltreatment of London (1971). H.L.A. Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in A. Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Letter, S. I. Benn, Acting Head of Department of Philosophy to Dr. R. Rosenkrantz, Department of Philosophy, University of South Caroline, 6 Sep 1973 re fellowship at the Research School of Social Sciences, supervised by Richard Routley. (3 pages) A < wx ^S> eJ *-X (J J *~7f^ ^2 /^t)A / ' / T L64'«-' *■■ J *e7^ 7' ** 44/ I { MorV 7^ c c *■/' /-X /_ ZMZL4ixO Z-/>< a>% , ... --------------- M-i-J ^1.___ /L (? k c 7 )------ 3o^> X^> £ i Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic? §1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people's relations to the natural environment, in Leopold’s words ’an ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it' ([1], p.238). It is not of course that old and prevailing ethics do not deal with man's relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. such as Thus assertions Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees' are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe's actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, It is to this, to the values and evaluations moral oojects. * of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take exception. Leopold regards as subject to moral crit­ icism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases,to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. 'A * A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house * spirits. 2. fanner who clears the woods off a 75% slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if other­ wise decent) a respected member of society.' ([1], p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such trad­ itionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the fanner subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriously, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain * obscure. Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension or modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn't a single ethical system uniquely assumed in * To the consternation no doubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeter­ minate . 3. Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women's rights and drugs, there are competing sets of principles. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man's relation to nature? a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant^ and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, ■ and tne co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environ­ mental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases, it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic can­ not be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserved * rom substantial human interference, whether of 4. the "improving" sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth's land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and comfortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is to develop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man's role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that will deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thorough­ going environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use, implying that every natural area should be culti­ vated or otherwise used * for human ends, "humanized". As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright, h// The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was * If 'use' is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature. simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assumption). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified posi tion can undoubtedly go much further towards an environ­ mental ethic. For example, the farmer's polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of(j[3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The position may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situation excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nonetheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted. §2. As we noticed (an) ethic is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster. * An ethical system S is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which includes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evalu­ ative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rightsr what * A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions. 6. is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems Sj and S2 contain different principles then they are different systems. It follows that any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlined. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) - in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is commonly assumed that there are, what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fair­ ness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified dominance position. A recent formulation * runs as follows ([3], p.58): K^> AACC C-aU tv/' i^/' of O'f speA SPcP yvxo &"( The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.' Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism - because jlfjA-aw itUU* under it humans, or people, come first and everything else a $4vM« *h bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives permission to perform a d(L<- tic. tic. Cl-IK Cl-ik i/Au*/ 7. others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restriction is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in £my interests, because I detest you?, that you stop breathing « I- you are free to breathe , for the time being anyway, because it does not harm me There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure because ’other' may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent, and privilege, of the chauvinism • t. whether 'other' expands to 'other human' - which is too ^1- -fL 3^ - WAa-Zm lullu rfy - Ah. I W-tc restrictive - <or to 'other person' or to 'other sentient being'; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and inversely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, and whether to possible others, The latter would make the principle completely unworkable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. It is taken for granted in designing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations (which may be incomplete or even incon­ sistent) , so that what is permissible holds in some ideal situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are 8. assessed over the class of ideal situations. The last man example. (1) The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays . . --------.................................... I about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly i you like, as at the best abattoirs) . What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, ) but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be committed to eso values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving I badly (the reason being perhaps that radical thinking ‘r- l C-a values have shifted in an environ-nt.l direction h- ■ eric '°f -^responding shifts in the formulation fundamental evaluative principles). The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One const ers the last people in order to rule out the posslbt 1 y that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where people arrive at a new planet and destroy its ecosystems whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruit.u or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild 4 v)O^ <? > J'" J fi. t(r JJj, /A h 9- ‘s, L . it ilr ll' ^onJk ^cU-i /6 U' , zcrta srS o/J oa­ animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various V, familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an environmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and KfalltL largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon bean ugly and largely wrecked place. But this conduct may conform witlCthe^basic chauvinist principle, and as well with jltZ - /W's the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is foz‘ QC Ko^r‘ because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauv­ 1 ft/qh'a»4. inism may conflict with stewardship or co-operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, b’J to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy^ 4^fV Vl to- A, (. ^,kJ ; 7 brovj^ rsuei jUj^^-° £o loot e^> K'oV«f^arjJ< (lii) ? But as_____________ the last people do not natural resources. --------------------------------------------- -------- —..... — xO°V ' ! J destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps "for the the variant is still environmentallW^,^ best of reasons", inadequate. The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3) . The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant, S.sau<i */>'»' \ v#' rei complex of automated factories and farms which he - <r> I01" ’• I Z/ "11 *-)- LJ ° V / f O XI 10. proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. A Of coarse he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare CHvc since he much prefers increased output and product­ ka L■/ l^,(- if- A> p^i^ /? * ’ gUV* k' I */t^> pQ (J ivity. The entrepreneur's behaviour is on the Western J ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonlyj'bovtW', thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being "better off". Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this C^S/XU-i example to the industrial society example: looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. (, J X «< T 7/ vr u*fl ^4/ ’“fa *• TafeTT lQ w the society Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic picture. The J— ' blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of X his qualities as a private good, as a source of valu- able oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, 7 though it may upset them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hunting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect rf the "C V '•S M 'n 11. blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruc— tion of its habitat by man's activity or the activ­ ities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plainsdwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible — at least according to basic chauvinism. L-iUl il~ Wk & But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whalers to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environ mental economics would; instead the market model will HL ui 7?I grind inexorably * along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable - if a n a 2^ o>^.‘ I, fisKis that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that Ola rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren't environmentalists going too far in claim­ ing that these people, those of the examples and respected industrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading activities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remaining blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a * For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [ 3 ] . 0 n ‘s ■UjK , i 111 „lth ... „„ r .=... .J- extending (2) to rnclu .,question were they placed in would be so affected by the action in It may be preferand (3) to exclude speciej&de. the environment in vieW of the way the freedom “J ab le, imply to scrap it altogether, and mate proof, s of rights and permissible conduct, as in a b classes theory sometimes forces changes §3 a radical change in a rejects the Reference in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which a modification of the Theory in a Reference Theory and usual -ta-tdef-eh^also^aeee Jat simllt pheno^nCseens to occur in the case of a neta- A somewhat s nxl P ethlc. Quite apart from ethl°de’“ several environmentally important notions, such as introducing several meta— n 4.4™ arowth and preservation, for mec» conservation, pollut^COTp^e-examinatlon I ethical analysis, an ,< of such characteristic(actions) as natural and modified analyses 3 of obligation and round of right, and of the relations right■ may well require re-assessment of permissibility to rights; it notions as value and right, espectraditional analyses of such on chauvinist assumptions; and it ially where these are based of the more prominent meta-ethical forces the rejection of many illustrated by a very brief exam­ positions. These points are then by a sketch of the ination of accounts of nature^ right an speciess bias of some major positions. * positions. to defeating conditions Hart (in [5]) accepts, subject doctrine of natural rights here irrelevant, the classical which are 'anv adult human ■.• to which, among other things, according are developed by those protesting about points are oevei p especially the essay s Some of these ltreatment of animals; see especial y human ma collected in [4] . 9 /z O /< A, °uf 13. a i, g>OT' ° >f 1 capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no oblig­ ation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons'. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a far from straight forward matter now that human rights with respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect .. to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees^have rights (though such a view is occasionally held, e.g. by partheists. since artefacts are not alive). But p^/theism is false For moral prohibitions forbidding certairTactions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., has a right also has responsibilities and thereat least , whatever____________ 'J fore obligations, and whatever has a right has interests, Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights, and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. r \fhO< * But persons can relate AT ***. A- */Z /» A '^s" fa . ... 8(^ 14. morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth, to practically anything at all. The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typ­ ically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happi­ ness, as a summum bgnum; characteristically each individual of soine base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual p rankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule­ utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to The species bias is transparent from the the collective ranking. selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism; namely that the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, ive then by the Pareto ranking test the collect/ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (hori­ zontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing * b'v d(k^ V10'" hU •x'5 5 15. oP , X» private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to kr^ow that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then "rational" economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on television. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not alone in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of .the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some vogue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill- disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is R. Routley (rough) justice. Australian National University REFERENCES [1] A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almenac with other essays on Conservation, New York (1966) . [2] J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). [3] P.W. Barkley and D.W. Seckier, Environmental Decay. New York (1972). [4] The Solution becomes the Problem, S. and R. Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Men and Morals. hon-humans, [5] Economic Growth and H.L.A. Hart, An enquiry into the maltreatment of London (1971) . 'Are there any natural rights?', reprinted in A. Quinton (editor), Oxford (1967). Animals, Political Philosophy, The species bias of certain ethical and economic positions which aim to make principles of conduct or reasonable economic behaviour calculable is easily brought out. These positions typically employ a single criterion p, such as preference or happiness, as a summum bonum; characteristically each individual of some base class, almost always humans, but perhaps including future humans, is supposed to have an ordinal p ranking of the states in question (e.g. of affairs, Of the economy); then some principle is supplied to determine a collective p ranking of these states in terms of individual prankings, and what is best or ought to be done is determined either directly, as in act-utilitarianism under the Greatest Happiness principle, or indirectly, as in rule-utilitarianism, in terms of some optimization principle applied to the collective ranking. The species bias is transparent from the selection of the base class. And even if the base class is extended to embrace persons, or even some animals (at the cost, like that of including remotely future humans, of losing testability), the positions are open to familiar criticism, namely that-the whole of the base class may be prejudiced in a way which leads to unjust principles. For example if every member of the base class detests dingoes, on the basis of mistaken data as to dingoes’ behaviour, then by the Pareto ranking test the collective ranking will rank states where dingoes are exterminated very highly, from which it will generally be concluded that dingoes ought to be exterminated (the evaluation of most Australian farmers anyway). Likewise it would just be a happy accident, it seems, if collective demand (horizontally summed from individual demand) for a state of the economy with blue whales as a mixed good, were to succeed in outweighing private whaling demands; for if no one in the base class happened to know that blue whales exist or cared a jot that they do then “rational” economic decision-making would do nothing to prevent their extinction. Whether the blue whale survives should not have to depend on what humans know or what they see on televi­ sion. Human interests and preferences are far too parochial to provide a satisfactory basis for deciding on what is environmentally desirable. These ethical and economic theories are not aione in their species chauvinism; much the same applies to most going meta-ethical theories which, unlike intuitionistic theories, try to offer some rationale for their basic principles. For instance, on social contract positions obligations are a matter of mutual agreements between individuals of the base class; on a social justice picture rights and obligations spring from the application of symmetrical fairness principles to members of the base class, usually a rather special class of persons, while on a Kantian position which has some vigue obligations somehow arise from respect for members of the base class, persons. In each case if members of the base class happen to be ill-disposed to items outside the base class then that is too bad for them: that is (rough) justice. / REFERENCES 1. A. Leopold, A Sand Country Almanac with other essays on Conservation. New York (1966). 2. J. Passmore, Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (unpublished). 3. P.W.Barkley and D.W.Seckier, Economic Growth and Environmental Decay. The Solution becomes the Problem, New York (1972). 4. S. and R.Godlovitch and J. Harris (editors), Animals, Men and Morals. An enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans, London (1971). 5. H.L.A.Hart, ‘Are there any natural rights?’, reprinted in A.Quinton (editor), Political Philosophy, Oxford (1967). § 3. A radical change in a teory sometimes forces changes in the meta-theory; e.g. a logic which rejects the Reference Theory in a thoroughgoing way requires a modification of the usual metatheory which also accepts the Reference Theory and indeed which is tailored to cater only for logics which do conform. A somewhat similar phenomena seems to occur in the case of a meta-ethic adequate for an environmental ethic. Quite apart from introducing several environmen­ tally important notions, such as conservation, pollution, growth and preservation,for meta-ethical analysis, an environmental ethic compels re-examination and modified analyses of such characteristic actions as natural right, ground of right, and of the relations of obligation and permissibility to rights; it may well require re-assessment of traditional analyses of such notions as XT value and right, especially where these are based on chauvinist assumptions; and it forces the rejec­ tion of many of the more prominent meta-ethical positions. These points are illustrated by a very brief examination of accounts of natural right and then by a sketch of the species bias of some * 6 major positions.7 A Hart (in [5]) accepts, subject to defeating conditions which are here irrelevant, the classical doctrine of natural rights according to which, among other things, ‘any adult human . . . capable of choice is at liberty to do (i.e. is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons’. But this sufficient condition for a human natural right depends on accepting the very human chauvinist principle an environmental ethic rejects, since if a person has a natural right he has a right; so too the definition of a natural right adopted by classical theorists and accepted with minor qualifications by Hart presupposes * the same defective principle. Accordingly an environmental ethic would have to amend the classical notion of a natural right, a farzfrom straight forward matter now that human rights with' respect to animals and the natural environment are, like those with respect to slaves not all that long ago, undergoing major re-evaluation. An environmental ethic does not commit one to the view that natural objects such as trees have rights (though such a view is occasionally held, e.g. by pantheists. But pantheism is false since artefacts are not alive). For moral prohibitions forbidding certain actions with respect to an object do not award that object a correlative right. That it would be wrong to mutilate a given tree or piece of property does not entail that the tree or piece of property has a correlative right not to be mutilated (without seriously stretching the notion of a right). Environmental views can stick with mainstream theses according to which rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities and so with bearing obligations, and with corresponding interests and concern; i.e., at least, whatever has a right also has responsibilities and therefore obligations, and whatever has a right has in­ terests. Thus although any person may have a right by no means every living thing can (significantly) have rights, and arguably most sentient objects other than persons cannot have rights. But persons can relate morally, through obligations, prohibitions and so forth, to practically anything at all. H Some of these points are developed by those protesting about human maltreatment of animals; see especially the essays collected in [4] /§ 2. As we noticed (an) ethic is ambiguous, as between a specific ethical system, a specific ethic, and a more generic notion, a super ethic, under which specific ethics cluster.4 An ethical system S 3 If ‘use’ is extended, somewhat illicitly, to include use for preservation, this total use principle is rendered inocuous at least as regards its actual effects. Note that the total use principle is tied to the resource view of nature 4 A meta-ethic is, as usual, a theory about ethics, super ethics, their features and fundamental notions is, near enough, a propositional system (i.e. a structured set of propositions) or theory which in­ cludes (like individuals of a theory) a set of values and (like postulates of a theory) a set of general evaluative judgements concerning conduct, typically of what is obligatory, permissible and wrong, of what are rights, what is valued, and so forth. A general or lawlike proposition of a system is a principle; and certainly if systems Sj and S2contain different principles, then they are different systems. It follows that any environmental ethic differs from the important traditional ethics outlin­ ed. Moreover if environmental ethics differ from Western ethical systems on some core principle embedded in Western systems, then these systems differ from the Western super ethic (assuming, what seems to be so, that it can be uniquely characterised) — in which case if an environmental ethic is needed then a new ethic is wanted. It suffices then to locate a core principle and to provide environmental counter examples to it. It is commonly assumed that there are. what amount to, core principles of Western ethical systems, principles that will accordingly belong to the super ethic. The fairness principle inscribed in the Golden Rule provides one example. Directly relevant here, as a good stab at a core principle, is the commonly formulated liberal principle of the modified dominance position. A recent for­ mulation5 runs as follows ( [31, p. 58): ’The liberal philosophy of the Western world holds that one should be able to do what he wishes, providing (1) that he does not harm others and (2) that he is not likely to harm himself irreparably.’ Let us call this principle basic (human) chauvinism - because under it humans, or people, come first and everything else a bad last - though sometimes the principle is hailed as a freedom principle because it gives permission to perform a wide range of actions (including actions which mess up the environment and natural things) providing they do not harm others. In fact it tends to cunningly shift the onus of proof to others. It is worth remarking that harming others in the restric­ tion is narrower than a restriction to the (usual) interests of others; it is not enough that it is in my interests, because I detest you, that you stop breathing; you are free to breathe, for the time being t anywav, because it does not harm me. There remains a problem however as to exactly what counts as harm or interference. Moreover the width of the principle is so far obscure because ‘other’ may be filled out in significantly different ways: it makes a difference to the extent, and privilege, of the chauvinism whethe^ ‘other’ expands to ‘other human’ - which is too restrictive - or to ‘other’person’ or to ‘other’seritient being’; and it makes a difference to the adequacy of the principle, and in­ versely to its economic applicability, to which class of others it is intended to apply, whether to future as well as to present others, whether to remote future others or only to non-discountable future others, and whether to possible others. The latter would make the principle completely un­ workable, and it is generally assumed that it applies at most to present and future others. It is taken for granted in designing counter examples to basic chauvinist principles, that a semantical analysis of permissibility and obligation statements stretches out over ideal situations * (which may be incomplete or even inconsistent), so that what is permissible holds in some ideal situation, what is obligatory in every ideal situation, and what is wrong is excluded in every ideal situation. But the main point to grasp for the counter examples that follow, is that ethical principles if correct are universal and are assessed over the class of ideal situations. (i) The last man example. The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong. Moreover one does not have to be commit­ ted to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly (the reason being perhaps that ra­ dical thinking and values have shifted in an environmental direction in advance of corresponding shifts in the formulation of fundamental evaluative principles). (ii) The last people example. The last man example can be broadened to the last people example. We can assume that they know they are the last people, e.g. because they are aware that radiation effects have blocked any chance of reproduction. One considers the last people in order to rule out the possibility that what these people do harms or somehow physically interferes with later people. Otherwise one could as well consider science fiction cases where peonle arrive at a new planet and 5 A related principle is that (modified) free enterprise can operate v. ithin similar limits destroy its ecosystems, whether with good intentions such as perfecting the planet for their ends and making it more fruitful or, forgetting the lesser traditions, just for the hell of it. Let us assume that the last people are very numerous. They humanely exterminate every wild animal and they eliminate the fish of the seas, they put all arable land under intensive cultivation, and all remaining forests disappear in favour of quarries or plantations, and so on. They may give various familiar reasons for this, e.g. they believe it is the way to salvation or to perfection, or they are simply satisfying reasonable needs, or even that it is needed to keep the last people employed or occupied so that they do not worry too much about their impending extinctions. On an en­ vironmental ethic the last people have behaved badly; they have simplified and largely destroyed all the natural ecosystems, and with their demise the world will soon be an ugly and largely wreck­ ed place. But this conduct may conform with the basic chauvinist principle, and as well with the principles enjoined by the lesser traditions. Indeed the main point of elaborating this example is because, as the last man example reveals, basic chauvinism may conflict with stewardship or co­ operation principles. The conflict may be removed it seems by conjoining a further proviso to the basic principle, to the effect (3) that he does not wilfully destroy natural resources. But as the last people do not destroy resources wilfully, but perhaps “for the best of reasons”, the variant is still environmentally inadequate. (iii) The great entrepreneur example. The last man example can be adjusted so as to not fall foul of clause (3). The last man is an industrialist; he runs a giant complex of automated factories and farms which he proceeds to extend. He produces automobiles among other things, from renewable and recyclable resources of course, only he dumps and recycles these shortly after manufacture and sale to a dummy buyer instead of putting them on the road for a short time as we do. Of course he has the best of reasons for his activity, e.g. he is increasing gross world product, or he is improving output to fulfil some plan, and he will be increasing his own and general welfare since he much prefers increased output and productivity. The entrepreneur’s behaviour is on the Western ethic quite permissible; indeed his conduct is commonly thought to be quite fine and may even meet Pareto optimality requirements given prevailing notions of being “better off’. Just as we can extend the last man example to a class of last people, so we can extend this ex­ ample to the Industrial society example: the society looks rather like ours. (iv) The vanishing species example. Consider the blue whale, a mixed good on the economic pic­ ture. The blue whale is on the verge of extinction because of his qualities as a private good, as a source of valuable oil and meat. The catching and marketing of blue whales does not harm the whalers; it does not harm or physically interfere with others in any good sense, though it may up­ set them and they may be prepared to compensate the whalers if they desist; nor need whale hun­ ting be wilful destruction. (Slightly different examples which eliminate the hunting aspect of the blue whale example are provided by cases where a species is eliminated or threatened through destruction of its habitat by man’s activity or the activities of animals he has introduced, e.g. many plains-dwelling Australian marsupials and the Arabian oryx.) The behaviour of the whalers in eliminating this magnificent species of whale is accordingly quite permissible-at least according to basic chauvinism. But on an environmental ethic it is not. However the free-market mechanism will not cease allocating whalep to commercial uses, as a satisfactory environmental economics would; instead the market model will grind inexorably 6 along the private demand curve until the blue whale population is no longer viable-if that point has not already been passed. In sum, the class of permissible actions that rebound on the environment is more narrowly circumscribed on an environmental ethic than it is in the Western super ethic. But aren’t en­ vironmentalists going too far in claiming that these people, those of the examples and respected in­ dustrialists, fishermen and farmers are behaving, when engaging in environmentally degrading ac­ tivities of the sort described, in a morally impermissible way? No, what these people do is to a greater or lesser extent evil, and hence in serious cases morally impermissible. For example, insofar as the killing or forced displacement of primitive peoples who stand in the way of an industrial development is morally indefensible and impermissible, so also is the slaughter of the last remain­ ing blue whales for private profit. But how to reformulate basic chauvinism as a satisfactory 6 For the tragedy-of-the-commons type reasons well explained in [3] freedom principle is a more difficult matter. A tentative, but none too adequate beginning might be made by extending (2) to include harm to or interference with others who would be so affected by the action in question were they placed in the environment and (3) to exclude specieside. It may be preferable, in view of the way the freedom principle sets the onus of proof, simply to scrap it altogether, and instead to specify classes of rights and permissible conduct, as in a bill of rights. CJ\^<. & ’ § 1. It is increasingly said that civilization, Western civilization at least, stands in need of a new ethic (and derivatively of a new economics) setting out people’s relations to the natural environ­ ment, in Leopold’s words ‘an ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it’ ([1], p. 238). It is not of course that old and prevaling ethics do not deal with man’s relation to nature: they do, and on the prevailing view man is free to deal with nature as he pleases, i.e. his relations with nature, insofar at least as they do not affect others, are not subject to moral censure. Thus assertions such as ‘Crusoe ought not to be mutilating those trees’ are significant and morally determinate but, inasmuch at least as Crusoe’s actions do not interfere with others, they are false or do not hold - and trees are not, in a good sense, moral objects.1 It is to this, to the values and evaluations of the prevailing ethics, that Leopold and others in fact take ex­ ception. Leopold regards as subject to moral criticism, as wrong, behaviour that on prevailing views is morally permissible. But it is not, as Leopold seems to think, that such behaviour is beyond the scope of the prevailing ethics and that an extension of traditional morality is required to cover such cases, to fill a moral void. If Leopold is right in his criticism of prevailing conduct what is required is a change in the ethics, in attitudes, values and evaluations. For as matters stand, as he himself explains, men do not feel morally ashamed if they interfere with a wilderness, if they maltreat the land, extract from it whatever it will yield, and then move on; and such conduct is not taken to interfere with and does not rouse the moral indignation of others. ‘A farmer who clears the woods off a 75% slope,turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall,rocks, andsoil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society.’ ([1]), p.245) Under what we shall call an environmental ethic such traditionally permissible conduct would be accounted morally wrong, and the farmer subject to proper moral criticism. Let us grant such evaluations for the purpose of the argument. What is not so clear is that a new ethic is required even for such radical judgements. For one thing it is none too clear what is going to count as a new ethic, much as it is often unclear whether a new development in physics counts as a new physics or just as a modification or extension of the old. For, notoriosly, ethics are not clearly articulated or at all well worked out, so that the application of identity criteria for ethics may remain obscure.2 Furthermore we tend to cluster a family of ethical systems which do not differ on core or fundamental principles together as the one ethic; e.g. the Christain ethic, which is an umbrella notion covering a cluster of differing and even competing systems. In fact then there are two other possibilities, apart from a new environmental ethic, which might cater for the evaluations, namely that of an extension of modification of the prevailing ethics or that of the development of principles that are already encompassed or latent within the prevailing ethic. The second possibility, that environmental evaluations can be incorporated within (and ecological problems solved within) the framework of prevailing Western ethics, is open because there isn’t a 1 A view occasionally tempered by the idea that trees house spirits - To the consternation modoubt of Quineans. But the fact is that we can talk perfectly well about inchoate and fragmentary systems the identity of which may be indeterminate 205 single ethical system uniquely assumed in Western civilization: on many issues, and especially on controversial issues such as infanticide, women’s rights and drugs, there are competing sets of prin­ ciples. Talk of a new ethic and prevailing ethics tends to suggest a sort of monolithic structure, a uniformity, that prevailing ethics, and even a single ethic, need not have. Indeed Passmore (in [2]) has mapped out three important traditions in Western ethical views concerning man’s relation to nature; a dominant tradition, the despotic position, with man as despot (or tyrant), and two lesser traditions, the stewardship position, with man as custodian, and the co-operative position with man as perfector. Nor are these the only traditions; primitivism is another, and both romanticism and mysticism have influenced Western views. The dominant Western view is simply inconsistent with an environmental ethic; for according to it nature is the dominion of man and he is free to deal with it as he pleases (since - at least on the mainstream Stoic - Augustine view - it exists only for his sake), whereas on an environmental ethic man is not so free to do as he pleases. But it is not quite so obvious that an environmental ethic cannot be coupled with one of the lesser traditions. Part of the problem is that the lesser traditions are by no means adequately characterised anywhere, especially when the religious backdrop is removed, e.g. who is man steward for and responsible to? However both traditions are inconsistent with an environmental ethic because they imply policies of complete interference, whereas on an environmental ethic some worthwhile parts of the earth's surface should be preserv­ ed from substantial human interference, whether of the “improving” sort or not. Both traditions would in fact prefer to see the earth’s land surfaces reshaped along the lines of the tame and com­ fortable north-European small farm and village landscape. According to the co-operative position man's proper role is todevelop, cultivate and perfect nature - all nature eventually - by bringing out its potentialities, the test of perfection being primarily usefulness for human purposes; while on the stewardship view man’s role, like that of a farm manager, is to make nature productive by his efforts though not by means that wiil deliberately degrade its resources. Although these positions both depart from the dominant position in a way which enables the incorporation of some evaluations of an environmental ethic, e.g. some of those concerning the irresponsible farmer, they do not go far enough: for in the present situation of expanding populations confined to finite natural areas, they will lead to, and enjoin, the perfecting, farming and utilizing of all natural areas. Indeed these lesser traditions lead to, what a thoroughgoing environmental ethic would reject, a principle of total use,implying that every natural area should be cultivated or otherwise used3 for human ends, “humanized”. As the important Western traditions exclude an environmental ethic, it would appear that such an ethic, not primitive, mystical or romantic, would be new alright. The matter is not so straightforward; for the dominant ethic has been substantially qualified by the rider that one is not always entitled to do as one pleases where this physically interferes with others. Maybe some such proviso was implicit all along (despite evidence to the contrary), and it was simply assumed that doing what one pleased with natural items would not affect others (the non-interference assump­ tion). Be this as it may, the modified dominant position appears, at least for many thinkers, to have supplanted the dominant position; and the modified position can undoubtedly go much further towards an environmental ethic. For example, the farmer’s polluting of a community stream may be ruled immoral on the grounds that it physically interferes with others who use or would use the stream. Likewise business enterprises which destroy the natural environment for no satisfactory returns or which cause pollution deleterious to the health of future humans, can be criticised on the sort of welfare basis (e.g. that of [3]) that blends with the modified position; and so on. The posi­ tion may even serve to restrict the sort of family size one is entitled to have since in a finite situa­ tion excessive population levels will interfere with future people. Nontheless neither the modified dominant position nor its Western variants, obtained by combining it with the lesser traditions, is adequate as an environmental ethic, as I shall try to show. A new ethic is wanted.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 15, Item 1720: Papers and notes on environmental theory, ethics, preference and economics Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span><span>,</span> Box 15, Item 1720 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:857e1c6" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:857e1c6</a> Description An account of the resource Letters redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Title in collection finding aid: Manilla Folder - Environmental Theory /1) Ethics 2) preference 3) economics - papers. and notes RS & VP + others Subject The topic of the resource Typescripts and handwritten notes. Includes 2 draft copies of 'Is there a need for a new, an environmental, ethic?' by Sylvan, with handwritten emendations and annotations; and 2 letters. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [75] leaves. 57.42 MB. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University Office - Second Bookcase - Third Shelf - Second Pile Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Second Bookcase > Third Shelf > Second Pile Box 15: Green Projects in Progress https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/aa63c63d0f45fac75f526b06c8424b3c.pdf 17bec21c0f33132227ac917e05e5336e PDF Text Text ������������ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear Power—Some Ethical and Social Dimensions Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Rowman and Littlefield Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1982 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/0b7902d211e4ae23ce6364a79b1fdef4.pdf 903a4c17a0584ed036707fe4b4aa469a PDF Text Text ������������������������������������������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear Power—Some Ethical, Social and Political Dimensions Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au/index.php/uqfl291" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Sylvan Papers, UQFL291</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/448d8517e9ca68f07df1452eec947883.pdf 5534af9a9b545e7a7587c7c0c0504e3a PDF Text Text ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft of Nuclear Power—Some Ethical, Social and Political Dimensions Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au/index.php/uqfl291" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Sylvan Papers, UQFL291</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/f6c3d304b2d018293fdb7af1b751feb9.pdf 7497b1a142a2ee74e689488a2bfa234a PDF Text Text Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 �134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- �Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear �136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the �Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a �138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the �Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- �140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary �Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear �142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his �Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. �144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community �Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. �146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) �Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a �148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) �Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present �150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower �Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's �152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and �Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is �154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in �Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast �156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will �Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future �158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- �Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring �160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person �Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. �162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the �Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy �164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy �Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- �166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of �Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. �168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, �Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) �170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's �Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion �172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, �Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: �174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable �Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: �176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. �Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- �178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. �Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear 136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- 140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear 142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. 144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. 146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a 148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present 150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's 152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is 154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast 156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future 158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring 160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. 162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy 164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- 166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. 168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) 170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion 172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: 174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: 176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- 178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear energy and obligations to the future Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Prometheus Books. <a href="https://manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au/index.php/uqfl291" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Sylvan Papers, UQFL291</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1981 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/6ef0b9e2ef93f843eb517882e681cbb3.pdf 7497b1a142a2ee74e689488a2bfa234a PDF Text Text Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 �134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- �Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear �136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the �Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a �138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the �Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- �140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary �Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear �142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his �Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. �144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community �Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. �146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) �Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a �148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) �Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present �150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower �Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's �152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and �Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is �154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in �Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast �156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will �Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future �158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- �Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring �160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person �Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. �162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the �Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy �164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy �Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- �166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of �Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. �168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, �Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) �170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's �Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion �172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, �Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: �174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable �Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: �176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. �Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- �178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. �Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Inquiry, 21, 133-79 Nuclear Energy and Obligations to the Future R. and V. Routley Plumwood Mountain, Braidwood, Australia The paper considers the morality of nuclear energy development as it concerns future people, especially the creation of highly toxic nuclear wastes requiring longterm storage. On the basis of an example with many parallel moral features it is argued that the imposition of such costs and risks on the future is morally unacceptable. The paper goes on to examine in detail possible ways of escaping this conclusion, especially the escape route of denying that moral obligations of the appropriate type apply to future people. The bulk of the paper comprises discussion of this philosophical issue, including many arguments against assigning obligations to the future drawn both from analyses of obligation and from features of the future such as uncertainty and indeterminacy. A further escape through appeal to moral conflict is also considered, and in particular two conflict arguments, the Poverty and Lights-going-out arguments are briefly discussed. Both these escape routes are rejected and it is concluded that if the same standards of behaviour are applied to the future as to the present, nuclear energy development is morally unacceptable. I. The Bus Example Suppose we consider a bus, a bus which we hope is to make a very long journey. This bus, a third world bus, carries both passengers and freight. The bus sets down and picks up many different passengers in the course of its long journey and the drivers change many times, but because of the way the bus line is managed and the poor service on the route it is nearly always full to overcrowded, with passengers hanging off the back, and as in Afghanistan, passengers riding on the roof, and chickens and goats in the freight compartment. Early in the bus's journey someone consigns on it, to a far distant destination, a package containing a highly toxic and explosive gas. This is packaged in a very thin container, which as the consigner well knows is unlikely to contain the gas for the full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the bus should encounter any trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior of the bus becomes very hot, if the bus should strike a very large bump or pothole of the sort commonly found on some of the bad roads it has to traverse, or if some 1 134 R. and V. Routley passenger should interfere deliberately or inadvertently with the cargo or perhaps try to steal some of the freight, as also frequently happens. All of these things, let us suppose, have happened on some of the bus's previous journeys. If the container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people and animals on the bus, while others could be maimed or contract serious diseases. There does not seem much doubt about what most of us would say about the morality of the consigner's action, and there is certainly no doubt about what the passengers would say. The consigner's action in putting the safety of the occupants of the bus at risk is appalling. What could excuse such an action, what sort of circumstances might justify it, and what sort of case could the consigner reasonably put up? The consigner might say that it is by no means certain that the gas will escape; he himself is an optimist and therefore feels that such unfavourable possible outcomes should be ignored. In any case the bus might have an accident and the passengers be killed long before the container gets a chance to leak; or the passengers might change to another bus and leave the lethal parcel behind. He might say that it is the responsibility of the passengers and the driver to ensure that the journey is a smooth one, and that if they fail to do so, the results are not his fault. He might say that the journey is such a long one that many of the passengers may have become mere mindless vegetables or degenerate wretches about whose fate no decent person need concern himself, or that they might not care about losing their lives or health or possessions anyway by that time. Most of these excuses will seem little more than a bad joke, and certainly would not usually be reckoned any sort of justification. The main argument the consigner of the lethal parcel employs, however, is that his own pressing needs justify his actions. He has no option but to consign his potentially lethal parcel, he says, since the firm he owns, and which has produced the material as a by-product, is in bad financial straits and cannot afford to produce a better container or to stop the production of the gas. If the firm goes out of business, the consigner says, his wife will leave him, and he will lose his family happiness, the comfortable way of life to which he has become accustomed and sees now as a necessity; his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others; not only will the firm's customers be inconvenienced but he, the consigner, will have to break some business contracts; the inhabitants of the local village through loss of spending and cancellation of the Multiplier Effect will suffer finan- Obligations to the Future 135 cial hardship, and, worst of all, the tiny flow of droplets that the poor of the village might receive (theoretically at any rate) as a result of the trickling down of these good things would dry up entirely. In short, some basic and some perhaps uncomfortable changes will be needed in the village. Even if the consigner's story were accepted at face value - and it would be wise to look critically at his story - only someone whose moral sensibilities had been paralysed by the disease of galloping economism could see such a set of considerations, based on 'needs', comfort, and the goal of local prosperity, as justifying the consigner's action. One is not generally entitled to thus simply transfer the risks and costs arising from one's own life onto other uninvolved parties, to get oneself out of a hole of one's own making by creating harm or risk of harm to someone else who has had no share in creating the situation. To create serious risks and costs, especially risks to life or health for such others, simply to avoid having to make some changes to a comfortable life style, or even for a somewhat better reason, is usually thought deserving of moral condemnation, and sometimes considered a crime; for example, the action of a company in creating risks to the lives or health of its workers or customers to prevent itself from going bankrupt. What the consigner says may be an explanation of his behaviour, but it is not a justification. The problem raised by nuclear waste disposal is by no means a perfect analogy to the bus case, since, for example, the passengers on the nuclear bus cannot get off the bus or easily throw out the lethal package. In many crucial moral respects, however, the nuclear waste storage problem as it affects future people, the passengers in the bus we are considering, resembles the consignment of the faultily packaged lethal gas. Not only are rather similar moral principles involved, but a rather similar set of arguments to the lamentable excuses the consigner presents have been seriously put up to justify nuclear development, the difference being that in the nuclear case these arguments have been widely accepted. There is also some parallel in the risks involved; there is no known safe way to package the highly toxic wastes generated by nuclear plants that will be spread around the world if large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.1 The wastes problem will not be a slight one, with each one of the more than 2,000 reactors envisaged by the end of the century, producing on average annual wastes containing one thousand times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.2 The wastes include not merely the spent fuels and their radioactive by-products, but also everything they contaminate, from fuel containers to the thousands of widely distributed decommissioned nuclear 136 R. and V. Routley reactors which will have to be abandoned, still in a highly radioactive condition, after the expiry of their expected lifetimes of about thirty years, and which have been estimated to require perhaps one and a half million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.3 The wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire active lifetime; for fission products the required storage period averages a thousand years or so, and for the actinides (transuranic elements) which include plutonium, there is a half-million to a million-year storage problem.4 Serious problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed longterm methods of storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste that have been produced over the last twenty years.5 With present known short-term surface methods of storage there is a continued need for human intervention to keep the material isolated from the environment, while with proposed longer-term methods such as storage in salt mines or granite to the risk of human interference there are added the risks of leakage, e.g. through water seepage, and of disturbance, for example through climatic change, earth movements, etc. The risks are significant: no reasonable person with even a limited acquaintance with the history of human affairs over the last 3,000 years could be confident of safe storage by methods involving human intervention over the enormous time periods involved. No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history of the earth over the last million years, a period which has seen a number of ice ages and great fluctuations in climate for example, could be confident that the waste material could be safely stored for the vast periods of time required. Much of this waste is highly toxic; for example, even a beachball sized quantity of plutonium appropriately distributed is enough to give every person on the planet lung cancer - so that a leak of even a small part of this waste material could involve huge loss of life, widespread disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.6 Given the enormous costs which could be involved for the future, it is plainly grossly inadequ'ate'to merely speculate concerning untested, but possibly or even probably, safe methods for disposal of wastes. Yet none of the proposed methods has been properly tested, and they may prove to involve all sorts of unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is made to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable. It is difficult to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the Obligations to the Future 137 geological or future human factors. But even if an economically viable, rigorously safe long-term storage method could be devised, there is the problem of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used. The assumption that it would be, especially if, as seems likely, such a method proved expensive economically and politically, seems to presuppose a level of efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future not previously encountered in human affairs, and certainly not conspicuous in the nuclear industry.7 Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long-term storage sites through perhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weapons-grade radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million-year storage period, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it. Our behaviour in creating this nightmare situation for the future is certainly no better than that of the consigner in the bus example. Industrialized countries, in order to get out of a mess of their own making essentially the creation of economies dependent on an abundance" of non-renewable energy in a situation where it is in fact in limited supply opt for a 'solution' which may enable them to avoid the making of uncomfortable changes during the lifetime of those now living, at the expense of passing heavy burdens on to the inhabitants of the earth at a future time burdens in the shape of costs and risks which, just as in the bus case, may adversely affect the life and health of future people and their opportunity to lead a decent life.8 It is sometimes suggested that analogies like the bus example are defective; that morally they are crucially different from the nuclear case, since future people, unlike the passengers in the bus, will benefit directly from nuclear development, which will provide an abundance of energy for the indefinite future. But this is incorrect. Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a million years, but even with the breeder reactor it could be an energy source for perhaps only 150 years. It will do nothing for the energy problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be seriously affected by the wastes. Thus perhaps 30,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear significant risks, without any corresponding benefits, in order to provide for the extravagant energy use of only five generations. Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future. Because the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop-gap, it seems probable that in due course the same problem, that of making a 138 R. and V. Routley transition to renewable sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope with it.9 For they may well have to face the change to renewable resources in an over-populated world not only burdened with the legacy of our nuclear wastes, but also in a world in which, if the nuclear proponents' dream of global industrialization is realized, more and more of the global population will have become dependent on high energy consumption and associated technology and heavy resource use, and will have lost or reduced its ability to survive without it. It will, moreover, probably be a world which is largely depleted of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests and soils as remain, resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run-down condition. Such points tell against the idea that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy, at least indirect beneficiaries. The 'solution' then is to buy time for contemporary industrial society at a price which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces their ability to cope with those problems. Just as in the bus case, contemporary industrial society proposes to get itself out of a hole of its own making by creating risk of harm, and by transferring costs and risks, to someone else who has had no part in producing the situation and who will obtain no clear benefit. It has clear alternatives to this action. That it does not take them is due essentially to its unwillingness to avoid changing wasteful patterns of consumption and to its desire to protect the interests of those who benefit from them. If we apply to the nuclear situation the same standards of behaviour and moral principles that we acknowledge (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the contemporary world, it will not be easy to avoid the conclusion that the situation involves injustice with respect to future people on a grand scale. It seems to us that there are only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance of such a conclusion. First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we acknowledge for the contemporary world and the immediate future do not apply because the recipients of our nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future. Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to say that there are no circumstances in which such an action might possibly be justifiable, or at least where the case is less clearcut. It is the same with the nuclear case. Just as in the case of the consigner of the Obligations to the Future 139 package there is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case. We turn now to the first of these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development, to the philosophical question of our obligations to the future. II. Obligations to the Distant Future The area in which these philosophical problems arise is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, that is, the future with which people alive today will make no direct contact; the immediate future provides comparatively few problems for moral theories. The issues involved, although of far more than academic interest, have not received any great attention in recent philosophical literature, despite the fact that the question of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories fail to pass, and also raises a number of questions in political philosophy concerning the adequacy of accepted institutions which leave out of account the interests of future people. Moral philosophers have predictably differed on the issue. But contrary to the picture painted in a recent, widely read, and influential work discussing it, Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature, a good many philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of contemporary or immediately future people. Other philosophers have tended to fall into three categories - those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them seriously or who assign them less weight, those who deny, or who are committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral obligations beyond the immediate future, and those like Passmore and Golding who come down, with admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond those to the next generation. • According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained; there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving from the effect of our actions on future people. Of those philosophers who say, or whose views imply, that we don't have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, i.e. those who have opted for the uncon- 140 R. and V. Routley strained position, many have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity. Thus moral obligation is seen as grounded on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space). For example, obligation is seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also non-transitive. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or requirements for moral obligation, which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future are these: First, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement. People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those accounts which base moral obligations on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement. But plainly these and other conventions will not hold invariantly over change in society and amendment of legal conventions and so will not be invariant over time. Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing offenders, and there could be no guarantee that any contemporary institution would do it for them. Both the view that moral obligation requires the context of a moral community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rule out the distant future as a field of moral obligation, as they not only require a commonality, or some sort of common basis, which cannot be guaranteed in the case of the distant future, but also a possibility of interchange or reciprocity of action which cannot apply to the future. Where the basis of moral obligation is seen as mutual exchange, the interests of future people must be set aside because they cannot change the past and cannot be parties to any mutual contract. The exclusion of moral obligations to the distant future also follows from those views which attempt to ground moral obligations in non-transitive relations of short duration such as sympathy and love. There are some difficulties also about love and sympathy for (non-existent) people in the far distant future about whose personal qualities and characteristics one must know very little and who may well be committed to a life-style for which one has no sympathy. On the current showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that contemporary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary Obligations to the Future 141 people have no obligations to future people and can harm them as it suits them. What all these views have in common is a naturalistic picture of obligation as something acquired, either individually or institutionally, something which is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. participating in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empathy).10 Because obligation therefore becomes conditional, features usually thought to characterize it, such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding features), are lost, especially where there is a choice of whether or not to do the thing required to acquire the obligation, and so of whether to acquire it. The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future. However, the view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future people, that one is free to act as one likes with respect to them, is a very difficult one to sustain. Consider the example of a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb which is to be set off by a triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its despatch. No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action. The unconstrained position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being unduly expensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do to future people. The unconstrained position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of examples: A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing, and manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problems for present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer among the inhabitants of the earth at that time. According to the unconstrained view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration for the harm it does to future people. Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view might seem childishly obvious. Yet the unconstrained position concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not only have a number of philosophers writing on the issue endorsed this position, but it is the clear 142 R. and V. Routley implication of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well as of economic theory. It does not appear, on the other hand, that those who opt for the unconstrained position have considered such examples and endorsed them as morally acceptable, despite their being clearly implied by their position. We suspect that when it is brought out that the unconstrained position admits such counterexamples, that being free to act implies, among other things being free to inflict pointless harm, most of those who opted for the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What those who have put forward the unconstrained position seem to have had in mind in denying moral obligation is rather that future people can look after themselves, that we are not responsible for their lives. The view that the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in cases such as those discussed above and the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself. Present people are influencing it, and in doing so must acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future. The thesis seems thus to assume an incorrect model of an independent and unrelated future. Also, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future people does not amount to the same as saying that we are free to do as we like with respect to them, that there are no moral constraints on our action involving them. In just the same way, the fact that one does not have, or has not acquired, an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never been involved - that one has no responsibility for his life - does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect to him, for example to rob him or to pursue some course of action of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him. These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the failure to make an important distinction between, on the one hand, acquired or assumed obligations towards somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption is required as a qualifying condition, and on the other hand moral constraints, which require, for example, that one should not act so as to damage or harm someone, and for which no act of acquisition is required. There is a considerable difference in the level and kind of responsibility involved. In the first case one must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e.g. have loves, sympathy, be contracted. In the second case responsibility arises as a result of being a causal agent aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his Obligations to the Future 143 action, and thus does not have to be especially acquired or assumed. Thus there is no problem about how the latter class, moral constraints, can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult or impossible for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfied. They apply as a result of the ability to produce causal effects on the distant future of a reasonably predictable nature. Thus also moral constraints can apply to what does not (yet) exist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist. While it may be the case that there would need to be an acquired or assumed obligation in order for it to be claimed that contemporary people must make special sacrifices of an heroic kind for future people, or even to help them especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained from harming them. Thus, to return to the bus example, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action that he has never assumed or acquired responsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for them, and that they are not part of his moral community, in short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one needs to argue in respect of both the bus and the nuclear case is that there are moral constraints against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations to take responsibility for the lives of the people involved. The confusion of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off non-acquired constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' in philosophy to indicate any type of deontic constraint, while in natural language it is used to indicate something which has to be assumed or acquired. Hence the equation and at least one root of the unconstrained position, that is of the belief that there are no moral constraints concerning the distant future. The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to a more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent position. Passmore's position in [1] is a striking example of the second ambivalent position. On the one hand Passmore regularly gives the impression of one championing future people; for example, in the final sentence of [1] he says, concerning men a century hence: My sole concern is that we should do nothing which will reduce their freedom of thought and action, whether by destroying.the natural world which makes that freedom possible or the social traditions which permit and encourage it. 144 R. and V. Routley Earlier (esp. pp. 84-85) Passmore appears to endorse the principle 'that we ought not to act so as certainly to harm posterity' and claims (p. 98) that, even where there are uncertainties, 'these uncertainties do not justify negligence'. Nevertheless, though obligations concerning non-immediate posterity are thus admitted, the main thrust of Passmore's argument is entirely different, being in favour of the unconstrained position according to which we have no obligations to non-immediate posterity. Thus his conclusion (p. 91): So whether we approach the problem of obligations to posterity by way of Bentham and Sidgwick, Rawls or Golding, we are led to something like the same conclusion: our obligations are to immediate posterity, we ought to try to improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to our immediate successors in a better condition, and that is all.11 Passmore's position is, to all appearances, simply inconsistent. There are two ways one might try to render it consistent, but neither is readily available to Passmore. The first is by taking advantage of the distinction between moral constraints and acquired obligations, but a basis for this distinction is not evident in Passmore's work and indeed the distinction is antithetical to the analyses of obligation that Passmore tries to synthesize with his own analysis in terms of loves. The second, sceptical, route to consistency is by way of the argument that we shall consider shortly, that there is always gross uncertainty with respect to the distant future, uncertainty which relieves us in practice of any moral constraints regarding the distant future. But though Passmore's writing strongly suggests this uncertainty argument (especially his sympathetic discussion of the Premier of Queensland's argument against conservationists [p. 77]), he also rules it out with the claim that uncertainties do not justify negligence.12 Many of the accounts of moral obligation that give rise to the unconstrained position are fused in Passmore's work, again not entirely consistently, since the different accounts exploited do not give uniform results. Thus the primary account of obligation is said to be in terms of loves though the account is never satisfactorily formulated or developed - and it is suggested that because our loves do not extend into the distant future, neither do our obligations. This sentimental account of obligation will obviously lead to different results from utilitarian accounts of obligation, which however Passmore appeals to in his discussion of wilderness. In yet other places in [1], furthermore, social contract and moral community Obligations to the Future 145 views are appealed to - see, e.g., the treatment of animals, of preservation, and of duties to nature. In the case of obligations to future people, however, Passmore does try to sketch an argument - what we call the convergence argument - that all the accounts lead in the end to the unconstrained position. As well as the convergence argument, and various uncertainty arguments to be considered later, Passmore appears to endorse several other arguments in favour of his theme that there are in practice no obligations to the distant future. In particular, he suggests that such obligations would in practice be otiose. Everything that needs to be accounted for can be encompassed through the chain picture of obligation as linking successive generations, under which each generation has obligations, based on loves, only to the succeeding generation. We outline three objections to this chain account. First, it is inadequate to treat constraints concerning the future as if they applied only between generations, as if there were no question of constraints on individuals as opposed to whole generations, since individuals can create causal effects, e.g. harm, on the future in a way which may create individual responsibility, and which can't necessarily be sheeted home to an entire generation. Secondly, such chains, since they are non-transitive, cannot yield direct obligations to the distant future. But for this very reason the chain picture cannot be adequate, as examples again show. For the picture is unable to explain several of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the examples already discussed which show that we can have a direct effect on the distant future without affecting the next generation, who may not even be able to influence matters.13 Thirdly, improvements for immediate successors may be achieved at the expense of disadvantages to people of the more distant future. Improving the world for immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstances be most easily achieved by, ruining it for less immediate successors. Such cases can hardly be written off as 'never-never land' examples, since many cases of environmental exploitation might be seen as of just this type, e.g. not just the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through overcropping. If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from the favouring or exclusive concern with immediate successors are to be avoided, obligations to the future will have to be seen as in some way fairly distributed over time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in the way the chain picture suggests. 146 R. and V. Routley Passmore tries to represent all obligations to the distant future in terms of heroic self-sacrifice, something which cannot of course be morally required. But in view of the distinctions between constraints and acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogation, this is just to misrepresent the position of these obligations. For example, one is no more engaging in heroic self-sacrifice by not forcing future people into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm, than one is resorting to heroic self-sacrifice in refraining from beating and robbing some stranger and leaving him to starve. Passmore's most sustained argument for the unconstrained position is a convergence argument, that different analyses of obligations, including his own, lead to the one conclusion. This style of argument is hardly convincing when there are well-known accounts of obligation which do not lead to the intended conclusion, e.g. deontological accounts such as those of Kant and of modern European schools, and teleological accounts such as those of Moore (in [8]). But such unfavourable positions are either rapidly passed over or ignored in Passmore's historical treatment and narrow selection of historical figures. The style of argument becomes even less persuasive when it is discovered that the accounts of the main authorities appealed to, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Rawls,14 do not lead, without serious distortion, to the intended conclusion. Indeed Passmore has twisted the historical and textual evidence to suit his case, as we now try to indicate. Consider Bentham first. Passmore's assumption, for which no textual evidence is cited, ls is that no Benthamite calculation can take account of a future more extensive than the immediate future (cf. pp. 87-88). The assumption seems to be based simply on the fact that Bentham remarked that 'the value of the pleasure or pain to each person to be considered in any estimate will be greater or less in virtue of the following circumstances'. '3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness' ([10], p. 16). But this does nothing to show that future persons are discounted: the certainty and propinquity do not concern persons, but the utilities of the persons concerned. As regards which persons are concerned in any calculation Bentham is quite explicit, detailing how to take an exact account. . . of the general tendency of any act.. . .5 . Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process [summation of values of pleasure and of pain] with respect to each. ([10], p. 16) Obligations to the Future 147 It follows that Bentham's calculation takes account of everyone (and, in his larger scheme, every sentient creature) whose interests appear to be concerned: if the interests of people in the distant future appear to be concerned - as they are in conservation issues - they are to be included in the calculation. And there is independent evidence16 that in Bentham's view the principle of utility was not temporally restricted: 'that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness' ([10], pp. 17-18, our italics). Thus the future cut-off that Passmore has attributed to Bentham is contradicted by Bentham's own account. The case of Sidgwick is more complex, because there is isolated oscillation in his application of utilitarianism between use of utility and of (something like) expected utility (see [11], pp. 381,414): Sidgwick's utilitarianism is, in its general characterization, essentially that of Bentham: the conduct which . . . is objectively right is that which will produce the greatest amount of happiness on the whole; that is, taking into account all those whose happiness is affected by the conduct. ([11], p. 411) All includes all sentient beings, both existing and to exist, as Sidgwick goes on to explain (p. 414). In particular, in answer to the question 'How far are we to consider the interests of posterity when they seem to conflict with those of existing human beings?' Sidgwick writes ([11], p. 414, our italics): It seems, however, clear that the time at which a man exists cannot affect the value of his happiness from a universal point of view; and that the interests of posterity must concern a Utilitarian as much as those of his contemporaries, except in so far as the effect of his actions on posterity - and even the existence of human beings to be affected - must necessarily be more uncertain. But Passmore manages, first of all, to give a different sense to what Sidgwick is saying by adjusting the quotation, by omitting the clause we have italicized, which equalizes the degree of concern for present and future persons, and by italicizing the whole except-clause, thereby placing much greater emphasis than Sidgwick does on uncertainty. For according to Sidgwick's impartiality principle, 'the mere difference in time is not a 148 R. and V. Routley reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one -amount than to that of another' ([11], p. 381; see also p. 124). The apparent tension in Sidgwick's theory as to whether uncertainty should be taken into account is readily removed by resort to a modern distinction between values and expected values (i.e. probability weighted values); utilitarian rightness is defined as before in terms of the net happiness of all concerned over all time without mention of uncertainty or probabilities, but it is distinguished from probable rightness (given present information), in the utilitarian sense,17 which is defined in terms of the expected net happiness of those concerned, using present probabilities. It is the latter notion, of probable rightness, that practical reasoning is commonly concerned with and that decision theory studies; and it is this that Passmore supposes Sidgwick is using ([1], p. 84). But it is evident that the utilitarian determination of probable rightness, like that of rightness, will sometimes take into account the distant future - as Sidgwick's discussion of utilitarian determination of optimum population (immediately following his remark on uncertainty) does. So how does Passmore contrive to reverse matters, to have Sidgwick's position lead to his own unconstrained conclusion? The answer is: By inserting an additional assumption of his own - which Sidgwick would certainly have rejected - that the uncertainties entitle us to ignore the distant future. What Passmore has implicitly assumed in his claim ([1], p. 85) that 'utilitarian principles [such as Sidgwick's] are not strong enough' 'to justify the kinds of sacrifice some conservationists now call upon us to make' is his own thesis that 'The uncertainty of harms we are hoping to prevent would in general entitle us to ignore them.. .'. From a decision-theory viewpoint this is simply irrational18 unless the probabilities of damage are approaching zero. We will deal with the essentially sceptical uncertainty arguments on which Passmore's position depends shortly: here it is enough to observe that Sidgwick's position does not lead to anything like that which Passmore attributes to him - without uncertainty assumptions which Sidgwick would have rejected (for he thought that future people'will certainly have pleasure and suffer pain). We can also begin to gauge from Passmore's treatment of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, such as Bentham and Sidgwick, the extent of the distortion which underlies his more general historical case for the unconstrained position which, so he claims, represents accurately enough what, over the last two centuries, men have seen as their duty to posterity as a whole. . . . ([1], p. 91) Obligations to the Future 149 The treatment accorded Rawls in only marginally more satisfactory. Passmore supposes that Rawls's theory of justice leads directly to the unconstrained position ([1], p. 87 and p. 91), whereas Rawls claims ([5], p. 293) that we have obligations to future people just as to present ones. But the situation is more complicated than Rawls's claim would indicate, as we now try to explain in a summary way (more detail is given in the Appendix). For, in order to justify this claim on his theory (with its present time-of-entry interpretation), Rawls has to invoke additional and dubious motivational assumptions; even so the theory which thus results does not yield the intended conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with Rawls's claim. However, by changing the time-of-entry interpretation to an omnitemporal one, Rawls's claim does result from the theory so amended. Moreover, the amended theory also yields, by exactly Rawls's argument for a just saving rate, a resource conservation policy, and also a case against nuclear development. Accordingly Passmore's other claims regarding Rawls are mistaken, e.g. that the theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation. Rawls does not emerge unscathed either. As on the issue of whether his contract is a necessary condition for obligations, so on obligations which the contract yields to the distant future, Rawls is far from consistent. Furthermore, institutions such as qualified market and voting systems are recommended as just though from a future perspective their results are far from that. Rawls, then, does not take obligations to the future with full seriousness. In sum, it is not true that the theory of Rawls, any more than the theories of the historical figures actually discussed by Passmore, unequivocally supports the unconstrained position. III. Uncertainty and Indeterminacy Arguments Although there are grave difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible position. According to the qualified position we are not entirely unconstrained with respect to the distant future: there are obligations, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of the present and immediate future. The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present people. Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative activities which benefit present 150 R. and V. Routley people should proceed, even if people of the distant future are disadvantaged by them. The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in most modern economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by application over time of an (opportunity cost) discount rate. The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to the qualified position. What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just as in practice it operates within legal constraints, and cannot determine what those constraints are. There are, moreover, alternative economic theories and simply to adopt one which discounts the future is to beg all the questions at issue. The discounting move often has the same result as the unconstrained position; if, for instance, we consider the cancer example and consider costs as payable compensation, it is evident that, over a sufficiently long period of time, discounting at current prices would lead to the conclusion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no constraints. In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off. One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the application of discount rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no more than about fifteen years,19 and application of such rates would simply beg the question against the interests and rights of future people. Where there is certain future damage of a morally forbidden type the whole method of discounting is simply inapplicable, and its use would violate moral constraints.20 Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections from cases of certain damage, comes from probability considerations.The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.21 But then if we take account of probabilities in the obvious way, by simply multiplying them against costs and benefits, it is evident that the interests of future people, except in cases where there is an unusually high degree of certainty, must count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring people where (much) higher probabilities obtain. So in the case of conflict between the present and the future where it is a question of weighing certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against a much lower Obligations to the Future 151 probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present, assuming that anything like similar costs and benefits were involved. But of course it can't be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people, in order to obtain quite doubtful or trivial benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportunity to continue unnecessarily high energy use. And even if the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that the consigner's action is acceptable provided the benefit, e.g. the profit he stood to gain from imposing significant risks on other people, was sufficiently large. Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision problems, with or without the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned, or for dealing with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results. For example, it would follow on such principles that it is permissible for a firm to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party provided the firm stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferable in any simple or general way from one party to another. Transfers of this kind, of costs and benefits involving different parties, commonly raise moral issues - e.g. is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs ony ? - which are not susceptible to a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted by some proponents of nuclear energy, who attempt to dismiss the costs to future people with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits. The transfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison, heavily relied on by McCracken [16] in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risk, between nuclear risks and those from cigarette smoking. In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity are also, to an overwhelming extent* those who bear the serious health costs and risks involved. In contrast the users and supposed beneficiaries of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own lives and health, but also those of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any direct way related to a person's extent of use. The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian's 152 R. and V. Routley happiness sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties, and the introduction of probability considerations does not change the principles involved but merely complicates analyses. One might further object to the probability argument that probabilities involving distant future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and that the outcomes of some moral problems such as the bus example do not depend on a high level of probability anyway. In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the bus example reveals, that a significant risk is created; such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments. Uncertainty arguments in various forms are the most common and important ones used by philosophers and others to argue for the position that we cannot be expected to take serious account of the effects of our actions on the distant future. There are two strands to the uncertainty argument, capable of separation, but frequently entangled. Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a priori grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds. The first argument is a generalized uncertainty argument which runs as follows: In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreliable, woolly, and highly speculative. But we cannot base assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate different action. Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future. More formally and crudely: One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on reliable information; there is no reliable information at present as regards the distant future; therefore one has no obligations to the distant future. The first argument is essentially a variation on a sceptical argument in epistemology concerning our knowledge of the future (formally, replace 'obligations' by 'knowledge' in the crude statement of the argument above). The main ploy is to considerably overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available with respect to the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with respect to the future. Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one hand and the distant future on the other. We shall not find, we suggest, that there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and Obligations to the Future 153 the adjacent future and present, at least with respect to those things in the present which are normally subject to moral constraints. We can and constantly do act on the basis of such 'unreliable' information as the sceptic as regards the future conveniently labels 'uncertainty'; for scepticproof certainty is rarely, or never, available with respect to much of the present and immediate future. In moral situations in the present, action often takes account of risk and probability, even quite low probabilities. A good example is again the bus case. We do not need to know for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape. In fact it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner's action. It is enough that there is a significant risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and the prospects of the passengers quite uncertain; the resolution of the problem is still clearly in favour of the so-called 'speculative' and 'unreliable'. But if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future? Why should we require epistemic standards for the future which the more familiar sphere of moral action concerning the present and adjacent future does not need to meet? The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an epistemic double standard. But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining the difference between the present and the future and to justify ignoring future peoples' interests, in fact cannot itself provide an explanation of the differences, since it already presupposes different standards of certainty appropriate to each class, which difference is in turn in need of justification. The second uncertainty argument is a practical uncertainty argument, that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice take the interests of future people into account, because uncertainty about the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely consequences of actions upon it will be and therefore, however good our intentions to the people of the distant future, in practice we have no choice but to ignore their interests. Uncertainty is gross where certain incompatible hypotheses are as good as one another and there is no rational ground for choosing between them. The second uncertainty argument can also be put in this way: If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form, that is of such forms as 'if* has character h then x is wrong, for every (action) x', then what the argument claims is 154 R. and V. Routley that we can never obtain the information about future actions which would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication. So even if moral principles theoretically apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain clear conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the 'It is wrong to do x' type. Many of the assumptions of the second argument have to be conceded. If the distant future really is so grossly uncertain that in every case it is impossible to determine in any way that is better than chance what the effects of present action will be, and whether any given action will help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although they may apply theoretically to the future, will not be applicable in practice for obtaining any clear conclusions about how to act. Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints on action. However, the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the future is always so grossly uncertain or indeterminate. Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or sweeping as the argument has to assume. There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point, noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certainty is commonly not required for moral constraints and that all that may be needed in some cases is the creation of"a significant risk. Again there is considerable uncertainty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally relevant, but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance to moral issues. For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years in girls' names or men's footwear, or what brands of ice cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3,000 years of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present makes it such a rich and interesting place. For this sort of reason, the second uncertainty argument should be rejected. While it is true that there are many areas in which the morally relevant information needed is uncertain or unavailable, and in which we cannot therefore determine satisfactorily how to act, there are certainly others in Obligations to the Future 155 which uncertainty in morally relevant areas is not so great as to preclude moral constraints on action, where we ascertain if not absolute certainties at least probabilities of the same sort of order as are considered sufficient for the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially where spatially remote people are involved. The case of nuclear waste storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, seems to be of the latter sort. Here there is no gross indeterminacy or uncertainty; it is simply not true that incompatible hypotheses about what may happen are as good as each other. It is plain that nuclear waste storage does impose significant risks of harm on future people, and, as we can see from the bus example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this type to make moral constraints applicable. In terms of the defects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can see the corresponding defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration. Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case, switching from one to the other in a way that is again reminiscent of sceptical moves. For example, we may be told that we cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources or from the things that would affect us (cf. Passmore [1]). But this is to insist upon complete certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future, where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake those we are morally committed to. Again we may be told that there is no guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because they may be morons or forever plugged into enjoyment- or other machines (Golding [12]). Even if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are eligible for moral consideration - what we are being handed in such arguments as a serious defeating consideration is again a mere outside possibility - like the sceptic who says that the solid-looking desk in front of us is perhaps only a facade, not because he has any particular reason for doing so, but because he hasn't looked around the back, drilled holes in it, etc. Neither the contemporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal moronity or universal pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility. We can contrast 156 R. and V. Routley with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilization through destruction of its resource base. The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty arguments of sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may consider a real possibility, but still does not succeed in showing that it is acceptable to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste case. This is the argument that future people may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage method for nuclear wastes before they are damaged by escaped waste material. Let us grant for the sake of the argument that this is a real possibility (though physical arguments may show that it is not). This still does not affect the fact that there is a significant risk of serious damage and that the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action of this type as morally impermissible. In just the same way, future people may discover a cure for cancer, and the fact that this appears to be a real and not merely a logical possibility, does not make the action of the firm in the example discussed above, of producing a substance likely to cause cancer in future people, morally admissible. The fact that there was a real possibility of future people avoiding the harm would show that actions of these sorts were admissible only if what was required for inadmissibility was certainty of harm or a very high probability of it. In such cases, before such actions could be considered admissible, what would be required is far more than a possibility, real or not22 - it is at least the availability of an applicable, safe, and rigorously tested, not merely speculative, technique for achieving it, something that future people could reasonably be expected to apply to protect themselves. The strategy of most of these uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then, and may be brought out by looking yet again at the bus example, where the consigner says that he cannot be expected to take account of the effect of his actions on the passengers because they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g. the bus may break down and they may all change to a different bus leaving the parcel behind, or the bus may crash, killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak. These are all possibilities, of course, but there is no positive reason to believe that they are any more than that, that is they are not real possibilities. The strategy is to stress such outside possibilities in order to create the false impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real possibility that the container will Obligations to the Future 157 break should be treated in the same way as these mere logical possibilities, that uncertainty about the future is so great as to preclude the consigners' taking account of the passengers' welfare and of the real possibility of harm from his parcel, and thereby excuse his action. A related strategy is to stress a real possibility, such as finding a cure for cancer, and thereby imply that this removes the case for applying moral constraints .This move implicitly makes the assumptions of the first argument, that certainty, or at least a very high probability, of harm is required before an action can be judged morally inadmissible, and the point of stressing the real possibility of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly required high degree of certainty or probability cannot be attained. That is, the strategy draws attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat the application of moral constraints. But, as we have seen, this is often not so. An argument closely related to the uncertainty arguments is based on the non-existence and indeterminacy of the future.23 An item is indeterminate in a given respect if its properties in that respect are, as a matter of logic, not settled (nor are they settlable in a non-arbitrary fashion). The respects in which future items are indeterminate are well enough known for a few examples to serve as reminders: all the following are indeterminate: the population of Australia at 2001, its distribution, its age structure, the preferences of its members for folk music, wilderness, etc., the size and shape of Wollongong, the average number of rooms in its houses and in its office blocks, and so on. Philosophical discussion of such indeterminacy is as old as Aristotle's sea battle and as modern as truth-value gaps and fuzzy logics, and many positions have been adopted on the existence and determinacy of future items. Nevertheless theories that there are obligations to the future are not sensitive to the metaphysical position adopted concerning the existence or non-existence of the future. Any theory which denied obligations to the future on the metaphysical grounds that the future did not exist, and did not have properties, so that the present could not be related to it, would be committed to denying such obvious facts as that the present could causally influence the future, that present people could be great-grandparents of purely future people, and so on, and hence would have to be rejected on independent grounds. This is not to say that there are not important problems about the existence or non-existence of future items, problems which are perhaps most straightforwardly handled by a Meinongian position which allows that items which do not exist may have properties. The non-existence of the future 158 R. and V. Routley does raise problems for standard theories which buy the Ontological Assumption (the thesis that what does not exist does not have properties), especially given the natural (and correct) inclination to say that the future does not (now) exist; but such theories can adopt various strategies for coping with these problems (e.g. the adoption of a platonistic position according to which the future does now exist, or the allowance for certain sorts of relations between existents at different times), although the satisfactoriness of these strategies is open to question (cf. [4]). Thus whether or not the Ontological Assumption is assumed and however it is applied, it will be allowed that future items will have properties even if they do not have them now, and that is enough to provide the basis for moral concern about the future. Thus the thesis of obligations to the future does not presuppose any special metaphysical position on the existence of the future. If the non-existence of future items creates no special problems for obligations to the future, the same is not true of their indeterminacy. Whether the indeterminacy of future items is seen as a logical feature of the future which results from the non-existence of purely future items or whether one adopts a (mistaken) platonistic view of the future as existing and sees the indeterminacy as an epistemological one resulting from our inability to know the character of these entities - that is, we cannot completely know the future .though it exists and has a definite characterwhichever view we take indeterminacy still creates major difficulties for certain ethical theories and their treatment of the future. The difficulties arise for theories which appear to require a high level of determinacy with respect to the number and character of future items, in particular calculus-type theories such as utilitarianism in its usual forms, where the calculations are critically dependent on such information as numbers, totals, and averages, information which so far as the future is concerned is generally indeterminate. The fact that this numerical information is typically indeterminate means that insofar as head-count utilitarianism requires determinate information on numbers, it is in a similar position to theories discussed earlier; it may apply theoretically to future people, but since the calculations cannot be applied to them their interests will be left out of account. And, in fact, utilitarianism for the most part does not, and perhaps cannot, take future creatures and their interests seriously; there is little discussion as to how the difficulties or impossibility of calculations regarding the open future are to be obtained. Non-platonistic utilitarianism is in logical difficulty on this matter, while platonis- Obligations to the Future 159 tic utilitarianism - which faces a range of other objections - is inapplicable because of epistemic indeterminacy. We have yet another case of a theory of the sort that applies theoretically but in practice doesn't take the future seriously. But far from this showing that future people's interests should be left out of account, what these considerations show are deficiencies in these sorts of theories, which require excessive determinacy of information. This kind of information is commonly equally unavailable for the accepted areas of moral constraint, the present and immediate future; and the resolution of moral issues is often not heavily dependent on knowledge of such specific determinate features as numbers or other determinate features. For example, we do not need to know how many people there will be on the bus, how intelligent they are, what their preferences are or how badly they will be injured, in order to reach the conclusion that the consigner's action in despatching his parcel is a bad one. Furthermore, it is only the ability of moral considerations to continue to apply in the absence of determinate information about such things as numbers that makes it possible to take account of the possible effects of action, as the risks associated with action - something which is quite essential even for the present if moral considerations are to apply in the normal and accepted way. For it is essential in order to apply moral considerations in the accepted way that we consider alternative worlds, in order to take account of options, risks, and alternative outcomes; but these alternative or counterfactual worlds are not in so different a position from the future with respect to determinacy; for example, there is indeterminacy with respect to the number of people who may be harmed in the bus case or in apossible nuclear reactor melt-down. These alternative worlds, like the distant future, are indeterminate in some respects, but not totally indeterminate. It might still be thought that the indeterminacy of the future, for example with respect to number and exact character, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a conflict with the present. Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests unknown, how can we weigh their competing claims against those of the present and immediate future where this information is available in a more or less accurate form? The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present and future people, when the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims of the future, any more than the problems raised by the need to take account in decision-making of factors difficult to quantify are resolved by ignoring 160 R. and V. Routley such factors. Nor are such distributional problems as large and representative a class of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest. It should be conceded then that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult or indeed impossible to resolve - a realistic ethical theory will not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be other conflict cases where the level of indeterminacy does not hinder resolution of the issue, e.g. the bus example which is a conflict case of a type. In particular, there will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numbers, numbers of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general probable characteristics of future people. Moreover, even where numbers are relevant often only bounds will be required, exact numerical counts only being required where, for instance, margins are narrow; e.g. issues may be resolved as in parliament where a detailed vote (or division) is only required when the issue is close. It is certainly not necessary then to have complete determinacy to resolve all cases of conflict. The question we must ask then is what features of future people could disqualify them from moral consideration or reduce their claims to it to below those of present people? The answer is: in principle None. Prima facie moral principles are universalizable, and lawlike, in that they apply independently of position in space or in time, for example.24 But universalizability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of dealing satisfactorily with the present; in other words, a theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects as regards the present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people, e.g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup such as (white-skinned) humans, etc. The only candidates for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, uncertainty and indeterminacy; what we have argued is that it would be far too sweeping to see these features as affecting the moral claims of future people in a general way. These special features only affect certain sorts of cases (e.g. the determination of best probable or practical course of action given only present information). In particular they do not affect cases of the sort being considered, the nuclear one, where highly determinate or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class likely to be harmed or certainty of damage are not required. To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability principle is not needed: it is enough to require that the temporal position of a person Obligations to the Future 161 cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral consideration;25 inversely that it is without basis to discriminate morally against a person in virtue of his temporal position. As a result of this universalizability, there is the same obligation to future people as to the present; and thus there is the same obligation to take account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions, to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions' causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act so as to rob future people of what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy do not free us of these obligations. If, in a closely comparable case concerning the present, the creation of a significant risk is enough to rule out an action as immoral, and there are no independent grounds for requiring greater certainty of harm in the future case under consideration, then futurity alone will not provide adequate grounds for proceeding with the action, thus discriminating against future people. Accordingly we cannot escape, through appeal to futurity, the conclusion tentatively reached in our first section, that proposals for nuclear development in the present state of technology for future waste disposal are immoral. IV. Overriding Consideration Arguments In the first part we noticed that the consigner's action could not be justified by purely economistic arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed. We also observed that the principle on which this assessment was based, that one was not usually entitled to create a serious risk to others for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in particular, applied to the nuclear case. For this reason the economistic arguments which are thus most commonly advanced to promote nuclear development - e.g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electricity utilities, and the need otherwise for uncomfortable changes such as restructuring of employment, investment, and consumption-do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an acceptable one. Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present people were correct (and there is reason to doubt that most of them are),26 the arguments would fail because economics must operate within the framework of moral constraints, and not vice versa. 162 R. and V. Routley What one does have to consider, however, are moral conflict arguments, that is arguments to the effect that, unless the prima facie unacceptable alternative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only possible outcome, and will ensue. For example, in the bus case, the consigner may argue that his action is justified because unless it is taken the village will starve. It is by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient, especially where the risk to the passengers is high, as the case seems to become one of transfer of costs and risks onto others; but such a moral situation would no longer be so clearcut, and one would perhaps hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances. Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing duties to present people, and others on competing obligations to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impose on the future significant risk of serious harm. The structure of such moral conflict arguments is based crucially on the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of alternatives (or at least practical alternatives), and upon showing that the only alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable ones. If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument-for example, if in the bus case it turns out that the villagers have another option to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living in some other way - then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched. We want to argue that suppression of practicable alternatives has occurred in the argument, designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are even worse than the option itself, and that there are other factual defects in these arguments as well. In short, the arguments depend essentially on the presentation of false dichotomies. The first argument, the poverty argument, is that there is an overriding obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of industrialized countries. Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed, would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialized nations. The unemployment and poverty argument does not stand up to examination either for the poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world. There is good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help to increase unemployment and poverty in the industrial world, through the Obligations to the Future 163 diversion of great amounts of available capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of direct employment, but also helps to reduce available jobs through encouraging substitution of energy use for labour use. 27 The argument that nuclear energy is needed for the third world is even less convincing. Nuclear energy is both politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, and creates negligible employment, while politically it increases foreign dependence, adds to centralized entrenched power and reduces the chance for change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.28 The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of people of the third world does not, of course, mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, their rulers, the westernized and often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are usually organized; but it is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling elites may make in the name of the poor. The poverty argument then is a fraud. Nuclear energy will not be used to help the poor.29 Both for the third world and for the industrialized countries there are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and the practical option of developing other energy sources,30 alternatives which are morally acceptable and socially preferable to nuclear development, and which have far better prospects for helping the poor.31 The second major argument advanced to show moral conflict appeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations to future people. We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed. Unless our high-technological, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilization will go out.32 . The lights-going-out argument raises rather sharply questions as to what is valuable in our society, and of what characteristics are necessary for a good society. These are questions which deserve much fuller treatment than we can allot them here, but a few brief points should be made. The argument adopts an extremely uncritical position with respect to existing high-technology societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable; it also assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that it can't be changed in the direction of energy 164 R. and V. Routley conservation or alternative energy sources without collapse. Such a society has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited supplies of energy are essential to maintain this whole. These assumptions are hard to accept. The assumption that technological society's energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so - after all, it has survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technological restructuring and consumption modification. If western society's demands for energy are totally unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a programme of increasing destruction, but one might ask what use its culture could be to future people who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of contemporary society. There is also difficulty with the assumption of uniform valuableness; but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain existing high-technological society and its political institutions? but rather: what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political institutions which are needed to maintain those valuable things? While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to the future. The evidence, e.g. from history, is that no very high level of material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable. There is good reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own. But even if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, as we believe it is, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at least, in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-going-out argument are wrong. No enormous reduction of wellbeing is required to consume less energy than at present, and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of consumption which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.33 What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilization, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza. In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy Obligations to the Future 165 is obtained by nuclear-fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralized, controlled, and garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert enormous power over the political system and over people's lives, even more than they do at present. Very persuasive arguments have been advanced by civil liberties groups and others in a number of countries to suggest that such a society would tend to become authoritarian, if only as an outcome of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation.34 There are reasons to believe then that with nuclear development what we would be passing on to future generations would be some of the worst aspects of our society (e.g. the consumerism, growing concentration of power, destruction of the natural environment, and latent authoritarianism), while certain valuable aspects would be lost or threatened. Political freedom is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagance. Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives which do not involve such unacceptable consequences are available. The alternative to the high technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but the development of alternative technologies and life-styles which offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is valuable in our society than the highly centralized nuclear option.35 The lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a false dichotomy. Thus both the escape routes, the appeal to moral conflict and to the appeal to futurity, are closed. If then we apply the same standards of morality to the future as we acknowledge for the present - as we have argued we should - the conclusion that the proposal to develop nuclear energy on a large scale is a crime against the future is inevitable, since both the escape routes are closed. There are, of course, also many other grounds for ruling it out as morally unacceptable, for saying that it-is not only a crime against the distant future but also a crime against the present and immediate future. These other grounds for moral concern about nuclear energy, as it affects the present and immediate future, include problems arising from the possibility of catastrophic releases of radioactive fuel into the environment or of waste material following an accident such as reactor melt-down, of unscheduled discharges of radiation into the environment from a plant fault, of proli- 166 R. and V. Routley feration of nuclear weapons, and of deliberate release or threat of release of radioactive materials as a measure of terrorism or of extortion. All these are important issues, of much moral interest. What we want to claim, however, is that on the basis of its effects on the future alone, the nuclear option is morally unacceptable. Appendix Passmore's Treatment ofRawls, and What Really Happens on Rawls's Theory Passmore takes it that Rawls's theory yields an unconstrained position but, according to Rawls, the theory leads to quite the opposite result; namely, persons in different generations [and not merely neighbouring generations] have duties and obligations to one another just as contemporaries do. The present generation cannot do as it pleases but is bound by the principles that would be chosen in the original position to define justice between persons at different moments of time.. . . The derivation of these duties and obligations may seem at first a somewhat far-fetched application of the central doctrine. Nevertheless these requirements would be acknowledged in the original position [where the parties do not know to which generation they belong], and so the conception of justice as fairness covers these matters without any change in its basic idea. ([5], p. 293; the second insert is drawn from p. 287) Through judicious use of the veil of ignorance and the time of entry of parties to the original contract position, Rawls's contract theory, unlike simpler explicit contract theories, can yield definite obligations to distant future people,36 for example, we ought to save at a just rate for future people. But, as Rawls remarks (p. 284), 'the question of justice between generations . . . subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests'. It is doubtful that Rawls's theory as formulated passes the tests; for the theory as formulated does not yield the stated conclusion, but a conclusion inconsistent with the thesis that there are the same obligations to future people as to contemporaries. Exactly how these obligations arise from the initial agreement depends critically on the interpretation of the time of Obligations to the Future 167 entry of the parties into the agreement. Insofar as Rawls insists upon the present-time-of-entry interpretation (p. 139), he has to introduce supplementary motivational assumptions in order to (try to) secure the desired bondings between generations, in particular to ensure that the generation of the original position saves for any later generation, even their immediate successors ([5], p. 140 and p. 292). Rawls falls back on-what is as we have seen inadequate to the task, since it does not exclude one generation damaging another remote generation in a way that bypasses mutually successive generations - 'ties of sentiment between successive generations' (p. 292): to this limited extent Passmore has a point, for such a social contract on its own (without additional assumptions about the motives of the parties to the agreement) does not furnish obligations even to our immediate successors. This is indicative also of the unsatisfactory instability of Rawls's theory under changes, its sensitivity to the way the original agreement is set up, to the motivation of parties, their time of entry, what they can know, etc. To arrive at a more adequate account of obligations to the distant future under Rawls's theory, let us adopt, to avoid the additional, dubious and unsatisfactory, motivational assumptions Rawls invokes, one of the alternative - and non -equivalent - time-of-entry interpretations that Rawls lists (p. 146), that of persons alive at some time in simultaneous agreement. Let us call this, following Rawls's notation (on p. 140), interpretation 4b (it is perhaps unnecessary to assume for 4b any more than 4a that all people need be involved: it may be enough given the equivalencizing effect of the veil of ignorance that some are, and as with the particular quantifier it is quite unnecessary to be specific about numbers). Then of course the parties, since they are, for all they know, of different generations, will presumably agree on a just savings rate, and also to other just distribution principles, simply on the basis of Rawlsian rationality, i.e. advancing their own interests, without additional motivation assumptions. This more appealing omnitemporal interpretation of time of entry into the agreement, which gives a superior account of obligation to the future consistent with Rawls's claim, Rawls in some places puts down as less than best (p. 292) but in his most detailed account of the original position simply dismisses (p. 139): To conceive of the original position [as a gathering of people living at different times] would be to stretch fantasy too far; the conception would cease to be a natural guide to intuition. 168 R. and V. Rout ley This we question: it would be a better guide to intuition than a position (like 4a) which brings out intuitively wrong results; it is a more satisfactory guide, for example, to justice between generations than the present-timeof-entry interpretation, which fails conspicuously to allow for the range of potential persons (all of whom are supposed to qualify on Rawls's account for just treatment, cf. § 77). Moreover, it stretches fantasy no further than science fiction or than some earlier contract accounts.36 But it does require changes in the way the original position is conceived, and it does generate metaphysical difficulties for orthodox ontological views (though not to the same extent for the Meinongian view we prefer); for, to consider the latter, either time travel is possible or the original hypothetical position is an impossible situation, with people who live at different times assembled at the same time. The difficulties - of such an impossible meeting help to reveal that what Rawls's theory offers is but a colourful representation of obligations in terms of a contract agreed upon at a meeting. The metaphysical difficulties do not concern merely possible people, because all those involved are sometime-actual people; nor are there really serious difficulties generated by the fact that very many of these people do not exist, i.e. exist now. The more serious difficulties are either those of time travel, e.g. that future parties relocated into the present may be able to interfere with their own history, or, if time travel is ruled out logically or otherwise, that future parties may be advantaged (or disadvantaged) by their knowledge of history and technology, and that accordingly fairness is lost. As there is considerable freedom in how we choose to (re)arrange the original position, we shall suppose that time travel is rejected as a means of entering the original position. For much less than travel is required; some sort of limited communicational network which filters out, for example, all historical data (and all cultural or species dependent material) would suffice; and in any case if time travel were not excluded essentially the present-time-of-entry interpretation would serve, though fairness would again be put in doubt. The filtered communicational hook-up by which the omnitemporal position is engineered still has - if fairness is to be seen to be built into the decision making - to be combined with a reinterpreted veil of ignorance, so that parties do not know where they are located temporally any more than they know who they are characterwise. This implies, among other things, limitations on the parties' knowledge of factual matters, such as available technology and world and local history; for otherwise parties could work out their location, temporal or spatial. For example, if some party knew, as Rawls supposes, Obligations to the Future 169 the general social facts, then he would presumably be aware of the history of his time and so of where history ends, that is of the date of his generation, his time (his present), and so be aware of his temporal location. These are already problems for Rawls's so-called 'present-time-ofentry interpretation' - it is, rather, a variable-time-of-entry interpretation - given that the parties may be, as Rawls occasionally admits (e.g. p. 287), of any one generation, not necessarily the present: either they really do have to be ofthepresent time or they cannot be assumed to know as much as Rawls supposes.37 There is, however, no reason why the veil of ignorance should not be extended so as to avoid this problem; and virtually any extension that solves the problem for the variable-time-of-entry interpretation should serve, so it seems, for the omnitemporal one. We shall assume then that the parties know nothing which discloses their respective locations (i.e. in effect we write in conditions for universalizability of principles decided upon). There are still gaps between the assumptions of the omnitemporal position as roughly sketched and the desired conclusion concerning obligations to the future, but (the matter is beginning to look non-trivially provable given not widely implausible assumptions and) the intuitive arguments are as clear as those in [5], indeed they simply restate arguments to obligations given by Rawls. Rawls's theory, under interpretation 4b, admits of nice application to the problems of just distribution of material resources and of nuclear power. The just distribution, or rate of usage, of material resources38 over time is an important conservation issue to which Rawls's theory seems to apply, just as readily, and in a similar fashion, to that in which it applies to the issue of a just rate of savings. In fact the argument from the original position for a just rate of saving - whatever its adequacy - can by simply mimicked to yield an argument for just distribution of resources over generations. Thus, for example: persons in the original position are to ask themselves how much they would be willing to save [i.e. conserve] at each stage of advance on the assumption that all other generations are to save at the same rate [conserve resources to the same extent]. . . . In effect, then, they must choose a just savings principle [resources distribution principle] that assigns an appropriate rate of accumulation to [degree of resource conservation at] each level of advance. ([5], p. 287; our bracketed options give the alternative argument) 170 R. and V. Routley Just as 'they try to piece together a just savings schedule' (p. 289), so they can try to piece together a just resource distribution policy. Just as a case for resource conservation can be made out by appeal to the original position, since it is going to be against the interests of, to the disadvantage of, later parties to find themselves in a resource depleted situation (thus, on Rawlsian assumptions, they will bargain hard for a share of resources), so, interestingly, a case against a rapid programme of nuclear power development can be devised. The basis of a case against large-scale nuclear development is implicit in Rawls's contract theory under interpretation 4b, though naturally the theory is not applied in this sort of way by Rawls. To state the case in its crude but powerful form: people from later generations in the original position are bound to take it as against their interests to simply carry the waste can for energy consumed by an earlier generation. (We have already argued that they will find no convincing overriding considerations that make it worth their while to carry the waste can.) Thus not only has Passmore misrepresented the obligations to the future that Rawls's theory admits; he is also wrong in suggesting (p. 87 and p. 91) that Rawls's theory cannot justify a policy of resource conservation which includes reductions in present consumption. There is, in this connection, an accumulation of errors in Passmore, some of which spill over to Rawls, which it is worth trying to set out. First, Passmore claims ([1], p. 86; cf. also p. 90) that 'Rawls does not so much mention the saving of natural resources'. In fact the 'husbanding of natural resources' is very briefly considered ([5], p. 271). It is true, however, that Rawls does not reveal any of the considerable power that his theory, properly interpreted, has for natural resource conservation, as implying a just distribution of natural resources over time. Secondly, Passmore attempts ([1], pp. 87 ff.) to represent the calls of conservationists for a reduction in present resource usage and for a more just distribution as a call for heroic self-sacrifices; this is part of his more general attempt to represent every moral constraint with respect to the non-immediate future as a matter of self-sacrifice. 'Rawls's theory', Passmore says (on p. 87), 'leaves no room for heroic sacrifice', and so, he infers, leaves no room for conservation. Not only is the conclusion false, but the premiss also: Rawls's theory allows for supererogation, as Rawls explains ([5], p. 117). But resource conservation is, like refraining from nuclear development, not a question of heroic self-sacrifice; it is in part a question of obligations or duties to the distant future. And Rawls's theory allows not only for obligations as well as supererogation, but also for natural duties. Rawls's Obligations to the Future 171 contract, unlike the contracts of what is usually meant by a 'contract theory', is by no means exhaustive of the moral sphere: But even this wider [contract] theory fails to embrace all moral relationships, since it would seem to include only our relations with other persons and to leave out of account how we are to conduct ourselves towards,animals and the rest of nature. I do not contend that the contract notion offers a way to approach these questions which are certainly of the first importance; and I shall have to put them aside, (p. 17) The important class of obligations beyond the scope of the contract theory surely generates obligations between persons which even the wider contract theory likewise cannot explain. The upshot is that such a contract account, even if sufficient for the determination of obligations, is not necessary. To this extent Rawls' s theory is not a full social contract theory at all. However, Rawls appears to lose sight of the fact that his contract theory delivers only a sufficient condition when he claims, for example (p. 298), that 'one feature of the contract doctrine is that it places an upper bound on how much a generation can be asked to save for the welfare of later generations'. For greater savings may sometimes be required to meet obligations beyond those that the contract doctrine delivers. In short, Rawls appears to have slipped into assuming, inconsistently, that his contract theory is a necessary condition. Although Rawls's theory caters for justice between generations and allows the derivation of important obligations to people in the distant future, the full theory is far from consistent on these matters and there are significant respects in which Rawls does not take justice to the future seriously. The most conspicuous symptoms of this are that justice to the future is reduced to a special case, justice between generations, and that the only aspect of justice between generations that Rawls actually considers is a just savings rate; there is, for example, no proper examination of the just distribution of resources among generations, though these resources, Rawls believes, provide the material base of the just institutions that he wants to see maintained. In fact Rawls strongly recommends a system of markets as a just means for the allocation of most goods and services, recognizing their well-known limitations only in the usual perfunctory fashion ([5], pp. 270 ff.). Yet market systems are limited by a narrow time horizon, and are quite ill-equipped to allocate resources in a just fashion 172 R. and V. Rout ley over a time span of several generations. Similarly Rawls's endorsement of democratic voting procedures as in many cases a just method of determining procedures depends upon the assumptions that everyone with ah interest is represented. But given his own assumptions about obligations to the future and in respect of potential persons this is evidently not the case. Catering in a just fashion for the interests of future people poses serious problems for any method of decision that depends upon people being present to represent their own interests. Some of the more conservative, indeed reactionary, economic assumptions in Rawls emerge with the assumption that all that is required for justice between generations is a just savings rate, that all we need to pass on to the future are the things that guarantee appropriate savings such as capital, factories, and machines. But the transmission of these things is quite insufficient for justice to the future, and neither necessary nor sufficient as a foundation for a good life for future generations. What is required for justice is the transmission in due measure of what is valuable. Rawls has, however, taken value accumulation as capital accumulation, thereby importing one of the grossest economic assumptions, that capital reflects value. But of course the accumulation of capital may conflict with the preservation of what is valuable. It is for this sort of reason (and thus, in essence, because of the introduction of supplementary economistic theses which are not part of the pure contract theory) that Rawls's theory is a reactionary one from an environmental point of view; on the theory as presented (i.e. the contract theory plus all the supplementary assumptions) there is no need to preserve such things as wilderness or natural beauty. The savings doctrine supposes that everything of value for transmission to the future is negotiable in the market or tradeable; but then transmission of savings can by no means guarantee that some valuable things, not properly represented in market systems, are not eliminated or not passed on, thereby making future people worse off. It becomes evident in this way, too, how culturally-bound Rawls's idea of ensuring justice to future generations through savings is. It is not just that the idea does not apply, without a complete overhaul, to non-industrial societies such as those of hunter-gatherers; it does not apply to genuinely post-industrial societies either. Consideration of such alternative societies suggests that whafis required, in place of capital accumulation, is that we pass on what is necessary for a good life, that we ensure that the basics are fairly distributed over time and not eroded, e.g. that in the case of the forest people that the forest is maintained. The narrowness of Rawls's picture, Obligations to the Future 173 which makes no due allowance for social or cultural diversity (from the original contractual position on) or for individual diversity arises in part from his underlying and especially narrow socio-economic assumption as to what people want: What men want is meaningful work in free association with others, these associations regulating their relations to one another within a framework of just basic institutions. ([5], p. 290) This may be what many Harvard men want; but as a statement of what men want it supplies neither sufficient nor even necessary conditions.39 NOTES 1 Thus according to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110; our italics). There is at present no generally accepted means by which high level waste can be permanently isolated from the environment and remain safe for very long periods. . . . Permanent disposal of high-level solid wastes in stable geological formations is regarded as the most likely solution, but has yet to be demonstrated as feasible. It is not certain that such methods and disposal sites will entirely prevent radioactive releases following disturbances caused by natural processes or human activity. The Fox Report also quoted approvingly ([2], p. 187; our italics) the conclusion of the British (Flowers) Report [6]: There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exist s to ensure the safe containment of long-lived, highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future. Although the absence of a satisfactory storage method has been conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development, e.g. Weinberg ([3], pp. 32-33), it is now disputed by others. In particular, the headline for Cohen [15], which reads 'A substantial body of evidence indicates that the high level radioactive wastes generated by U.S. nuclear power plants can be stored satisfactorily in deep geological formations', has suggested to many readers - what it was no doubt intended to suggest- that there is really no problem about the disposal of radioactive wastes after all. Cohen presents, however, no new hard evidence, no evidence not already available to the British and Australian Commissions ([2] and [6]). Moreover the evidence Cohen does outline fails conspicuously to measure up to the standards rightly required by the Flowers and Fox Reports. Does Cohen offer a commercial-scale procedure for waste disposal which can be demonstrated as safe? Far from it: 174 R. and V. Routley The detailed procedures for handling the high-level wastes are not yet definite, but present indications are that. . . . (Cohen [1], p. 24; our italics) Does Cohen 'demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt' the long-term safety of burial of wastes, deep underground? Again, far from it: On the face of it such an approach appears to be reasonably safe. . . . (p. 24; our italics) Cohen has apparently not realized what is required. At issue here are not so much scientific or empirical issues as questions of methodology, of standards of evidence required for claims of safety, and above all, of values, since claims of safety, for example, involve implicit evaluations concerning what counts as an acceptable risk, an admissible cost, etc. In the headline 'a substantial body of evidence . . . indicates that. . . wastes . . . can be stored satisfactorily' the key words (italicized) are evaluative or elastic, and the strategy of Cohen's case is to adopt very low standards for their application. But in view of what is at stake it is hardly acceptable to do this, to dress up in this way what are essentially optimistic assurances and untested speculations about storage, which in any case do little to meet the difficulties and uncertainties that have been widely pointed out as regards precisely the storage proposals Cohen outlines, namely human or natural interference or disturbance. 2 See [18], pp. 24-25. 3 On all these points, see [14], esp. p. 141. According to the Fox Report ([2], p. 110): Parts of the reactor structure will be highly radioactive and their disposal could be very difficult. There is at present no experience of dismantling a full size reactor. 4 See, in particular, The Union of Concerned Scientists, The Nuclear Fuel Cycle, Friends of the Earth Energy Paper, San Francisco 1973, p. 47; also [3], p. 32 and [14], p. 149. 5 As the discussion in [14], pp. 153-7, explains. 6 Cf. [17], pp. 35-36, [18] and, for much detail, J. R. Goffman and A. R. Tamplin, Poisoned Power, Rodale Press, Emmau Pa. 1971. 7 On the pollution and waste disposal record of the infant nuclear industry, see [14] and [17]. The record of many countries on pollution control, where in many cases available technologies for reducing or removing pollution are not applied because they are considered too expensive or because they adversely affect the interests of some powerful group, provides clear historical evidence that the problem of nuclear waste disposal would not end simply with the devising of a 'safe' technology for disposal, even if one could be devised which provided a sufficient guarantee of safety and was commercially feasible. The fact that present economic and political arrangements are overwhelmingly weighted in favour of the interests and concerns of (some) contemporary humans makes it not unrealistic to expect the long-term nuclear waste disposal, if it involved any significant cost at all, when public concern about the issue died down, would be seen to conflict with the interests of contemporary groups, and that these latter interests would in many cases be favoured. Nor, as the history of movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament shows, could generalized public concern in the absence of direct personal interest, be relied upon to be sustained for long enough to ensure implementation of costly or troublesome long-term disposal methods - even in those places where public concern exists and is a politically significant force. It must be stressed then that the problem is not merely one of disposal technique. Historical and other evidence points to the conclusion that many of the most important risks associated with nuclear waste disposal are not of the kind which might be amenable Obligations to the Future 175 to technical solutions in the laboratory. A realistic assessment of potential costs to the future from nuclear development cannot overlook these important non-technical risk factors. 8 Of course the effect on people is not the only factor which has to be taken into consideration in arriving at a moral judgment. Nuclear radiation, unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life. But since the harm nuclear development is likely to cause to non-human life can hardly improve its case, it suffices if the case against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the conventional way. 9 Proponents of nuclear power often try to give the impression that future people will not just bear costs from nuclear development but will also be beneficiaries, because nuclear powerprovides an 'abundant' or even 'unlimited' source of energy; thus Weinberg ([3], p. 34): 'an all but infinite source of relatively cheap and clean energy'. A good example of an attempt to create the impression that 'abundant' and 'cheap' energy from nuclear fission will be available to 'our descendants', i.e. all future people, is found in the last paragraph of Cohen [15]. Such claims are most misleading, since fission power even with the breeder reactor has only about the same prospective lifetime as coal-produced electricity (a point that can be derived using data in A. Parker, 'World Energy Resources: A Survey', Energy Policy, Vol. 3 [1975], pp. 58-66), and it is quite illegitimate to assume that nuclear fusion, for which there are still major unsolved problems, will have a viable, clean technology by the time fission runs out, or, for that matter, that it ever will. Thus while some few generations of the immediate future may obtain some benefits as well as costs, there is a very substantial chance that tho se of the more distant future will obtain nothing but costs. 10 These feelings, of which Smith's and Hume's sympathy is representative, are but the feeling echoes of obligation. At most, sympathy explains the feeling of obligation or lack of it, and this provides little guide as to whether there is an obligation or not - unless one interprets moral sympathy, the feeling of having a obligation, or being obligated, itself as a sufficient indication of obligation, in which case moral sympathy is a non-explanatory correlate in the feelings department of obligation itself and cannot be truly explanatory of the ground of it; unless, in short, moral sympathy reduces to an emotive rewrite of moral obligation. 11 Elsewhere in [1] Passmore is especially exercised that our institutions and intellectual traditions - presumably only the better ones - should be passed on to posterity, and that we should strive to make the world a better place, if not eventually an ideal one. 12 This is not the only philosophically important issue in environmental ethics on which Passmore is inconsistent. Consider his: 'over-arching intention: to consider whether the solution of ecological problems demands a moral or metaphysical revolution' (p. x), whether the West needs a new ethic and a new metaphysics. Passmore's answer in [1] is an emphatic No. Only insofar as Western moralists have [made various erroneous suggestions] can the West plausibly be said to need a 'new ethic'. What it needs, for the most part, is not so much a 'new ethic' as adherence to a perfectly familiar ethic. For the major sources of our ecological disasters - apart from ignorance - are greed and shortsightedness, which amount to much the same thing. . . There is no novelty in the view that greed is evil; no need of a new ethic to tell us as much. (p. 187) 'The view that the West now needs. . . a new concept of nature' is similarly dismissed (p. 186, cf. p. 72). But in his paper [1*] (i.e. 'Attitudes to Nature', Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, Vol. 8, Macmillan, London 1975), which is said to be an attempt to bring together and to reformulate some of the basic philosophical themes of [1], Passmore's answer is Yes, and quite different themes, inconsistent with those of [1], are advanced: 176 R. and V. Routley [T]he general conditions I have laid down . . . have not been satisfied in most of the traditional philosophies of nature. To that degree it is true, I think, that we do need a 'new metaphysics' which is genuinely not anthropocentric. . . . A 'new metaphysics', if it is not to falsify the facts, will have to be naturalistic, but not reductionist. The working out of such a metaphysics is, in my judgement, the most important task which lies ahead of philosophy. ([1*], pp. 260-1) A new ethic accompanies this new metaphysics. The emergence of new moral attitudes to nature is bound up, then, with the emergence of a more realistic philosophy of nature. That is the only adequate foundation for effective ecological concern. ([1*], p. 264) This is a far cry from the theme of [1] that ecological problems can be solved within the traditions of the West. 13 Put differently, the causal linkage can bypass intermediate generations, especially given action at a temporal distance: the chain account implies that there are no moral constraints in initiating such causal linkages. The chain picture accordingly seems to presuppose an unsatisfactory Humean model of causation, demanding contiguity and excluding action at a distance. 14 Golding we shall concede to Passmore, though even here the case is not clearcut. For Golding writes towards the end of his article ([12], p. 96): My discussion, until this point, has proceeded on the view that we have obligations to future generations. But do we? I am not sure that the question can be answered in the affirmative with any certainty. I shall conclude this note with a very brief discussion of some of the difficulties. All of Passmore's material on Golding is drawn from this latter and, as Golding says, 'speculative' discussion. 15 There is no textual citation for Bentham at all for the chapter of [1] concerned, viz. Ch. 4, 'Conservation'. 16 As Passmore himself at first concedes ([1], p. 84): If, as Bentham tells us, in deciding how to act men ought to take account of the effects of their actions on every sentient being, they obviously ought to take account of the pleasure and pains of the as yet unborn. 17 Neither rightness nor probable lightness in the hedonistic senses correspond to these notions in the ordinary sense; so at least [13] argues, following much anti-utilitarian literature. 18 On this irrationality different theories agree: the rational procedure, for example according to the minimax rule for decision-making under uncertainty, is to minimize that outcome which maximizes harm. 19 Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to follow the market (cf. P. A. Samuelson, Economics, 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York 1967, p. 351). Thus the rates have little moral relevance. 20 Cf. Rawls [5], p. 287: 'From a moral point of view there are no grounds for discounting future well-being on the basis of pure time preference.' 21 What the probabilities would be depends on the theory of probability adopted: a Carnapian theory, e.g., would lead back to the unconstrained position. Obligations to the Future 177 22 A real possibility is one which there is evidence for believing could eventuate. A real possibility requires producible evidence for its consideration. The contrast is with mere logical possibility. 23 Thus, to take a simple special case, economists dismiss distant future people from their assessments of utility, welfare, etc., on the basis of their non-existence; cf. Ng ('the utility of a non-existent person is zero') and Harsanyi ('only existing people [not even "nonexisting potential individuals"] can have real utility levels since they are the only ones able to enjoy objects with a positive utility, suffer from objects with a negative utility, and feel indifferent to objects with zero utility') (see Appendix B of Y. K. Ng, 'Preference, Welfare, and Social Welfare', paper presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977, pp. 24, 26-27). Non-existent people have no experiences, no preferences; distant future people do not exist; therefore distant future people have no utility assignments - so the sorites goes. But future people at least will have wants, preferences, and so on, and these have to be taken into account in adequate utility assessments (which should be assessed over afuture time horizon), no matter how much it may complicate or defeat calculations. 24 There are problems about formulating universalizability satisfactorily, but they hardly affect the point. The requisite universalizability can in fact be satisfactorily brought out from the semantical analysis of deontic notions such as obligation, and indeed argued for on the basis of such an analysis which is universal in form. The lawlikeness requirement, which can be similarly defended, is essentially that imposed on genuine scientific laws by logical empiricists (e.g. Carnap and Hempel), that such laws should contain no proper names or the like, no reference to specific locations or times. 25 Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitarianism (e.g. Sidgwick [11], p. 414), and in a range of contract and other theories from Kant and Rousseau toRawls ([5], p. 293). How the principle is argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlying theory; and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particular ethical theories. 26 See esp. R. Lanoue, NuclearPlants:The MoreTheyBuild, The More You Pay, Centerfor Study of Responsive Law, Washington DC 1976; also [14], pp. 212 ff. 27 On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and Energy, Environmentalists for Full Employment, Washington DC 1977, pp. 1-7, and also the details supplied in substantiating the interesting case of Commoner [7]. On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as well [18], p. 23. On the employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [9], p. 149. A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich, Energy and Equality, Calder & Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly the opposite of what the poor need. 28 For much more detail on the inappropriateness see E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Blond & Briggs, London 1973. As to the capital and other requirements, see [2], p. 48, and also [7] and [9]. For an illuminating look at the sort of development high-energy technology will tend to promote in the so-called underdeveloped countries, see the paper of Waiko and other papers in the Melanesian Environment (ed. by J. H. Winslow), Australian National University Press, Canberra 1977. 29 This fact is implicitly recognized in [2], p. 56. 30 A useful survey is given in A. Lovins, Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken, Friends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Foreign Affairs, October 1976); see also [17], [6], [7], [14], pp. 233 ff., and Schumacher, op. cit. 31 This is also explained in [2], p. 56. 32 An argument like this is suggested in Passmore [1], Chs. 4 and 7, with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument for the overriding importance of passing on contemporary culture is underpinned by what appears to be a future- 178 R. and V. Routley directed ethical version of the Hidden Hand argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed be fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only way to do so, since do-good intervention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care of the present and immediate future. The argument has all the defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others. 33 See [14], p. 66, p. 191, and also [7]. 34 For such arguments see esp. M. Flood and R. Grove-White, Nuclear Prospects. A Comment on the Individual, the State and Nuclear Power, Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England and National Council for Civil Liberties, London 1976. 35 For a recent sketch of one such alternative which is outside the framework of the conventional option of centralized bureaucratic socialism, see E. Callenbach's novel, Ecotopia, Banyan Tree Books, Berkeley, California 1975. For the outline of a liberation socialist alternative see Radical Technology (ed. by G. Boyle and P. Harper), Undercurrents Limited, London 1976, and references therein. 36 Some earlier contract theories also did. Burke's contract (in E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, Dent, London 1910, pp. 93-94) 'becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are not yet born'. Thus Burke's contract certainly appears to lead to obligations to distant future generations. Needless to say, there are metaphysical difficulties, which however Burke never considers, about contracts between parties at widely separated temporal locations. 37 Several of the preceding points we owe to M. W. Jackson. 38 Resources such as soil fertility and petroleum could even be a primary social goods on Rawls's very hazy general account of these goods ([5], pp. 62, 97): are these 'something a rational man wants whatever else he wants'? The primary social goods should presumably be those which are necessary for the good and just life -which will however vary with culture. 39 We have benefited from discussion with Ian Hughes and Frank Muller and useful comments on the paper from Brian Martin and Derek Browne. REFERENCES [1] J. Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, Duckworth, London 1974. [2] Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra 1977. [3] A. M. Weinberg, 'Social Institutions and Nuclear Energy", Science, Vol. 177 (July 1972), pp. 27-34. • [4] R. Routley, 'Exploring Meinong's Jungle II. Existence is Existence Now', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (to appear). [5] J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1971. [6] Nuclear Power and the Environment. Sixth Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, London 1976. [7] B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power, Knopf, New York 1976. [8] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1903. [9] B. Commoner, H. Boksenbaum and M. Corr (Eds.), Energy and Human Welfare - A Critical Analysis, Vol. III, Macmillan, New York 1975. Obligations to the Future 179 [10] J. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 1, published under the superintendence of J. Bowring, with an intro. by J. H. Burton; William Tait, Edinburgh 1843. [11] H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Macmillan, London 1962 (reissue). [12] M. P. Golding, 'Obligations to Future Generations', Monist, Vol. 56 (1972), pp. 85-99. [13] R. and V. Routley, 'An Expensive Repair Kit for Utilitarianism', presented at the Colloquium on Preference, Choice and Value Theory, RSSS, Australian National University, August 1977. [14] R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy, Outback Press, Melbourne 1977. [15] B. L. Cohen, 'The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes from Fission Reactors', Scientific American, Vol. 236 (June 1977), pp. 22-31. [16] S. McCracken, 'The Waragainst the Atom' .Commentary (September 1977), pp. 33-47. [17] A. B. Lovins and J. H. Price, Non-Nuclear Futures: The Case for an Ethical Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth International, San Francisco 1975. [18] A. Roberts, "The Politics of Nuclear Power', Arena, No. 41 (1976), pp. 22-47.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Nuclear waste, obligations to the future, and social choice Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c.1979 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/ed8352051a1e549600f0284f6200d6d0.pdf fd3cb0d6d36d314a2139ba942ebcae87 PDF Text Text RICHARD ROUTLEY metaphysical fallout from nuclear predicament the string of nuclear prophets has produced a series of philosophically oriented works on nuclear war ’ The series is important for its deeper penetration mto the main nuclear predicament, down to metaphysical levels; m this, the series contrasts with the superficialities of much of the political commentary. The most widely circulated and influential text of the series is undoudbtedly that of the slightest of the ’prophets&dquo;, A Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. This skillful piece of mediasome of the apparently Anders So, conveniently, main assumptions of Schell and Anders can often be considered together. To criticize their assumptions is not of course to belittle their work. In particular, Schell’s little book, for all its political shortcomings, is having a significant and much needed effect m shifting attitudes towards nuclear arrangements. It is especially valuable for its vivid and horrifying scenarios of the aftermath of nuclear attack Unfortunately it also exhibits, both philosophically and factually, severe defects. philosophy unncannily redeploys deep phenomenological themes of Some of it is simply rubbish- to take one example, consider the claim that &dquo;without ... a worldwide program of action for preserving the [human] species, .. nothing else that we undertake together can make any practical or moral sense ...&dquo; (p.173, rearranged). This should certainly be rejected philosophically; for there is no separate moral issue of such overwhelming importance that all other issues become morally neutral. Moral issues remain moral issues they do not cease to be so when compared with more important moral issues (as Schell effectively acknowledges elsewhere, e g �p.130). And the claim should be questioned on more factual grounds. Humans form a highly resilient species, like rats a survivor species, unlikely to be entirely exterminated under presently arranged nuclear holocausts. The example was selected, however, because it leads into, indeed presupposes, two of the major defective assumptions in the work of Schell and Anders: S 1. Nuclear war will eliminate I~fe, human life at least, (the extinction assumption) and on earth S2. In the absence of humans, very many notions, not only those of mortality and values, but those of time and space for example, make no sense: or, to put it mto a more sympathefic philosophical form, these notions depend for their sense on an actual human context (the extravagant anthropocentric assumption).22 of S2 which gave Anders’ and Schell’s works of their apparent philosophical depth, and certainly induce much philosophical puzzlement through the paradoxical propositions generated. But the frequent applications of S2 It is applications some S1.3 For without total extinction there will be humans about, to make past and future, to do good end evil, and to go on making sense! depend essentially on Granted, assumption S1 by no means ruled out as a real possibility, as the technological means appear available to make it true (to render Homo Sapiens extinct).4 Granted, the prospect of large-scale nuclear war does threaten leading is centers of Western civilization with obliteration. Even so, S1 unlikely m the light of present-admittedly inadequate-information Even m Canada, which lies on the polar appears route of Soviet missiles, human life should be able to continue in certain northern areas (according to Canadian medical studies). Schell’s argument to S1 is extremely flimsy. It de- pends, for example, 20 on an unjustified extrapolation from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very North American thing of contracting the world to North America. (All that matters, all worthwhile civilization, is in the USA, or at least, to be more char~table, in North America and Europe, which will also be wiped out, e , its entire human population will be eliminated in a nuclear holocaust.) Some of the data Schell relies upon, for example the effect of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, was significantly out of date even when he wrote Other effects than ozone destruction, such as variations in the ultraviolet radiation and temperature levels, apparently extrapolate even less well from North to South A factually superior study of nuclear �produced at about the same time as Schell’s, by and others, indicates that part of the Southern Hemisphere, such as New Zealand and southern latitudes of Latin Amenca, could escape relatively unscathed from even the most massive northern exchanges. disaster Preddy Doomsday prophets may appear to have gained new purchase through recent (if belated) scientific forecasts of a nuclear winter following upon nuclear war But although these forecasts certainly add a new, and alarming, ecological dimension to the very damaging consequences of large-scale nuclear war, they do not sustain the extinction assumpt~on.55 On the available evidence, human life will continue, though no doubt with new complications and simplifications, for example in many southern mid-latitude coastal regions outside zones of radiation fallout More generally, life will go on, though likely seriously and irreversibly impoverished through loss of valuable nonhuman systems and creatures. Nuclear prophets usually see the world (though with most of it carried along) as already set, in crucial respects, on the route to nuclear catastrophe. Much of the way taken is seen as both inevitable and irreversible Thus both Anders and Schell insist upon the &dquo;impossibility of unlearning&dquo; the means of manufacturing nuclear bombs. It would seem that extinction, which they both foresee, would furnish a good medium for unlearning nuclear technology (something very like this emerges from van Damken’s theory of an earlier &dquo;h~gh&dquo; technology). In virtue of S2, they would, however, exclude such a possibility as a case of unlearning, contending wrongly that the notion no longer made sense. But what they again want to suggest with the i m possibility-of -u n learning message is the inevitability of the development and eventual use of the technology-as if having learned the means all else was determined, and manufacture and use ceased to be a matter of choice. Certainly such views have been advanced6, but they are not tenable There are many examples of technological advances that have not been taken advantage of, and there are even cases of technological developments that have been manufactured but not marketed or used. There is not something very special about nuclear apparatus that puts it beyond the scope of such generalizations. Both Schell and Anders do claim that there are very special things about nuclear weapons, notably that they do not allow Even if this were true just of nuclear 11 experiment it is certainly not of smaller weapons-it weapons-and would not rebut the previous argument against the inevitability of nuclear weapons. And in fact Anders and (even) Schell &dquo; 21 �hedge their claims about testing, and the limits to nuclear scientific work, to large-scale weapons and independent experiments which do not interfere with observers and those outside the &dquo;laboratories.&dquo; Again they have latched onto major prints, m particular, we have at present no way of testing the cumulative effects of large-scale nuclear weapons in concert, e.g. for more holistic effects, such as fireballs or firestorms, or changes m coupled atmospheric circulation and radiation fields. Short of a large-scale nuclear war, and likely enough with it, these crucial effects must remain largely untested and hypothetical in character. Nontheless enough data can be assembled to carry through informative modellings, which point to the improbability of S1, and so undermine applications of S2. The penetration of human chauvinism, as thing peculiar to Schell and Anders, but is m S2, a product of West- is not some- philosophy, European philosophy especially. This chauvinism is unfortunately alive and still well, Anders version of S2 being just one striking illustration (cf. AA p. 252ff.). It has also deeply penetrated Anglo-American philosophy, and has been extended under the influence of Wittgenstein’s ern work, where even the necessary truths of mathematics are taken to be a product of human conventions, and would vanish with humans! Such are the alleged implications of extinction : but the fact is that the truths of arithmetic are m no way dependent on the existence of humans or humanoids or of gods or giraffes. As with necessary truths and falsehoods so with contingents ones: very many propositions about the world do not depend upon in any way for their truth-value or content on humans or their communities. _ 22 In Schell, human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly powerful and obnoxious Kantian form. Thoughts and propositions, time and tenses, history and memories, values and morality all depend on the life-giving presence of human beings-past or future or merely potential humans are not enough. Thus, according to Schell (p 140, e.g), &dquo; . the thought ’Humanity is now extinct’ is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as it is, we are not In imagining any other event, we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human tame....&dquo; The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; we can have it right now. Though we no doubt have it falsely, a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. Schell erroneously denies that: there is no &dquo;later&dquo; &dquo;outside the human tenses of past, present, and future ... &dquo; (p 140) .7 Human extinction eliminates &dquo;the creature that divides time into past, present and �future&dquo; annihilation cannot &dquo;come to pass&dquo; (p.143). But it false that the tenses are human: the tenses depend simply on a local time ordering (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at all on that perceptibility for its viability) relating other times to the present, to now (also a human-independent location, evident to other creatures, and borne witness to by such sequences as the passing seasons). Annihilation may also too easily come to pass, for many humans m the North at least, as it came to pass in recent geological times that humans began to exist upon earth Before that there was a time before there were any human beings. so is Anders’ argument for the demise of time, that &dquo;what has been will no longer be even what has been,&dquo; is also explicitly (and narrowly) verificatiomst: &dquo;for what would the difference be between what has only been and what has never been, if there is no one to remember the things that have been (AA p.245). There would still remain many sorts of differences; for one, the history recorded m many other organisms would be different Temporal themes do not lack wlegitimacy because not registered [or verified] by anyone&dquo;; truth, significance, still less meaning, are not matters of human verification. elsewhere, the human chauvinism is mixed with distorting metaphysical assumptions of our Western heritage, m particular, verificationism and ontological assumptions (to the effect that there are severe difficulties m talking about what does not exist Thus, for example, Schell takes over dubious metaphysics from Freud, according to whom ’nt is mdeed impossible to imagine our own death: and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are m fact still present as spectators&dquo; (p 138) The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting the first In fact there is no great difficulty in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both of Freud’s claims. The same goes for Schell’s extensions of human chauvinism into one of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: &dquo; . the simple and basic fact (sic!) that before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.&dquo; human life (p.171 ) These are no facts, but deeply entrenched philosophical dogmas (which have been exposed and criticized elsewhere, e.g , HC). Here, as other will disappear with the extinction of humans: trivially there will be no more humans (unless humans re-evolve or are recreated), and thus no more human communities, human institutions, human activities, human emotions, and so forth But it is already gomg too far to sug- Naturally 23 many things �gest, as no Anders does, that there will accordingly be &dquo;no love, no struggle, no pain, no hope, no comfort, sacrifice, no image, no song...&dquo; For there are, and may thought, no continue to exist, other creatures than humans with emotion, struggles, songs... Nor will the ending of all such human ventures, if it comes to pass, show that all past human ventures have been &dquo;all in vain,&dquo; meaningless, and already so to say dead The decay of the solar system, or the heat-death of the universe even, will not show that worthwhile human activities were not worthwhile.9 Several of the other notions and themes common to Schell and Anders derive from their shared assumptions S1 and S2. It is these that underlie the biblical notion (in Revelations) of a Second Death, redeployed by both. &dquo;The death of mankind,&dquo; under S1 , is reckoned a &dquo;second death,&dquo; because by S2 and S1 remamng life is rendered meaningless and already ’ seems to be dead (AA p.244, S p 166) and is already overhung with death&dquo; (S p.166). Thus, too, more trivially, a person faces &dquo;a second death,&dquo; not merely one’s own but m addition that greater death of the species and all future generations (S p 166. p.1 15). However, even if nuclear extinction came to pass, the stronger notion would not be vindicated, because it depends on the fallacious inference to the meaninglessness of preceding life and on the very questionable representation of this meaninglessness as a sort of death. There is no such Second Death: creatures die just once, perhaps all at about the same time. The idea of a Second Death lacks even a solid metaphysical base. From S1 , together with the minor principle that the extinction absolute does not differ m degree, comes the unibeing versality of peril theme that &dquo;we are all exposed to peril m the same degree,&dquo; which is accordingly &dquo;d~sgmsed~ and &dquo;difficult to recognize,&dquo; because there is no contrast (AE p 64; S p.150). This theme falls with S1. In any event, not all peoples are equally imperilled by the nuclear situation, the Indians of southern Patagonia being rather better placed than the Germans of northern Europe Nor are all people equally locked into the situation or incapacitated by it; the prospects are different in different countries and places. an Nor, likewise, are all people equally responsible, a pernicious theme which Schell (m contrast to Anders) repeatedly filtrates. This is the Pogo theme, according to whichS3. co, 24 in- Responsibility for the present nuclear predIcament (flasreally) dlstnbutes onto everybody, It belongs to every hu- man lií the world ’o ...i �But there is also, mixed in, a weaker, more plausible claim that gives the lie to the stronger one, namely, that we have some responsibility (the Nazi situation is compared) An especially blatant example of the Pogo theme’ runs as follows: &dquo;... the world’s political leaders though they now menace the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. At least, this is true for democracies&dquo; (pp.229-30). The theme is elaborated elsewhere: &dquo;... we are the authors of that distinction (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, since we pay for extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, while for the peoples of the non-nucleararmed world it is true only m the negative sense that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)&dquo; (p.152). But this is ... of an argument indicting representative government, by revealing its insensitivity and unresponsiveness to many of the populace they allegedly govern, not to mention those affected by its activities who are not represented at all (namely foreigners). But Schell conveniently neglects all such points: &dquo;... we are all potential mass killers. The moral cost of more nuclear armaments is that it makes all of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions&dquo; (p 152) And again [at] perpetrators ... we convey the steady message .. that life not only is not sacred but it is worthless; that ... it had been judged acceptable for everyone to be killed&dquo; (p 153) Little of this is true. Those who campaign against nuclear arrangements, vote against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility for the nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. Nor does the responsibilityor the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell illegitimately attributes to everyone-fall on those who have done less. Responsibility for decisions taken in &dquo;literal democracies&dquo; even by representatives (m the unlikely event of this happening m the case of anything as important as defense) cannot be traced back to those represented, since among many other things, a representative is only representative of a party which offers a complex and often ill-characterized package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero or more policies of this package. Only m the (uncommon) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to those who voted for it, not to everyone in the community. While S3 is false, there is an important related theme that is much more plausible, namely, that the present nuclear situation generates responsibilities for every socially involved person. 25 When moreover the Pogo assumption is disentangled from �the accompanyng themes, part of what results along the right lines: namely, is decidedly S4 The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell’s fashion, with all of us] have failed to change our pre-nuclear mstltutlons. The sovereign system Is out of step with the nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. (the whole earth theme). Though Schell remains relatively clear about the serious defects of the state and the frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used, unfortunately he often loses sight of this important theme (indicated pp.187-8) Yet S4 forms part of Schell’s critique of the state which is, by and large, scattered and fragmentary. Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new political institutions more &dquo;consonant with the global reality&dquo; are required as a matter of urgency. But he evades what he admits is the major task, making out viable alternatives. 12 At most he makes some passing gestures, some pointing towards the Way Up to world political control Solutions to the nuclear arms dilemma come, if not easily, m a similar simplistic way, from Top Down: those who can must appeal to the Top, to those who govern (cf. p.230). Schell places his hope m treaties for arms reduction and limitations, such as SALT, and m world government, through the United Nations (see p.225ff. and especially p 227, bottom paragraph) Given the record of these organizations and treaties, the negotiations and regulators, it is by now a pathetic faith. Nor is a serious need felt for further analysis of the nuclear situation, to investigate the origins of nuclear technology, to explore the roots of nuclear blindness, to consider effective changes to military-mdustrial organization and ways of life. 26 But some of the requisite deeper analysis of the nuclear situation and, more generally, of the roots of war can be found in Anders and elsewhere. 13 The roots of the nuclear predicament are not confined to the ideologically-aligned arrangements of nation-states, but penetrate also into key components of those states, their military, their controlling classes, and their supporting bureaucracies Both within the arrangements of states, what accounts in part for the arrangements, and in key components of the states, a conspicuous and crucial feature is the drive for power and domination (and, often, the accompanyng privilege). 14 Thus the push for [nuclear] superiority by the super-states, to be achieved through military-oriented science and technology, which involves and enables domination,in several interrelated forms The main �the large nation-state, where enough surplus be accumulated (from at home and from abroad, and bled from nature) to proceed with military and bureaucratic ambitions and to found the high-technology research and development means to ever more expendable power and power-base product can is energy. 15 In changing the structural arrangements to eliminate the proof nuclear war, it is not ultimately enough just to downspect the main power-base, the nation-state: it is also imporgrade tant to alter key components of the state, and, more sweepingly, to remove trouble-making patterns embedded m all these social and political arrangements, namely, patterns of domination-patterns manifested not only in state political organization, but in white-coloured relations, male-female relations, human-animal relations, human-nature relations-to remove, m short, chauvinistic relations. However, not everything needs to be accomplished at once: the cluster of damaging power and domination relations tied into war can be tackled separately There the problems can largely be narrowed to certain problems of states and certain key components of states In what analysis he does offer of the problem with states, Schell repeats the familiar false contrast of state expediency with morality, as a contrast between &dquo;raison d’etat&dquo; and the Socratic-Christian ethics The teaching that &dquo;the end justifies the means is the basis on which governments, in all times, have licensed themselves to commit crimes of every sort&dquo; (p 134). So &dquo;states may do virtually anything whatever m the name of [their] survival.&dquo; Schell then argues, however, that extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; but again the argument is far from sound, and depends on human chauvinism (as under S2) combined with ontological assumptions. Even if all humans were extinguished (as under S1 ) ends could remain, for instance, for nonhumans such as animals and extraterrestrials, actual or not. The end-means argument can, however, be repaired to remove such objections: instead it is claimed that extinction 27 nullifies end-means justification by frustrating the realization of every relevant end-meaning by &dquo;relevant,&dquo; in this context, those ends the realization of which the state appeals to m justification of its nuclear policies. 16 A nuclear war, even without human extinction but with severe enough losses, would undoubtedly frustrate the realization of relevant state ends So even from an expediency perspective, super-state policies are open to severe criticism, for example, as motivationally irrational in the nuclear risks taken. �As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty m war, Schell leaves us in no doubt. A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the right and power to go to war m defense or pursuit of its interests (p 187) War arises from how things are, from the arrangement of political affairs via jealous nation-states (p.188). Indeed there is a two-way linkage between having sovereignty and capacity to wage war. On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell contends, necessary for people to organize for war. On the other side, without war it is impossible to preserve sovereignty Neither of these contentions is transparently clear as it stands. The first is damaged by civil war and the like, the second by the persistence of small nonmilitary states. Now that the macro-state system is entrenched, it is, however, easy for conservatives (m particular) to argue from the &dquo;realties&dquo; of international life, which includes self-interest, aggression, fear, hatred. It is on this basis that peace arrangements are readily dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist (cf. p.185). Schell’s further theme that nuclear war is not war threatens, however, to undermine his case against the sovereign state: for example, his ends-means argument and the argument based on its nuclear-war making capacity. Fortunately the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out from an erroneous characterization of war as &dquo;a violent means employed by a nation to achieve an end&dquo; (p.189): but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for war. What is correct is that nuclear wars are very different from previous conventional (cf. WP). Schell goes on to claim that war requires an end which nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; does not have. But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends (even if large nuclear wars cannot be won in the older sense: but not all wars or games are won). It is also claimed that war depends on weakness, on one side being defeated on a decision by arms. But in a nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; this doesn’t happen, &dquo;no one’s strength fails until both sides have been annihilated&dquo; (p.190). But what these sorts of considerations contribute to showing is again not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars (because they fail on such criteria as reasonable prospect of success and improvement), not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. That conventional wars have persisted into nuclear times does damage to Schell’s argument that nuclear weapons have also ruined &dquo;conventional&dquo; wars, and his connected theme that the demise of war has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court has been removed (pp 192-193). The theme depends on a pair of mistaken propositions: that conwars 28 �cerning the demise of conventional war, and the idea that war of some sort has to be the final &dquo;court of appeal&dquo; between nations (for there are other types of contests that could serve, and there is also the possibility of more cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda) The theme also imports the social-Darwinian assumption of Clausewicz (the &dquo;log~c of war&dquo; theme) that war has to proceed to the technological limit-as if war and violence were thoroughly natural activities, independent of recognized social settings (for winning, surrender, etc.), and ruleless activities. On the contrary, wars are parasitic on social organizations such as states and are governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. They are a social phenomenon, with a rule structure, if not a 29 logic. Much capital has been made not merely from the logic of war&dquo; but from what is now called &dquo;the logic of deterrence&dquo; and the &dquo;logic of nuclear [strategic] planning.&dquo; The message that is usually supposed to emerge is that the massive arrangements the world is now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, rational. However, this represents little more than a cheap semantical trick. Logic in no way justifies the present arrangements, or anything like them, or renders them reasonable. There are logics of decision (as presented, e.g., for the classical case in Jeffrey) which can be applied in strategic planting; but they do not yeld specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative outcomes, that is without values being pumped in, extralogically. There are various ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not: but in nuclear strategic planning they have invariably been settled on the basis of expediency 17 . For the most part, however, &dquo;logic of&dquo; tends to be used very loosely, as a word of general commendation, to cover something like &dquo;reasomng and rational considerations entering into the policy or strategy of.&dquo; In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the term &dquo;logic of,&dquo; should write of &dquo;the illogic of deterrence,&dquo; for he emphasizes its unreasonableness. For instance, he stresses (p.213) the disparity between the supposed rationality of threatening use of nuclear weapons and the irrationality (even from a national interest viewpoint) of actually using them should the threat fail- 18 yet the success of deterrence doctrine depends on the credibility of the threat of this unjustifiable and irrational use. Indeed Schell wants to go still further and locate a contradiction in deterrence (e g. pp.2012) ; but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation,’9 along with the assumption �that deterrence involves cancellation. Nuclear deterrence may well be irrational, it is immoral, but it is not inconsistent. The Australian National University NOTES *This is a revised version of "Appendix 1 On the fate of mankind and the earth, according to Schell, and to Anders" of my monograph referred to as WP, where several points, only touched upon in this review, are further developed References are by way of authors names or else through obvious acronyms, given in the list of references which follows 1 The distinguishing term is from Foley’s Nuclear Prophets. where many leading anti-nuclear prophets are assessed One well-known prophet not so considered there is Jaspers, presumably because his main work comes out in entirely the wrong direction It gives heavy philosophical attire to the better-dead-than-red abomination A main argument against Jaspers so presented is simple However bad being red might become (at present it is debatably worse than living under some of the totalitarian regimes the free West props up), it still gives humans a further chance for good lives, since regimes fall or can be toppled but the total annihilation removes that all- important opportunity 2 A detailed comparison of Schell and Anders’ of S2 is made in Foley JS remarkably similar versions 3 Should S2 appeal, as it may. to suitable communities of humans. S1 will require reformulation in similar terms, and the argument that follows needs minor adjustment, with appropriate groups replacing individuals 4. Thus the Last Person environmental ethics (as HC for instance, the remote death of the Sun, but assumes new urgency It is this sort of argument that connects environmental ethics and nuclear ethics. at a deeper metaphysical level The Bomb and Bulldozer are out of the same technological Pandora’s box. explams), is no argument, important in longer merely hypothetical, awaiting, Nuclear technology is not the only route to human extinction, nor the only Pandora’s box. Biological and chemical means are perhaps even more effective, and certainly can be more selective in what gets extinguished. Nuclear extinction would presumably require a different and more massive 30 exchange than is usually assumed in nuclear war scenarios. with heavy targeting in particular of Southern Hemisphere sites (including internationally-recognized nuclear-free zones). �5 Nor do recent scientific studies claim as much The most intrepid of these studies, Erlich and others, only contends that in certain worst-case circumstances, "the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded" (p 1299). The study admits that, in the scenario described, "it seems unlikely Homo sapiens would be forced to extinction immediately," and the difficulties indicated in the way of long-term human survival are exaggerated In many of the drastic effects predicted for Northern midlatitudes very much milder forms in equivalent Southern latitudes For example, temperatures for regions with maritime climates appear likely to vary by only a few degrees and perhaps negligibly for many agricultural purposes after 100 days (cf. Turco and others, p 1287 case 29, and p 1286) Similarly the extent of nuclear darkness and of surface ultraviolet radiation will be appreciably less in the South and perhaps minor for many crucial purposes. such as photosynthesis and human outdoor activity. after 100 days (cf the data in Benton and Partridge) particular, are reflected in No doubt some scientifically respectable sections of the environmental and peace movements have an interest in exaggerating the probable effects of nuclear holocaust for life on earth, much as many heads of states and strategists have an interest in minimizing them And there is certainly substantial margin for error and for variation in conclusions drawn For Crutzen (p 59) is right that "analysis of the environmental effects of a global thermonuclear war remain uncertain because of a lack of information on various important processes [among other things] The environment might become extremely hostile, because of hitherto overlooked changes in the composition of the atmosphere," again among other things Such uncertainty bodes considerable caution as rational The way to err is clear 6 Not worth, military merely by technological determinists of Marxist persuasion Hackformer US general, argues by straight induction that if the US a has a weapon it will use it appalling theme that humans create past, present and repeated elsewhere, e.g . p 173. 7 The 8 For a detailed refutation of these assumptions, is here (AA pp perseverance, criticized 9 Anders see future (etc ) is JB 244-5) relying upon a version of the argument from in detail in Routley and Griffin interesting converse of this theme is sometimes advanced, that no responsible. the whole thing is out of control The technological version of this no-responsibility theme is discussed below (fn 15) More satisfactory is the theme that nuclear arrangements are out of political 10 An one is in terms of vested interests in keeping nuclear going, which enable responsibility to be distributed The vested interests, which bear considerable responsibility. include the military weapons industry, and research and academic communities (cf Barnaby) Under pressures for re-election especially, politicians give in to these powerful groups, so losing control of political processes The argument is flawed at its final stage For many influential politicians either belong to or represent vested interests Thus. though there is no doubt some "lack of control," political processes tend rather to reflect vested interests than to run out of political control control, but for reasons, things 31 11 Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows "The self-extinction of our species is not an act that anyone describes as sane or �sensible, nevertheless, it is an act that, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we plan In certain circumstances to commit (p 185) Even for most of the planners, extinction is presumably not part of "the plan," but an unintended consequence, and most of us have little or no role in the planning : enough of us even campaign against the planning. Further "the world chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons" (p 194) the world? This connects the course with the faulty ideological argument from defence of fundamentals, e g , for liberty, for the "free enterprise" (USA) nation, and against socialism 12. A more detailed discussion is given in WP8, where too the the state from nuclear dilemmas is elaborated case against explanation is elaborated in Foley, some of the themes are straightforwardly in Martin The incomplete list of items given, to be investigated in a deeper analysis of the nuclear situation, paraphrases Foley JS p.164 13 Anders’ presented more These motivating drives form a part of a larger integrated package. comprising maximization drives for power, knowledge, control, wealth, enfor the "newer" Enlightenment (but Faustian) ergy, speed, satisfaction, virtues. Frequently there are attempts (the human failing for excessive neatness and simplicity manifested) to reduce the package to one main component, preference-satisfaction. for instance, or utility And the type of drive is justified (especially for those who have it, but also as rational, which again it is not) Rationality, the deeply entrenched myth has it, consists in maximization of a suitable mix of these virtues 14 Maximization of the objects of the drives runs, however, into limitation theorems and associated paradoxes The maximization of self-interest (individual or national) runs into Newcomb’s paradox and special cases of it such as Prisoner’s Dilemma situations The maximization of power, as symbolized in the Christian-Islamic God. encounters the paradox of omnipotence, the parallel maximization of knowledge, paradoxes of omniscience. There are no consistent objects which are omnipotent or omniscient The drive for maximum consistency, often taken to be the epitome of rationality. also leads to inconsistency in the case of more important theories, such as arithmetic and set theory (by virtue of Godel s theorem and associated limitative theorems) 15 R & D, drives the though directed by military requirements and the arms race, also arms race Its role is partly disguised by the myth of neutral science 32 There have been attempts, not only by those committed to technological determinism, to involve technology more deeply as the main, or single, source of the nuclear fix (thus especially Mumford, in part thereby anticipating Commoner’sparallel indictment of technology-choice in the ecological fix) It is technology, the mega-machine, running out of control, that has brought us to this predicament, the nuclear abyss. Sometimes this serves to exonerate states and their key components and those who control them, for they are simply caught up by this out-of-control machine, but sometimes the state itself is seen as a machine also running out of control But the technological determinism, like other varieties of stronger (nonanalytic) determinism, is false Nuclear technology was selected and proceeded with, after a well-known political dispute involving distinguished scientists, it was deliberated, funded and promoted, while other alternatives were not �of the nuclear age were not inevitable. but dechosen certain liberately by components of the large nation-states And much as they need not have been chosen, so they do not have to be persisted with The fashionable inevitability determinism themes admit not only of refutation by bringing out the many choices made in persisting with often recalcitrant technologies They also admit of being made to look ridiculous If the Bomb is determined, as part of human evolution, then if it functions (as it probably will, a matter also determined), it will serve as a human population control device, a matter also determined That is. the Bomb has its fixed evolutionary place in human population regulation 1 Damaging technologies 16 This reformulation main 17 qualification can proposed by N Griffin, who suggested that the be inferred from Schell’s context was the usual game theory setting sees to this almost autothen assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her matically, own advantage Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that "the logic of deterrence" is based on eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth assumptions Selecting for it is 18 Even the irrationality of retaliatory (or first-strike) use has been contested, e.g., it has been wishfully thought that America will rise like a phoenix from the radioactive ashes. There is moreover a simple solution to Schell’s problem of the "missing motive" for retaliating to a large strike (p 204), namely, not a future retributive one, but an ideological one eliminate the prospect of the future dominance of the rival ideology. Such a motive has been offered for the conjectured targeting of Latin America 19 An appears confusion of negation with cancellation or obliteration thinking, where US missiles are supposed incoming USSR missiles analogous in recent US "star-war" to " negate" Moral paradoxes of deterrence take a different direction For although inupon perhaps questionable interconnections of intensional functors. One type of paradox (considered in WP 5, where the immorality of deterrence is argued) derives from a policy of credibly threatening war without, however. intending to proceed to war. though credible threats [appear to] imply an intention to proceed Another style derives from acclaimed intention to reduce the number of nuclear missiles when the persistent practice, which implies an intention, is to increase the number This paradox is technically removed&mdash;how satisfactorily is another matter&mdash; by a distinction between long-term aims and immediate practice, a timehonoured method of removing contradictions by conveniently discerned temporal distinctions volving negation, they depend REFERENCES 33 G Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, C H Beck. Munchen, 1956, referred to as AA. �G Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenende: Gendanken tion, C H Beck, Munchen, 1972, referred to as AE F. Barnaby, "Will there be a Nuclear War," in zur atomaren Situa- Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 2-37. I J Benton and G W Partridge,"’Twilight at Noon Overstated," Ambio 13 (1984) 49-51 B. Commoner, The New York, 1972 Closing Circle: Nature, PJ Crutzen, "Darkness after a Man and Technology, Knopf, Nuclear War," Ambio 13 (1984) 52-4. M. Denborough (ed ), Australia and Nuclear War Croom Helm, Australia, 1983. P R Erlich and others, "Long-term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War," Science 222 (1983) 1293-1300 Jonathan Schell Genius&mdash;Philosopher&mdash;Rewrite Man," type1982, referred to as JS Brisbane, script, G Foley, G Foley, Nuclear Prophets. The True and the False, typescript, Brisbane, 1983 D. Hackworth, "A Soldier’s Report," Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 209-12 K Jaspers. The Future of Mankind. (trans Chicago E B Ashton). University of Press, 1961 B Martin, Grass Roots ham, 1984 L Mumford, The 1970 Myth Strategy Against War, Freedom Press, Notting- of the Machine, 2 vols., Harcourt Brace. New York, Preddey and others, Future contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters. A Report to the Commission for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, G F New Zealand, 1982 Routley and N. Griffin. ’’Unravelling the Meanings of Life," Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 3, Australian National University, CanR. berra, 1982 R Routley, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, Research School of Social Sciences. Australian National University, 1980, referred to as JB R Routley. War and Peace I. On the Ethics of Large-Scale Nuclear War and Nuclear Deterrence and the Political Fall-Out, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 5, Australian National University, 1984, referred to as WP R and V Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics," in Environmental Philosophy (ed D Mannison and others), Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1980, referred to as HC J Schell, The Fate of the Knopf, Earth, New York, 1982, referred to K P Turco and others, "Nuclear Winter, Global Consequences of Nuclear Explosions." Science 222 (1983) 1283-92 34 M Walzer, Just and Unjust as S F Multiple Wars Basic Books, New York, 1977. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Published Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan formally published very little of his nuclear ethics and politics, although a nuclear imaginary is present throughout his ouevre. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document RICHARD ROUTLEY metaphysical fallout from nuclear predicament the string of nuclear prophets has produced a series of philosophically oriented works on nuclear war ’ The series is important for its deeper penetration mto the main nuclear predicament, down to metaphysical levels; m this, the series contrasts with the superficialities of much of the political commentary. The most widely circulated and influential text of the series is undoudbtedly that of the slightest of the ’prophets&dquo;, A Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. This skillful piece of mediasome of the apparently Anders So, conveniently, main assumptions of Schell and Anders can often be considered together. To criticize their assumptions is not of course to belittle their work. In particular, Schell’s little book, for all its political shortcomings, is having a significant and much needed effect m shifting attitudes towards nuclear arrangements. It is especially valuable for its vivid and horrifying scenarios of the aftermath of nuclear attack Unfortunately it also exhibits, both philosophically and factually, severe defects. philosophy unncannily redeploys deep phenomenological themes of Some of it is simply rubbish- to take one example, consider the claim that &dquo;without ... a worldwide program of action for preserving the [human] species, .. nothing else that we undertake together can make any practical or moral sense ...&dquo; (p.173, rearranged). This should certainly be rejected philosophically; for there is no separate moral issue of such overwhelming importance that all other issues become morally neutral. Moral issues remain moral issues they do not cease to be so when compared with more important moral issues (as Schell effectively acknowledges elsewhere, e g p.130). And the claim should be questioned on more factual grounds. Humans form a highly resilient species, like rats a survivor species, unlikely to be entirely exterminated under presently arranged nuclear holocausts. The example was selected, however, because it leads into, indeed presupposes, two of the major defective assumptions in the work of Schell and Anders: S 1. Nuclear war will eliminate I~fe, human life at least, (the extinction assumption) and on earth S2. In the absence of humans, very many notions, not only those of mortality and values, but those of time and space for example, make no sense: or, to put it mto a more sympathefic philosophical form, these notions depend for their sense on an actual human context (the extravagant anthropocentric assumption).22 of S2 which gave Anders’ and Schell’s works of their apparent philosophical depth, and certainly induce much philosophical puzzlement through the paradoxical propositions generated. But the frequent applications of S2 It is applications some S1.3 For without total extinction there will be humans about, to make past and future, to do good end evil, and to go on making sense! depend essentially on Granted, assumption S1 by no means ruled out as a real possibility, as the technological means appear available to make it true (to render Homo Sapiens extinct).4 Granted, the prospect of large-scale nuclear war does threaten leading is centers of Western civilization with obliteration. Even so, S1 unlikely m the light of present-admittedly inadequate-information Even m Canada, which lies on the polar appears route of Soviet missiles, human life should be able to continue in certain northern areas (according to Canadian medical studies). Schell’s argument to S1 is extremely flimsy. It de- pends, for example, 20 on an unjustified extrapolation from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, but for the most part it does that very North American thing of contracting the world to North America. (All that matters, all worthwhile civilization, is in the USA, or at least, to be more char~table, in North America and Europe, which will also be wiped out, e , its entire human population will be eliminated in a nuclear holocaust.) Some of the data Schell relies upon, for example the effect of nuclear explosions on the ozone layer, was significantly out of date even when he wrote Other effects than ozone destruction, such as variations in the ultraviolet radiation and temperature levels, apparently extrapolate even less well from North to South A factually superior study of nuclear produced at about the same time as Schell’s, by and others, indicates that part of the Southern Hemisphere, such as New Zealand and southern latitudes of Latin Amenca, could escape relatively unscathed from even the most massive northern exchanges. disaster Preddy Doomsday prophets may appear to have gained new purchase through recent (if belated) scientific forecasts of a nuclear winter following upon nuclear war But although these forecasts certainly add a new, and alarming, ecological dimension to the very damaging consequences of large-scale nuclear war, they do not sustain the extinction assumpt~on.55 On the available evidence, human life will continue, though no doubt with new complications and simplifications, for example in many southern mid-latitude coastal regions outside zones of radiation fallout More generally, life will go on, though likely seriously and irreversibly impoverished through loss of valuable nonhuman systems and creatures. Nuclear prophets usually see the world (though with most of it carried along) as already set, in crucial respects, on the route to nuclear catastrophe. Much of the way taken is seen as both inevitable and irreversible Thus both Anders and Schell insist upon the &dquo;impossibility of unlearning&dquo; the means of manufacturing nuclear bombs. It would seem that extinction, which they both foresee, would furnish a good medium for unlearning nuclear technology (something very like this emerges from van Damken’s theory of an earlier &dquo;h~gh&dquo; technology). In virtue of S2, they would, however, exclude such a possibility as a case of unlearning, contending wrongly that the notion no longer made sense. But what they again want to suggest with the i m possibility-of -u n learning message is the inevitability of the development and eventual use of the technology-as if having learned the means all else was determined, and manufacture and use ceased to be a matter of choice. Certainly such views have been advanced6, but they are not tenable There are many examples of technological advances that have not been taken advantage of, and there are even cases of technological developments that have been manufactured but not marketed or used. There is not something very special about nuclear apparatus that puts it beyond the scope of such generalizations. Both Schell and Anders do claim that there are very special things about nuclear weapons, notably that they do not allow Even if this were true just of nuclear 11 experiment it is certainly not of smaller weapons-it weapons-and would not rebut the previous argument against the inevitability of nuclear weapons. And in fact Anders and (even) Schell &dquo; 21 hedge their claims about testing, and the limits to nuclear scientific work, to large-scale weapons and independent experiments which do not interfere with observers and those outside the &dquo;laboratories.&dquo; Again they have latched onto major prints, m particular, we have at present no way of testing the cumulative effects of large-scale nuclear weapons in concert, e.g. for more holistic effects, such as fireballs or firestorms, or changes m coupled atmospheric circulation and radiation fields. Short of a large-scale nuclear war, and likely enough with it, these crucial effects must remain largely untested and hypothetical in character. Nontheless enough data can be assembled to carry through informative modellings, which point to the improbability of S1, and so undermine applications of S2. The penetration of human chauvinism, as thing peculiar to Schell and Anders, but is m S2, a product of West- is not some- philosophy, European philosophy especially. This chauvinism is unfortunately alive and still well, Anders version of S2 being just one striking illustration (cf. AA p. 252ff.). It has also deeply penetrated Anglo-American philosophy, and has been extended under the influence of Wittgenstein’s ern work, where even the necessary truths of mathematics are taken to be a product of human conventions, and would vanish with humans! Such are the alleged implications of extinction : but the fact is that the truths of arithmetic are m no way dependent on the existence of humans or humanoids or of gods or giraffes. As with necessary truths and falsehoods so with contingents ones: very many propositions about the world do not depend upon in any way for their truth-value or content on humans or their communities. _ 22 In Schell, human chauvinism is dished up in a particularly powerful and obnoxious Kantian form. Thoughts and propositions, time and tenses, history and memories, values and morality all depend on the life-giving presence of human beings-past or future or merely potential humans are not enough. Thus, according to Schell (p 140, e.g), &dquo; . the thought ’Humanity is now extinct’ is an impossible one for a rational person, because as soon as it is, we are not In imagining any other event, we look ahead to a moment that is still within the stream of human tame....&dquo; The thought is however perfectly possible for humans; we can have it right now. Though we no doubt have it falsely, a later rational creature may well be able to have it truly. Schell erroneously denies that: there is no &dquo;later&dquo; &dquo;outside the human tenses of past, present, and future ... &dquo; (p 140) .7 Human extinction eliminates &dquo;the creature that divides time into past, present and future&dquo; annihilation cannot &dquo;come to pass&dquo; (p.143). But it false that the tenses are human: the tenses depend simply on a local time ordering (perceptible to many creatures other than humans, but not depending at all on that perceptibility for its viability) relating other times to the present, to now (also a human-independent location, evident to other creatures, and borne witness to by such sequences as the passing seasons). Annihilation may also too easily come to pass, for many humans m the North at least, as it came to pass in recent geological times that humans began to exist upon earth Before that there was a time before there were any human beings. so is Anders’ argument for the demise of time, that &dquo;what has been will no longer be even what has been,&dquo; is also explicitly (and narrowly) verificatiomst: &dquo;for what would the difference be between what has only been and what has never been, if there is no one to remember the things that have been (AA p.245). There would still remain many sorts of differences; for one, the history recorded m many other organisms would be different Temporal themes do not lack wlegitimacy because not registered [or verified] by anyone&dquo;; truth, significance, still less meaning, are not matters of human verification. elsewhere, the human chauvinism is mixed with distorting metaphysical assumptions of our Western heritage, m particular, verificationism and ontological assumptions (to the effect that there are severe difficulties m talking about what does not exist Thus, for example, Schell takes over dubious metaphysics from Freud, according to whom ’nt is mdeed impossible to imagine our own death: and whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are m fact still present as spectators&dquo; (p 138) The second clause goes a good distance towards refuting the first In fact there is no great difficulty in describing counterfactual situations which undermine both of Freud’s claims. The same goes for Schell’s extensions of human chauvinism into one of its main traditional strongholds, value theory: &dquo; . the simple and basic fact (sic!) that before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.&dquo; human life (p.171 ) These are no facts, but deeply entrenched philosophical dogmas (which have been exposed and criticized elsewhere, e.g , HC). Here, as other will disappear with the extinction of humans: trivially there will be no more humans (unless humans re-evolve or are recreated), and thus no more human communities, human institutions, human activities, human emotions, and so forth But it is already gomg too far to sug- Naturally 23 many things gest, as no Anders does, that there will accordingly be &dquo;no love, no struggle, no pain, no hope, no comfort, sacrifice, no image, no song...&dquo; For there are, and may thought, no continue to exist, other creatures than humans with emotion, struggles, songs... Nor will the ending of all such human ventures, if it comes to pass, show that all past human ventures have been &dquo;all in vain,&dquo; meaningless, and already so to say dead The decay of the solar system, or the heat-death of the universe even, will not show that worthwhile human activities were not worthwhile.9 Several of the other notions and themes common to Schell and Anders derive from their shared assumptions S1 and S2. It is these that underlie the biblical notion (in Revelations) of a Second Death, redeployed by both. &dquo;The death of mankind,&dquo; under S1 , is reckoned a &dquo;second death,&dquo; because by S2 and S1 remamng life is rendered meaningless and already ’ seems to be dead (AA p.244, S p 166) and is already overhung with death&dquo; (S p.166). Thus, too, more trivially, a person faces &dquo;a second death,&dquo; not merely one’s own but m addition that greater death of the species and all future generations (S p 166. p.1 15). However, even if nuclear extinction came to pass, the stronger notion would not be vindicated, because it depends on the fallacious inference to the meaninglessness of preceding life and on the very questionable representation of this meaninglessness as a sort of death. There is no such Second Death: creatures die just once, perhaps all at about the same time. The idea of a Second Death lacks even a solid metaphysical base. From S1 , together with the minor principle that the extinction absolute does not differ m degree, comes the unibeing versality of peril theme that &dquo;we are all exposed to peril m the same degree,&dquo; which is accordingly &dquo;d~sgmsed~ and &dquo;difficult to recognize,&dquo; because there is no contrast (AE p 64; S p.150). This theme falls with S1. In any event, not all peoples are equally imperilled by the nuclear situation, the Indians of southern Patagonia being rather better placed than the Germans of northern Europe Nor are all people equally locked into the situation or incapacitated by it; the prospects are different in different countries and places. an Nor, likewise, are all people equally responsible, a pernicious theme which Schell (m contrast to Anders) repeatedly filtrates. This is the Pogo theme, according to whichS3. co, 24 in- Responsibility for the present nuclear predIcament (flasreally) dlstnbutes onto everybody, It belongs to every hu- man lií the world ’o ...i But there is also, mixed in, a weaker, more plausible claim that gives the lie to the stronger one, namely, that we have some responsibility (the Nazi situation is compared) An especially blatant example of the Pogo theme’ runs as follows: &dquo;... the world’s political leaders though they now menace the earth with nuclear weapons, do so only with our permission, and even at our bidding. At least, this is true for democracies&dquo; (pp.229-30). The theme is elaborated elsewhere: &dquo;... we are the authors of that distinction (For the populations of the superpowers this is true in a positive sense, since we pay for extinction and support the governments that pose the threat of it, while for the peoples of the non-nucleararmed world it is true only m the negative sense that they fail to try to do anything about the danger)&dquo; (p.152). But this is ... of an argument indicting representative government, by revealing its insensitivity and unresponsiveness to many of the populace they allegedly govern, not to mention those affected by its activities who are not represented at all (namely foreigners). But Schell conveniently neglects all such points: &dquo;... we are all potential mass killers. The moral cost of more nuclear armaments is that it makes all of us underwriters of the slaughter of hundreds of millions&dquo; (p 152) And again [at] perpetrators ... we convey the steady message .. that life not only is not sacred but it is worthless; that ... it had been judged acceptable for everyone to be killed&dquo; (p 153) Little of this is true. Those who campaign against nuclear arrangements, vote against nuclear-committed parties so far as is possible, and the like, are certainly not the authors of potential destruction, and responsibility for the nuclear situation does not simply distribute onto them. Nor does the responsibilityor the unlikely opinions as to worth Schell illegitimately attributes to everyone-fall on those who have done less. Responsibility for decisions taken in &dquo;literal democracies&dquo; even by representatives (m the unlikely event of this happening m the case of anything as important as defense) cannot be traced back to those represented, since among many other things, a representative is only representative of a party which offers a complex and often ill-characterized package of policies, and a voter may vote for zero or more policies of this package. Only m the (uncommon) event of a clear single issue referendum, which is adopted, can responsibility, still of a qualified sort, be sheeted home, to those who voted for it, not to everyone in the community. While S3 is false, there is an important related theme that is much more plausible, namely, that the present nuclear situation generates responsibilities for every socially involved person. 25 When moreover the Pogo assumption is disentangled from the accompanyng themes, part of what results along the right lines: namely, is decidedly S4 The controllers [not to be confused, in Schell’s fashion, with all of us] have failed to change our pre-nuclear mstltutlons. The sovereign system Is out of step with the nuclear age, the one-earth system, etc. (the whole earth theme). Though Schell remains relatively clear about the serious defects of the state and the frequently immoral purposes for which the state is used, unfortunately he often loses sight of this important theme (indicated pp.187-8) Yet S4 forms part of Schell’s critique of the state which is, by and large, scattered and fragmentary. Schell arrives at the conclusion that the nation-state has outlasted its usefulness, and that new political institutions more &dquo;consonant with the global reality&dquo; are required as a matter of urgency. But he evades what he admits is the major task, making out viable alternatives. 12 At most he makes some passing gestures, some pointing towards the Way Up to world political control Solutions to the nuclear arms dilemma come, if not easily, m a similar simplistic way, from Top Down: those who can must appeal to the Top, to those who govern (cf. p.230). Schell places his hope m treaties for arms reduction and limitations, such as SALT, and m world government, through the United Nations (see p.225ff. and especially p 227, bottom paragraph) Given the record of these organizations and treaties, the negotiations and regulators, it is by now a pathetic faith. Nor is a serious need felt for further analysis of the nuclear situation, to investigate the origins of nuclear technology, to explore the roots of nuclear blindness, to consider effective changes to military-mdustrial organization and ways of life. 26 But some of the requisite deeper analysis of the nuclear situation and, more generally, of the roots of war can be found in Anders and elsewhere. 13 The roots of the nuclear predicament are not confined to the ideologically-aligned arrangements of nation-states, but penetrate also into key components of those states, their military, their controlling classes, and their supporting bureaucracies Both within the arrangements of states, what accounts in part for the arrangements, and in key components of the states, a conspicuous and crucial feature is the drive for power and domination (and, often, the accompanyng privilege). 14 Thus the push for [nuclear] superiority by the super-states, to be achieved through military-oriented science and technology, which involves and enables domination,in several interrelated forms The main the large nation-state, where enough surplus be accumulated (from at home and from abroad, and bled from nature) to proceed with military and bureaucratic ambitions and to found the high-technology research and development means to ever more expendable power and power-base product can is energy. 15 In changing the structural arrangements to eliminate the proof nuclear war, it is not ultimately enough just to downspect the main power-base, the nation-state: it is also imporgrade tant to alter key components of the state, and, more sweepingly, to remove trouble-making patterns embedded m all these social and political arrangements, namely, patterns of domination-patterns manifested not only in state political organization, but in white-coloured relations, male-female relations, human-animal relations, human-nature relations-to remove, m short, chauvinistic relations. However, not everything needs to be accomplished at once: the cluster of damaging power and domination relations tied into war can be tackled separately There the problems can largely be narrowed to certain problems of states and certain key components of states In what analysis he does offer of the problem with states, Schell repeats the familiar false contrast of state expediency with morality, as a contrast between &dquo;raison d’etat&dquo; and the Socratic-Christian ethics The teaching that &dquo;the end justifies the means is the basis on which governments, in all times, have licensed themselves to commit crimes of every sort&dquo; (p 134). So &dquo;states may do virtually anything whatever m the name of [their] survival.&dquo; Schell then argues, however, that extinction nullifies end-means justification by destroying every end; but again the argument is far from sound, and depends on human chauvinism (as under S2) combined with ontological assumptions. Even if all humans were extinguished (as under S1 ) ends could remain, for instance, for nonhumans such as animals and extraterrestrials, actual or not. The end-means argument can, however, be repaired to remove such objections: instead it is claimed that extinction 27 nullifies end-means justification by frustrating the realization of every relevant end-meaning by &dquo;relevant,&dquo; in this context, those ends the realization of which the state appeals to m justification of its nuclear policies. 16 A nuclear war, even without human extinction but with severe enough losses, would undoubtedly frustrate the realization of relevant state ends So even from an expediency perspective, super-state policies are open to severe criticism, for example, as motivationally irrational in the nuclear risks taken. As to the part of the state and (state) sovereignty m war, Schell leaves us in no doubt. A sovereign state is virtually defined as one that enjoys the right and power to go to war m defense or pursuit of its interests (p 187) War arises from how things are, from the arrangement of political affairs via jealous nation-states (p.188). Indeed there is a two-way linkage between having sovereignty and capacity to wage war. On the one side, sovereignty is, Schell contends, necessary for people to organize for war. On the other side, without war it is impossible to preserve sovereignty Neither of these contentions is transparently clear as it stands. The first is damaged by civil war and the like, the second by the persistence of small nonmilitary states. Now that the macro-state system is entrenched, it is, however, easy for conservatives (m particular) to argue from the &dquo;realties&dquo; of international life, which includes self-interest, aggression, fear, hatred. It is on this basis that peace arrangements are readily dismissed as unrealistic, utopian, even (amusingly) as extremist (cf. p.185). Schell’s further theme that nuclear war is not war threatens, however, to undermine his case against the sovereign state: for example, his ends-means argument and the argument based on its nuclear-war making capacity. Fortunately the not-war theme needs much qualification, and starts out from an erroneous characterization of war as &dquo;a violent means employed by a nation to achieve an end&dquo; (p.189): but this is neither necessary nor sufficient for war. What is correct is that nuclear wars are very different from previous conventional (cf. WP). Schell goes on to claim that war requires an end which nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; does not have. But nuclear attacks can certainly have ends (even if large nuclear wars cannot be won in the older sense: but not all wars or games are won). It is also claimed that war depends on weakness, on one side being defeated on a decision by arms. But in a nuclear &dquo;war&dquo; this doesn’t happen, &dquo;no one’s strength fails until both sides have been annihilated&dquo; (p.190). But what these sorts of considerations contribute to showing is again not that nuclear wars are not wars, but that they are not wars of certain sorts, e.g., not just wars (because they fail on such criteria as reasonable prospect of success and improvement), not rational wars (in a good sense), and so on. That conventional wars have persisted into nuclear times does damage to Schell’s argument that nuclear weapons have also ruined &dquo;conventional&dquo; wars, and his connected theme that the demise of war has left no means to finally settle disputes between nations, for the final court has been removed (pp 192-193). The theme depends on a pair of mistaken propositions: that conwars 28 cerning the demise of conventional war, and the idea that war of some sort has to be the final &dquo;court of appeal&dquo; between nations (for there are other types of contests that could serve, and there is also the possibility of more cooperative behaviour, e.g. joint referenda) The theme also imports the social-Darwinian assumption of Clausewicz (the &dquo;log~c of war&dquo; theme) that war has to proceed to the technological limit-as if war and violence were thoroughly natural activities, independent of recognized social settings (for winning, surrender, etc.), and ruleless activities. On the contrary, wars are parasitic on social organizations such as states and are governed by a range of understandings, conventions and rules. They are a social phenomenon, with a rule structure, if not a 29 logic. Much capital has been made not merely from the logic of war&dquo; but from what is now called &dquo;the logic of deterrence&dquo; and the &dquo;logic of nuclear [strategic] planning.&dquo; The message that is usually supposed to emerge is that the massive arrangements the world is now entangled in are perfectly logical, sound, rational. However, this represents little more than a cheap semantical trick. Logic in no way justifies the present arrangements, or anything like them, or renders them reasonable. There are logics of decision (as presented, e.g., for the classical case in Jeffrey) which can be applied in strategic planting; but they do not yeld specific results without desirability measures being assigned to alternative outcomes, that is without values being pumped in, extralogically. There are various ways these value assignments may be determined, to meet moral requirements or not: but in nuclear strategic planning they have invariably been settled on the basis of expediency 17 . For the most part, however, &dquo;logic of&dquo; tends to be used very loosely, as a word of general commendation, to cover something like &dquo;reasomng and rational considerations entering into the policy or strategy of.&dquo; In these terms, Schell, who like others enjoys playing with the term &dquo;logic of,&dquo; should write of &dquo;the illogic of deterrence,&dquo; for he emphasizes its unreasonableness. For instance, he stresses (p.213) the disparity between the supposed rationality of threatening use of nuclear weapons and the irrationality (even from a national interest viewpoint) of actually using them should the threat fail- 18 yet the success of deterrence doctrine depends on the credibility of the threat of this unjustifiable and irrational use. Indeed Schell wants to go still further and locate a contradiction in deterrence (e g. pp.2012) ; but the argument depends on an interesting confusion of contradiction with cancellation,’9 along with the assumption that deterrence involves cancellation. Nuclear deterrence may well be irrational, it is immoral, but it is not inconsistent. The Australian National University NOTES *This is a revised version of "Appendix 1 On the fate of mankind and the earth, according to Schell, and to Anders" of my monograph referred to as WP, where several points, only touched upon in this review, are further developed References are by way of authors names or else through obvious acronyms, given in the list of references which follows 1 The distinguishing term is from Foley’s Nuclear Prophets. where many leading anti-nuclear prophets are assessed One well-known prophet not so considered there is Jaspers, presumably because his main work comes out in entirely the wrong direction It gives heavy philosophical attire to the better-dead-than-red abomination A main argument against Jaspers so presented is simple However bad being red might become (at present it is debatably worse than living under some of the totalitarian regimes the free West props up), it still gives humans a further chance for good lives, since regimes fall or can be toppled but the total annihilation removes that all- important opportunity 2 A detailed comparison of Schell and Anders’ of S2 is made in Foley JS remarkably similar versions 3 Should S2 appeal, as it may. to suitable communities of humans. S1 will require reformulation in similar terms, and the argument that follows needs minor adjustment, with appropriate groups replacing individuals 4. Thus the Last Person environmental ethics (as HC for instance, the remote death of the Sun, but assumes new urgency It is this sort of argument that connects environmental ethics and nuclear ethics. at a deeper metaphysical level The Bomb and Bulldozer are out of the same technological Pandora’s box. explams), is no argument, important in longer merely hypothetical, awaiting, Nuclear technology is not the only route to human extinction, nor the only Pandora’s box. Biological and chemical means are perhaps even more effective, and certainly can be more selective in what gets extinguished. Nuclear extinction would presumably require a different and more massive 30 exchange than is usually assumed in nuclear war scenarios. with heavy targeting in particular of Southern Hemisphere sites (including internationally-recognized nuclear-free zones). 5 Nor do recent scientific studies claim as much The most intrepid of these studies, Erlich and others, only contends that in certain worst-case circumstances, "the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded" (p 1299). The study admits that, in the scenario described, "it seems unlikely Homo sapiens would be forced to extinction immediately," and the difficulties indicated in the way of long-term human survival are exaggerated In many of the drastic effects predicted for Northern midlatitudes very much milder forms in equivalent Southern latitudes For example, temperatures for regions with maritime climates appear likely to vary by only a few degrees and perhaps negligibly for many agricultural purposes after 100 days (cf. Turco and others, p 1287 case 29, and p 1286) Similarly the extent of nuclear darkness and of surface ultraviolet radiation will be appreciably less in the South and perhaps minor for many crucial purposes. such as photosynthesis and human outdoor activity. after 100 days (cf the data in Benton and Partridge) particular, are reflected in No doubt some scientifically respectable sections of the environmental and peace movements have an interest in exaggerating the probable effects of nuclear holocaust for life on earth, much as many heads of states and strategists have an interest in minimizing them And there is certainly substantial margin for error and for variation in conclusions drawn For Crutzen (p 59) is right that "analysis of the environmental effects of a global thermonuclear war remain uncertain because of a lack of information on various important processes [among other things] The environment might become extremely hostile, because of hitherto overlooked changes in the composition of the atmosphere," again among other things Such uncertainty bodes considerable caution as rational The way to err is clear 6 Not worth, military merely by technological determinists of Marxist persuasion Hackformer US general, argues by straight induction that if the US a has a weapon it will use it appalling theme that humans create past, present and repeated elsewhere, e.g . p 173. 7 The 8 For a detailed refutation of these assumptions, is here (AA pp perseverance, criticized 9 Anders see future (etc ) is JB 244-5) relying upon a version of the argument from in detail in Routley and Griffin interesting converse of this theme is sometimes advanced, that no responsible. the whole thing is out of control The technological version of this no-responsibility theme is discussed below (fn 15) More satisfactory is the theme that nuclear arrangements are out of political 10 An one is in terms of vested interests in keeping nuclear going, which enable responsibility to be distributed The vested interests, which bear considerable responsibility. include the military weapons industry, and research and academic communities (cf Barnaby) Under pressures for re-election especially, politicians give in to these powerful groups, so losing control of political processes The argument is flawed at its final stage For many influential politicians either belong to or represent vested interests Thus. though there is no doubt some "lack of control," political processes tend rather to reflect vested interests than to run out of political control control, but for reasons, things 31 11 Another example of spreading the responsibility runs as follows "The self-extinction of our species is not an act that anyone describes as sane or sensible, nevertheless, it is an act that, without quite admitting it to ourselves, we plan In certain circumstances to commit (p 185) Even for most of the planners, extinction is presumably not part of "the plan," but an unintended consequence, and most of us have little or no role in the planning : enough of us even campaign against the planning. Further "the world chose the course of attempting to refashion the system of sovereignty to accommodate nuclear weapons" (p 194) the world? This connects the course with the faulty ideological argument from defence of fundamentals, e g , for liberty, for the "free enterprise" (USA) nation, and against socialism 12. A more detailed discussion is given in WP8, where too the the state from nuclear dilemmas is elaborated case against explanation is elaborated in Foley, some of the themes are straightforwardly in Martin The incomplete list of items given, to be investigated in a deeper analysis of the nuclear situation, paraphrases Foley JS p.164 13 Anders’ presented more These motivating drives form a part of a larger integrated package. comprising maximization drives for power, knowledge, control, wealth, enfor the "newer" Enlightenment (but Faustian) ergy, speed, satisfaction, virtues. Frequently there are attempts (the human failing for excessive neatness and simplicity manifested) to reduce the package to one main component, preference-satisfaction. for instance, or utility And the type of drive is justified (especially for those who have it, but also as rational, which again it is not) Rationality, the deeply entrenched myth has it, consists in maximization of a suitable mix of these virtues 14 Maximization of the objects of the drives runs, however, into limitation theorems and associated paradoxes The maximization of self-interest (individual or national) runs into Newcomb’s paradox and special cases of it such as Prisoner’s Dilemma situations The maximization of power, as symbolized in the Christian-Islamic God. encounters the paradox of omnipotence, the parallel maximization of knowledge, paradoxes of omniscience. There are no consistent objects which are omnipotent or omniscient The drive for maximum consistency, often taken to be the epitome of rationality. also leads to inconsistency in the case of more important theories, such as arithmetic and set theory (by virtue of Godel s theorem and associated limitative theorems) 15 R & D, drives the though directed by military requirements and the arms race, also arms race Its role is partly disguised by the myth of neutral science 32 There have been attempts, not only by those committed to technological determinism, to involve technology more deeply as the main, or single, source of the nuclear fix (thus especially Mumford, in part thereby anticipating Commoner’sparallel indictment of technology-choice in the ecological fix) It is technology, the mega-machine, running out of control, that has brought us to this predicament, the nuclear abyss. Sometimes this serves to exonerate states and their key components and those who control them, for they are simply caught up by this out-of-control machine, but sometimes the state itself is seen as a machine also running out of control But the technological determinism, like other varieties of stronger (nonanalytic) determinism, is false Nuclear technology was selected and proceeded with, after a well-known political dispute involving distinguished scientists, it was deliberated, funded and promoted, while other alternatives were not of the nuclear age were not inevitable. but dechosen certain liberately by components of the large nation-states And much as they need not have been chosen, so they do not have to be persisted with The fashionable inevitability determinism themes admit not only of refutation by bringing out the many choices made in persisting with often recalcitrant technologies They also admit of being made to look ridiculous If the Bomb is determined, as part of human evolution, then if it functions (as it probably will, a matter also determined), it will serve as a human population control device, a matter also determined That is. the Bomb has its fixed evolutionary place in human population regulation 1 Damaging technologies 16 This reformulation main 17 qualification can proposed by N Griffin, who suggested that the be inferred from Schell’s context was the usual game theory setting sees to this almost autothen assumed that each player plays to maximize his or her matically, own advantage Thus too the presumption in Walzer, p.277, that "the logic of deterrence" is based on eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth assumptions Selecting for it is 18 Even the irrationality of retaliatory (or first-strike) use has been contested, e.g., it has been wishfully thought that America will rise like a phoenix from the radioactive ashes. There is moreover a simple solution to Schell’s problem of the "missing motive" for retaliating to a large strike (p 204), namely, not a future retributive one, but an ideological one eliminate the prospect of the future dominance of the rival ideology. Such a motive has been offered for the conjectured targeting of Latin America 19 An appears confusion of negation with cancellation or obliteration thinking, where US missiles are supposed incoming USSR missiles analogous in recent US "star-war" to " negate" Moral paradoxes of deterrence take a different direction For although inupon perhaps questionable interconnections of intensional functors. One type of paradox (considered in WP 5, where the immorality of deterrence is argued) derives from a policy of credibly threatening war without, however. intending to proceed to war. though credible threats [appear to] imply an intention to proceed Another style derives from acclaimed intention to reduce the number of nuclear missiles when the persistent practice, which implies an intention, is to increase the number This paradox is technically removed&mdash;how satisfactorily is another matter&mdash; by a distinction between long-term aims and immediate practice, a timehonoured method of removing contradictions by conveniently discerned temporal distinctions volving negation, they depend REFERENCES 33 G Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, C H Beck. Munchen, 1956, referred to as AA. G Anders, Endzeit und Zeitenende: Gendanken tion, C H Beck, Munchen, 1972, referred to as AE F. Barnaby, "Will there be a Nuclear War," in zur atomaren Situa- Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 2-37. I J Benton and G W Partridge,"’Twilight at Noon Overstated," Ambio 13 (1984) 49-51 B. Commoner, The New York, 1972 Closing Circle: Nature, PJ Crutzen, "Darkness after a Man and Technology, Knopf, Nuclear War," Ambio 13 (1984) 52-4. M. Denborough (ed ), Australia and Nuclear War Croom Helm, Australia, 1983. P R Erlich and others, "Long-term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War," Science 222 (1983) 1293-1300 Jonathan Schell Genius&mdash;Philosopher&mdash;Rewrite Man," type1982, referred to as JS Brisbane, script, G Foley, G Foley, Nuclear Prophets. The True and the False, typescript, Brisbane, 1983 D. Hackworth, "A Soldier’s Report," Australia and Nuclear War, (ed M Denborough), Croom Helm, Australia, 1983, 209-12 K Jaspers. The Future of Mankind. (trans Chicago E B Ashton). University of Press, 1961 B Martin, Grass Roots ham, 1984 L Mumford, The 1970 Myth Strategy Against War, Freedom Press, Notting- of the Machine, 2 vols., Harcourt Brace. New York, Preddey and others, Future contingencies 4. Nuclear Disasters. A Report to the Commission for the Future, Government Printer, Wellington, G F New Zealand, 1982 Routley and N. Griffin. ’’Unravelling the Meanings of Life," Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 3, Australian National University, CanR. berra, 1982 R Routley, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, Research School of Social Sciences. Australian National University, 1980, referred to as JB R Routley. War and Peace I. On the Ethics of Large-Scale Nuclear War and Nuclear Deterrence and the Political Fall-Out, Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy 5, Australian National University, 1984, referred to as WP R and V Routley, "Human Chauvinism and Environmental Ethics," in Environmental Philosophy (ed D Mannison and others), Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, 1980, referred to as HC J Schell, The Fate of the Knopf, Earth, New York, 1982, referred to K P Turco and others, "Nuclear Winter, Global Consequences of Nuclear Explosions." Science 222 (1983) 1283-92 34 M Walzer, Just and Unjust as S F Multiple Wars Basic Books, New York, 1977.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Metaphysical fallout from the nuclear predicament Type The nature or genre of the resource Journal Article Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/6ac75cab884e6903e8ca85828a326c92.pdf eeb1d61051d34810a2b451c1badfacfe Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/search?query=Richard+Routley+&amp;query_type=keyword&amp;record_types%5B%5D=Item&amp;record_types%5B%5D=File&amp;record_types%5B%5D=Collection&amp;record_types%5B%5D=SimplePagesPage&amp;record_types%5B%5D=Exhibit&amp;record_types%5B%5D=ExhibitPage&amp;submit_search=Search">Richard Routley</a> PDF Text Text �������������������������������������������� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Self-published Papers Description An account of the resource <span>Sylvan favoured the </span><span lang="EN-GB">highly-unorthodox practice of self-publishing a vast amount of his work<span>—</span><span></span>quite literally, using his own printing press!</span> Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence and the political fall-out Type The nature or genre of the resource Report Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1984-01-01 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Manuscript https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/68d29df80f9d20e41a77ef7fdb412966.pdf f2093594e525a6ba4c68813d0f8e0eb4 PDF Text Text GAEAN GREENHOUSE, NUCLEAR WINTER, AND ANTHROPIC DOOMSDAY. ... climate change, like no other issue, calls the whole notion of human progress into question. The [ever promised] benefits of newer technologies, more efficient economics, and improved political systems could be overwhelmed by uncontrolled global warming. ... the pace of climate change will soon overwhelm natural variability in the earth's climate. Indeed, it can be improved with nuclear war for its potential to disrupt a wide range of human and natural systems, [severely] complicating the back of moneying economics and coping with other problems. Irrigation works, settlement patterns, and food production [among others] would be tragically disrupted ... (Worldwatch 89, p.ll, p.10) There are many approaches to the Greenhouse problematique, upon which this philosophical investigation focuses. These approaches, range from playing the issue down entirely, dismissing it as not a problem, not something anyone should worry about, at the one end of the range, to playing it up at the other. Those who play it up may even foresee the demise of the human race, the substantially new socio-economic arrangements soon eventuate. There is certainly plenty of room for different approaches, and for some eclecticism. For what is being relied upon, in every case, comprises shaky and contestable arguments, from flimsy forecasting models lacking many apparently relevant details. No one of sound judgment, aware that weather reports for twelve hours ahead can be wildly astray, would place a very high level of confidence on climatic forests for fifty years ahead down a very hazardous track. But there is enough information to act; and there is information rationally requiring action. For things in the future are not going to be the same. It is very doubtful that they are going to be any better (though much important economic theorizing presupposes as much, such as the monetary discounting of the future). They are not going to be similar even, because so many parameters important to life are changing, several at exponential rates. Significant in these changes are likely climatic changes. The Greenhouse effect is among those, a result of the increases of “greenhouse” gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, in the Earth's atmosphere, which have followed exponential paths since the highenergy phase of industrial culture. The growth in gas concentration produces, what it is lagged by, but is now apparent, a significant increase in mean global temperatures. This has major implications for much of life on Earth. �2 Diagram 1. Spectrum of approaches: Course of action Reasons offered Short response No problem Refutable No certainty Irrational Adaptive capacity Exaggerated High tech resolution Wishful thinking Severe dislocation otherwise Utopian Individual survival Pointless No action1 Moderate action Considerable action These very condensed responses will be expanded and explained as we proceed. Breifly too the outcome is that there is no easy path; future humans should expect a hard landing. 1. Investigative philosophy, argument and rational decision The role of philosophy in such a complex problematique as that of Greenhouse is not difficult to state briefly. Philosophy, Anglo-American philosophy especially, is concerned above all with argument. Investigative philosophy is applied philosophy, investigating arguments, their features - assumptions, reliability, etc. - and their generalisation to rational processes, but outside normal philosophical topics. The generalisation to rational processes comprehends a wider range of philosophical throughput than the orthodox range of argument typically addressed in logic courses; to probabilistic and plausibilistic reasoning, to decision processing and making. A main objective in this piece of investigative philosophy is to consider certain arguments for severe dislocation pprobabilities, as a result of Greenhouse effects, and the resulting impact on rational decision formation and action. There are certain arguments of particular interest radical decision and action: various neo-Malthusian arguments, and doomsday arguments. 1 Taoist no-action would be different. It would not have undertaken excessive industrial action in the first place. �3 The main run of arguments to considerable action are neo-Malthusian in character. The general form of these arguments is simply this: growth in some parameter encounters limits, with severe effects. A characteristic graphic representation is as follows: limits growth parameter time exponential growth pattern J encountering limits subsequent varying unstable behavior The limits are often imposed just by finitude, e.g. finiteness of a resource or a sink. But other limits can be important, for instance where new phenomena or thresholds come into play. General Malthusian arguments loom in the background in what follows. But a different argument, of especial concern as regard climatic changes, is the following anthropic doomsday argument:• There is some probability that the Gaean “greenhouse effect”, generated by human activity, will get out of control, that Gaean control mechanisms will fail, and that the Earth will, for example, overheat (Runaway Greenhouse, or Lesser Venus Prospect, premiss). • That result would be disastrous for human activities, and indeed for humans (Catastrophe Prospect). • Because of the unusual, and unusually precarious, position of humans, such a probability of disaster is not in fact small but decidedly large As a consequence then, the human species will probably sharply decline, and even become extinct (Catastrophe Probability). That is, by a rectified version of Murphy's law - that if something can go wrong then in appropriate unusual conditions, it very probability will - an incrementally small probability is inflated into a very large probability. �4 It would be a mistake to conclude that because the argument itself is an unlikely one, everyone can stop worrying. The argument is but one of a substantial raft of arguments that should have everyone worried; it is but a final intellectual string, so to say, from the inconspicuous cosmological tail. Such a doomsday argument no doubt puts together, in one more exact form, some of the sorts of considerations that are troubling many people, especially concerned youth, about the Greenhouse business: that humans (including themselves) are on a decline or extinction path. It is no doubt not the only consideration that should be troubling them or us. For whether or not doomsday warnings are warranted, there are other matters that should be sufficiently worrisome, to anyone of moral integrity:• Future times are likely to be exceedingly uncomfortable for very many creatures, as habitats are destroyed, food producing regions are eliminated, and environments seriously impoverished. (Many of these creatures are nonexistents, mere future existents, i.e. creatures that do not yet exist or participate in market or voting rituals, but who -will exist and may participate. But, despite their presently unfavourable ontological status, they are entitled to fair and decent treatment.) • Given such future prospects, present practices which do nothing or vanishingly little to ameliorate these prospects, are decidedly irrational. Indeed a main message that will emerge from the present exercise is the moral irrationality of critical large-scale human practices. The irrationality, morally-weighed-down irrationality, of present large-scale human practices is already conspicuous from the wintry downside of climatic prospects of which Greenhouse warming is the upside. Diagram 2. Macro-climatic setting. Bands: all boundaries fuzzy mean global temperature (degrees C) escalating emissions Disequilibrium: Venus prospect increasing dislocation possible adaptation increasing dislocation thermonuclear war disequilibrium: Mars prospect �5 1860 1990 The apparatus for conducting a world-wide nuclear wars is entirely in place and indeed on alert. The probability of such a war, even if small, is not zero. Among the many awful effects of a large nuclear war is that of nuclear winter, which would bring about the demise of present human civilisation, and would at the very least mean enormous dislocation for most surviving humans and other creatures. A sufficiently diabolical chemo-nuclear war, reaching into all inhabited parts of the globe, could indeed drive the human species close to extinction. The decidedly dubious rationality and morality of these nuclear arrangements - both through what they are in themselves for what purposes, and through their moral opportunity costs - are widely appreciated. The thesis that the arrangements and practices are immoral, irrational, and ought to be dismantled - already much argued, and also contested2 - is not the present concern. The thermonuclear downside is, by comparison, a very easy case to examine philosophically, and argue, as compared with the greenhouse upside.3 For there is, for instance, a case of sorts, for much increased use of greenhouse gases, such as CFCs in refrigerators, a case that hardly extends very plausibly to nuclear weapons. It is a case heavily pressed by some “developing” nations, for polluting devices already in widespread use in more affluent places, as necessary for local standards of living. Greenhouse and nuclear winter are more intricately connected than being the upside and downside of meteorological phenomena. One of the high-tech solutions suggestions for atmospheric overheating, involves the generation of wintering effects - to cool things down - by flinging enough dust up into the atmosphere, a trick most easily achieved no doubt on the requisite scale by nuclear explosives. Needless to say, like backburning against out-of- control fires, artificial winter would be a pretty desperate and, given present expertise, irrational expedient. 2. The Greenhouse debate, main policy responses, and irrational decision. The Greenhouse debate, as to what to do, if anything, about forecast Greenhouse effects on Earth, is intellectually disturbing. For it has revealed, as we shall soon see, that many of those who have spoken, worse that many who have some role in decision making For my very small contribution to this, see the War and Peace series in Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National UniversityGlobal warming, by no means entirely certain, is assumed to be the outcome of increasing greenhouse gas build up. Of course though some temperatures will rise, cooling will probably occur also in some localized regions. �6 (including both experts and politicians), lack a firm grasp on decision-making in conditions of uncertainty or possible risk.4 The main canvassed policy approaches to the Greenhouse problematique lie firmly within the dominant social paradigm, the high-tech growth and development ideology. Diagram 2 Broad policy responses to the Greenhouse problematique. Dominant paradigm Alternative paradigm Procrastination (wait-and-see) Soft energy paths and alternative regulation Adaptation (sink-or-swim) Socio-economic transformation Regulation Intervention (star wars) We will briefly outline, and find wanting, all the dominant approaches. • Procrastination, the prevailing response. In fact the main gooon mental and conservative response thus far has been procrastination, or “wait-and-see” as it is more benignly known.5 The approach makes much of the uncertainties, of the shortcomings in even the most elaborate general circulation models, of the high noise-to-signal levels. On such bases, it contends that it is too early to do anything, except staging some meetings, organising some review committees, undertaking some monitoring, and funding a little more “research”. It obviously does nothing to rock the growth ideology boat. There is the pretence that we do not know enough to act6 But it is known that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are fast increasing. The main causes and enough likely consequences are also known. Theoretical consideration, have already been partially confirmed by rising temperatures in the eighties. Outlines of rising temperatures are also known in broad outline, rising sea levels, and so forth. In addition, there are partial Following Knight, some economists (try to) distinguish between uncertainty and risk. Risk is said to obtain when some more or less objective numberable probabilities can be assigned to outcomes, a situation not obtaining as regards the global greenhouse effect. Bayesians, who can always assign subjective probabilities tend to eschew the distinction, e.g. Cyert and DeGroot, also say that ‘decision making under uncertainty refers to situations in which the outcome of the decision is not precisely predictable’ (p.3). Either way, Greenhouse involves uncertainty. There is significant rhetorical art in the choice of classificatory labels, a rather philosophically neglected art. A PR person must have been hired to produce the Greenhouse adaptation of ‘adaptation’. Part of the problem is that scientists have been caught out (e.g. crying wolf) and have become ultra-cautious. With the advent of thermodymumies, for instance, scientists begin ‘threatening mankind with a rather swift “bad death’” as the universe random ‘Thus m. Aber, on ‘balant ideological use of science even by scientists themselves’ (Bernard p.9). �7 small-scale models of the Greenhouse effect in action. For example a city such as MexicoCity, which is situated in the bowl-like valley is placed in an environment traps heat as well as pollution. The ecological affects, like the human affects, are pretty dramatic even at this small level, and hardly to be sought, or amelated elsewhere. There is a pretence, fostered also by many scientists, that Greenhouse difficulties have only just been discovered; a date commonly set for that watershed even is the Villiers conference and statement of 1986 (e.g. Pittoch ....). Actually there have been Greenhouse warmings for more than a decade, and there has been a corresponding decade of inaction. Nor is any action of much significance presently seriously contemplated. Back in 1979 Bernard wrote at length about and reported the substantial concern of climate logists about Greenhouse effects. Even the magazine Nature, not noted for its green sympathies, recorded that ‘the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is, concemally, the most important environmental issue in the world today’ (May ? 1975). Bernard quotes many other concerned scientists, several asserting that ‘the government must start dealing with this problem now’. They meant the United States government. “The” government didn't take the hint. For more than a decade then scientists have been emphasizing that the greenhouse threat is a major environmental problem, and that action should be taken immediately. Over 10 years nothing of real significance to counter the problem has happened. There has been more than a decade of inaction , during which matters have got worse, and the time frame for evasive action disturbingly shorter. It is already evident that requisite decision making under uncertainty is not taking place. On straight inductive grounds, it would be reasonable to expect nothing will be done. While there are theoretical grounds to bark up such an assessment, still it is only just beginning to get through to a much wider public (which can exercise a marginal influence on what politicians say) that there is - or may be, as some more reactionary modal-managering academics would have - a problem or two. Many scientists have joined the wait-and-see queue, with their begging bowls, hoping for more hand-outs for research. They assume, rightly enough, that more information would assist with rational decision-making, and also, quite wrongly, that “scientific activity” is required for action to be taken. Physical scientists are not done in their misapprehension of rational decision methods. Although there is a good deal of practical experience available of statistical-type decision making order uncertainty, for instance as regards insurance coverage and engineering projects, decision theory, especially as regards unreputable situations, has not penetrated very far into standard scientific methodology or much into mainstream parts of social sciences. ‘Economists in particular have shown a talent for bringing ever problem back to a world of certainty where all solutions are known or can be easily found.’ Natural scientists �including dematologists are, for the most part, on the same erroneous-reduction-toconlittainable-certainty trip. ‘This is not to say that economists have not worked on uncertainty. ... however ... uncertainty is introduced and then taken out by assumption’ (Cyort and DeGroot p.l). But there are several classes of problematic situations, where decision and action may be required, where uncertainty cannot be discarded by first, reduction strategeness or otherwise, notably:• inheritantly probabilistic situations, such as those of indeterminacy in quantum theory; • essentially unpredictable situations (which may be deterministic) such as those now under investigation chaos theory; • presently uncertain situations and outcomes, which may eventually resolve into certain cases, or may turn into some of the above classes, where there is not time to wait for resolution. The Greenhouse problem is regularly put into the latter class, a standard assumption being that with enough money and research effort thrown at it, it will resolve to decent certainty. But it may well not; there are grounds for supposing that critical parts of climatology will fall into the essentially unpredictable class. The standard approach of too many research scientists is a pathetic begging-bowl posture: Supply more funding so we can go on researching until we obtain certainty.7 There are some severe problems with this standard response. Firstly, it is irrational. Certainty if achieved may be achieved too late. What was required for rationality was decision making in advance of certainty. Secondly, certainty may be unobtainable. The meteorological equations may be non additive (non additive) and so incapable of delivering stable results over slightly fluctuating in strict data. The standard response is methodologically unsound. • Adaptation, learning to live with and love the Greenhouse. The policy ‘that tends to be favoured by most economists’ is an adaptive strategy: “Let society adjust to environmental changes without attempting to mitigate or prevent the changes in advance” We could adapt to climate change for example, by planting alternative crop strain [themselves] ... more widely adopted... ’ (Schneider p.8). Observe, however, that it is a decidedly restricted “adaptation” that is being proposed, that humans adjust to the results of present economic and industrial practices, rather than adjusting them. It is assumed that economic growth comes first, that we do not change (e.g. through decent regulation) high energy industrial practices. A fuller and smarter adaptation would adapt these practices. The policy is like a pernicious agriculture policy that says, “Let farmers adjust to the results of soil erosion, salination and 7 It does not seem to have occurred to most research scientists demanding more money (even more per article) that an important reason why they are not obtaining the funding they expect is because their research results could, if unfavorable, act a serious drag on the industrial establishment. They are not going to be funded to delegitimize modem industrial society. �9 so on, without attempting to mitigate or prevent these deleterious changes in advance.” Such “adaptative agriculture”, the present predominant practice in advanced agriculture, is antienvironmental, but is given a spurious air of evolutionary inevitability and evolutionary redistributive justice; you can't back natural evolution, which is entirely natural, can you. Let us condense such far-from-inevitable and highly artificial mal-adaptation in the neologism badaptation. Greenhouse adaptation, like nuclear adaptation, is badaptation (some, less kind, would say medaptation). There is a pragmatic, if cynical, political argument for badaptation, namely, that unilateral action to prevent a warning is unfeasible and requisite international cooperation unattainble. Both contentions open to doubt. Unilateral action by the USA, by far the World's heaviest resource and energy consumer (per capita and on several other relevant domains) backed up by pressure (familiar from other settings, such as the narcotics war) on other nations and through the United Nations could make a major difference. Unfortunately the USA is also the world's largest supplier of influential grown economists. In any case, international agreements such as those in whaling and Antarctica, are attainable, and sometimes effective. The ozone protocols, limiting production of CFCs show that results can be achieved to limit trace gas emissions. The adaptation proposal is presently compatible with wait-and-see; both mean no hauling back on trace gas production. Indeed procrastination will force societies towards badaptation. Typical of adaptation, like procrastination, is an (over-)emphasis on the uncertainties of Greenhouse forecasts, and on the decision-theoretic paralysis such uncertainties are alleged to produce. Characteristic of adaptation too is a minimisation of the extent of Greenhouse modification. No doubt the impression that things won't be so very different, or far removed from what has already been experienced, is important in getting adaptationism more readily accepted, as a rational course of action (instead of the seemingly irrational course it is). Thus badaptation tends to play with figures at the law end of projected ranges of temperature increase, such as 1.5°C for 2050, when in fact present data indicates something rather in the vicinity of 4°C - in a setting, furthermore, where fractions of a degree centigrade may well be linked ot macro-physical and macro-biological change. Recent modellings deliver, an average, on increase in 2°C attributable to carbon dioxide, and it is widely thought that other trace gases will double the CO2 effect, yielding a 4°C temperature increase.8 8 Sources. Note that methane is beginning to rival carbon dioxide as a gas where atmospheric propostems really matter and whose present increase is excessive. �10 The colossal extent of future human dislocation has correspondingly been deliberately underemphasized. The adaptive capacities of human arrangements, when humans are living at the margin, to massive natural shifts, has been grossly exaggerated. Consider agriculture alone - set aside flooded cities, sunken atoll islands, and all the rest. Some of the Earth's major grain producing regions - upon which famine relief projects depend - could be pushed substantially out of business. The conditions which prevailed during the American dust-bowl experience of the nineteen-thirties were benign indeed compared with those which threaten with mid twenty-first century Greenhouse conditions. The mid continental summer temperatures were only 1-2° C warmer than the present average, under greenhouse conditions they could be more than 3-4° C warmer. In the dustbowl rainfall only slipped at critical growing times (e.g. July for northern com) to 80% of the contemporary norm; but under Greenhouse conditions it could be significantly less again. A super dust-bowl is not improbable (for much more detail, see Bernard). Similarly for other similar latitude Northern grain producing regions. But the high-energy industrial superstructure is crucially based upon sufficient cheap food (bread) for the urban masses. • Intervention, high-tech Gaean engineering. Interventionist proposals so far floated include • New oceans in parts of the Earth's land surface lying below, at, or near sea level. These projects would make the mega-dams of recent times look like childrens' play. • Wintering effects. Production of sufficient dust in the atmosphere, achieved for instance by nuclear detonations, to mitigate heating effects. Such enterprise would make modification of the weather by cloud seeding look like childs' play. Fortunately these and other expensive and grandiose proposals, which would call for considerable international cooperation, are far down the planning track; with these schemes procrastination is rational. • Regulation, controlling free(-wheeling) enterprise. Regulation itself, not so bureaucratically popular under that presentation in these latter days of economic irrationalism, is of course transparadigmatic, where it belongs depend on what measures (what sorts of constraints, rights, etc.) are proposed and how they are imposed or enforced. If it is, for example, some industrial law-and-order, smokestack scrubbing regulations or Greenhouse polluting rights, within the status quo, that is one thing, but if a minimally-constrained growth paradigm is questioned and alternative socio-economic arrangements advocated, that is quite another, and falls outside the dominant paradigm. Such policies involving regulations controlling fossil fuel emissions especially, are negatively labelled prevention in the predominantly American policy literature, though there is now no preventing some Greenhouse effects; but the worse to follow could still be prevented. What is usually covered under the label is however some regulation within prevailing political arrangements. So energy efficiencies and savings for investment in �11 growth elsewhere is comprehensible, straight growth-curtailing non-consumption is not contemplated. But the latter is just what alternatives do contemplate. Democratic political arrangements do not exclude such alternatives both the power bases of political leaders and economic prescriptions do. Adequate regulation within prevailing socio-economic arrangements is going to prove impossible, without adjustment of power structures and economic imperatives, in effect without far-reaching systems and a devological adjustment. While such adjustment may be rational, it is unlikely. Power structures have too much to lose.9 This is an opposite point to record the chauvinism and environmental shallowness of the Greenhouse debate. Like heart disease and cancer, the Greenhouse effect is gaining much discussion and some funding because it just may severely effect the affluent, affluent people and affluent nations, that have a good deal to lose, in North America especially. The impact will, however, be at least as severe in some third world nations, whose lands or much of them will be flooded, countries which cannot afford extensive expensive dyking (or where such effort would be in the longer term, as seas rise, pointless), countries such as Pacific coral atoll nations and delta states like Bangladesh. But the really serious losers will no doubt be, not humans , rich or poor, but nonhumans. Biological diversity, already being reduced by various human activities, may be one of the chief casualties of global worming. Massive destruction of forests, wetlands, and even the polar tundra could irrevocably destroy complex ecosystems that have existed for millennia. Indeed, various biological reserves created in the past decade to protect species diversity could become virtual death traps as wildlife attempt to survive in conditions for which they are poorly suited. Accelerated species extinction is an inevitable consequence of a rapid warming (Worldwatch p.10). 3. Arguments to dislocation and for a Lesser Venus Prospect. There is at least a small probability that predicted increase in mean atmospheric temperatures will seriously interfere with most remaining natural environments and result in the degeneration or destruction of many of them, especially forests wetlands, maritime environments. Nor will adaptationism help here; for natural evolution is much too slow for adaptationism to succeed (cf. Keeton pp.763-4). Natural ecosystems will not adapt effectively to rapid climatic change,... With regard to forests, habitats for plants and animals cannot be re-created or transplanted rapidly. Continuing climatic changes would strain the capabilities Holistic problems are too extensive for individuals, or even small collectives, to make much difference acting or their own. Some are too beg even for large collectives or states, but would require whole regions of the Earth acting in concerte. But of course some state players, such as the superpowers, as regards nuclear winter, can make a substantial difference, or even all the difference. �12 of management practices even in commercial tree plantations (Beijer Institute Report pp.21-3). The decline or demise of these systems, vast reservoirs for greenhouse gases will accelerate the warming, and accordingly make matters substantially worse: Trees are adapted to a narrow range of temperature and moisture levels, and cannot cope with rapid climate change. A temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius per decade in mid- to upper latitudes translates into a shift in vegetation zones of 60-100 miles northward. Terrestrial ecosystems cannot migrate that fast. Vast numbers of trees are likely to die, and new trees adapted to warmer temperatures are unlikely to be able to replace them rapidly. During such a disruption, huge areas of forest could die and, as they decay or bum, send large quantities of additional CO2 into the atmosphere, accelerating the warming (Brown p.10). Of course the immediate climate patterns would be somewhat more complex. If enough soot and ash from fires were flung into the atmosphere there would be a cooling effect, like that of a small nuclear winter, before heating accelerated. The present pattern of ecosystemic loss would also be sharply accelerated. When natural ecosystems get reduced to about 30% of their initial size, they tend to collapse of themselves. Moreover, there would be other significant positive feedback from ecosystems other than the terrestrial forests, from the oceans especially. As the oceans warm, they lose their capacity to serve as carbon dioxide reservoirs. So they too release additional gases, including previously absorbed CO2, back into the atmosphere, further accelerating the warming. A critical question arises as to how much danger such positive feedback poses? As so often, informed opinions, and so probability estimates differ. However ‘several scientists working in the area consider that positive feedback effects will force a very bleak picture to be drawn’ (p.19 ref?)10 Unlike the interim effect of a small nuclear winter, where after a few years at most, climatic behavior (as distinct from radioactivity levels) would presumably return towards the previous norm, there will be no similar recovery under greenhouse impact. Technically then, stability would be lost under the impact,11 disequilibrium induced. An eventual longterm return to some different equilibrium could well be excluded. Under new climatic regimes plants themselves may be able to do little more than hang on for part of their own lives. In many places conditions would be too severe for much of the “year” to permit normal plant functioning, including what is crucial for greenhouse amelioration, photosynthesis. In most plants, photosynthesis only occurs across a narrow band of Second order probabilities, probabilities and uncertainties in the light of first order subjective probabilities, enter importantly. Stability is defined in physics in terms of return to an initial (inertial) position after small disturbance. �13 temperatures (e.g. 6 - 34°C); outside that range the plants shut down operations.12 Even more important, many plants would leave few or no successful successors. Even where plants set seed, seedlings would not survive under the severe conditions expected; for instance, they would be killed by hot dry summer conditions, or in other places by frosts to which they are not adapted, both phenomena already familiar after clearfelling of forests. The situation at... in southern Sahara, where there is but one ancient tree hanging on in thousands of square kilometers of desert, a tree with viable seeds which sets no seedlings, could be more or less replicated in many other places where forests or woody plants once grew. In fact we are already witnessing the demise of the trees in much of Australia. Already dead and dying trees form a predominant feature of the Australian rural landscape. Virtually whichever way ecologists travel in Australia where trees remain, they are confronted with dead and dying trees 13 The reasons for the present decline of trees in rural Australia is, for the most part, not to be attributed to early greenhouse or even pollution effects.14 It is thought to be due to a complex of factors, including a range of insect predators whose effects are enhanced on isolated trees left after an excessive zeal for clearing (i.e. holistic effects enter as regards healthy persistence of trees). The relevant point is that these features are likely to be accelerated given the additional impact of greenhouse warming on plant functioning and reproduction. There are several major ways through which the maintenance structures of the Earth can be not merely awkwardly disturbed, but thrown right out of kilter - perhaps, given the delicacy of several critical matters, never to return present norms. Most obvious and immediately threatening is • nuclear warfare, and therewith nuclear Winter. But there are of course other severe shocks the planet could suffer than those chemo-nuclear warfare, some human induced, some a “chance” matter of the planets' position in space, namely • a mini Big Bang, or an undermining of metastability, brought about through very high energy experimentation (see Leslie) • a collision with a large meteorite or asteroid. Such uncertainties, not germane to the main climatic arguments, are listed, not to achieve a bogus completeness, but to emphasize that complete certainty is not to expected, not rationally.. Should we obtain it, should we obtain easy relatively unproblematic lives, then we have, by world standards, been rather lucky. Moreover, these latter uncertainties do The upper bound may be difficult to appreciate in most of Aotearoa. But in much of Australia, during the summer, many plants close down their operations for much of the day. Reported by Recher on Earthworm. Thus coastline vegetational destruction through detergents in sewerage waters. �14 appear negligible compared with those bound up with climate, ascribable to: • excess economic development. The practices involve a complex and sustained assault on most of the Earth's major ecosystems, forests, seas, etc, along with the alteration of atmospheric composition by greenhouse gases. For example, the forests are cut down, burnt, poisoned by herbicides and acid rain, or otherwise removed or destroyed. (Therewith too a great deal more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and major sinks of carbon dioxide are removed.) As a result of these concerted growth-and-development activities such systems are driven to limits, and breakdown occurs. Once it occurs at some weak point it can escalate elsewhere, like a conflagration.; thus again ecosystemic collapse for example. Quite apart from breakdown at or approaching limits, for instance because of systemic overload, remarkable changes can occur in desiccative systems under stress or strain. • excess energy or chemical loading. Though such striking examples as the chemical clock, it has been demonstrated that dissipative systems can suddenly, and often rather unpredictably, undergo extraordinary changes, as for instance energy flux is increased (Prigogine and others), [describe briefly] Such non-additive, or nonlinear, effects, characteristic of more holistic dissipative systems, are bound to occur within the Earth's atmosphere and oceans as they undergo compositional changes. Carbon dioxide itself provides a good example. With small quantities its effect on the temperature of the air is proportional to the amount added; there is a linear effect. However once the carbon dioxide concentration in the air approaches 1%, new nonlinear effects come into play and heating greatly increases. In the absence of a biosphere to fix carbon dioxide, its concentration in the atmosphere would probably exceed the critical figure of 1%. The Earth would then heat up rapidly to a temperature near to that of boiling water. Increasing temperatures would speed up chemical reactions and accelerate their progress towards chemical equilibrium. ... eventually ... the Earth would become permanently cocooned in a brilliant white cloud - a second Venus, although not quite as hot (Lovelock pp.45-6). Fortunately for Gaean prospects, the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now nowhere near 1% nor likely to be pushed near 1% by projected doubting of carbon dioxide levels under economic activity over the next 50 years15. However eventual exponential growth will lead towards levels, and the side effect of such growth, the release of carbon dioxide from forests and oceans and the considerable reduction in fixation of carbon dioxide with the decline of forests, will lead in that disastrous direction rather more rapidly. The 1% 15 In the atmosphere of the very early Earth, CO2 exceeded the critical 1% figure; but solar luminority was about 25% less than now. With increasing solar flux the Earth would have overheated had the proposition of CO2 not been much reduced (e.g. see Lovelock 88 p.56). �15 bound constitutes just one of the many serious limits to continuation of present developmental practices. Now there can be no rational confidence with respect to complex dissipative systems - about the behavior of which we presently know comparatively little - that no other nonadditive effects will no be encountered at a much earlier stage. After all, the Gaean system, its atmosphere, oceans and ecosystems, will be pushed into essentially unexperienced and substantially unknown reaches. There is, for example, no experience from past times of such elevated temperatures as Green house effects will lead to, to draw upon. ‘There is no evidence that the land-bound glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica have ever completely melted in the last two million years’. There is experience of much colder periods. ‘During ice ages, the earth's average temperature has been about 5°C colder than at present, with glaciers covering major portions of continents’ (Barth p.7). But there is no similar experience of temperatures 4-5° C warmer than at present (in a warm interglacial period), ‘a global increase of more than 2°C above present is unprecedented in the era of human civilization’ (Schneider p.6) It would accordingly be decidedly rash, rash decision makings, to assign a zero or negligible probability to the emergence of new or unknown effects of relevance, to assume all will go smoothly and well. That would presuppose, in any event, a completeness in present scientific knowledge, contrary to the information we have that present investigation of holistic systems, among much else, is still in its infancy. The probability of something critical (e.g. perhaps radicals like hydroxyl) having been left out of estimations, of room accordingly for something unexpected or for something to go wrong, may be small, though experience implies it is not always so but it certainly appears to be non-zero. For the overconfident, with excess faith in the flimsy scientific edifice, there is a salutary lesson to be drawn from the erratic and stumbling path of the main proponent of Gaia hypotheses, Lovelock. Lovelock, coming from a working life as an industrial chemist, part of that time for a giant chemical transnational, had, and retained for a considerable time after he began his holistic hypothesizing a strong antipathy for environmentalists.16 Even Gaia was for industry and against the environmentalists; she was going to laughingly soak up all the pollution, courtesy of the chemical companies especially, that we humans could throw at her. In particular, we did not really need to worry much about ozone depletion or greenhouse gas escalation.17 ‘Contrary to the forebodings of many environmentalists, Coupled with this, there is a certain schizophrenia in Lovelock's attitude to the natural environment. There is also a matching schizophrenia as to the fragility of life on Earth. On the one side, it required very delicate settings and fine barring to arise; this is part of the argument for a Gaia hypothesis. On the other side, life is ‘tough, robust, and [highly] adaptable’, virtually indestructable (p.90). But though a flawed hero, Lovelock is a hero nonetheless. See Lovelock 79, p.40ff; and also 88? [detail] �16 finding a suitable’ destructive agent to bring about a ‘doom scenario’ ‘turns out to be an almost insoluble problem’ (p.40). Lovelock makes it easier for himself by helping himself to the assumption that a doomsday scenario involves the destruction of all “life”, ‘down to the last spore of some deep-buried anaerobic bacteria’ (p.40). But even for the least chauvinistic of environmentalists, destruction of all humans but the select elect would be quite enough for a decent doomsday. Lovelock's high redefinition of a environmental ‘doomsday scenario’ is unacceptable. Lovelock does not however stay within the bound of his redefinition. He proceeds to pooh-pooh the idea that anything much that we humans could accomplish would make any difference to Gaia (p.41) or even to most humans, including use of nuclear devices. Unfortunately for Lovelock's credibility, he was writing three years before the seemingly obvious wintering effects of a major nuclear war were realised by the accredited scientific community. Appealing in a common scientific fashion to scientific authority, he proceeds to minimalize the human and ecological effects of a major war. The report he relies upon as authoritative was a 1975 (unreferenced) one of ‘the US National Academy of Sciences ... prepared by an eight-man committee of their own distinguished members, assisted by forty-eight other scientists chosen from those expert in the effects of nuclear explosions and all things subsequent to them’ (p.41, italics added). Lovelock draws from the distinguished expert report the findings that ... if half of all the nuclear weapons in the world's arsenals, about 10,000 megatons, were used in a nuclear war the effects on most of the human and man-made ecosystems of the world would be small at first and would become negligible within thirty years. Both aggressor and victim nations would of course suffer catastrophic local devastation, but areas remote from the battle and, especially important in the biosphere, marine and coastal ecosystems would be minimally disturbed (p.41). Three years later Turco and others proceeded to detail a very different scenario that of widespread and ecologically damaging nuclear winter.. Not for the first time, Lovelock had been caught out badly. As with pollution, Lovelock has more recently shifted ground18 considerably in the vulnerability of the Earth to human-induced disturbance. When a system such as Gaia in homeostatis is stressed to near the limits of regulation even a small disturbance may cause it to jump to a new stable state or even fail entirely.... Shifting ground may be fine, especially when it is to an improved position. But it should be done honestly and openly, not stealthily or shiftily. Lovelock proceeds to attribute a caricuture of his own previous position to critics of the Gaia hypothesis (as a clever ‘fabrication’ which it was not); that it is ‘an argument developed to allow industry to pollute at will, since mother Gaia will clean up the mess (85 p.53). �17 It could be that the regulation of the Earth's climate is not far from one of these limits. Thus if some part of climate regulation is connected with the natural level of CO2 then clearly we are close to the limits of its regulation. This is because CO2 cannot be reduced much below the level observed for the last glaciation, about 180 ppm, without seriously limiting the rate of growth of the more abundant C3 type plants. If we perturb the Earth's radiation balance by adding more CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or reduce its capacity to regulate by decreasing the area of forests or both of these together then we could be surprised by a sudden jump of both CO2 and temperature to a new and much warmer steady state; or by the initiation of periodic fluctuations between that state and our present climate. The anomalously low abundance of CO2 on Earth when compared with the other terrestrial planets and especially the fact that the mean temperature of the Earth is on the cool side of the optimum for regulation, suggests strongly that the biota is regulating the climate by pumping CO2 from the air. The common feature of most of our pollutions and of our exploitation of the land surface seems to be unintentionally to thwart this natural process (Lovelock 85 pp5354). The argument to the lesser Venus path, to significant disequilibrium with the Earth's ecological support system destabilized, takes the following lines. The Earth appears to be a discipative (far-from-equilibrium) system held at its present balance by a combination of an (increasing) solar flux - a main energy input into the system - and its major ecological arrangements, especially vegetation complanes and live oceans. The sheer extent to which the resulting system differs from the stable dead system it could otherwise be is shown by the following table for atmospheric and oceanic composition. TABLE 1. Substance Carbon dioxide A Nitrogen T R Oxygen Argon 0 C E A N S Water Planetary comparisons (principal components per cent). Equilibrium Earth Venus Lifeless Earth Mass Present Earth 99 0 98 1.9 98 1.9 95 2.7 0.03 79 0 1 trace 0.1 trace 0.1 0.13 2 21 1 63 Salt 3.5 Sodium nitrate 1.7 96 n.a. n.a. 3.5 traces Surface temperatures (°C) n.a 477 Total pressure (bars) n.a. 90 290±50 60 -53 13 0064 1 The table is based upon tables 1 and 2 of Lovelock 79, pp37 and p.39. �18 The whole Earth system is accordingly far from equilibrium. Unpredictable behavior as locals increase is therefore almost to be expected. A likely moral is presumably: stress they system, or destabilize ecosystem controls sufficiently, and the system may be in deep trouble. It is relevant to inquire into what evidence we have on this case. To do so let us reconsider some of the array of arguments there are from some sort of holistic organisation of the Earth (for a modest Gaia hypothesis). But for the participation of the Earth's ecological support systems, plant complexes especially the Earth would not be blessed with its present life-benign physical characteristics. The oceans would be much saltios and too salty for most life, the air would not contain the present rich mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide so important for terrestrial life, and so on, perhaps most important the Earth would be significantly hotter and too hot for most life, for what of what does the regulating and stabilizing of present conditions. For the solar flux has increased in intensity about 30% since life appeared on Earth, but the mean global temperatures have exhibited no corresponding increase, but have remained relatively constant. Such an expected consistency in the face of disturbing inputs is ascribed, under holistic approaches that do something to explain it, to the concerted activity of plants, [detail] Lovelock and collaberaters have devised an elementary daisy world model which reveals how a feedback system with two types of daisies can, within limits, stabilize temperatures despite increasing energy input. The limits are important, for as these limits are approached the maintenance systems break down. diagram Q Similarly several of the well-known chemical cycles, such as those for nitrogen, sulphur, sodium and so forth depends for their maintenance on the adequate operation of active ecological structures. Plainly if a cycle loops through a component, such as forests, which is severely disturbed then the cycle itself could be disrupted. There is some probability furthermore that the foregoing changes will disturb crucial equilibrium systems and chemical cycles. Some of these feedback systems are in fact maintained in equilibrium by natural ecosystems (an example is Lovelock's daisy world model, which becomes unstable when temperature rises too high). Instability could ensue under disturbance [explain, include Greenhouse holism]. Without doubt these matters are bad enough. Demise of most of the Earth's richness19 is not a minor matter. Worse could follow. Natural richness is the main richness, much exceeding human artifice. �19 The general tenor of the argument is so far this:- By arguments from physical models, and because of uncertainties, the probability that something could go badly wrong is nonzero,20 and indeed far from negligible. Part of the argument can be put as follows: there is a decent probability that a modest Gaia hypothesis holds. But then, there is a considerable probability that excessive Greenhouse build up will lead to damaging system destabilization. So containing probabilities, there at least a nonneglizible probability of such destabilization. An analogy should now emphasize both the dubiousness of what is being proposed under adaptationism and the precariousness of the human predicament. The proposal is to take this ancient craft, now overloaded with human passengers and their heavy baggage, a cargo it was never organised to carry, out on new routes and run it fast and higher than it has ever travelled before. Even for an experimental prototype, a now very fast (air-)bus say, with a select text crew, such a procedure, of running over new uncharted routes at speeds and heights never attained before, would be risky enterprise. With an ancient craft, with a heavy nonelite cargo of baggage and passengers (some whom try to interfere with the controls), the proposal is extremely rash. For the chances that the craft will breakdown and perhaps crash, with serious consequences to passengers and for the baggage, are greatly elevated over the risks of proceeding as usual much more slowly. With the costs of crashing so severe, rational operators and sensible pilots would not take them.21 Unfortunately the analogy is not at all far-fetched, but resembles what is in store for spaceship Earth, already under significant stress with its excessive human passenger load and their heavy ecological practices. Not only is the future itself pretty new territory, but it is a future at terrestrial temperatures, important processes will proceed faster than ever before, in particular all chemical processes. Simply to take the craft up there, as do-nothing and adaptation approaches would have is to emulate the risks and hubris of Daedelus; such approaches are aptly rarely Daedelian 4. The Sting in the Cosmic Tail: the mini-Furphy theorem and the likely demise of homo sapiens, spp. economicus.. The trouble with the initial formulation of Murphy's law: if anything can go wrong, it will, From logical theories of probability such as Carnap's non-zero probabilities are rather easily reached (perhaps too easily, with the converse feature that natural laws never obtain high probabilities. The difficulty can be characteristed, to some extent, by restruction to physical models). The analogy is an old one, which we exploited before in the nuclear case; for the “bus analogy”, see Routley and Routley. The analogy admits of much graphic variation. Instead of running the craft at excess speed, an alternative or additional image is that of destroying the controls of the craft. Lovelock deploys this opposite image (88 p.63), which corresponds to the demolition of Gaians control systems. �20 was that it was insufficiently qualified, much too absolutist, and apparently self-refuting..22 Certain crucial qualifications are required:• Replacement of the certain (certainlistic) conclusion by a somewhat weaker probabilistic one: namely, it probably will. • Correlative to weakening the conclusion, strengthening the premiss, by rendering it more specific; namely, in place of ‘anything’ or ‘something’ put ‘some thing ... given a chancy situation’. The modified formulation is accordingly the following Mini-Furphy result:23 if some thing can genuinely go wrong, given a relatively chancy situation, it probably will. Here ‘chancy’ means more or less what it means according to the dictionaries: doubtful, decidedly risky, or as we shall construe it, having a comparatively low probability vis-a-vis its alternatives. The precise extent of relative chanciness will be explained as we go. To prove this proposition, let us first recast it in appropriate symbolic form. Let D be some arbitrary bad situation, a suitable disaster. Let the possibility of D's happening something's going wrong - be represented by a non-zero probability, and genuineness by non-negligible probability. It can be assumed that that probability, P(D), is small, otherwise the requisite conclusion would follow in any case. Let C represent the features that render the situation chancy. Then what we aim to show is that where P(D) is small positive, P(D < C) is probable. The proof applies a special case of Bayes' theorem, which take the following form where there are n alternative hypotheses hi,...,hn including h: Pv(h) x P(i < h) P(h < i) X P(hr) X P(i < hr) r = 1 Here h is the hypothesis, which in our application is D, i is the additional information (or, is in Carnap, a new observation), which in our case is C.24 P(h < i) is the probability of h 22 23 24 For this and other formulations of Murphy's law, and many loosely associated humorous maxims with grains of truth encapsulated, see Block. As to the history of the “law”, which originated with J.M. Chase, editor of Aviation Mechanics, see the Encyclopaedia Americana', Chase's initial formulation in a 1955 issue read ‘If an aircraft part can be installed in correctly, someone will install it the way”. This little theorem was originally more accurately entitled the Murphy-Leslie theorem. It is an adaptation, suggested by Leslie's work, of Murphy's Law. This section is overwhelmingly indebted to Leslie; for Leslie's debts, and so the transitive debts of this section, see Leslie himself, who deserves to be read in defence his legitimate doomsday apprehensions. The next not indicates the limited extent to which Leslie's arguments are endorsed. The formulation is a special case of that proved in Carnap, p.331; namely that (absolute) case where the evidence e is elided, or e set = 1. A similar result follows, subject to slightly more rigorous conditions, in relevant probability theory; see Routley 79 p.954. �21 given i, or of h on condition i (the backward arrow notation, <, symbolises the condition involved and shows its direction). For simplicity we shall suppose that all the alternatives to D are concentrated (as far as symbolic exposure goes) in one, namely D*. Then the form we seek to apply is simply: p(D < C) __________ P(D) x P(C < D)__________ P(D) x P(C < D) + P(D*) x P(C < D*)' = The arithmetic details needed can be tabulated in a revealing form as follows: Cases D D* Initial (or prior) probability d 1-d m, say Vd m/l, say 1/dl of outcome relative chance that C As it is the relative chance of C that matters, we can rescale to set m = 1/d. To make C relatively chancy, I has some modest size; specifically let I exceed 1-d/d. Then the probability to be estimated, P(D < C), is d x 1/d d x 1/d + (l-d)/dl where k = • 1 1+k _ “ That is» and P(D < C) | y when k < 1, i.e. when I [ p(D < C) = where k = 1, . Thud D is probable, at least in being more probable than not, given C, when I is of at least modest size, i.e. given C is relatively chancy. In a merely apparently more general form of the estimation, where we do not align m to d, In effect we shall look at the form P(h < i) = --------------- < h)------------------------------P(h) X P(i < h) + XP(hr) X P(i < hr)’ n with the sum excluding the product for h. Though demonstrable given satisfiable exclusion and exhaustion conditions, Bayes' theorem is not lacking critics, in part because of the surprises this bit of logic can deliver. Carnap meets the objection that Bayes' theorem has sometimes ‘been applied to cases where it led to strange or even absurd results’ thus: ‘This was mostly due to an uncritical use of the principle of indifference :... [The] theorem is provable ... on the basis of those weak assumptions which practically all theories of probability seem to have in common’ (p.331, sub 1 elided). Of course the present applications could (just) be objected to on the grounds that the logical conditions for the theorem to apply are not fully satisfied. �P(D [ C) 22 d x m d x m + (1-d) x m/l 1 1 + k’ 1 as before. That is m drops out, only the relative chanciness really matters. The little Furphy theorem follows as before. Now to put some relevant flesh on these abstract statements and figures. Let D be some future disaster such as the catastrophic decline, for instance, through summer or winter phenomena of the human species, from which the enormous present population never recovers. At worst (from a chauvinistic angle) the population, like many catastrophically effected by human activities, goes extinct. Suppose, for a bifurcating outcome, there is a catastrophe stage, before halfway through next century, 2050. If humans do not get their act together before then, they go into catastrophic decline, as already indicated. If however they do get their ecopolitical act together then humans, while they hardly live happily ever after (poverty, inequality, domination, and other evils not being removed), they continue to persist or even grow in numbers, perhaps fanning out through the solar system ( in the way envisaged by too many physicists). Suppose further we are optimists, imagining that the prior probability of D ecodisaster and human decline, is small, say 1%. That is d = .01, and the initial probability of D*, human “success”, is .99. The figures are pretty notional. Supreme optimists would want to set d much smaller, pessimists rather at a higher probability. Application Table 1. Cases D human decline D* human success Initial probabilities 1%, i.e. .01 99%, i.e. .99 Relative chanciness, VlOO, i.e. .01 1/100 x l/l ofC Then the probability of human decline given .01 x ,01 P(D < C) .01 x .01 + .99 x .01/1 1 !/2 , when I > 99. �23 It remains to fill out C, thereby showing that I is likely much much larger, and correspondingly human decline so much the more probable in the light of additional information, i.e. a posteriori probable in the usual jargon. There are several high risk factors, acting in a certain concert, factors emphasized more than a decade ago in world systems modellings (such as, most famously that, of the Club of Rome) Malthusian factors such as human population, economic product, pollution, energy consumption,.... It is appropriate for estimate posterier probability relative to anyone of these, any of which can serve as C, in order to expose the riskiness of present gross human practices. In brief, because there are several high risk factors, so there are several appropriate relative or reference classes. Thus the posterier probability is assessed relative to such matters as our being alive, humans being thus and so (Leslie's reference class), this being present energy use, present wast output, present forest destruction and so forth.25 The anthropic argument considers the environmentally invidious situation of present humans on the Earth. The argument can be carried through either in terms of sheer population, gross numbers, or in terms of human resource grabbing, as estimated for instance through energy consumption. Let us consider the prospects given additional information as to the present phase of gross human population. C will be some such proposition as: the proportional preponderance of humans who have ever lived alive now, or to personalize it: the chance that you or your family, is alive now. Chart: Our present population predictment on the two scenerios. Demise scenerio “Success” scenerio - representative zjs human numbers human numbers On of the weaknesses in the argument may appear to be its dependence on an appropriate choice of relative class. For, the relative probabilities can fall away if different reference classes, not exhibiting such growth patterns are taken, e.g. present wattle distribution, birds being thus and so. On the other hand, probabilities can be elevated even more by selection of more unusual reference classes cuh as our being scientists, or being computer programmers, etc.. �24 Humans have got themselves - to some extent put themselves, though much may be the result of muddling through - into an extremely dubious, environmentally insidious and unsustainable position, on a range of critical parameters. Their numbers are excessive, their high energy use is excessive, their waste and their pollution are both excessive - and all chose and other excesses are at the steep end of upward exponential curves. Several relevant graphs are distressingly exponential, with the present in the near vertical growth phase: graphs Many other similarly shaped graphs26 could be added, for instance for growth of pollution, of waste products, of weapons (in terms of tonnes of explosive power), of other greenhouse gases such as methane, and so on. The display typifies the accelerating human roller coaster. Those curves are tightly interconnected, in criss-crossing fashion. For example, the productivity of contemporary agriculture which enables the feeding of hugh urbanised human populations depends on a very high energy use (in term of energy efficiency, contemporary high-tech agriculture falls below that of much traditional agriculture). The maintenance of high populations with supplies of cheap food depends in turn on fossil fuel agriculture. Because of the intertwining of these phenomena, there is no easy way of getting off the accelerating roller-coaster. 26 All the graphs exhibited are drawn from Boyden. �25 Nor, as observed, is there much effort devoted to slowing the coaster. For politicians it would be politically risky and inexpedient to try (for them the rhetoric about an ecologically sustainable future must remain just that, more rhetoric). For many other power holders and brokers such ideas are ideologically excluded: growth remains the gospel. So a precarious position becomes ever more precarious. Humans are in a decidedly chancy position, because of their population situation and other Malthusian factors; they are becoming very disasterprone. If humans want an acceptable future for themselves - they have virtually ruled out an acceptable future for many other creatures, through their predominantly selfish thoughtless greedy practices - then they will probably have to mend their ways, very considerably and very soon. But, given the nature of the beast, that itself seems improbable. Humans, if they seek a more assured future, should make a concerted effort to put themselves into a less precarious position. That could be achieved by proceeding to reduce relative risks. These relative risks, sharply reducing prospects for a reliable future, fall into two classes:• manufactured risk factors, including weaponry such as mega-nuclear devices and elements of biochemical warfard, and experimental equipment such as very high energy particle accelerators (which could perhaps tunnel under a metastable state or induce a min-Big-Bang; see Leslie). • Accumulated risk factors, such as the hugh relative size of human population, energy consumption, greenhouse gas production, etc..27 Despite the ideological obstacles, enormous political, religious and economic obstacles blocking the way of requisite change, major efforts should be put into reducing both these types of risks. Philosophers could have a significant role in breaking down the ideological barriers and in clarifying and developing the arguments involved. 5. What ought to be done about Greenhouse? The general result already reached, that humans collectively should reduce their risk taking, and in particular reduce their gross numbers, extends to rational Greenhouse decision and action theory. But that large and difficult challenge is not all that there is to try, that should rationally be attempted. While some increase in mean global temperatures, and all that implies, can no longer be averted, the potentially most damaging effects can be: namely, by curtailing human-induced 27 As before, there are various different reasons why these induce risk, neo-Malthusian and probabilistic in particular. �26 output of Greenhouse gases. Moreover, there is an approximate upper bound upon temperature of importance, which can serve to supply a significant limit as output. That bound - which reduces risk taking by confining encountered situations to those where there is some past experiential basis - is given by estimated temperatures during Altithermal and Eemian eras. Those temperatures are estimated to have been between about 1/2 a degree and 1 degree Centigrade above contemporary (pre-1980) temperatures; so the upper bound is about 1°C. Not only will a continuation of current emission trends take global temperatures clean through and way beyond that bound, so also will an alternative set-up where emission rates are fixed more or less at current rates. The only apparent way to remain rationally within an experiential domain is to curtail sharply trace gas emissions beginning easily in the 1990s. That means shifting from the dominant growth paradigm; it means expensive re- and deindustrialisation. It is unlikely. Final corollary: Humans collectively are not (particularly) rational. But we had already guessed as much from the latest...... in the long history of human wars. References H.W. Bernard, The Greenhouse Effect, Ballinger, Cambridge Mass., 1980. A. Block, Murphy's Law. Book Two, Magnum, Methuen, ... S. Boyden, Western Civilization in Biological Perspective, Clarendon, Oxford, 1987. L.R. Brown and others, State of the World 1989, Norton/Worldwatch, New York, 1989; referred to as Worldwatch. R. Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability, Second edition, University of Chicago Press, 1962. R.M. Cyert and M.H. DeGroot, Bayesian Analysis and Uncertainty in Economic Theory, Rowman & Littfield, New Jersey, 1987. ‘Developing policies for responding to climatic change’, Report of the Beijer Institute, February 1988. Keeton, J. Leslie, ‘Risking and World's End’, Bulletin of the Curiadian Nuclear Society 10(3) (1989) 1-6; all references to Leslie are to this article unless otherwise indicated. J. Leslie, ‘Is the end of the world nigh?’, The Philosophical Quarterly, to appear; referred to as PQ. J.E. Lovelock, Gaia. A new look at life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 1979. J. Lovelock, ‘Are we destabilising world climate?’, The Ecologist 15(1985) 52-55. �27 J.Lovelock, ‘Man and Gaia’, The Earth Report Monitoring the Battle for Our Environment, (ed. E. Goldsmith and N. Hilgard) Mitchell Benzley, London, 1988, 51-64. R. and V. Routley, ‘Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquirey 21(1978) 133R. Routley, ‘Ultralogic as universal?’ reprinted as an Appendix in Exploring Meinong's Jungle, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979. S. Schneider ‘Not to decide is to decide’, in Greenhouse 1988: Planning for Climate Change (ed. T. Dendy), Department of Environment and Planning, Adelaide, 1989, 5-10. R.P. Turco and others, ‘Nuclear winter: Global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions’, Science 222 (1983) 1283-1292. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document GAEAN GREENHOUSE, NUCLEAR WINTER, AND ANTHROPIC DOOMSDAY. ... climate change, like no other issue, calls the whole notion of human progress into question. The [ever promised] benefits of newer technologies, more efficient economics, and improved political systems could be overwhelmed by uncontrolled global warming. ... the pace of climate change will soon overwhelm natural variability in the earth's climate. Indeed, it can be improved with nuclear war for its potential to disrupt a wide range of human and natural systems, [severely] complicating the back of moneying economics and coping with other problems. Irrigation works, settlement patterns, and food production [among others] would be tragically disrupted ... (Worldwatch 89, p.ll, p.10) There are many approaches to the Greenhouse problematique, upon which this philosophical investigation focuses. These approaches, range from playing the issue down entirely, dismissing it as not a problem, not something anyone should worry about, at the one end of the range, to playing it up at the other. Those who play it up may even foresee the demise of the human race, the substantially new socio-economic arrangements soon eventuate. There is certainly plenty of room for different approaches, and for some eclecticism. For what is being relied upon, in every case, comprises shaky and contestable arguments, from flimsy forecasting models lacking many apparently relevant details. No one of sound judgment, aware that weather reports for twelve hours ahead can be wildly astray, would place a very high level of confidence on climatic forests for fifty years ahead down a very hazardous track. But there is enough information to act; and there is information rationally requiring action. For things in the future are not going to be the same. It is very doubtful that they are going to be any better (though much important economic theorizing presupposes as much, such as the monetary discounting of the future). They are not going to be similar even, because so many parameters important to life are changing, several at exponential rates. Significant in these changes are likely climatic changes. The Greenhouse effect is among those, a result of the increases of “greenhouse” gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, in the Earth's atmosphere, which have followed exponential paths since the highenergy phase of industrial culture. The growth in gas concentration produces, what it is lagged by, but is now apparent, a significant increase in mean global temperatures. This has major implications for much of life on Earth. 2 Diagram 1. Spectrum of approaches: Course of action Reasons offered Short response No problem Refutable No certainty Irrational Adaptive capacity Exaggerated High tech resolution Wishful thinking Severe dislocation otherwise Utopian Individual survival Pointless No action1 Moderate action Considerable action These very condensed responses will be expanded and explained as we proceed. Breifly too the outcome is that there is no easy path; future humans should expect a hard landing. 1. Investigative philosophy, argument and rational decision The role of philosophy in such a complex problematique as that of Greenhouse is not difficult to state briefly. Philosophy, Anglo-American philosophy especially, is concerned above all with argument. Investigative philosophy is applied philosophy, investigating arguments, their features - assumptions, reliability, etc. - and their generalisation to rational processes, but outside normal philosophical topics. The generalisation to rational processes comprehends a wider range of philosophical throughput than the orthodox range of argument typically addressed in logic courses; to probabilistic and plausibilistic reasoning, to decision processing and making. A main objective in this piece of investigative philosophy is to consider certain arguments for severe dislocation pprobabilities, as a result of Greenhouse effects, and the resulting impact on rational decision formation and action. There are certain arguments of particular interest radical decision and action: various neo-Malthusian arguments, and doomsday arguments. 1 Taoist no-action would be different. It would not have undertaken excessive industrial action in the first place. 3 The main run of arguments to considerable action are neo-Malthusian in character. The general form of these arguments is simply this: growth in some parameter encounters limits, with severe effects. A characteristic graphic representation is as follows: limits growth parameter time exponential growth pattern J encountering limits subsequent varying unstable behavior The limits are often imposed just by finitude, e.g. finiteness of a resource or a sink. But other limits can be important, for instance where new phenomena or thresholds come into play. General Malthusian arguments loom in the background in what follows. But a different argument, of especial concern as regard climatic changes, is the following anthropic doomsday argument:• There is some probability that the Gaean “greenhouse effect”, generated by human activity, will get out of control, that Gaean control mechanisms will fail, and that the Earth will, for example, overheat (Runaway Greenhouse, or Lesser Venus Prospect, premiss). • That result would be disastrous for human activities, and indeed for humans (Catastrophe Prospect). • Because of the unusual, and unusually precarious, position of humans, such a probability of disaster is not in fact small but decidedly large As a consequence then, the human species will probably sharply decline, and even become extinct (Catastrophe Probability). That is, by a rectified version of Murphy's law - that if something can go wrong then in appropriate unusual conditions, it very probability will - an incrementally small probability is inflated into a very large probability. 4 It would be a mistake to conclude that because the argument itself is an unlikely one, everyone can stop worrying. The argument is but one of a substantial raft of arguments that should have everyone worried; it is but a final intellectual string, so to say, from the inconspicuous cosmological tail. Such a doomsday argument no doubt puts together, in one more exact form, some of the sorts of considerations that are troubling many people, especially concerned youth, about the Greenhouse business: that humans (including themselves) are on a decline or extinction path. It is no doubt not the only consideration that should be troubling them or us. For whether or not doomsday warnings are warranted, there are other matters that should be sufficiently worrisome, to anyone of moral integrity:• Future times are likely to be exceedingly uncomfortable for very many creatures, as habitats are destroyed, food producing regions are eliminated, and environments seriously impoverished. (Many of these creatures are nonexistents, mere future existents, i.e. creatures that do not yet exist or participate in market or voting rituals, but who -will exist and may participate. But, despite their presently unfavourable ontological status, they are entitled to fair and decent treatment.) • Given such future prospects, present practices which do nothing or vanishingly little to ameliorate these prospects, are decidedly irrational. Indeed a main message that will emerge from the present exercise is the moral irrationality of critical large-scale human practices. The irrationality, morally-weighed-down irrationality, of present large-scale human practices is already conspicuous from the wintry downside of climatic prospects of which Greenhouse warming is the upside. Diagram 2. Macro-climatic setting. Bands: all boundaries fuzzy mean global temperature (degrees C) escalating emissions Disequilibrium: Venus prospect increasing dislocation possible adaptation increasing dislocation thermonuclear war disequilibrium: Mars prospect 5 1860 1990 The apparatus for conducting a world-wide nuclear wars is entirely in place and indeed on alert. The probability of such a war, even if small, is not zero. Among the many awful effects of a large nuclear war is that of nuclear winter, which would bring about the demise of present human civilisation, and would at the very least mean enormous dislocation for most surviving humans and other creatures. A sufficiently diabolical chemo-nuclear war, reaching into all inhabited parts of the globe, could indeed drive the human species close to extinction. The decidedly dubious rationality and morality of these nuclear arrangements - both through what they are in themselves for what purposes, and through their moral opportunity costs - are widely appreciated. The thesis that the arrangements and practices are immoral, irrational, and ought to be dismantled - already much argued, and also contested2 - is not the present concern. The thermonuclear downside is, by comparison, a very easy case to examine philosophically, and argue, as compared with the greenhouse upside.3 For there is, for instance, a case of sorts, for much increased use of greenhouse gases, such as CFCs in refrigerators, a case that hardly extends very plausibly to nuclear weapons. It is a case heavily pressed by some “developing” nations, for polluting devices already in widespread use in more affluent places, as necessary for local standards of living. Greenhouse and nuclear winter are more intricately connected than being the upside and downside of meteorological phenomena. One of the high-tech solutions suggestions for atmospheric overheating, involves the generation of wintering effects - to cool things down - by flinging enough dust up into the atmosphere, a trick most easily achieved no doubt on the requisite scale by nuclear explosives. Needless to say, like backburning against out-of- control fires, artificial winter would be a pretty desperate and, given present expertise, irrational expedient. 2. The Greenhouse debate, main policy responses, and irrational decision. The Greenhouse debate, as to what to do, if anything, about forecast Greenhouse effects on Earth, is intellectually disturbing. For it has revealed, as we shall soon see, that many of those who have spoken, worse that many who have some role in decision making For my very small contribution to this, see the War and Peace series in Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy, RSSS, Australian National UniversityGlobal warming, by no means entirely certain, is assumed to be the outcome of increasing greenhouse gas build up. Of course though some temperatures will rise, cooling will probably occur also in some localized regions. 6 (including both experts and politicians), lack a firm grasp on decision-making in conditions of uncertainty or possible risk.4 The main canvassed policy approaches to the Greenhouse problematique lie firmly within the dominant social paradigm, the high-tech growth and development ideology. Diagram 2 Broad policy responses to the Greenhouse problematique. Dominant paradigm Alternative paradigm Procrastination (wait-and-see) Soft energy paths and alternative regulation Adaptation (sink-or-swim) Socio-economic transformation Regulation Intervention (star wars) We will briefly outline, and find wanting, all the dominant approaches. • Procrastination, the prevailing response. In fact the main gooon mental and conservative response thus far has been procrastination, or “wait-and-see” as it is more benignly known.5 The approach makes much of the uncertainties, of the shortcomings in even the most elaborate general circulation models, of the high noise-to-signal levels. On such bases, it contends that it is too early to do anything, except staging some meetings, organising some review committees, undertaking some monitoring, and funding a little more “research”. It obviously does nothing to rock the growth ideology boat. There is the pretence that we do not know enough to act6 But it is known that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases are fast increasing. The main causes and enough likely consequences are also known. Theoretical consideration, have already been partially confirmed by rising temperatures in the eighties. Outlines of rising temperatures are also known in broad outline, rising sea levels, and so forth. In addition, there are partial Following Knight, some economists (try to) distinguish between uncertainty and risk. Risk is said to obtain when some more or less objective numberable probabilities can be assigned to outcomes, a situation not obtaining as regards the global greenhouse effect. Bayesians, who can always assign subjective probabilities tend to eschew the distinction, e.g. Cyert and DeGroot, also say that ‘decision making under uncertainty refers to situations in which the outcome of the decision is not precisely predictable’ (p.3). Either way, Greenhouse involves uncertainty. There is significant rhetorical art in the choice of classificatory labels, a rather philosophically neglected art. A PR person must have been hired to produce the Greenhouse adaptation of ‘adaptation’. Part of the problem is that scientists have been caught out (e.g. crying wolf) and have become ultra-cautious. With the advent of thermodymumies, for instance, scientists begin ‘threatening mankind with a rather swift “bad death’” as the universe random ‘Thus m. Aber, on ‘balant ideological use of science even by scientists themselves’ (Bernard p.9). 7 small-scale models of the Greenhouse effect in action. For example a city such as MexicoCity, which is situated in the bowl-like valley is placed in an environment traps heat as well as pollution. The ecological affects, like the human affects, are pretty dramatic even at this small level, and hardly to be sought, or amelated elsewhere. There is a pretence, fostered also by many scientists, that Greenhouse difficulties have only just been discovered; a date commonly set for that watershed even is the Villiers conference and statement of 1986 (e.g. Pittoch ....). Actually there have been Greenhouse warmings for more than a decade, and there has been a corresponding decade of inaction. Nor is any action of much significance presently seriously contemplated. Back in 1979 Bernard wrote at length about and reported the substantial concern of climate logists about Greenhouse effects. Even the magazine Nature, not noted for its green sympathies, recorded that ‘the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is, concemally, the most important environmental issue in the world today’ (May ? 1975). Bernard quotes many other concerned scientists, several asserting that ‘the government must start dealing with this problem now’. They meant the United States government. “The” government didn't take the hint. For more than a decade then scientists have been emphasizing that the greenhouse threat is a major environmental problem, and that action should be taken immediately. Over 10 years nothing of real significance to counter the problem has happened. There has been more than a decade of inaction , during which matters have got worse, and the time frame for evasive action disturbingly shorter. It is already evident that requisite decision making under uncertainty is not taking place. On straight inductive grounds, it would be reasonable to expect nothing will be done. While there are theoretical grounds to bark up such an assessment, still it is only just beginning to get through to a much wider public (which can exercise a marginal influence on what politicians say) that there is - or may be, as some more reactionary modal-managering academics would have - a problem or two. Many scientists have joined the wait-and-see queue, with their begging bowls, hoping for more hand-outs for research. They assume, rightly enough, that more information would assist with rational decision-making, and also, quite wrongly, that “scientific activity” is required for action to be taken. Physical scientists are not done in their misapprehension of rational decision methods. Although there is a good deal of practical experience available of statistical-type decision making order uncertainty, for instance as regards insurance coverage and engineering projects, decision theory, especially as regards unreputable situations, has not penetrated very far into standard scientific methodology or much into mainstream parts of social sciences. ‘Economists in particular have shown a talent for bringing ever problem back to a world of certainty where all solutions are known or can be easily found.’ Natural scientists including dematologists are, for the most part, on the same erroneous-reduction-toconlittainable-certainty trip. ‘This is not to say that economists have not worked on uncertainty. ... however ... uncertainty is introduced and then taken out by assumption’ (Cyort and DeGroot p.l). But there are several classes of problematic situations, where decision and action may be required, where uncertainty cannot be discarded by first, reduction strategeness or otherwise, notably:• inheritantly probabilistic situations, such as those of indeterminacy in quantum theory; • essentially unpredictable situations (which may be deterministic) such as those now under investigation chaos theory; • presently uncertain situations and outcomes, which may eventually resolve into certain cases, or may turn into some of the above classes, where there is not time to wait for resolution. The Greenhouse problem is regularly put into the latter class, a standard assumption being that with enough money and research effort thrown at it, it will resolve to decent certainty. But it may well not; there are grounds for supposing that critical parts of climatology will fall into the essentially unpredictable class. The standard approach of too many research scientists is a pathetic begging-bowl posture: Supply more funding so we can go on researching until we obtain certainty.7 There are some severe problems with this standard response. Firstly, it is irrational. Certainty if achieved may be achieved too late. What was required for rationality was decision making in advance of certainty. Secondly, certainty may be unobtainable. The meteorological equations may be non additive (non additive) and so incapable of delivering stable results over slightly fluctuating in strict data. The standard response is methodologically unsound. • Adaptation, learning to live with and love the Greenhouse. The policy ‘that tends to be favoured by most economists’ is an adaptive strategy: “Let society adjust to environmental changes without attempting to mitigate or prevent the changes in advance” We could adapt to climate change for example, by planting alternative crop strain [themselves] ... more widely adopted... ’ (Schneider p.8). Observe, however, that it is a decidedly restricted “adaptation” that is being proposed, that humans adjust to the results of present economic and industrial practices, rather than adjusting them. It is assumed that economic growth comes first, that we do not change (e.g. through decent regulation) high energy industrial practices. A fuller and smarter adaptation would adapt these practices. The policy is like a pernicious agriculture policy that says, “Let farmers adjust to the results of soil erosion, salination and 7 It does not seem to have occurred to most research scientists demanding more money (even more per article) that an important reason why they are not obtaining the funding they expect is because their research results could, if unfavorable, act a serious drag on the industrial establishment. They are not going to be funded to delegitimize modem industrial society. 9 so on, without attempting to mitigate or prevent these deleterious changes in advance.” Such “adaptative agriculture”, the present predominant practice in advanced agriculture, is antienvironmental, but is given a spurious air of evolutionary inevitability and evolutionary redistributive justice; you can't back natural evolution, which is entirely natural, can you. Let us condense such far-from-inevitable and highly artificial mal-adaptation in the neologism badaptation. Greenhouse adaptation, like nuclear adaptation, is badaptation (some, less kind, would say medaptation). There is a pragmatic, if cynical, political argument for badaptation, namely, that unilateral action to prevent a warning is unfeasible and requisite international cooperation unattainble. Both contentions open to doubt. Unilateral action by the USA, by far the World's heaviest resource and energy consumer (per capita and on several other relevant domains) backed up by pressure (familiar from other settings, such as the narcotics war) on other nations and through the United Nations could make a major difference. Unfortunately the USA is also the world's largest supplier of influential grown economists. In any case, international agreements such as those in whaling and Antarctica, are attainable, and sometimes effective. The ozone protocols, limiting production of CFCs show that results can be achieved to limit trace gas emissions. The adaptation proposal is presently compatible with wait-and-see; both mean no hauling back on trace gas production. Indeed procrastination will force societies towards badaptation. Typical of adaptation, like procrastination, is an (over-)emphasis on the uncertainties of Greenhouse forecasts, and on the decision-theoretic paralysis such uncertainties are alleged to produce. Characteristic of adaptation too is a minimisation of the extent of Greenhouse modification. No doubt the impression that things won't be so very different, or far removed from what has already been experienced, is important in getting adaptationism more readily accepted, as a rational course of action (instead of the seemingly irrational course it is). Thus badaptation tends to play with figures at the law end of projected ranges of temperature increase, such as 1.5°C for 2050, when in fact present data indicates something rather in the vicinity of 4°C - in a setting, furthermore, where fractions of a degree centigrade may well be linked ot macro-physical and macro-biological change. Recent modellings deliver, an average, on increase in 2°C attributable to carbon dioxide, and it is widely thought that other trace gases will double the CO2 effect, yielding a 4°C temperature increase.8 8 Sources. Note that methane is beginning to rival carbon dioxide as a gas where atmospheric propostems really matter and whose present increase is excessive. 10 The colossal extent of future human dislocation has correspondingly been deliberately underemphasized. The adaptive capacities of human arrangements, when humans are living at the margin, to massive natural shifts, has been grossly exaggerated. Consider agriculture alone - set aside flooded cities, sunken atoll islands, and all the rest. Some of the Earth's major grain producing regions - upon which famine relief projects depend - could be pushed substantially out of business. The conditions which prevailed during the American dust-bowl experience of the nineteen-thirties were benign indeed compared with those which threaten with mid twenty-first century Greenhouse conditions. The mid continental summer temperatures were only 1-2° C warmer than the present average, under greenhouse conditions they could be more than 3-4° C warmer. In the dustbowl rainfall only slipped at critical growing times (e.g. July for northern com) to 80% of the contemporary norm; but under Greenhouse conditions it could be significantly less again. A super dust-bowl is not improbable (for much more detail, see Bernard). Similarly for other similar latitude Northern grain producing regions. But the high-energy industrial superstructure is crucially based upon sufficient cheap food (bread) for the urban masses. • Intervention, high-tech Gaean engineering. Interventionist proposals so far floated include • New oceans in parts of the Earth's land surface lying below, at, or near sea level. These projects would make the mega-dams of recent times look like childrens' play. • Wintering effects. Production of sufficient dust in the atmosphere, achieved for instance by nuclear detonations, to mitigate heating effects. Such enterprise would make modification of the weather by cloud seeding look like childs' play. Fortunately these and other expensive and grandiose proposals, which would call for considerable international cooperation, are far down the planning track; with these schemes procrastination is rational. • Regulation, controlling free(-wheeling) enterprise. Regulation itself, not so bureaucratically popular under that presentation in these latter days of economic irrationalism, is of course transparadigmatic, where it belongs depend on what measures (what sorts of constraints, rights, etc.) are proposed and how they are imposed or enforced. If it is, for example, some industrial law-and-order, smokestack scrubbing regulations or Greenhouse polluting rights, within the status quo, that is one thing, but if a minimally-constrained growth paradigm is questioned and alternative socio-economic arrangements advocated, that is quite another, and falls outside the dominant paradigm. Such policies involving regulations controlling fossil fuel emissions especially, are negatively labelled prevention in the predominantly American policy literature, though there is now no preventing some Greenhouse effects; but the worse to follow could still be prevented. What is usually covered under the label is however some regulation within prevailing political arrangements. So energy efficiencies and savings for investment in 11 growth elsewhere is comprehensible, straight growth-curtailing non-consumption is not contemplated. But the latter is just what alternatives do contemplate. Democratic political arrangements do not exclude such alternatives both the power bases of political leaders and economic prescriptions do. Adequate regulation within prevailing socio-economic arrangements is going to prove impossible, without adjustment of power structures and economic imperatives, in effect without far-reaching systems and a devological adjustment. While such adjustment may be rational, it is unlikely. Power structures have too much to lose.9 This is an opposite point to record the chauvinism and environmental shallowness of the Greenhouse debate. Like heart disease and cancer, the Greenhouse effect is gaining much discussion and some funding because it just may severely effect the affluent, affluent people and affluent nations, that have a good deal to lose, in North America especially. The impact will, however, be at least as severe in some third world nations, whose lands or much of them will be flooded, countries which cannot afford extensive expensive dyking (or where such effort would be in the longer term, as seas rise, pointless), countries such as Pacific coral atoll nations and delta states like Bangladesh. But the really serious losers will no doubt be, not humans , rich or poor, but nonhumans. Biological diversity, already being reduced by various human activities, may be one of the chief casualties of global worming. Massive destruction of forests, wetlands, and even the polar tundra could irrevocably destroy complex ecosystems that have existed for millennia. Indeed, various biological reserves created in the past decade to protect species diversity could become virtual death traps as wildlife attempt to survive in conditions for which they are poorly suited. Accelerated species extinction is an inevitable consequence of a rapid warming (Worldwatch p.10). 3. Arguments to dislocation and for a Lesser Venus Prospect. There is at least a small probability that predicted increase in mean atmospheric temperatures will seriously interfere with most remaining natural environments and result in the degeneration or destruction of many of them, especially forests wetlands, maritime environments. Nor will adaptationism help here; for natural evolution is much too slow for adaptationism to succeed (cf. Keeton pp.763-4). Natural ecosystems will not adapt effectively to rapid climatic change,... With regard to forests, habitats for plants and animals cannot be re-created or transplanted rapidly. Continuing climatic changes would strain the capabilities Holistic problems are too extensive for individuals, or even small collectives, to make much difference acting or their own. Some are too beg even for large collectives or states, but would require whole regions of the Earth acting in concerte. But of course some state players, such as the superpowers, as regards nuclear winter, can make a substantial difference, or even all the difference. 12 of management practices even in commercial tree plantations (Beijer Institute Report pp.21-3). The decline or demise of these systems, vast reservoirs for greenhouse gases will accelerate the warming, and accordingly make matters substantially worse: Trees are adapted to a narrow range of temperature and moisture levels, and cannot cope with rapid climate change. A temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius per decade in mid- to upper latitudes translates into a shift in vegetation zones of 60-100 miles northward. Terrestrial ecosystems cannot migrate that fast. Vast numbers of trees are likely to die, and new trees adapted to warmer temperatures are unlikely to be able to replace them rapidly. During such a disruption, huge areas of forest could die and, as they decay or bum, send large quantities of additional CO2 into the atmosphere, accelerating the warming (Brown p.10). Of course the immediate climate patterns would be somewhat more complex. If enough soot and ash from fires were flung into the atmosphere there would be a cooling effect, like that of a small nuclear winter, before heating accelerated. The present pattern of ecosystemic loss would also be sharply accelerated. When natural ecosystems get reduced to about 30% of their initial size, they tend to collapse of themselves. Moreover, there would be other significant positive feedback from ecosystems other than the terrestrial forests, from the oceans especially. As the oceans warm, they lose their capacity to serve as carbon dioxide reservoirs. So they too release additional gases, including previously absorbed CO2, back into the atmosphere, further accelerating the warming. A critical question arises as to how much danger such positive feedback poses? As so often, informed opinions, and so probability estimates differ. However ‘several scientists working in the area consider that positive feedback effects will force a very bleak picture to be drawn’ (p.19 ref?)10 Unlike the interim effect of a small nuclear winter, where after a few years at most, climatic behavior (as distinct from radioactivity levels) would presumably return towards the previous norm, there will be no similar recovery under greenhouse impact. Technically then, stability would be lost under the impact,11 disequilibrium induced. An eventual longterm return to some different equilibrium could well be excluded. Under new climatic regimes plants themselves may be able to do little more than hang on for part of their own lives. In many places conditions would be too severe for much of the “year” to permit normal plant functioning, including what is crucial for greenhouse amelioration, photosynthesis. In most plants, photosynthesis only occurs across a narrow band of Second order probabilities, probabilities and uncertainties in the light of first order subjective probabilities, enter importantly. Stability is defined in physics in terms of return to an initial (inertial) position after small disturbance. 13 temperatures (e.g. 6 - 34°C); outside that range the plants shut down operations.12 Even more important, many plants would leave few or no successful successors. Even where plants set seed, seedlings would not survive under the severe conditions expected; for instance, they would be killed by hot dry summer conditions, or in other places by frosts to which they are not adapted, both phenomena already familiar after clearfelling of forests. The situation at... in southern Sahara, where there is but one ancient tree hanging on in thousands of square kilometers of desert, a tree with viable seeds which sets no seedlings, could be more or less replicated in many other places where forests or woody plants once grew. In fact we are already witnessing the demise of the trees in much of Australia. Already dead and dying trees form a predominant feature of the Australian rural landscape. Virtually whichever way ecologists travel in Australia where trees remain, they are confronted with dead and dying trees 13 The reasons for the present decline of trees in rural Australia is, for the most part, not to be attributed to early greenhouse or even pollution effects.14 It is thought to be due to a complex of factors, including a range of insect predators whose effects are enhanced on isolated trees left after an excessive zeal for clearing (i.e. holistic effects enter as regards healthy persistence of trees). The relevant point is that these features are likely to be accelerated given the additional impact of greenhouse warming on plant functioning and reproduction. There are several major ways through which the maintenance structures of the Earth can be not merely awkwardly disturbed, but thrown right out of kilter - perhaps, given the delicacy of several critical matters, never to return present norms. Most obvious and immediately threatening is • nuclear warfare, and therewith nuclear Winter. But there are of course other severe shocks the planet could suffer than those chemo-nuclear warfare, some human induced, some a “chance” matter of the planets' position in space, namely • a mini Big Bang, or an undermining of metastability, brought about through very high energy experimentation (see Leslie) • a collision with a large meteorite or asteroid. Such uncertainties, not germane to the main climatic arguments, are listed, not to achieve a bogus completeness, but to emphasize that complete certainty is not to expected, not rationally.. Should we obtain it, should we obtain easy relatively unproblematic lives, then we have, by world standards, been rather lucky. Moreover, these latter uncertainties do The upper bound may be difficult to appreciate in most of Aotearoa. But in much of Australia, during the summer, many plants close down their operations for much of the day. Reported by Recher on Earthworm. Thus coastline vegetational destruction through detergents in sewerage waters. 14 appear negligible compared with those bound up with climate, ascribable to: • excess economic development. The practices involve a complex and sustained assault on most of the Earth's major ecosystems, forests, seas, etc, along with the alteration of atmospheric composition by greenhouse gases. For example, the forests are cut down, burnt, poisoned by herbicides and acid rain, or otherwise removed or destroyed. (Therewith too a great deal more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere and major sinks of carbon dioxide are removed.) As a result of these concerted growth-and-development activities such systems are driven to limits, and breakdown occurs. Once it occurs at some weak point it can escalate elsewhere, like a conflagration.; thus again ecosystemic collapse for example. Quite apart from breakdown at or approaching limits, for instance because of systemic overload, remarkable changes can occur in desiccative systems under stress or strain. • excess energy or chemical loading. Though such striking examples as the chemical clock, it has been demonstrated that dissipative systems can suddenly, and often rather unpredictably, undergo extraordinary changes, as for instance energy flux is increased (Prigogine and others), [describe briefly] Such non-additive, or nonlinear, effects, characteristic of more holistic dissipative systems, are bound to occur within the Earth's atmosphere and oceans as they undergo compositional changes. Carbon dioxide itself provides a good example. With small quantities its effect on the temperature of the air is proportional to the amount added; there is a linear effect. However once the carbon dioxide concentration in the air approaches 1%, new nonlinear effects come into play and heating greatly increases. In the absence of a biosphere to fix carbon dioxide, its concentration in the atmosphere would probably exceed the critical figure of 1%. The Earth would then heat up rapidly to a temperature near to that of boiling water. Increasing temperatures would speed up chemical reactions and accelerate their progress towards chemical equilibrium. ... eventually ... the Earth would become permanently cocooned in a brilliant white cloud - a second Venus, although not quite as hot (Lovelock pp.45-6). Fortunately for Gaean prospects, the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now nowhere near 1% nor likely to be pushed near 1% by projected doubting of carbon dioxide levels under economic activity over the next 50 years15. However eventual exponential growth will lead towards levels, and the side effect of such growth, the release of carbon dioxide from forests and oceans and the considerable reduction in fixation of carbon dioxide with the decline of forests, will lead in that disastrous direction rather more rapidly. The 1% 15 In the atmosphere of the very early Earth, CO2 exceeded the critical 1% figure; but solar luminority was about 25% less than now. With increasing solar flux the Earth would have overheated had the proposition of CO2 not been much reduced (e.g. see Lovelock 88 p.56). 15 bound constitutes just one of the many serious limits to continuation of present developmental practices. Now there can be no rational confidence with respect to complex dissipative systems - about the behavior of which we presently know comparatively little - that no other nonadditive effects will no be encountered at a much earlier stage. After all, the Gaean system, its atmosphere, oceans and ecosystems, will be pushed into essentially unexperienced and substantially unknown reaches. There is, for example, no experience from past times of such elevated temperatures as Green house effects will lead to, to draw upon. ‘There is no evidence that the land-bound glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica have ever completely melted in the last two million years’. There is experience of much colder periods. ‘During ice ages, the earth's average temperature has been about 5°C colder than at present, with glaciers covering major portions of continents’ (Barth p.7). But there is no similar experience of temperatures 4-5° C warmer than at present (in a warm interglacial period), ‘a global increase of more than 2°C above present is unprecedented in the era of human civilization’ (Schneider p.6) It would accordingly be decidedly rash, rash decision makings, to assign a zero or negligible probability to the emergence of new or unknown effects of relevance, to assume all will go smoothly and well. That would presuppose, in any event, a completeness in present scientific knowledge, contrary to the information we have that present investigation of holistic systems, among much else, is still in its infancy. The probability of something critical (e.g. perhaps radicals like hydroxyl) having been left out of estimations, of room accordingly for something unexpected or for something to go wrong, may be small, though experience implies it is not always so but it certainly appears to be non-zero. For the overconfident, with excess faith in the flimsy scientific edifice, there is a salutary lesson to be drawn from the erratic and stumbling path of the main proponent of Gaia hypotheses, Lovelock. Lovelock, coming from a working life as an industrial chemist, part of that time for a giant chemical transnational, had, and retained for a considerable time after he began his holistic hypothesizing a strong antipathy for environmentalists.16 Even Gaia was for industry and against the environmentalists; she was going to laughingly soak up all the pollution, courtesy of the chemical companies especially, that we humans could throw at her. In particular, we did not really need to worry much about ozone depletion or greenhouse gas escalation.17 ‘Contrary to the forebodings of many environmentalists, Coupled with this, there is a certain schizophrenia in Lovelock's attitude to the natural environment. There is also a matching schizophrenia as to the fragility of life on Earth. On the one side, it required very delicate settings and fine barring to arise; this is part of the argument for a Gaia hypothesis. On the other side, life is ‘tough, robust, and [highly] adaptable’, virtually indestructable (p.90). But though a flawed hero, Lovelock is a hero nonetheless. See Lovelock 79, p.40ff; and also 88? [detail] 16 finding a suitable’ destructive agent to bring about a ‘doom scenario’ ‘turns out to be an almost insoluble problem’ (p.40). Lovelock makes it easier for himself by helping himself to the assumption that a doomsday scenario involves the destruction of all “life”, ‘down to the last spore of some deep-buried anaerobic bacteria’ (p.40). But even for the least chauvinistic of environmentalists, destruction of all humans but the select elect would be quite enough for a decent doomsday. Lovelock's high redefinition of a environmental ‘doomsday scenario’ is unacceptable. Lovelock does not however stay within the bound of his redefinition. He proceeds to pooh-pooh the idea that anything much that we humans could accomplish would make any difference to Gaia (p.41) or even to most humans, including use of nuclear devices. Unfortunately for Lovelock's credibility, he was writing three years before the seemingly obvious wintering effects of a major nuclear war were realised by the accredited scientific community. Appealing in a common scientific fashion to scientific authority, he proceeds to minimalize the human and ecological effects of a major war. The report he relies upon as authoritative was a 1975 (unreferenced) one of ‘the US National Academy of Sciences ... prepared by an eight-man committee of their own distinguished members, assisted by forty-eight other scientists chosen from those expert in the effects of nuclear explosions and all things subsequent to them’ (p.41, italics added). Lovelock draws from the distinguished expert report the findings that ... if half of all the nuclear weapons in the world's arsenals, about 10,000 megatons, were used in a nuclear war the effects on most of the human and man-made ecosystems of the world would be small at first and would become negligible within thirty years. Both aggressor and victim nations would of course suffer catastrophic local devastation, but areas remote from the battle and, especially important in the biosphere, marine and coastal ecosystems would be minimally disturbed (p.41). Three years later Turco and others proceeded to detail a very different scenario that of widespread and ecologically damaging nuclear winter.. Not for the first time, Lovelock had been caught out badly. As with pollution, Lovelock has more recently shifted ground18 considerably in the vulnerability of the Earth to human-induced disturbance. When a system such as Gaia in homeostatis is stressed to near the limits of regulation even a small disturbance may cause it to jump to a new stable state or even fail entirely.... Shifting ground may be fine, especially when it is to an improved position. But it should be done honestly and openly, not stealthily or shiftily. Lovelock proceeds to attribute a caricuture of his own previous position to critics of the Gaia hypothesis (as a clever ‘fabrication’ which it was not); that it is ‘an argument developed to allow industry to pollute at will, since mother Gaia will clean up the mess (85 p.53). 17 It could be that the regulation of the Earth's climate is not far from one of these limits. Thus if some part of climate regulation is connected with the natural level of CO2 then clearly we are close to the limits of its regulation. This is because CO2 cannot be reduced much below the level observed for the last glaciation, about 180 ppm, without seriously limiting the rate of growth of the more abundant C3 type plants. If we perturb the Earth's radiation balance by adding more CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or reduce its capacity to regulate by decreasing the area of forests or both of these together then we could be surprised by a sudden jump of both CO2 and temperature to a new and much warmer steady state; or by the initiation of periodic fluctuations between that state and our present climate. The anomalously low abundance of CO2 on Earth when compared with the other terrestrial planets and especially the fact that the mean temperature of the Earth is on the cool side of the optimum for regulation, suggests strongly that the biota is regulating the climate by pumping CO2 from the air. The common feature of most of our pollutions and of our exploitation of the land surface seems to be unintentionally to thwart this natural process (Lovelock 85 pp5354). The argument to the lesser Venus path, to significant disequilibrium with the Earth's ecological support system destabilized, takes the following lines. The Earth appears to be a discipative (far-from-equilibrium) system held at its present balance by a combination of an (increasing) solar flux - a main energy input into the system - and its major ecological arrangements, especially vegetation complanes and live oceans. The sheer extent to which the resulting system differs from the stable dead system it could otherwise be is shown by the following table for atmospheric and oceanic composition. TABLE 1. Substance Carbon dioxide A Nitrogen T R Oxygen Argon 0 C E A N S Water Planetary comparisons (principal components per cent). Equilibrium Earth Venus Lifeless Earth Mass Present Earth 99 0 98 1.9 98 1.9 95 2.7 0.03 79 0 1 trace 0.1 trace 0.1 0.13 2 21 1 63 Salt 3.5 Sodium nitrate 1.7 96 n.a. n.a. 3.5 traces Surface temperatures (°C) n.a 477 Total pressure (bars) n.a. 90 290±50 60 -53 13 0064 1 The table is based upon tables 1 and 2 of Lovelock 79, pp37 and p.39. 18 The whole Earth system is accordingly far from equilibrium. Unpredictable behavior as locals increase is therefore almost to be expected. A likely moral is presumably: stress they system, or destabilize ecosystem controls sufficiently, and the system may be in deep trouble. It is relevant to inquire into what evidence we have on this case. To do so let us reconsider some of the array of arguments there are from some sort of holistic organisation of the Earth (for a modest Gaia hypothesis). But for the participation of the Earth's ecological support systems, plant complexes especially the Earth would not be blessed with its present life-benign physical characteristics. The oceans would be much saltios and too salty for most life, the air would not contain the present rich mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide so important for terrestrial life, and so on, perhaps most important the Earth would be significantly hotter and too hot for most life, for what of what does the regulating and stabilizing of present conditions. For the solar flux has increased in intensity about 30% since life appeared on Earth, but the mean global temperatures have exhibited no corresponding increase, but have remained relatively constant. Such an expected consistency in the face of disturbing inputs is ascribed, under holistic approaches that do something to explain it, to the concerted activity of plants, [detail] Lovelock and collaberaters have devised an elementary daisy world model which reveals how a feedback system with two types of daisies can, within limits, stabilize temperatures despite increasing energy input. The limits are important, for as these limits are approached the maintenance systems break down. diagram Q Similarly several of the well-known chemical cycles, such as those for nitrogen, sulphur, sodium and so forth depends for their maintenance on the adequate operation of active ecological structures. Plainly if a cycle loops through a component, such as forests, which is severely disturbed then the cycle itself could be disrupted. There is some probability furthermore that the foregoing changes will disturb crucial equilibrium systems and chemical cycles. Some of these feedback systems are in fact maintained in equilibrium by natural ecosystems (an example is Lovelock's daisy world model, which becomes unstable when temperature rises too high). Instability could ensue under disturbance [explain, include Greenhouse holism]. Without doubt these matters are bad enough. Demise of most of the Earth's richness19 is not a minor matter. Worse could follow. Natural richness is the main richness, much exceeding human artifice. 19 The general tenor of the argument is so far this:- By arguments from physical models, and because of uncertainties, the probability that something could go badly wrong is nonzero,20 and indeed far from negligible. Part of the argument can be put as follows: there is a decent probability that a modest Gaia hypothesis holds. But then, there is a considerable probability that excessive Greenhouse build up will lead to damaging system destabilization. So containing probabilities, there at least a nonneglizible probability of such destabilization. An analogy should now emphasize both the dubiousness of what is being proposed under adaptationism and the precariousness of the human predicament. The proposal is to take this ancient craft, now overloaded with human passengers and their heavy baggage, a cargo it was never organised to carry, out on new routes and run it fast and higher than it has ever travelled before. Even for an experimental prototype, a now very fast (air-)bus say, with a select text crew, such a procedure, of running over new uncharted routes at speeds and heights never attained before, would be risky enterprise. With an ancient craft, with a heavy nonelite cargo of baggage and passengers (some whom try to interfere with the controls), the proposal is extremely rash. For the chances that the craft will breakdown and perhaps crash, with serious consequences to passengers and for the baggage, are greatly elevated over the risks of proceeding as usual much more slowly. With the costs of crashing so severe, rational operators and sensible pilots would not take them.21 Unfortunately the analogy is not at all far-fetched, but resembles what is in store for spaceship Earth, already under significant stress with its excessive human passenger load and their heavy ecological practices. Not only is the future itself pretty new territory, but it is a future at terrestrial temperatures, important processes will proceed faster than ever before, in particular all chemical processes. Simply to take the craft up there, as do-nothing and adaptation approaches would have is to emulate the risks and hubris of Daedelus; such approaches are aptly rarely Daedelian 4. The Sting in the Cosmic Tail: the mini-Furphy theorem and the likely demise of homo sapiens, spp. economicus.. The trouble with the initial formulation of Murphy's law: if anything can go wrong, it will, From logical theories of probability such as Carnap's non-zero probabilities are rather easily reached (perhaps too easily, with the converse feature that natural laws never obtain high probabilities. The difficulty can be characteristed, to some extent, by restruction to physical models). The analogy is an old one, which we exploited before in the nuclear case; for the “bus analogy”, see Routley and Routley. The analogy admits of much graphic variation. Instead of running the craft at excess speed, an alternative or additional image is that of destroying the controls of the craft. Lovelock deploys this opposite image (88 p.63), which corresponds to the demolition of Gaians control systems. 20 was that it was insufficiently qualified, much too absolutist, and apparently self-refuting..22 Certain crucial qualifications are required:• Replacement of the certain (certainlistic) conclusion by a somewhat weaker probabilistic one: namely, it probably will. • Correlative to weakening the conclusion, strengthening the premiss, by rendering it more specific; namely, in place of ‘anything’ or ‘something’ put ‘some thing ... given a chancy situation’. The modified formulation is accordingly the following Mini-Furphy result:23 if some thing can genuinely go wrong, given a relatively chancy situation, it probably will. Here ‘chancy’ means more or less what it means according to the dictionaries: doubtful, decidedly risky, or as we shall construe it, having a comparatively low probability vis-a-vis its alternatives. The precise extent of relative chanciness will be explained as we go. To prove this proposition, let us first recast it in appropriate symbolic form. Let D be some arbitrary bad situation, a suitable disaster. Let the possibility of D's happening something's going wrong - be represented by a non-zero probability, and genuineness by non-negligible probability. It can be assumed that that probability, P(D), is small, otherwise the requisite conclusion would follow in any case. Let C represent the features that render the situation chancy. Then what we aim to show is that where P(D) is small positive, P(D < C) is probable. The proof applies a special case of Bayes' theorem, which take the following form where there are n alternative hypotheses hi,...,hn including h: Pv(h) x P(i < h) P(h < i) X P(hr) X P(i < hr) r = 1 Here h is the hypothesis, which in our application is D, i is the additional information (or, is in Carnap, a new observation), which in our case is C.24 P(h < i) is the probability of h 22 23 24 For this and other formulations of Murphy's law, and many loosely associated humorous maxims with grains of truth encapsulated, see Block. As to the history of the “law”, which originated with J.M. Chase, editor of Aviation Mechanics, see the Encyclopaedia Americana', Chase's initial formulation in a 1955 issue read ‘If an aircraft part can be installed in correctly, someone will install it the way”. This little theorem was originally more accurately entitled the Murphy-Leslie theorem. It is an adaptation, suggested by Leslie's work, of Murphy's Law. This section is overwhelmingly indebted to Leslie; for Leslie's debts, and so the transitive debts of this section, see Leslie himself, who deserves to be read in defence his legitimate doomsday apprehensions. The next not indicates the limited extent to which Leslie's arguments are endorsed. The formulation is a special case of that proved in Carnap, p.331; namely that (absolute) case where the evidence e is elided, or e set = 1. A similar result follows, subject to slightly more rigorous conditions, in relevant probability theory; see Routley 79 p.954. 21 given i, or of h on condition i (the backward arrow notation, <, symbolises the condition involved and shows its direction). For simplicity we shall suppose that all the alternatives to D are concentrated (as far as symbolic exposure goes) in one, namely D*. Then the form we seek to apply is simply: p(D < C) __________ P(D) x P(C < D)__________ P(D) x P(C < D) + P(D*) x P(C < D*)' = The arithmetic details needed can be tabulated in a revealing form as follows: Cases D D* Initial (or prior) probability d 1-d m, say Vd m/l, say 1/dl of outcome relative chance that C As it is the relative chance of C that matters, we can rescale to set m = 1/d. To make C relatively chancy, I has some modest size; specifically let I exceed 1-d/d. Then the probability to be estimated, P(D < C), is d x 1/d d x 1/d + (l-d)/dl where k = • 1 1+k _ “ That is» and P(D < C) | y when k < 1, i.e. when I [ p(D < C) = where k = 1, . Thud D is probable, at least in being more probable than not, given C, when I is of at least modest size, i.e. given C is relatively chancy. In a merely apparently more general form of the estimation, where we do not align m to d, In effect we shall look at the form P(h < i) = --------------- < h)------------------------------P(h) X P(i < h) + XP(hr) X P(i < hr)’ n with the sum excluding the product for h. Though demonstrable given satisfiable exclusion and exhaustion conditions, Bayes' theorem is not lacking critics, in part because of the surprises this bit of logic can deliver. Carnap meets the objection that Bayes' theorem has sometimes ‘been applied to cases where it led to strange or even absurd results’ thus: ‘This was mostly due to an uncritical use of the principle of indifference :... [The] theorem is provable ... on the basis of those weak assumptions which practically all theories of probability seem to have in common’ (p.331, sub 1 elided). Of course the present applications could (just) be objected to on the grounds that the logical conditions for the theorem to apply are not fully satisfied. P(D [ C) 22 d x m d x m + (1-d) x m/l 1 1 + k’ 1 as before. That is m drops out, only the relative chanciness really matters. The little Furphy theorem follows as before. Now to put some relevant flesh on these abstract statements and figures. Let D be some future disaster such as the catastrophic decline, for instance, through summer or winter phenomena of the human species, from which the enormous present population never recovers. At worst (from a chauvinistic angle) the population, like many catastrophically effected by human activities, goes extinct. Suppose, for a bifurcating outcome, there is a catastrophe stage, before halfway through next century, 2050. If humans do not get their act together before then, they go into catastrophic decline, as already indicated. If however they do get their ecopolitical act together then humans, while they hardly live happily ever after (poverty, inequality, domination, and other evils not being removed), they continue to persist or even grow in numbers, perhaps fanning out through the solar system ( in the way envisaged by too many physicists). Suppose further we are optimists, imagining that the prior probability of D ecodisaster and human decline, is small, say 1%. That is d = .01, and the initial probability of D*, human “success”, is .99. The figures are pretty notional. Supreme optimists would want to set d much smaller, pessimists rather at a higher probability. Application Table 1. Cases D human decline D* human success Initial probabilities 1%, i.e. .01 99%, i.e. .99 Relative chanciness, VlOO, i.e. .01 1/100 x l/l ofC Then the probability of human decline given .01 x ,01 P(D < C) .01 x .01 + .99 x .01/1 1 !/2 , when I > 99. 23 It remains to fill out C, thereby showing that I is likely much much larger, and correspondingly human decline so much the more probable in the light of additional information, i.e. a posteriori probable in the usual jargon. There are several high risk factors, acting in a certain concert, factors emphasized more than a decade ago in world systems modellings (such as, most famously that, of the Club of Rome) Malthusian factors such as human population, economic product, pollution, energy consumption,.... It is appropriate for estimate posterier probability relative to anyone of these, any of which can serve as C, in order to expose the riskiness of present gross human practices. In brief, because there are several high risk factors, so there are several appropriate relative or reference classes. Thus the posterier probability is assessed relative to such matters as our being alive, humans being thus and so (Leslie's reference class), this being present energy use, present wast output, present forest destruction and so forth.25 The anthropic argument considers the environmentally invidious situation of present humans on the Earth. The argument can be carried through either in terms of sheer population, gross numbers, or in terms of human resource grabbing, as estimated for instance through energy consumption. Let us consider the prospects given additional information as to the present phase of gross human population. C will be some such proposition as: the proportional preponderance of humans who have ever lived alive now, or to personalize it: the chance that you or your family, is alive now. Chart: Our present population predictment on the two scenerios. Demise scenerio “Success” scenerio - representative zjs human numbers human numbers On of the weaknesses in the argument may appear to be its dependence on an appropriate choice of relative class. For, the relative probabilities can fall away if different reference classes, not exhibiting such growth patterns are taken, e.g. present wattle distribution, birds being thus and so. On the other hand, probabilities can be elevated even more by selection of more unusual reference classes cuh as our being scientists, or being computer programmers, etc.. 24 Humans have got themselves - to some extent put themselves, though much may be the result of muddling through - into an extremely dubious, environmentally insidious and unsustainable position, on a range of critical parameters. Their numbers are excessive, their high energy use is excessive, their waste and their pollution are both excessive - and all chose and other excesses are at the steep end of upward exponential curves. Several relevant graphs are distressingly exponential, with the present in the near vertical growth phase: graphs Many other similarly shaped graphs26 could be added, for instance for growth of pollution, of waste products, of weapons (in terms of tonnes of explosive power), of other greenhouse gases such as methane, and so on. The display typifies the accelerating human roller coaster. Those curves are tightly interconnected, in criss-crossing fashion. For example, the productivity of contemporary agriculture which enables the feeding of hugh urbanised human populations depends on a very high energy use (in term of energy efficiency, contemporary high-tech agriculture falls below that of much traditional agriculture). The maintenance of high populations with supplies of cheap food depends in turn on fossil fuel agriculture. Because of the intertwining of these phenomena, there is no easy way of getting off the accelerating roller-coaster. 26 All the graphs exhibited are drawn from Boyden. 25 Nor, as observed, is there much effort devoted to slowing the coaster. For politicians it would be politically risky and inexpedient to try (for them the rhetoric about an ecologically sustainable future must remain just that, more rhetoric). For many other power holders and brokers such ideas are ideologically excluded: growth remains the gospel. So a precarious position becomes ever more precarious. Humans are in a decidedly chancy position, because of their population situation and other Malthusian factors; they are becoming very disasterprone. If humans want an acceptable future for themselves - they have virtually ruled out an acceptable future for many other creatures, through their predominantly selfish thoughtless greedy practices - then they will probably have to mend their ways, very considerably and very soon. But, given the nature of the beast, that itself seems improbable. Humans, if they seek a more assured future, should make a concerted effort to put themselves into a less precarious position. That could be achieved by proceeding to reduce relative risks. These relative risks, sharply reducing prospects for a reliable future, fall into two classes:• manufactured risk factors, including weaponry such as mega-nuclear devices and elements of biochemical warfard, and experimental equipment such as very high energy particle accelerators (which could perhaps tunnel under a metastable state or induce a min-Big-Bang; see Leslie). • Accumulated risk factors, such as the hugh relative size of human population, energy consumption, greenhouse gas production, etc..27 Despite the ideological obstacles, enormous political, religious and economic obstacles blocking the way of requisite change, major efforts should be put into reducing both these types of risks. Philosophers could have a significant role in breaking down the ideological barriers and in clarifying and developing the arguments involved. 5. What ought to be done about Greenhouse? The general result already reached, that humans collectively should reduce their risk taking, and in particular reduce their gross numbers, extends to rational Greenhouse decision and action theory. But that large and difficult challenge is not all that there is to try, that should rationally be attempted. While some increase in mean global temperatures, and all that implies, can no longer be averted, the potentially most damaging effects can be: namely, by curtailing human-induced 27 As before, there are various different reasons why these induce risk, neo-Malthusian and probabilistic in particular. 26 output of Greenhouse gases. Moreover, there is an approximate upper bound upon temperature of importance, which can serve to supply a significant limit as output. That bound - which reduces risk taking by confining encountered situations to those where there is some past experiential basis - is given by estimated temperatures during Altithermal and Eemian eras. Those temperatures are estimated to have been between about 1/2 a degree and 1 degree Centigrade above contemporary (pre-1980) temperatures; so the upper bound is about 1°C. Not only will a continuation of current emission trends take global temperatures clean through and way beyond that bound, so also will an alternative set-up where emission rates are fixed more or less at current rates. The only apparent way to remain rationally within an experiential domain is to curtail sharply trace gas emissions beginning easily in the 1990s. That means shifting from the dominant growth paradigm; it means expensive re- and deindustrialisation. It is unlikely. Final corollary: Humans collectively are not (particularly) rational. But we had already guessed as much from the latest...... in the long history of human wars. References H.W. Bernard, The Greenhouse Effect, Ballinger, Cambridge Mass., 1980. A. Block, Murphy's Law. Book Two, Magnum, Methuen, ... S. Boyden, Western Civilization in Biological Perspective, Clarendon, Oxford, 1987. L.R. Brown and others, State of the World 1989, Norton/Worldwatch, New York, 1989; referred to as Worldwatch. R. Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability, Second edition, University of Chicago Press, 1962. R.M. Cyert and M.H. DeGroot, Bayesian Analysis and Uncertainty in Economic Theory, Rowman & Littfield, New Jersey, 1987. ‘Developing policies for responding to climatic change’, Report of the Beijer Institute, February 1988. Keeton, J. Leslie, ‘Risking and World's End’, Bulletin of the Curiadian Nuclear Society 10(3) (1989) 1-6; all references to Leslie are to this article unless otherwise indicated. J. Leslie, ‘Is the end of the world nigh?’, The Philosophical Quarterly, to appear; referred to as PQ. J.E. Lovelock, Gaia. A new look at life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 1979. J. Lovelock, ‘Are we destabilising world climate?’, The Ecologist 15(1985) 52-55. 27 J.Lovelock, ‘Man and Gaia’, The Earth Report Monitoring the Battle for Our Environment, (ed. E. Goldsmith and N. Hilgard) Mitchell Benzley, London, 1988, 51-64. R. and V. Routley, ‘Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquirey 21(1978) 133R. Routley, ‘Ultralogic as universal?’ reprinted as an Appendix in Exploring Meinong's Jungle, RSSS, Australian National University, 1979. S. Schneider ‘Not to decide is to decide’, in Greenhouse 1988: Planning for Climate Change (ed. T. Dendy), Department of Environment and Planning, Adelaide, 1989, 5-10. R.P. Turco and others, ‘Nuclear winter: Global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions’, Science 222 (1983) 1283-1292.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 14, item 2064: Gaean Greenhouse, Nuclear Winter, and Anthropic Doomsday Subject The topic of the resource Typescript of paper published in Australian National University. Department of Philosophy (1990) Research series in unfashionable philosophy, 4. Description An account of the resource Title in collection finding aid: RS: Gaean Greenhouse, Nuclear Winter, Anthropic Doomsday ts. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span><span>,</span> Box 14, item 2064 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990-01-01. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [27] leaves. 18.58 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <div class="element-set"> <div id="dublin-core-identifier" class="element"> <div class="element-text"><a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:fdb034b" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:fdb034b</a></div> </div> </div> Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Miscellaneous Box 14: Green Projects in Progress https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/4fe1fe98ae8c68a6133b900b99cc64c3.pdf 6d0edff22c3ea28d0c8ed53a3961f5b8 PDF Text Text AN ALTERNATIVE ANGLE ON THE HUMANITIES by Richard Routley Higher education in the humanities, beyond the basics of literacy, has been under attack for a Long time. This is partly because it costs money and public resources that might be otherwise invested (e.g. for technological education, for industrial assistance or subsidization); it is also because education in the humanities can lead to dissatisfac­ tion with established ways, and criticism of them^i.e. "rocking the boat . While it is impossible to develop a definitive argument for extensive education in the humanities—any more than it is possible to mount a conclusive argument against it—a telling case can nonetheless be made. There tends to be little dispute about some of the things humanities' subjects teach, much better than other areas: competence and skills in composition and communication, for example, both essential for many roles in modern technological society. University courses Ln humanities teach these things, mostly as a by—product of the other topics they rightly focus upon. It is about subjects and topics beyond this usually conceded minimal level that questions are asked: Why should universities teach, or teach so much of, typical humanities' subjects English, other languages and literatures, linguistics, history and philosophy when a university education in these areas affords direct access to but few jobs, and is, it is assumed, inessential for most day-to-day ^The social sciences, which are sometimes grouped with the humanities, have been excluded from consideration; that is, humanities is being used in its narrower modern sense. This artificial separation sharpens the issues; for the case for university, or at least polytechnic education in economics, for instance, is straightforward in much the way that forestry and engineering is. �2 living? It is obvious enough why they should be offered and taught: because they comprise a significant part of knowledge. But this reply does not meet the complaint that they are still too much taught. The older response to this type of challenge appealed to the importance of culture, to "the utilization of the intellect as an end", to the desirability of having cultivated and civilized men and women in the community. Higher education in the humanities was taken to be distinctively fitted to confer these virtues. The older response has force, but it has to meet the tedious objection that much humanities' education merely delivers "dreamers who can converse well over cocktails;" moreover, it needs supplementation if it is to be sustained nowadays. In particular, it requires underpinning by an argument, independently called for, which counteracts the narrow industrial utilitarianism into the framework of which answers are all too often supposed to fit. According to this type of industrial philosophy, university education is important if it contributes directly to such things as providing (typically at public expense) a technically skilled but not surplus workforce, if it helps to enlarge the industrial base, enables expansion or improvements in sales and marketing of industrial products, and so on—taking it for granted that all these industrial activities are worthwhile. But the further and deeper issue is: these industrial activities and makes them valuable? What justifies To put it bluntly, these activities are valuable not for the profits they inequitably distribute, but rather for what they add to the communities they should serve, in the way of net value (such as a richer life for members of the community, making some allowance for the costs involved, by way of pollution, despoiliation of urban, rural and �- 3 - and natural environments, etc.)- And it is to these same values that higher education in the humanities should also answer—not, to consider a worst case, to the direct demands of a damaging and undesirable industry furnishing dangerous or alienated jobs. If we do look at these more ultimate values, the attainment of rich and rewarding and varied lifestyles, then it is evident, without much elaboration, that higher education in the humanities has much to recommend it, that people whose lives are fuller and richer and who add to the variety and culture of the communities in which they live will be produced by humanities education at its best., that the older argument can be pushed through. There are, however, further responses, reinforcing the older response, which it is now necessary to indicate. All the older response generally implies is that an educated person can simply be pumped full of a stuff called "culture"—a supply of allegedly factual information, views, and prejudices on this or that area. What higher education in the humanities teach s at its best is much more, and more important than this: namely, the acquisition of a range of critical and analytical skills of practical value. These include such analytical skills as being able to dissect an issue or problem, to break it down to its components and determine the basic assumptions, to work out the presuppositions made, to draw out the implications of the matter, and to view the problem from various angles. They include such critical skills as the ability to assess a problem or work analysed; for instance the ability to criticise the assumptions made and to locate and evaluate alternatives to them, to weigh evidence, to see faults in arguments and fallacies when they occur, and so on. They also include such skills as the �4 ability to obtain further information and to apply the methods, and to research new areas and new problems independently of a teacher. In short, the humanities, properly done, teach an analytical and critical method, and above all the ability "to reason well in all matters". As an integral part of this, they should teach the awareness of alternatives, an appreciation of alternative situations, cultures, and worlds. A first step in the critical evaluation of an institution, for example, is often the awareness of alternatives, that things do not have to be exactly the way the institution is, but that there are alternative situations where the institution is variously modified or even eliminated. It is not difficult to see how depth education in history or the languages leads to an appreciation of options, by placing the student in contexts where things are done and seen differently. Philosophy and parts of modern linguistics, specifically semantics, take this whole enterprise much further and now, in the explicit investigation of possible worlds, render it systematic. Indeed, a significant part of the history of philosophy has consisted in the envisaging and following through of certain such alternatives. And such a devising of alternative situations is tied intimately to reasoning. For example, an argument is valid if there are no alternative situations where its premisses hold but its conclusion does not. Finally, the critical method, in particular the ability to discern alternatives, helps people to become aware of their own intellectual assumptions, and where necessary to change them. Thus too, it leads to an intellectual flexibility and adaptability, which is increasingly important for modern, practical problem-solving, �- 5 - and for the adjustments in lifestyle many of us may confront. Systematic philosophy teaches critical reasoning explicitly; a central part of philosophy is the assessment of arguments and the detection of fallacies. Other humanities' disciplines teach the analytic and critical method also, though less directly, and more by example. English does it through the medium of literary criticism; languages, in analogous ways, by the analysis and critical evaluation of "foreign" literature and the critical examination of the practices, customs, and thought of a culture with a different language and literature. A good language education can not only introduce people to alternatives, but can in the process reveal to them their own cultural assumptions, and so open the way to alternative possibilities they have not previously considered. So it is also with history, which involves similar interpretative skills in the investigation of far-removed societies. What is the virtue of critical and analytical reasoning, of being able to think in a concentrated, systematic imaginative way, of being able to approach problems from several angles? What, in particular, is the relevance of these skills to that obtrusive part of the practical world, business, commerce, etc.? Not only will there be many problems for firms and services to handle and try to resolve, problems often best dealt with using just such skills, but the problems arising will increasingly be of a different character, of a type for which purely technological educations are inappropriate or inadequate, and where new alternatives will have to be devised, seriously considered, and sometimes adopted. newer problems include two important overlapping types: mental problems and resource problems. These environ­ The resource problems are �- 6 - due to increasing scarcity and escalating prices of materials, especially oil^but also lumber, etc. As a result, industry and government, as well as the private individual, will have to be re­ conciled to, and make, very considerable adaptations and adjustments (of kinds still to be determined), to adopt alternative practices and solutions to problems on a wide range of fronts. The environ­ mental problems arise because present and historical practices are often damaging, sometimes destructive, to the environment or the people who live in it, and because these practices, such as rapacious forestry and injurious pollution, are not going to be tolerated^ indefinitely, but will require much modification at the very least. In each case, resource and environmental, much innovation will be essential, much new and alternative thinking required, far better if it is analytical and critical, and so does not lead to a compounding of old and bad technological fixes. In sum, the problems to be faced, many of them of considerable complexity, are of a different character: successful resolution of them, where it can be accomplished, and superior decision-making will more and more demand substantial and imaginatively-deployed analytical and critical skills. The requisite skills are inculcated in a good education in the humanities. Of course, some of these skills are acquired in the theore­ tical sciences—though the critical skills usually in a lesser way, much as compositional skills are acquired in a lesser way in the sciences. What further distinguishes most of the humanities is the way they relate to, and take account of, humans—of people as people and not merely as statistics. Those educated in the humanities tend to have a sensitivity to people, and understanding of them, �-7 - that technologists often lack. So it is that they can introduce important elements into problem-solving, due respect for persons (and not mere fobbing off by public relations exercises), that technological resolutions of problems frequently, but inadmissibly, neglect. A corollary of all this is that there is a sound case for deploying people well educated in the humanities more widely in organizations engaged in research and problem solving. It would be rash to pretend that either industry, governments, and so on (the potential employers) on the one side, or the universities (the potential suppliers of humanities graduates) on the other, are entirely ready for this already initiated scenario. It is not that universities do not always teach humanities at their best (that could hardly be expected), but that the skills and methods called for, analytical and critical, are often not sought and are sometimes deliberately devalued. Sometimes indeed the critical method is forgotten and university education—not just in the humanities— degenerates into something approaching a brainwashing process, reinforcing prevailing practices, attitudes and ideologies instead of indicating serious weaknesses in prevailing practices and revealing the range of alternatives open in one way or another. Nor do universities make much effort, so far, to prepare students for the possibility that the critical skills they acquire may be put into practice outside class assignments, not just in their day-to-day living, but in the workplace and in their attempts to enter it (e.g. by being duly prepared for interviews). There is also apparently some resistance by humanities' students to �8 - entering employment in industry, owing to a blanket condemnation of industry^ instead of a more discriminating attitude which makes due criticism where it is warranted. on the other side as well. Faults of similar magnitude appear For example, even where senior management does recognize the modern relevance of the skills humanities' students acquire, personnel selection staff are usually unequipped to select for such skills. A further corollary is that an integral part of a modern technological education is a training in the humanities. 2 'Both Professor Raymond Bradley of Simon Fraser University and the Editor of this Newsletter made many useful suggestions which have been incorporated in the text. The main quotations are from Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University. �/ AN ALTERNATIVE ANGLE ON THE HUMANITIES by Richard Routley* Higher education in the humanities, beyond the basics of literacy, has been under attack for a long time, in part because it costs money and public resources that might be otherwise invested (e.g. for technological education, for industrial assistance and subsidization), but also because it can lead to (sometimes warranted) dissatisfaction with established ways and criticism of them (e.g. to "rocking the boat"). While it is impossible to develop a definitive argument for extensive education in the humanities—any more than it is possible to mount a conclusive argument against it—a telling caye can nonetheless be made. About some of the things humanities* subjects teach, much better than other areas such as the sciences and technologies, competence and skills in composition and communication—essential for many roles in modern technological society—there tends to be little dispute. University courses in humanities teach these things, sometimes, initially, directly, but more often as a by-product of the other topics they rightly focus upon. It is about subjects and topics beyond this usually conced ed minimal level that questions are asked:—Why should universities teach, or teach so much of, typical humanities' subjects— such as English, and other languages and literatures, linguistics, history and philosophy^—when a university education in these areas affords direct access to but few jobs, and is, it is assumed, inessential for most day-to-day living? It is obvious enough '"The author is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and Senior Fellow in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is visiting the University of Victoria as a Canadian Commonwealth Fellow. ^The social sciences, which are sometimes grouped with the humanities, have been excluded from consideration; that is, 'humanities' is being used in its narrower modern sense. This (artificial) separation sharpens the issues; for the case for university, or at least polytechnic, education in economics, for instance, is straightforward in much the way that forestry and engineering is. �2 - why they should be offered and taught: cant part of knowledge. because they comprise a signifi­ But this reply does not meet the complaint that they are still too much taught. The older response to this type of challenge appealed to the importance of culture and of "the utilization of the intellect as an end", of having cultivated and civilized men (and women) in the community, higher education in the humanities being taken to be distinctively fitted to confer, at least often, these virtues. The older response has force, but it has to meet the %ne^riiag objection that much humanities' education merely delivers "god-damn dreamers who can converse well over cocktails," and it needs supplementation if it is to be sustained nowadays. In addition, it requires underpinning by a move, independently called for, which takes on the narrow industrial utilitarianism into the framework of which answers are all too often supposed to fit. According to this type of industrial philosophy, university education is important if it contributes directly to such things as providing (typically at public expense) a technically skilled but not surplus workforce, if it helps enlarge the industrial base, enables expansion or improvements in sales and marketing of industrial products, and so on—taking it for granted that all these industrial activities are worthwhile. But the further and deeper issue is what justifies these industrial activities and makes them valuable when they are (which is far from always the case). To put it bluntly, they are valuable not for the profits they inequitably distribute, but rather for what they add to the communities they should serve, in the way of net value (such as a richer life for members of the community, making some allowance for the costs involved, by way of pollution, despoiliation of urban, rural and natural environments, etc.). And it is to these values, that industrial activities themselves have ultimately to answer, that higher education in the humanities should also answer—not, to consider a worst case, to the direct demands of a damaging and undesirable industry furnishing dangerous or alienated jobs. If we do look at these more ultimate values, the attainment of rich and rewarding and varied lifestyles, then it is evident , �- 3 - / without much elaboration, that higher education in the humanities has much to recommend it., that people whose lives are fuller and richer and who add to the variety and culture of the communities in which they live will be produced by humanities education at its best, coat the older argument can be pushed through. There are, however, further responses, reinforcing the older response, which it is now necessary to indicate. response sometimes says, an educated For all tae older person can simply be pumped full of a stuff called culture, a supply of (allegedly) factual information, views, and also prejudices, on this or that area. What higher education in the humanities, at its best, teaches is much more, and more important than this; namely the acquisition of a range of crff*Ktal and analytical skills of practical value. These include such analytical skills as being able to dissect an issue or problem, to break it down to^components and determine the basic assumptions; to work out the presuppositions made, and to draw out the implications of the matter; to view the problem from various They include such critical skills as the ability to assess angles. critically a problem or w^rk analysed, for instance to criticise the assumptions made and to locate and evaluate alternatives to them, the ability to weigh evidence, to see faults in arguments and fallacies when they occur, and so on. They also include such skills as the ability to obtain further information and to apply the methods, to research independently of a teacher in new areas and on new problems. In short, the humanities, properly done, teach an analytical and critical method, and above all the ability "to reason well in all matters". As an integral part of this they (should) t.^ctch the aware­ ness of alternatives, an appreciation of alternative situations, cultures, worlds. A first step in the critical evaluation of an institution, for example, is often the awareness of alternatives, that things do not have to be exactly that way, the way the institution is, but that there are alternative situations where the institution is variously modified or even eliminated. It is not difficult to see how depth education in history or the languages leads to an appreciation of alternatives, by placing the student in contexts where things are done and seen differently. Philosophy and parts �4 of modern linguistics (specifically semantics) take this whole enter­ prise much further and now, in the explicit investigation of (possible) worlds, render it systematic: but a significant part of the history of philosophy has consisted (it can now be seen) in the envisaging and following through of certain such alternatives. And such a devising of alternative situations is tied intimately to reasoning. For example, whether an argument is valid or not is a matter of there are not or are alternative situations where its premises hold but its conclusion does not. Finally, the critical method, in particular the ability to discern alternatives, helps people to become aware of their own intellectual assumptions, and where necessary to change them. Thus too it leads to an intellectual flexibility and adaptability, which is increasingly important for modern, practical problem-solving and for the adjustments in lifestyle many of us may confront. Systematic philosophy teaches critical reasoning explicitly: a central part of philosophy is the assessment of arguments and the detection of fallacies. Other humanities' disciplines teach the analytic and critical method also, though less directly, and more by example. English does it through, for instance, the medium of literary criticism, languages in analogous ways, by the analysis and critical evaluation of "foreign" literature and the critical examination of the practices, customs, and thought of a culture with a different language and literature. A good language education can not only introduce people to alternatives, but can in the process reveal to them their own cultural assumptions, and so open the way to alternative possibilities they have not previously considered. So it is also with history, which often involves similar interpretative skills, e.g. in the investigation of some period in the history of a society as far removed from modern societies as that of ancient Athens. What is the virtue, or relevance, of critical and analytical reasoning, of being able to think in a concentrated, systematic imaginative way, of being able to approach problems from several angles? What, in particular, is the relevance to that obtrusive part of the practical world, business, commerce, etc. Not only will there be many many problems for firms and services to handle and �5 try to resolve, problems often best dealt with using just such skills, but the problems arising will increasingly be of a different character, of a type for which purely technological educations are inappropriate or inadequate, and where new alternatives will have to be devised, seriously considered and sometimes adopted. These newer problems include two important (overlapping) types, environmental problems and resource problems. The resource problems are due to increasing scarcity and escalating prices of materials, especially oil (but also, e.g., lumber)—as a result of which industry and government (as well as the private individual) will have to be reconciled to and niaoke very considerably, adaptations and adjustments of kinds still to be determined, to adopt alternative practices and solutions to problems on a wide range of fronts. The environmental problems arise because present practices are frequently damaging, * - ' 1 destructive, to the environment or the people who live in it (e.g. through pollution and effects such as cancer), and because these practices, such as rapacious forestry and ser^oct^s pollution, are not going to be tolerated indefinitely, but will require much modification at the very least. In each case, resource and environmental, much, innovation will be essential, much new and alternative thinking required, far better if it is analytical and critical, and so does not lead, for example, to a compounding of old and bad technological fixes. In sum, the problems to be faced, many of them of considerable complexity, are of a different character: successful resolution of them, where it can be accomplished, and superior decision-making will more and more demand, among other things, substantial and imaginatively-deployed analytical and critical skills. The requisite skills are inculcated in a good education in the humanities. Of course, some of these skills are acquired in the theoretical sciences—though usually in a m^rked^-lesser way, piuch as compositional skills (which typically increase with further training in the humanities) are acquired in a-de-eide<Hy lesser way in the sciences. What further distinguishes most of the humanities is the way they relate to, and take account of, humans people and not merely as statistics. of people as Those educated in the humanities tend to have a sensitivity to people, and understanding of them, that technologists often lack. So it is that they can introduce importune �6 -- elements into problem-solving, due respect for persons (and not mere fobbing off by public relations exercises), that technological resolutions of problems frequently, but inadmissibly, neglect. A corollary of all this is that there is a sound case for deploying people well educated in the humanities more widely in organizations engaged in research and problem solving. It would be rash to pretend that either industry, governments, and so on (the potential employers) on the one side, or the universities (the potential suppliers of humanities graduates) on the other, are entirely ready for this already initiated scenario. It is not that universities do not always teach humanities at their best (that could hardly be expected), but that the skills and methods called for, analytical and critical, are often (e.g. in language ers) not sought and are sometimes (deliberately) devalued. Sometimes indeed the critical method is forgotten and university education—not just in the humanities—degenerates into something approaching a brainwashing process, reinforcing prevailing practices, attitudes and ideologies instead of indicating < ; in prevailing practices and.the range of alternatives open in one way A or another. Nor do universities fticke much effort, so far, to prepare students for the possibility that the. critical skills they acquire may be put into practice outside class assignments, not just in their day-to-day living, but in the workplace and in their attempts to enter it (e.g. by being duly prepared for interviews). There is also apparently some resistance by humanities' students to entering employment in industry, owing to a blanket condemnation of industry (not altogether unexpected given the performances and attitudes of some industries), instead of a mere discriminating attitude which makes due criticism where it is warranted. of similar magnitude appear on the other side as well. Faults For example, even where senior management does re&o<? nize the modern relevance of the skills humanities' students acquire, personnel selection staff (who often have a technological background) are usually § unequipped to select for such skills and reluctant to do so. �§Both Professor Raymond Bradley of Simon Fraser University and the Editor of this Newsletter made many useful suggestions which have been incorporated in the text. The main quotations are from Cardinal Newman' s Tire Idea of a University. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document AN ALTERNATIVE ANGLE ON THE HUMANITIES by Richard Routley Higher education in the humanities, beyond the basics of literacy, has been under attack for a Long time. This is partly because it costs money and public resources that might be otherwise invested (e.g. for technological education, for industrial assistance or subsidization); it is also because education in the humanities can lead to dissatisfac­ tion with established ways, and criticism of them^i.e. "rocking the boat . While it is impossible to develop a definitive argument for extensive education in the humanities—any more than it is possible to mount a conclusive argument against it—a telling case can nonetheless be made. There tends to be little dispute about some of the things humanities' subjects teach, much better than other areas: competence and skills in composition and communication, for example, both essential for many roles in modern technological society. University courses Ln humanities teach these things, mostly as a by—product of the other topics they rightly focus upon. It is about subjects and topics beyond this usually conceded minimal level that questions are asked: Why should universities teach, or teach so much of, typical humanities' subjects English, other languages and literatures, linguistics, history and philosophy when a university education in these areas affords direct access to but few jobs, and is, it is assumed, inessential for most day-to-day ^The social sciences, which are sometimes grouped with the humanities, have been excluded from consideration; that is, humanities is being used in its narrower modern sense. This artificial separation sharpens the issues; for the case for university, or at least polytechnic education in economics, for instance, is straightforward in much the way that forestry and engineering is. 2 living? It is obvious enough why they should be offered and taught: because they comprise a significant part of knowledge. But this reply does not meet the complaint that they are still too much taught. The older response to this type of challenge appealed to the importance of culture, to "the utilization of the intellect as an end", to the desirability of having cultivated and civilized men and women in the community. Higher education in the humanities was taken to be distinctively fitted to confer these virtues. The older response has force, but it has to meet the tedious objection that much humanities' education merely delivers "dreamers who can converse well over cocktails;" moreover, it needs supplementation if it is to be sustained nowadays. In particular, it requires underpinning by an argument, independently called for, which counteracts the narrow industrial utilitarianism into the framework of which answers are all too often supposed to fit. According to this type of industrial philosophy, university education is important if it contributes directly to such things as providing (typically at public expense) a technically skilled but not surplus workforce, if it helps to enlarge the industrial base, enables expansion or improvements in sales and marketing of industrial products, and so on—taking it for granted that all these industrial activities are worthwhile. But the further and deeper issue is: these industrial activities and makes them valuable? What justifies To put it bluntly, these activities are valuable not for the profits they inequitably distribute, but rather for what they add to the communities they should serve, in the way of net value (such as a richer life for members of the community, making some allowance for the costs involved, by way of pollution, despoiliation of urban, rural and - 3 - and natural environments, etc.)- And it is to these same values that higher education in the humanities should also answer—not, to consider a worst case, to the direct demands of a damaging and undesirable industry furnishing dangerous or alienated jobs. If we do look at these more ultimate values, the attainment of rich and rewarding and varied lifestyles, then it is evident, without much elaboration, that higher education in the humanities has much to recommend it, that people whose lives are fuller and richer and who add to the variety and culture of the communities in which they live will be produced by humanities education at its best., that the older argument can be pushed through. There are, however, further responses, reinforcing the older response, which it is now necessary to indicate. All the older response generally implies is that an educated person can simply be pumped full of a stuff called "culture"—a supply of allegedly factual information, views, and prejudices on this or that area. What higher education in the humanities teach s at its best is much more, and more important than this: namely, the acquisition of a range of critical and analytical skills of practical value. These include such analytical skills as being able to dissect an issue or problem, to break it down to its components and determine the basic assumptions, to work out the presuppositions made, to draw out the implications of the matter, and to view the problem from various angles. They include such critical skills as the ability to assess a problem or work analysed; for instance the ability to criticise the assumptions made and to locate and evaluate alternatives to them, to weigh evidence, to see faults in arguments and fallacies when they occur, and so on. They also include such skills as the 4 ability to obtain further information and to apply the methods, and to research new areas and new problems independently of a teacher. In short, the humanities, properly done, teach an analytical and critical method, and above all the ability "to reason well in all matters". As an integral part of this, they should teach the awareness of alternatives, an appreciation of alternative situations, cultures, and worlds. A first step in the critical evaluation of an institution, for example, is often the awareness of alternatives, that things do not have to be exactly the way the institution is, but that there are alternative situations where the institution is variously modified or even eliminated. It is not difficult to see how depth education in history or the languages leads to an appreciation of options, by placing the student in contexts where things are done and seen differently. Philosophy and parts of modern linguistics, specifically semantics, take this whole enterprise much further and now, in the explicit investigation of possible worlds, render it systematic. Indeed, a significant part of the history of philosophy has consisted in the envisaging and following through of certain such alternatives. And such a devising of alternative situations is tied intimately to reasoning. For example, an argument is valid if there are no alternative situations where its premisses hold but its conclusion does not. Finally, the critical method, in particular the ability to discern alternatives, helps people to become aware of their own intellectual assumptions, and where necessary to change them. Thus too, it leads to an intellectual flexibility and adaptability, which is increasingly important for modern, practical problem-solving, - 5 - and for the adjustments in lifestyle many of us may confront. Systematic philosophy teaches critical reasoning explicitly; a central part of philosophy is the assessment of arguments and the detection of fallacies. Other humanities' disciplines teach the analytic and critical method also, though less directly, and more by example. English does it through the medium of literary criticism; languages, in analogous ways, by the analysis and critical evaluation of "foreign" literature and the critical examination of the practices, customs, and thought of a culture with a different language and literature. A good language education can not only introduce people to alternatives, but can in the process reveal to them their own cultural assumptions, and so open the way to alternative possibilities they have not previously considered. So it is also with history, which involves similar interpretative skills in the investigation of far-removed societies. What is the virtue of critical and analytical reasoning, of being able to think in a concentrated, systematic imaginative way, of being able to approach problems from several angles? What, in particular, is the relevance of these skills to that obtrusive part of the practical world, business, commerce, etc.? Not only will there be many problems for firms and services to handle and try to resolve, problems often best dealt with using just such skills, but the problems arising will increasingly be of a different character, of a type for which purely technological educations are inappropriate or inadequate, and where new alternatives will have to be devised, seriously considered, and sometimes adopted. newer problems include two important overlapping types: mental problems and resource problems. These environ­ The resource problems are - 6 - due to increasing scarcity and escalating prices of materials, especially oil^but also lumber, etc. As a result, industry and government, as well as the private individual, will have to be re­ conciled to, and make, very considerable adaptations and adjustments (of kinds still to be determined), to adopt alternative practices and solutions to problems on a wide range of fronts. The environ­ mental problems arise because present and historical practices are often damaging, sometimes destructive, to the environment or the people who live in it, and because these practices, such as rapacious forestry and injurious pollution, are not going to be tolerated^ indefinitely, but will require much modification at the very least. In each case, resource and environmental, much innovation will be essential, much new and alternative thinking required, far better if it is analytical and critical, and so does not lead to a compounding of old and bad technological fixes. In sum, the problems to be faced, many of them of considerable complexity, are of a different character: successful resolution of them, where it can be accomplished, and superior decision-making will more and more demand substantial and imaginatively-deployed analytical and critical skills. The requisite skills are inculcated in a good education in the humanities. Of course, some of these skills are acquired in the theore­ tical sciences—though the critical skills usually in a lesser way, much as compositional skills are acquired in a lesser way in the sciences. What further distinguishes most of the humanities is the way they relate to, and take account of, humans—of people as people and not merely as statistics. Those educated in the humanities tend to have a sensitivity to people, and understanding of them, -7 - that technologists often lack. So it is that they can introduce important elements into problem-solving, due respect for persons (and not mere fobbing off by public relations exercises), that technological resolutions of problems frequently, but inadmissibly, neglect. A corollary of all this is that there is a sound case for deploying people well educated in the humanities more widely in organizations engaged in research and problem solving. It would be rash to pretend that either industry, governments, and so on (the potential employers) on the one side, or the universities (the potential suppliers of humanities graduates) on the other, are entirely ready for this already initiated scenario. It is not that universities do not always teach humanities at their best (that could hardly be expected), but that the skills and methods called for, analytical and critical, are often not sought and are sometimes deliberately devalued. Sometimes indeed the critical method is forgotten and university education—not just in the humanities— degenerates into something approaching a brainwashing process, reinforcing prevailing practices, attitudes and ideologies instead of indicating serious weaknesses in prevailing practices and revealing the range of alternatives open in one way or another. Nor do universities make much effort, so far, to prepare students for the possibility that the critical skills they acquire may be put into practice outside class assignments, not just in their day-to-day living, but in the workplace and in their attempts to enter it (e.g. by being duly prepared for interviews). There is also apparently some resistance by humanities' students to 8 - entering employment in industry, owing to a blanket condemnation of industry^ instead of a more discriminating attitude which makes due criticism where it is warranted. on the other side as well. Faults of similar magnitude appear For example, even where senior management does recognize the modern relevance of the skills humanities' students acquire, personnel selection staff are usually unequipped to select for such skills. A further corollary is that an integral part of a modern technological education is a training in the humanities. 2 'Both Professor Raymond Bradley of Simon Fraser University and the Editor of this Newsletter made many useful suggestions which have been incorporated in the text. The main quotations are from Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University. / AN ALTERNATIVE ANGLE ON THE HUMANITIES by Richard Routley* Higher education in the humanities, beyond the basics of literacy, has been under attack for a long time, in part because it costs money and public resources that might be otherwise invested (e.g. for technological education, for industrial assistance and subsidization), but also because it can lead to (sometimes warranted) dissatisfaction with established ways and criticism of them (e.g. to "rocking the boat"). While it is impossible to develop a definitive argument for extensive education in the humanities—any more than it is possible to mount a conclusive argument against it—a telling caye can nonetheless be made. About some of the things humanities* subjects teach, much better than other areas such as the sciences and technologies, competence and skills in composition and communication—essential for many roles in modern technological society—there tends to be little dispute. University courses in humanities teach these things, sometimes, initially, directly, but more often as a by-product of the other topics they rightly focus upon. It is about subjects and topics beyond this usually conced ed minimal level that questions are asked:—Why should universities teach, or teach so much of, typical humanities' subjects— such as English, and other languages and literatures, linguistics, history and philosophy^—when a university education in these areas affords direct access to but few jobs, and is, it is assumed, inessential for most day-to-day living? It is obvious enough '"The author is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and Senior Fellow in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He is visiting the University of Victoria as a Canadian Commonwealth Fellow. ^The social sciences, which are sometimes grouped with the humanities, have been excluded from consideration; that is, 'humanities' is being used in its narrower modern sense. This (artificial) separation sharpens the issues; for the case for university, or at least polytechnic, education in economics, for instance, is straightforward in much the way that forestry and engineering is. 2 - why they should be offered and taught: cant part of knowledge. because they comprise a signifi­ But this reply does not meet the complaint that they are still too much taught. The older response to this type of challenge appealed to the importance of culture and of "the utilization of the intellect as an end", of having cultivated and civilized men (and women) in the community, higher education in the humanities being taken to be distinctively fitted to confer, at least often, these virtues. The older response has force, but it has to meet the %ne^riiag objection that much humanities' education merely delivers "god-damn dreamers who can converse well over cocktails," and it needs supplementation if it is to be sustained nowadays. In addition, it requires underpinning by a move, independently called for, which takes on the narrow industrial utilitarianism into the framework of which answers are all too often supposed to fit. According to this type of industrial philosophy, university education is important if it contributes directly to such things as providing (typically at public expense) a technically skilled but not surplus workforce, if it helps enlarge the industrial base, enables expansion or improvements in sales and marketing of industrial products, and so on—taking it for granted that all these industrial activities are worthwhile. But the further and deeper issue is what justifies these industrial activities and makes them valuable when they are (which is far from always the case). To put it bluntly, they are valuable not for the profits they inequitably distribute, but rather for what they add to the communities they should serve, in the way of net value (such as a richer life for members of the community, making some allowance for the costs involved, by way of pollution, despoiliation of urban, rural and natural environments, etc.). And it is to these values, that industrial activities themselves have ultimately to answer, that higher education in the humanities should also answer—not, to consider a worst case, to the direct demands of a damaging and undesirable industry furnishing dangerous or alienated jobs. If we do look at these more ultimate values, the attainment of rich and rewarding and varied lifestyles, then it is evident , - 3 - / without much elaboration, that higher education in the humanities has much to recommend it., that people whose lives are fuller and richer and who add to the variety and culture of the communities in which they live will be produced by humanities education at its best, coat the older argument can be pushed through. There are, however, further responses, reinforcing the older response, which it is now necessary to indicate. response sometimes says, an educated For all tae older person can simply be pumped full of a stuff called culture, a supply of (allegedly) factual information, views, and also prejudices, on this or that area. What higher education in the humanities, at its best, teaches is much more, and more important than this; namely the acquisition of a range of crff*Ktal and analytical skills of practical value. These include such analytical skills as being able to dissect an issue or problem, to break it down to^components and determine the basic assumptions; to work out the presuppositions made, and to draw out the implications of the matter; to view the problem from various They include such critical skills as the ability to assess angles. critically a problem or w^rk analysed, for instance to criticise the assumptions made and to locate and evaluate alternatives to them, the ability to weigh evidence, to see faults in arguments and fallacies when they occur, and so on. They also include such skills as the ability to obtain further information and to apply the methods, to research independently of a teacher in new areas and on new problems. In short, the humanities, properly done, teach an analytical and critical method, and above all the ability "to reason well in all matters". As an integral part of this they (should) t.^ctch the aware­ ness of alternatives, an appreciation of alternative situations, cultures, worlds. A first step in the critical evaluation of an institution, for example, is often the awareness of alternatives, that things do not have to be exactly that way, the way the institution is, but that there are alternative situations where the institution is variously modified or even eliminated. It is not difficult to see how depth education in history or the languages leads to an appreciation of alternatives, by placing the student in contexts where things are done and seen differently. Philosophy and parts 4 of modern linguistics (specifically semantics) take this whole enter­ prise much further and now, in the explicit investigation of (possible) worlds, render it systematic: but a significant part of the history of philosophy has consisted (it can now be seen) in the envisaging and following through of certain such alternatives. And such a devising of alternative situations is tied intimately to reasoning. For example, whether an argument is valid or not is a matter of there are not or are alternative situations where its premises hold but its conclusion does not. Finally, the critical method, in particular the ability to discern alternatives, helps people to become aware of their own intellectual assumptions, and where necessary to change them. Thus too it leads to an intellectual flexibility and adaptability, which is increasingly important for modern, practical problem-solving and for the adjustments in lifestyle many of us may confront. Systematic philosophy teaches critical reasoning explicitly: a central part of philosophy is the assessment of arguments and the detection of fallacies. Other humanities' disciplines teach the analytic and critical method also, though less directly, and more by example. English does it through, for instance, the medium of literary criticism, languages in analogous ways, by the analysis and critical evaluation of "foreign" literature and the critical examination of the practices, customs, and thought of a culture with a different language and literature. A good language education can not only introduce people to alternatives, but can in the process reveal to them their own cultural assumptions, and so open the way to alternative possibilities they have not previously considered. So it is also with history, which often involves similar interpretative skills, e.g. in the investigation of some period in the history of a society as far removed from modern societies as that of ancient Athens. What is the virtue, or relevance, of critical and analytical reasoning, of being able to think in a concentrated, systematic imaginative way, of being able to approach problems from several angles? What, in particular, is the relevance to that obtrusive part of the practical world, business, commerce, etc. Not only will there be many many problems for firms and services to handle and 5 try to resolve, problems often best dealt with using just such skills, but the problems arising will increasingly be of a different character, of a type for which purely technological educations are inappropriate or inadequate, and where new alternatives will have to be devised, seriously considered and sometimes adopted. These newer problems include two important (overlapping) types, environmental problems and resource problems. The resource problems are due to increasing scarcity and escalating prices of materials, especially oil (but also, e.g., lumber)—as a result of which industry and government (as well as the private individual) will have to be reconciled to and niaoke very considerably, adaptations and adjustments of kinds still to be determined, to adopt alternative practices and solutions to problems on a wide range of fronts. The environmental problems arise because present practices are frequently damaging, * - ' 1 destructive, to the environment or the people who live in it (e.g. through pollution and effects such as cancer), and because these practices, such as rapacious forestry and ser^oct^s pollution, are not going to be tolerated indefinitely, but will require much modification at the very least. In each case, resource and environmental, much, innovation will be essential, much new and alternative thinking required, far better if it is analytical and critical, and so does not lead, for example, to a compounding of old and bad technological fixes. In sum, the problems to be faced, many of them of considerable complexity, are of a different character: successful resolution of them, where it can be accomplished, and superior decision-making will more and more demand, among other things, substantial and imaginatively-deployed analytical and critical skills. The requisite skills are inculcated in a good education in the humanities. Of course, some of these skills are acquired in the theoretical sciences—though usually in a m^rked^-lesser way, piuch as compositional skills (which typically increase with further training in the humanities) are acquired in a-de-eide<Hy lesser way in the sciences. What further distinguishes most of the humanities is the way they relate to, and take account of, humans people and not merely as statistics. of people as Those educated in the humanities tend to have a sensitivity to people, and understanding of them, that technologists often lack. So it is that they can introduce importune 6 -- elements into problem-solving, due respect for persons (and not mere fobbing off by public relations exercises), that technological resolutions of problems frequently, but inadmissibly, neglect. A corollary of all this is that there is a sound case for deploying people well educated in the humanities more widely in organizations engaged in research and problem solving. It would be rash to pretend that either industry, governments, and so on (the potential employers) on the one side, or the universities (the potential suppliers of humanities graduates) on the other, are entirely ready for this already initiated scenario. It is not that universities do not always teach humanities at their best (that could hardly be expected), but that the skills and methods called for, analytical and critical, are often (e.g. in language ers) not sought and are sometimes (deliberately) devalued. Sometimes indeed the critical method is forgotten and university education—not just in the humanities—degenerates into something approaching a brainwashing process, reinforcing prevailing practices, attitudes and ideologies instead of indicating < ; in prevailing practices and.the range of alternatives open in one way A or another. Nor do universities fticke much effort, so far, to prepare students for the possibility that the. critical skills they acquire may be put into practice outside class assignments, not just in their day-to-day living, but in the workplace and in their attempts to enter it (e.g. by being duly prepared for interviews). There is also apparently some resistance by humanities' students to entering employment in industry, owing to a blanket condemnation of industry (not altogether unexpected given the performances and attitudes of some industries), instead of a mere discriminating attitude which makes due criticism where it is warranted. of similar magnitude appear on the other side as well. Faults For example, even where senior management does re&o<? nize the modern relevance of the skills humanities' students acquire, personnel selection staff (who often have a technological background) are usually § unequipped to select for such skills and reluctant to do so. §Both Professor Raymond Bradley of Simon Fraser University and the Editor of this Newsletter made many useful suggestions which have been incorporated in the text. The main quotations are from Cardinal Newman' s Tire Idea of a University.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 72, Item 3: Two drafts of An alternate angle on the humanities Subject The topic of the resource Two typescript drafts, handwritten emendations. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 72, Item 3 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [15] leaves. 32.46 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8054ad6">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:8054ad6</a> Box 72: Unlisted and Untitled Boxes https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/55fb7770f181791e005281a8636a1abd.pdf 1ed72ad17f186317bccf30e6630b50d8 PDF Text Text RBSTRRCT The proposed syntheses Ls set Mithin generat object-theorg. tde3 The undertging the sgnthesis ts that the 3tternative Mortds sewantics - arrived 3t tn of pursuit of a tnctudtng senanttes universat ones) retevant and, semantics generat (a as connectedLg, part for of att a Languages, comprehensive object-theorg - be apptted atso tn fundamentat phgstcs, Most importanttg to the natter of the ortgtn, htstorg, 3nd phgstcat features of the cosmos, but as Mett, agatn connectedtg, theorg. etseMhere, Ln particutar Ln the LnterpretatLon of quantum a The unLversat semantics Ls a mang Mortds - theorg. The poLnt of such apptgLng an mang nonexistent Mortds - LnterpretatLon Ln cosmotogg atso Ls exptained bg Mag of examp Les, concernLng the understandLng of the contLngencg of exLstence and of present arrangements. improbabititg the R resotutton of the basLc question, sketched, a as Marm-up exerctse 'Nhg does angthLng at for exLst?' att questions as to Mhg various other the prominent features of the universe are as theg are, notabtg Mhg the constants of phgstcs appear to have. have the fundamentat parttcutar surprtstngtg senstttve vatues theg Chauvinistic ansMers through anthroptc prLnctptes are crLttcattg Ln favour of resotutLon bg Mag of Mortd sgntactLcattg, status quo arguments, MhLch use setection^ and gross rejected, correspondLng features geophgsLcat thLs and neLghbourLng unLverses to exp La Ln the surprLsLng vatues of The character of the Mortd—sgnthests resotutton - reaLLg a resotutton Ls ts of constants. frameMork fLLLed out Ln the course of countering a Mide SMeep of objections, and of exp La LnLng Mhg the resotutton frameMork invotving seLeet ion satisfactorg of the main tgpes LLLustrated in the four-fotd: is the most �IMPROVED CO3MO-LOCICRL 3YMTHE3I3 TOWRRD RH There Logicai is a foundations tradition persistent - impiging simpLe and get undiscovered - for the whoLe of cosmoLogg. The as tradition, which peaked in modern rationaiism, continues strong in cosmoLogicai specuLation. unassaiiabLe Thus, contemporarg for exampLe, recent rationaiistic theories of the universe, ambitiousLg aimed at mathematico-iogicai expression and capture of nature. Thus, of MheeLer: for exampLe, the bottom Line to the mang theoreticaL enterprises LittLe astonishment shouLd there be, therefore, if the description of nature carries one in the end to Logic, the ethereat egrie at the center of mathematics. If, as one beiieves, aLL mathematics reduces to the mathematics of Logic, and aLL phgsics reduces to mathematics, what aLtemative is there but for aLL phgsics to reduce to the mathematics of Log ic ? Logic is the ontg branch of mathematics that can think about itse Lf'. Logic reassumes its ancient roLe 3S the fundamentaL science; the Mord expresses a LogicaL recipe. Even white abandoning some of the it Lus ions of grand reduct ion istic schemes, and undermining the EnLightenment power guest for the LogicaL the theoreticaL capture and can The sgnthesis outiined in setting. contribute what foLLows LiberaLised bg are semantics and to the organisation of a unified fits into this more modest It is achieved bg suitabig reLocating cosmoLogg as a part of semantics (generousig construed, for exampie, to admit contextuaL eLements). then, to controt of the universe, there is much of a more modest character that recent LogicaL theorg, as nonstandard sgstematisation, worid picture. kegs universaL So unified, semantics, re Levant semantics and cosmoLogg, as suggested in a preLiminarg wag in diagram 1. �RCTURL X L ORLD(S) GEOPHYSICRL SYSTEMS SUBSPRCE PHYSICRL SYSTEMS SUBSPRCE RELEVRHT SYSTEMS SUBSPRCE MORLD SPRCE Comment. The subspaces are Marked out by ctosure and other requirements, that of by cLosure of each worLd under deducibiLity (reLevant deriva— systems reLevant biLity), that of physicaL systems by cLosure aLso under physicaL Laws formuLated terMS Ln (suitabLy of condLtLonaLs) and perhaps factuaL constraints as weLL. actuaL (or better t3ctuai) worLd Ls a seLect coMMon worLd the to nested spaces. The underLytng Lde3 of the synthesis is siMpiy this: a subspace of is aLso a suitabLe framework for cosmoLogy, for an interpret— semantics worids neutrai *3 L Lon of the Log iceL theory of the universe as a whoLe. In Less condensed form, the ide3 is that the aLternative worids semantics arrived at in the pursuit of a semantics universaL part connectedLy, as semantics comprehensive (a theory the of aLL of for aLL be objects, Languages) and, aLso appLied physics - most importantiy to the matter of the origin, history and fundamentaL physicaL features of this cosmos, but 3S weLL eLsewhere, in interpretation theory. quantum of particuLar Ln That stripping. ontoLogicai of Load MorLd-ensembLe terms of nonexistent Mortds. Hot surprisingiy, in the recasting the in theory j^s for is, the theory can be recast in existentiaLLy neutraL terms, wcthout the originaL object ionabLe theory, the Rnd in the case of quantum theory there is aLready, most convenientiy, a many-universe or worLd-ensembLe theory, ready neutrai in (e.g. changed unobservabLe the spiitting worLd of the Everett other worids interpretation gives way to future— directed worLd branching). The setting in terms of do which objects not exist, especiaLLy, is essentiaL. For one reason, the idea grew out of investigation (with Griffin for the provisionaL but so far nonexistent book UQ) of what is normaLLy taken to be a phiLosophicaL question, indeed by some such as as the fundamentaL question of metaphysics, nameLy exist? . Reset in worLd terms this becomes a question worLd such Mhy does anything at aLL of seiection the - a contains be to taken exist. For then the oLd circLe is simpiy reentered, expiaining existence in terms of more existents. Here the circLe is metaphysics: 3 much more tractabLe question. But the recasting Loses expLanatory merit shouLd aLL the worids invoived objectionabie of that we find ourseLves in which contains something existent (us as among other existent things) as opposed to an aLternative worLd, which nothing Heidegger cf. JB broken, as it is eLsewhere (particuLarLy in chapter 2), by expiaining what exists by way of what does not. It is the faiLure to duty aLLow for and -2- acknowLedge this pattern of �expLsnatLons, though Lt represents coMMon practLce Ln the theoretLcaL sciences, that has wade Lssues LLke the Lntractab Le. In fact quest Lons Lihg Hetdeggerean the concernLng does angthLng quest Lon onLg Ls exLst? question LLke Lt so ftrst of a LattLce of the the character and nature of the cosMos Ln whLch Me happen to be, that are LLabLe to be asked , questLons ascendLng to (Just) seen Ls? ; questLons Uhg Ls thLs cosMos Mhtch MorLd ModeLLLngs wag fruLtfuLLg be to appLLed, as an Lwportant fLrst step Ln eLLcLtLng sone ansMers. (Bounded) LattLce of questLons. DIRGRRM 2. 7 Uhg does Mhg does angthLng evergthLng at aLL exLst? exLst as Lt Uhg do 7 Hhg do eLectrons Lihg does Lnte L L Lgent ex Lst? (Ln LLf e LLfe forns the nunbers exLst? (Ln the ex Lst? theg do?) forM Lt does?) In the reorLentatLon of MorLds senantLcs fron Languages to cosnoLog Les, f row Language to the MorLd, there are certaLn features that shouLd be kept fLrriLg Ln vLeM - apart fron such notorLous features as that anong the MorLds of the node L L Lngs are a range of bLzarre, absurd, LncoMpLete and MaverLck MorLds, and that each (nonexLstent) MorLd has a LncLudes donaLn of objects though Lt a subdoMatn (perhaps nuLL) of ent Lt Les, tgpLcaLLg contaLns nonexLstent objects, both posstbLe and not, phgsLcaLLg reaLLsabLe and the MhLch, feature of not. In partLcuLar, MorLd seLectLon shouLd not be Lost sLght of. For Lnstance, Ln assessing truth, a factuaL MorLd T Ls seLected - Ln one Mag or' another, but tgpLcaLLg bg a choLce functLon on a cLrcunscrLbed evaLuatLons are Morked out (recursLveLg) at I. cLass NaturaLLg and ho LdLng the assessnent of truth MLLL generaLLg Lead begond MorLd T LtseLf. For (reLevant) <deducLbLLLtg a subsgstew of dertvatLonaLLg cLosed MorLds Ls defLned; for poss Lb L L Ltg a subsgsteM coMprLsLng consLstent MorLds Ls Marked out; for naturaL LaMLLkeness a subsgsteM of phgsLcaL MorLds Ls dLstLnguLshed^; and so on for other cases of subsgstew and group seLectLon. $I- The Mang MorLds approach to the "Uhg does angthLng at aLL exLst?" quest Lon. -3- �There ere Many canvassed answers to thts questton, and stLLL More Mays of trytng to dtsMtss Lt. RLL dtsposat the atteMpts are defective, 3nd Most of the canvassed answers are unsattsfytng (so Grtfftn and I devote a good deat of space tn UQ to showtng). One approach that ts not inadequate — but perMtts however devetopMent tn severat dtfferent dtrecttons - ts the Many wortds approach. It ts true (and argued eLsewhere, e.g. JB) that R) SoMe thtngs extst. Thts truth enjoys a Modat status, that of conttngency tn fact. weaker ctatM sufftees, naMety But, to begtn, a C) It ts conttngentty true that sone thtngs extst. For the extstence that Most thtngs enjoy or regret ts conttngent. The obvious truth of the More controverstat ctatM that nothtng necessartty Left open for the present. extsts, can be NeutraL wortds ModeLLtng of theMe C) yteLds dtreetty a Many wortds picture, wtth soMe wortds, tnctudtng the actuat wortd T, contatntng extstents, and wtth soMe posstbte wortds contatntng no extstents (but perhaps soMe nonextstents). Likened to a dtsp Lay of baLLoons: DIRGRRH 3. Static pteture of a 0 : 0 : 0 Object doMatns contatn 0 ____ _________ extstents 0 0 : 0 0 worLds ModeLLtng for theMe 0). 0 : 0 0 It can be 0 00 DoMatns contatn no 0 extstents posstbte worLds Such a neutraL nodeLLLng begs no sertous onto Log teat questions, invotves no ontoLogtcaL prodtgaLLty. For tt ts not assuMed that any of these Ln worLds extst, any way. (It ts not dtfftcuLt to represent what does not extst.) Nor need Lt prejudtee Matters unduty agatnst necesstty theMes such even were Lt Lf Lnterpretatton MistakenLy Lnststed, as as agatnst God-hypotheses. the For stratghtforward of C), whtch aLLows Lt ts necessartty true (under soMe necesstty deterMtnabLe) that soMe thtngs extst, a retated Many worLds pteture woutd resuLt; the dashed LLne woutd stMpty Move down the diagraM). But Let us st Lek wtth what ts rtght, C. It ts More reveattng to take theMe C) as tensed - after aLL extstence ts existence now (JB chapter 2) - and to tntroduce, what further Lnvesttgatton wLLL require, dynaMtcat ModeLLLngs. Then, wtth soMe evtdent eMbrotdery, the foLLowtng sort of pteture eMerges: -4- �Dgnantc ptcture untverses. DIRGRRfl t*. MorLds of nodeLLLng of thene C), ML th sanpLe t 3 EXI5TEHTS (FULL CONSERVRTION) RLse and faLL of HD ] A Lt SOMET IME EXISTENTS^ R NULL LJORLD f* ExternaL ttne scats (tsLgnLfLes the Locat present) Consents. r-bjch Ls presupposed Ln the wag the pLcture Ls draMn (e.g. that sone Measure of exLstents C3n be obtained, bg Mag of partLcLe nunbers)^ but these presupposLtLons can be nodLfLed or renoved. The such as sane sort nodeLLLng serves aLso to vaLLdate thenes LLnked to C), of D) There mag have been a tLne Mhen nothLng exLsted. ConsLder seLectLon, noM (or done Ln terns of of the cructat wetter of T-seLectLon, L.e. factuat Mortd 6-seLectLon, L.e. referentLaL sub-Mortd seLectLon). ThLs Ls certaLn features these Mortds have, such as contaLnLng entttLes, LncLudLng observers, exhLbLtLng LLfe, nanLfestLng LnteLLLgence or wLnd - to antLcLpate features conLng up and sonetLnes proposed for MorLd seLectLon. Such seLectLon pLcks out thts MorLd fron the ensenbLe of MorLds (our Mortd aLso, as Lt happens). Rnd the Mortd thus seLected LncLudes exLstents. Mhg does angthLng at aLL exLst? Because thts MorLd, T, LncLudes, happens to LncLude, extstent objects. To thts extent Lt Ls -5- a natter of fortune - qood �it night be hazarded, since the worLd exhibits enough that is good 3nd fortune, enough potentiaL for good. Rs a contingent Matter, this worLd contains (in its object donain) '.tens that exist. So T-setection deLivers a worLd n3king it true objectiveLg that sone things exist.^ The answer Mag seeM trite; that but is in Measure Large because the and answer are taken in isoLation, apart froM issues as to the detaiLs question of the process, the how questions, such as H) How does it happen that soMething exists? The issue can be considered in uLtinateLg exists is question terns this of of nass-energg, since evergthing that kind (so it is argued in JB chapter 9). To the H ) How does it happen that sone Mass-energg exists? tMo sorts of answer are possibte. FirstLg, there is the conservative answer: sone atwags existed. There is an end Less ongoing sea of Mass-energg, which sinpLg fLuctuates, Moves, recgcLes, etc. There are pLentg of probLens with this answer; for instance, phgsicaL prob Lens, such as how did the Big Bang of standard cosMOLogg occur, what was happening before it? But there are aLternative MatheMaticai stories now being toLd, for instance, of a Massive singuLaritg Located in space (rather than at phgsic3t tine t = 0 as with the Big Bang), which trg to offer a phgsicaL account of a continuous universe (see e.g. G. ELLis). Rnd the singuLaritg stories offered can be enriched (aiong Lines rather Like what wiLL be ventured in the case of the second answer). RLnost aLL traditionaL phiiosophicai and theoLogicat accounts, aLL v^rtuaLLg honage paging to ontoLogicaL assunptions, shouLd be inciuded aMong the conservative, existence-aiwags answers. But the nonnateriaLLst accounts anong these characteristicaLLg invoLve LeveL shifts^^Thei is back to the existence of God or the (uLtinate) One, who, on a higher LeveL, serves as eternaL sustainer, and perhaps fashioner, of the MateriaL universe. The conceptual and other probtens of such answers are sufficientLg notorious. SecondLg, there is stage nothcng existed. The energg. the Rt More appeaiing and siMpLe radicaL answer: at sone that difficuLtg before tiMe, the that anccent Long-received probLeM orthodox of how prejudice, sonething that nchLi fct, is invariabLg reinforced bg again Bang, there was no for this picture is how Mass-energg ever appeared froM the MacroscopicaLLg tranquiL sea of nothingness. past Big can It is no great feat to get coMe froM nothing. The froM nothing nothing cones, ex nihiLo Mistaken ontoLogicaL assunptions (see JB chapter 2). Yet even when these ontoLogicaL assunptions are set aside, there is the awkward natter of C3usai nechanisn. But an unLikeig storg can be toLd, a ngth retated, expLaining how sonething -6- �a may (suddenly) emerge from nothing, jet of mass-energy the from sea of nothingness. The story borrows from the quantum theory of the vacuum (or rather, ot suitabie vacuums). There is suddeniy an avaianche of energy borrowing , 3nd mass creation of particies in a concentrated area.& This is the beginning of the Big Bang (at internaL time zero). It is unigue (in experience) because such a singuiarity is very improbabte. (Even a SmaLL Bang wouid be rather improbabie.) The net energy "borrowed" is borrowed on a very Long term (at high interest?), with a gradu3i repLayment pLan. This ties concerning the run-down eventuaL eventuaLLy (though perhaps over this of very a with principLes universe. protracted of thermodynamics, On this story, it wiLL time) subside back into From nothing everything existent originaLLy came; into nothingness everything existent wiLL uitimateLy process. nothingness. It is one thing to such devise 3 story, or rather the (or outLine scaffoLding) of a story; it is another to condense it into science. before But scorn is poured on such a story, Let it be noted that the story is Less bizarre, more and informative, than other extant phiiosophicaL stories. For exampLe, it appears more piausibie than the ideaList story of the construction of the physicaL worid from idea, or than the set-theoreticaL myth of the construction of the entire universe from the nuLL set - undoubtedLy a it as earLy encompasses existent individuaLs, construction, insofar of something existent from nothing, not since, despite orthodox cLaims to the contrary, the nuLL set certainty does exist (JB 9.9). There are reasons for much preferring the second styLe of story to the first - though it may appear to some to viotate conservation principLes such that mass-energy: of as in fact it need not. One is that the end Less mass-energy story faits to account for the presence of mass-energy. By contrast, nothingness does not reguire expLanation: it is, so to speak, the rest position. In terms of the range of possibiiities here, existence is what is unusuaL, what is atypicaL, what especiaLLy caLLs for expLanation, not nonexistence.? Hence the expLanatory superiority of the radicaL answer. Rs one might expect in varying such an obvious and ancient story, and as is easity discovered, scientific condensation and assessment has begun, especiaLLy in the Last decade. The idea that the totaL energy of the universe is zero was considered a human generation ago by Mhitrow&, refLecting on Flach s phiLosophy of motion. More recentLy, Tryon has argued the zero totaL energy theme, assuming a cLcsed universe and appeaLing the standard treatment of gravitationai to If the universe contains just enough potentiaL energy as negative energy. mass to cLose it, then the negative energy must more or Less exactLy canceL the energy (mc^) invoLved in the existence of that mass. Hence, the argument runs, even a a cosmos as impressiveLy Large and ancient as this universe couLd exist as deveLopment quantum vacuum through in borrowing fLuctuation on a a zero-energy vacuum, that is, through grand scaLe in a reiativistic setting. Such vacuum fLuctuations can occur by dispensation of the AE.At --h; when the mass-energy AE of a physicaL object -7- uncertainty principLe approaches zero, its �LLfe,tLMe At can becoMe verg targe. OnLg the Merest begLnnLng on reMOvtng certaLn object Lons and to wore scLenttfLc storg MtLL be atteMpted. FLrstLg, there are, LnevLtabLg a such obstacLes Lt seews, onto Log LeaL and verLfteat Lontst object Lons. Hang of these turn hoMever on assuMtng that a vacuuM and ewptg space Must soMehoM exLst, at Least bg Mag of sort of exLstLng contaLner or structure. Such assuMpttons are wtstaken: no (pre-) exLstence need be assuwed. Such objects 3s vacuuws and unoccupLed space sone nonexLstent are and dLstLnctLve Mtth objects assessLbLe MatheMatLcaLLg propertLes. Though theg nag not be access LbLe to observatton, and Ln thLs narroM respect are outsLde the range of experLence, then concernLng tnvesttgattons exactLng for there to LnfornatLon Ls suffLcLent be Made of theLr features. SLnLLar potnts teLL agaLnst the objection that Lt Ls Mrong to Lwpose an externat spatLaL or tewporaL Measure on (Mass-energg) cLosed space-tLMe; for exawpLe, Mhat happened before the BLg Bang, or to ewbed the curved space-ttMe of LnquLre the unLverse Ln a Larger spatLaL or tenporaL settLng. Rs a Matter of fact, cosMOLogLsts wang exh Lb Lt no unease Ln ashLng Mhat happened before the BLg Bang even Mhen assuwLng no Matter before that, though verLftcattonLsM MouLd no doubt such to ruLe guesttons out as weanLngLess or otherMtse out of order. More to the potnt, bounded Metrtcs can atMags be extended (HubbLe ttMe Ls just wtstahe though fruLtfuLLg, soMettnes bounds vertfLcatLontst one are exaMpte), exceeded. and Rnother has been to assuwe that NothLng, stnee nonexLstent, Ls entLreLg Mtthout structure or organLsatton and ungoverned. Indeed tMo dtaMetrtcaLLg opposed poLar v,eMS of Lt have prevented, and even been run together: of NothLng chaottc, as and so excessLveLg rtch, and of Nothing as entLreLg bLank, and so excessLveLg tMpovertshed. Both are Lnadequate. R More tnteresttng ontoLogtcaL objeetton (ratsed bg Rrwstrong) Ls that such an account of the ortgtn of the unLverse takes granted for exLstence the naturaL LaMS, and so does not expLaLn hoM sowethLng ex Latent cane frow objecttons Such confuse truth neo-PLaton Law. LaMS hoLd, but do not vteMs, Mhere LaMS Mtth exLstence, exLst - bg after contrast Mtth nothLng. fashLon the of of neo-PLatonLc reLatLons of unLversaLs, MhLch exLst. On object-theorg are (such as that of JB), hoMever, unLversaLs do not exLst, and so LaMS are not thus extstentLaLLg Loaded. Once truth Ls duLg separated frow exLstence, there Ls of course the further questton of Mhg the LaMS that hoLd or evoLve do hoLd. But thts Ls a separate, and vextng, questton of uLttMate expLanatton.^ SecondLg, are there More technLcaL adwLttedLg shakg phgstcaL account; for quantuM nuwbers of objeettons, instance, that dtrected But Lt the Mtth the the vacuuw MtLL constst equaLLg of Matter and antt-Matter, and qutckLg vantsh agatn, Mhereas features of the unLverse perstst tMbaLance. agaLnst fLuctuattons and suggest noM seeMs that a verg sLLght (and, so Lt Ls satd, deLLcate) tMbaLance earLg Ln the evoLutton of the unLverse after the BLg Bang Ls just Mhat Ls required for present perMLtted features of the unLverse; and such an LMbaLance, on recent (GUT) theorLes, catastrophtc fLuctuatton hardLg excLudes. R thLrd connected obstacLe used to be sertous: Lt -8- has been presupposed that a �state can be assigned to the whoLe universe.^ But that is now aLright; quantuM according for neutraL to of) (adaptation the Everett Many-universe interpretation of quantuM theory, a state function i covers the behaviour of the P worLds phgsicaL I (with P c K), which presuMabig evoLve according to a e reLativised Schrodinger equation of the fom SE(T). To soMe expLain of the recent appeaL of this sort of wortd-ensewbLe interpretation, it is worth turning to the interesting and curious business of the phgsicaL constants. The §2. of constants of phgsics and sone of their neat interreLations. natter The interesting cLaiM is that the setting or adjustMent of certain constants surprisingLg deLicate, and if the constants (and soMe of their constant that ratios) were different bg ontg sMaLL Margins, then the actuaL universe woutd very is be with the resuLt, aMong Mang other things, that we shoutdn't be different, here to observe ang of its LocaL passing show. Now the possibiLity of exp Lanation of the specific vaLues of these the in terMS of phgsicaL theory itseLf is not so far exciuded. Perhaps no constants constants in physics are uLtiMateLy fundaMentai, Various ways eiiMinating of constants though seeMS that unLikeLy. are now faMitiar, e.g. soMe represent new scaie factors and are eiiMinated by re-scaLing or choice of coordinates. Others are reMoved by More radicaL ways of reLooking at things, as in Einstein s treatMent of gravitation. But sone resist eiiMination - so far. in For, phgsicaL any theory, what case, fundaMentai is depends and soMe previousLg fundaMentat constants (such as Rvogadro s nuMber) have turned out to be derivative as theory constants on the given shape of advanced new and (deeper) were introduced. There is the reMote possibiLity, obviousLy cherished that bg soMe scientists, that in the end aLL phgsicaL constants can be reMoved, a constant-free (very grand unified) theorg in which aLL constants can be reMoved wiLL resuLt. This is not obviousLg iMpossibLe in the wag that a coMpLete eiiMination of LogicaL constants froM Log teat theorg is, that a finat triuMphant reMovat of the Scheffer stroke froM cLassicaL propositionaL Logic is iMpossibLe. However, it is too Much to expect that a "deep MatheM3tic3i anaLgsis" aLways do the job. For one thing, exp Lanations of this sort do give is an arguMent for this out. can There froM the backward proceeding character of deductive expLanations to More generaL preMisses (appLging the content-incLusion character of deduction proper). There are no MatheMaticaL anaigses without assuMptions, without a systeM of postutates. The hope (expressed by MatheMaticat Carter and others), that generaLLy deeper underlying theories can be found, wiLL not 3iwags be fuLfiLLed, of necessity. Since transforMations, such as seating, aLter or reMove constants, can transfer the Big Bang back to Minus-infinity, and so on, there is no soLid to expLain, underLying the ELLis, for one, aLLegedLy probLeMatic nuMericaL features (so data B. contends). UhiLe it is true that which constants feature, and what their vaLues are, wiLL depend on initiaL choice of units, whatever that �at Least some of the constants wiLL emerge. Thus there wiLL be features choice, and vatues which require expianation, and exptanation of the however transforming the done. is For S3me broad tgpe, the present, 3nd immediate future at Least, there is no getting rid of the constants, and white theg to continue figure their numericaL vatues and ratios set some trickg prob Lems. There is the probtem, first of aLL, of describing the reLevant phgsicat data neutraL non—prejudiciaL fashion. The facts of the matter are more or Less a Ln as foLLows:- Present phgsicat theories incLude mang (phgsicaL) constants, which occur in the formutation of Laws and principtes. R number of these constants are fundamentsL, in that theg are not derived from other constants (or deduced from deeper phgsicat theorg). Two things have been noticed concerning fundamentat constants of present phgsicat theorg, both of which caLL for expLanation:If 1) the of certain constants Lag outside a rather narrow band (sur­ vatues rounding their perhaps universe wouLd be ascertained vatue), gross features of the geophgsicaL different. this - hopefuttg without CaLL prejudice, since its contra­ position represents the substantiat core of the anthropic poss ib Le principte - the sens i t iv i tg numer teat f eature. va Lues For record, the the geophgsicaL principte resuLting from contraposition takes the foLLowing form: certain gross features of the geophgsicaL universe are onLg possibie in present form if the numericaL vatues of certain constants Lie within a narrow sensitivitg band. Examptes of such gross features are isLand gataxies, Long-Lived stars, ptanets, recognised ittustrate, water, hgdrogen, heavg carbon, metats. RLL the forces, for instance, exhibit the sensitivitg features. To phgsicat the strong nuctear force were marginattg stronger, nuctei coutd if grow much begond the present Limits and att hgdrogen woutd Long have ago been converted to heLium, with the resutt that there wouLd be no Long-Lived stars (of present tgpe) and no water. On the other side, a decrease in the strong force wouLd prevent the formation of nucLei of heavg metaLs. R dozen further and more of simitar phgsics Literature. sensitivitg mag be assembLed from the re Levant easiLg 2) The Pgthagorean feature. Large numbers arrived at in ions famous turn of Eddington s out these to coincide Large reLation, exampLes astronomicaL computat­ (to within order of magnitudes). Perhaps the most number stating coincidences', the universe is the inverse square of the number as theg are mostLg caLLed, of gravitationaL other exampLes are assembLed in Bondi.) -10- particLes coupLing in the constant. is visibLe (Mang �These two nunericaL features sensitivitg features co inc idences. are are (or can be) These nunericaL features are cited LaMs) conservation of inportanttg that in Large exptain to used nunber as evidence Justifging the introduction of various exotic theories (e.g. invoLving phgsicaL Most interconnected, departures exaMpies earLg Mhich froM accepted norMaLLg Mere the "verging G theories of Dirac and Jordan . So Mrites Carter, Mho appeais to soMe differentig exotic principies, anthropic principtes, Mithin features in order froM far opposite the phgsics Bang) thesis: (GeneraL cosMoLogg and Mhich couLd in principLe have been used to unsurprisingLg, the order of the dag in Mag and be great fun. It cosnoLogg. course Of that the is distiLLation specuLation is is Mith the conversion of this stuff to in received MisdoM, or even knoMLedge, that caveats shouLd be Mhen cLaiM froM evidentLg estabLished. But Large cLains on fLinsg foundations are, far fine, i.e. ReLativistic predict theM 3LL in advance of their observation' (p.291) - 3 Large is nuMericat evidence in favour of exotic theories these coincidences being shouLd rather be considered as confirMing "conventionat" Big the noM received cosMoiogicai setting. Mith the heLp of these the anthropic principies he canvasses, as he puts it, that expLain to prejudiciaL, in e.g. that entered, especiaLLg it points to favoured cone Lus ions such as priviLege or design (for huMans) in the universe. Much capitaL has aireadg been Made of the nuMericat features, of Mhat is referred to - gou C3n see the Loading straightaMag - as a cataLogue of extra­ ordinarg phgsicaL coincidence and apparentig accidentsL co-operation' (0 p.110). Here is a tgpicaL beat-up, bg Davies: The structure of the phgsicaL MorLd is deiicsteig dependent on a varietg of apparent nunericaL accidents. hang of the rather basic features of the universe are deternined in essence bg the vaLues that are assigned to the fundanentaL constants of nature, such as G, a, Mp and so on, and these features MouLd be drasticsLLg aLtered if the constants assuned even noderateig different vaLues. ... for nature to produce a cosnos even renoteLg resenbLing our own, Mang apparentLg unconnected branches of phgsics have to co-operate to a renarkabLe degree (D p.lll; sone of the prejudiciaL terninoLogg is under L ined). The part Last is particuiarig Meak: so our ignorance of interconnections is disclosed, ignorance Me Might have forestaLLed froM arguMent theorg integrated resist apparentLg fitting of unreLated phgsics: together. the topics' present if Carter serves is right. RLL the to reveaL is Lack of an theorg is bits and pieces, Mhich Nor do Large nunber coincidences point to ang hidden co-operation, but rather to over Looked connections Mhich can be argued toHards (as bg Dicke, Carter and others) using fairLg conventionaL phgsicaL equations.^ Rs for the hidden purpose terMinotogg, for nature to produce ...', MeLL, the Justificatorg case for its use is not Mereig not evident, but entireLg The sane appLies to other Lacking. terns Mhich Davies and others infiLtrate, such as -11- �* 'conspire' (Dp.Ill), 'fine-tuned', deiicateiy baianced', 3ii of which suggests agents with certain purposes. Re Lated happening not objections te rm ino Logy, be some against Lodged accident , it accidentaL; be shouLd of the improbab Le coincidence , etc. R contingent worLd need is not accidentaL that Griffin Lives in Troy, Ontario, though it is contingent certainty. Rn improbabLe worLd need not be accidentaL either. RccidentaL means, according to the Concise EngLish Dictionary (CED), Occurring by chance, unexpectedLy, not according to the usuaL order of non-essentiaL'. The misp Laced for the actuaL worLd; and adventitious, th ings; generaL thrust of the notion is decidedLy accidentaL universe is a misdescription.^ To be sure, there is some considerabLe sLackness in terms Like accidentaL', wh Lch can come cLose aLso, when appLied as in schoLastic theory, to meaning contingent. The term vac i L La t ion, as its of condition dictionary coinciding; concurrence nicety coincidence' a definition remarkabLe iLLustrates makes instance the The pLain: of we L L-known act, fact or apparentLy fortu itous Large-number The coincidences are of the first type; there is LittLe case for making them out as of the second type. argue, To however, that the actuaL worLd is not mereLy contingent, but improbabLe, Lt is hardLy necessary to go so far afieLd as advanced physics. Some more homeiy exampies have managed ho Les wiLL do, such as the matter of aLL the Lucky goLfers who in one. consider Or foLLowing the from argument contingencies, to the improbabiLity of the actuaL worLd. Take some contingency, e.g. that person 1 in some ordering of the audience <^s wearing a green top. She might have been wearing any other cotour. Say there are 100 shades to choose from in the cLothing coLour cards. Then the probabiLity that she is in green is no more than 1 in 100. eut the same sort of probabiLity hoids for every other person on the earth presentLy wearing 3 top, and these probabiLities are LargeLy independent, say in I(US) bit Lion cases, i.e. 10^ cases. That is, the probabiLity of the present array of tops is no more than 1 in loH. That aLready makes present arrangements exceedingiy unLikeLy, before we go into the coLours of other bits of appareL peopie are customariLy bedecked in, the coLours towards 16 improbabLe. Lead of the NonetheLess, of motor cars and so on. So even surface contingencies books, cone Lus ion that the worLd actuaL is astronomicaLLu the situation with the fundamentaL constants does differ. Rn important difference between these day-to-day improbabilities, such as have the spouses we do, and those the constants induce is things these this:- Even that if aLL (coLours, e.g.) had been different, the worLd wouLd not be a very different pLace. Contrast the constants: their significant variation wouLd the we make worLd a very different pLace. Is there a difference in kind, with 3 radicaL improbabiLity appearing as regards the constants, degree? OnLy in degree, picture wiLL serve for the bridging range exampies of cases, or tend for -12- mereLy a difference in to suggest. The same broad everyday and cosmoLogicaL �contingencg. §3- Back to mang worLds: improbabiLities and the universaL quantum theorg. Mhere that broad - Leads picture so sgnthesis sought the suggests, as does an increasing amount of cosmoLogicaL theorg - is to the mang-worLds of interpretation Quite evidentLg, worLds semantics are not the onLg semantics improbabiLitg. that can be offered for probabiLitg. few But other offer semantics simitar universaLLtg and informativeness, and some of the aLLeged competitors (not to be taken too serioustg as face damaging circuLaritg in this area, e.g. rivaLs) probabiListic semantics, urn semantics. The idea of the modeLLing naturaLLg It is improbabLe that gou have the spouse gou have , is true bg virtue of this: fact the is that in onLg a few worLds of the modeLLing, incLuding the actuaL one, do gou have gour current spouse; mostLg (insofar as gou occur) gou do not. In preciseLg the same improbabiLities, cosmic wag such particuLar as numericaL vaLues for phgsicaL constants, Lead to mang universe modeLLings. is argument to mang-universes from improbabiLities . The description of the the situation phgsicaL coincidence of probabiListic requires remarkabLe constants, notions, features', e.g. etc. extraordinarg semantics But probabiListic notions caLLs for aLternative worLds. (Thus Davies archerg Les Lie s and This goLf exampLe Of course Davies tends to see worLds used for exampLe). probabiLities as a conceptuaL device (D p.128); Everett invariabLg sees them That reaL. is, what we have emerging is repLag then do improbabiLities the as of universaLs issue! But universaLs do not exist, and nor do these expLanatorg worLds (cf. JB onLg of 8.8). Not Lead to a mang-nonexistent-worLds picture; converseLg the muLti-universe theorg expLains the improbabiLities. envisaged modeL contains ref Leet a huge coLLection of certain intervaL of accuracg); thus worLds the range of (naturaL) vaLues of the fundamentaL constants. RLL initiaL arrangements of matter and motion are refLected in worLds is The worLds. the chances of the present smaLL, exceedingig which expLains (at Least within universe a resuLting various improbabiLities. Does it than matter that we can t normaLLg quantifg these improbabiLities? Rng more we can quantifg the (Large) probabiLitg of nucLear war? No; there is something offensive about the repeated demand for quantification.^ Quantum theorg circumscribed affords situations, a the aLternative phgsicaL situations. actuaL worLd - is seLected, simiLar state mang worLds function is On measurement, one apparentLg at random picture. Least Rt for a superposition of severaL particuLar worLd - the (D p.12!*). This approach enab Les immediate resoLution of an important prob Lem in orthodox quantum theorg. R standing probLem with a compLete universe state function is that sgstem we must have some measuring apparatus that is sgstem. ... Mhen the not itseLf to measure a part of the sgstem is the entire universe, the notion of a piece of externaL measuring apparatus is meaningLess (D p.I2t+). So emerges the famiLiar conundrum for quantum theorg presented aLong orthodox (von Neumann) Lines: If there is nothing Left with which to measure [or otherwise interfere with] the -13- �state the of how universe, universe the can transition from a the make superposition of many possibLe worids to one, concrete, actu3t wortd?' (D p.12^) is, There asserts, Davies interpretation many-universes one oniy - which comprehensive however a resoLution 'accept[s] simuitaneous the reaiity of aLL the possibte atternative universes' (D p.I2i+). But, given the route we have come, it is easy to ontccaLLy atternative neutrai this, to direct that see from there an is object-theory. atternative assumes many universes atso, but onty some at any stage are This actuat. It is obvious enough is that the probabilistic spread of quantum states does not require existent states, any more than the range of atternative dress states for someone probabty attired in requires green, the existence of the person in different ctothes. Measurement now shows which wortd/state an object such as etectron or person in. actuatty is an In these terms it does not cotLapse the probabiLity wave packet, or set of worLds, but marks one out. Lihat isn't known measurement is which worLd (or narrower set of worLds) is actuaL (or the before actuat etectron is in). quantum description, Uhen nothing the entire cosmos encompassed is the within Left to coLLapse the wave' (D p,12S). Rather is nothing in the way of externat measurements is avaiLabLe to determine which is the actuaL worLd; however internaL information can be made use of in the usuaL experimentaL ways. To set interpretations many-worids Everett the quantum of theory and in the contrasting neutrai worLds perspective, here (adapting OeLJitt and Graham) are some Leading features: i) R separate cLassicaL sphere externaL to any and every is not required; quantum set-up it makes sense to consider and investigate a state vector for the whoLe universe. ii) The state vector covering the totaL system never universes) (of coLLapses, and so the totatity it describes can be deterministic. iii) LJhat is described through variabLes dynamicaL the jointLy, comprehensive is not aLL equaLLy reaL; vector and the the actuaL worLd but a system comprising many worLds. (On the Everett are state interpretation on the neutraL worLds these interpretation they are not, other worLds than actuaL ones Lacking of any sort of reaLity.) iv) Through chronoLogicaL deveLopment of the dynamicaL the state vector decomposes naturaLLy ref Leeting a progressing branching of the into system orthogonaL universe worLds) into a set of mutuaLLy unobservabLe worLds. variabLes, (and (On account this is described as a continuaL spLitting into vectors system the of Everett equaLLy reaL worLds; but not in neutraL theory which disposes of this reLativism.) v) In each worLd good" measurements yieLd definite resuLts, and in many -14- �worLds, incLuding the actuaL, famiLiar statisticaL quantum Laws hoLd, indeed C3n be derived or approximated. *- -^ince the neutraL version directLg avoids mang of the to theorg, what is the case for the Everett form? In main part it consists Everett simptg of mistaken ontoLogicaL assumptions, as such objections the what that ReaLitg overactive an principte, has phgsicaL properties must exist.The further argument that aLL branches must be equaLLg reaL, is not compeLLing. Thus DeMitt contends: Because there exists neither a mechanism within the framework of the formaiism nor, bg definition, an entitg outside of the universe that can designate which branch of the grand superposition is the reaL worLd, aLL branches must be regarded as equaLLg reaL (p.178). But we can easiLg incLude actuaL worLd seLection (as group worLd seLection) within cone Lus ion does not foLLow. the weLL and framework; other as given difficuLties the Everett specific, there is, Ln the first pLace, reaList theories such Everett's. as permissive regarding such worLds. In reaList-reLativist a demarcation SecondLg, fact, the however, interpretation theorg avoids. To be faced prob Lem not neutraL theorg the of this the intended It has been objected (e.g. bg Lewis) that the neutraL worLd encounters kinds neutraL bg is too theorg is restrictive about worLds; and few or none of worLds of contemporarg reaLists (^uch as Lewis) get into the picture, since aLL such worLds incLude as existents certain universaLs. OnLg neutraLised anaLogues of such worLds appear fn case, the theorg can be as restrictive as is appropriate about ang In 7). aLso (see which worLds are phgsLeaL, or phgsicaLLg possible. Requisite subcLasses such worLds phgsicaL can marked be out conform tig to phgsicaL Laws and through framework requirements (e.g. that the ensembLe forms a HLLbert space). it is an iLLusion that reaLism as Moreover soLves the reLevant demarcation probLem. It simpLg covers it up, in an unsatisfactorg wag. highLight To us varg a in stock of coupLe pertations, some of what is different in a neutraL iLLustrations of reaListic interpretation, the ontic mang-worLds Let inter- the famiLLar two sLit interfer­ wag. Consider first ence affair. On a straightforward the neutraL approach, we appear forced to concLude that each eLectron traverses both sLits in a wave Like form' (Les Lie LI, p.I!+6), is to the dcaLectic interpretation that the eLectron goes through that both sLits. The mang- worLds approach avoids such contradiction^, aLLowing eLectron to traverse just one sLit in the actuaL worLd - onLg in another branching from this, the the worLd, eLectron traverses the other sLit, therebg inducing probabiListic interference with the actuaL-case eLectron. The wave function provides a superposition of two such possibLe cases, not two actuaL cases. In the transition other worLds are not mang-worLds theorg). from phgsicaL (or potentiaL) worLds to the actuaL one, 'destroged' (as LesLie suggests in his criticism of Nor is the interaction of worLds causaL. There are few or -15- �no causaL effects even on the Everett reaLity version; is spiitting thus not not actuaity observed (cf. virtuai worLds, reLations, etc.). Though there seen, are transworLd interreLations on object-theory these do further criticaL point is that physicaL worLds are not probabiListicaLLy The entities. as exist not independent. But that s aLright; since probabiLity is an natter, intensionaL probabiListic interference is unprobLenatic (cf. "possibiLity" interference). scattering exanpLe where an eLectron is Consider next Davies at fired a proton. The probabiLity wave in such scattering represents a set of worLds for the eLectron. 'The quantun wave provides a Measure of the probabiLity of finding the eLectron 3t the Location: where the eLectron is Most LikeLy to be found ation, and disturbance is greatest there the wave (D p.l2i*). Fleasurenent deterMines the Loc­ so aLters the probabiLities, thus on the orthodox view reducing the wave. Recording to the Everett on however, interpretation, neasurenent the universe divides into two, ... one containing a right Moving eLectron ... Each worLd is equaLLy rest inhabiting each since it is not The observer conscious upon that MeasureMent down-right is spiitting so thus, by occurs; the for there certain a is so near­ probabiLities, anending scattering, that, possibie the because of the uncertainties physicaL states of universe, corres­ ponding to the probabiLity wave, are increased. Lihere there was one for the actuaL possibLities). worLd in possibiLity regard, now there are N Many (N Mirroring the this R nany-worids interpretation of physicaL theory provides a naturaL for neutraL a new state function resuits, appearing to coLLapse 'the wave. since RLL that happens wuth worLd branching is guaranteed copy worLds. But onLy one worLd is actuaL, and represents the (reaL) of universe. Heasurenent can deterMine which this is, and one spLits, MisLeading. There is no spiitting; rather in quantuM processes worLd-branching takes pLace, rep Licat ion atso wortd . Even on the Everett interpretation this is inaccurate, it interpretation ... principLes which aMong seLect detinit or wortds, as setting what are caLLed anthropic principLes, and aLso non-chauvinistic reptaceMents for then such as geophysicaL principLes, can serve to do.^ Rnd in this setting expLanations, of a sort and of varying adequacy, The of aLL the nunericaL features can be furnished. under Lying reason is not (siMpty) that there wiLL aLways be sone universes, which are duty seLected, where the nuMbers coMe out right, but that sone and universes conditions (for of the right sort are aLso decent physicaL universes (a Much More difficuLt requirenent to satisfy). sone such coincidences) It is as these, furtherMore, that are observed (by us), contain universes carbon and water LocaLLy, and so forth. It is then no surprise that we perceive a universe to which so Many speciaL conditions pertain, for we have seLected fron the enseMbLe onLy by our very existence' (0 p.126). But it again, taLk of our seLecting is MisLeading (though taLk of seLection, or naturaL seLection, is not). It is rather that, as a contingent natter, we happen to inhabit such universes^. Rnd such taLk negLects the iMportant point that further work is required, for satisfactory expianation - that piausibte argunents, not invoLving us, but connecting gross geophysicaL features with nuMericaL features, have aLso -16- �to be suppLLed. In thts Mag, ustng the MorLd-ensembLe hgpothests ... [but] MLth[out] the Meak anthropLc prLncLpLe, Lt Ls possLbte to discover pLausLbLe arguments to pLn doMn the vaLues of aLmost aLL of the fundamentaL parameters p.129, a centraL part of hLs cLatm). Indeed DavLes hotds out the negatLng but (D prospect of beLng abte to do much more, constraLnLng the dtmensLonaLttg of space and ttme, the number of quarks and Leptons, numbers of fundamentaL forces, That reaLLg MouLd a sgnthesLs of consLderabLe poMer. It Ls a sgnthesLs, gtve moreover, MhLch can be absorbed or sLmuLated MLth Ln a upon mang-MorLds neutraLLsLng prLncLpLes MorLd bg etc. quantum seLectLon theorg prLncLpLes. and cosmo-Log LeaL repLacLng NonetheLess sgnthesLs, the anthropLc DavLes, the LLke maLnstream phgsLcLsts he artLcuLateLg represents, Ls uncomfortabLe MLth ang such that he LndLcates, ang such grand pLcture, and rLghtLg so, as the 3S sgnthesLs anthropLc expLanattons LnvoLved are far from entLreLg satLsfactorg. HostLg he seems to hope Lnstead that contLngencLes MLLL aLL be expLaLned as necessLtLes of (proposLtLons phgsLcs grand a pLcture, necessarg grand at Least Ln foLLoMLng Log LeaLLg from another theorg). But the hope Ls mLspLaced; Ln Large unLfLed measure Lt represents 17thC ratLonaLLsm over agatn. SometLmes, hoMever, he seems to feet desLgn Ln the untverse. - Ls Mhat features: to supposed emerge, and does emerge, from the numerLcaL Mhat anthropLc prLncLpLes vs. MorLd seLectLon prLncLpLes. Uhat Ls supposed to emerge depends upon hoM the matter Ls set up, hoM the pLcture emphasLaed. Ls Mhat presented, For exampLe, DavLes and LesLLe both set thtngs up so onLg tMo optLons are supposed to be open. In hLs Preface to Da^Le^ Ls The RcctdentaL UnLverse, suggests the sgstematLc aLternatLves are eLther reLLgLon or an anthropLc prLncLpLe. R sLmLLar cLaLm appears Ln LesLLe, Mho puts the aLternatLves as (ethtcaL) necessttg or anthropLc assumptLons. Thus hLs concLusLon (to L2, p.81) The cosmotogLcaL evidence can suppLg __ forcefut grounds for vLeMLng at Least one of these thtngs ss true. (1) God Ls reaL, though presumabLg as a creattve ethtcaLrequtrement rather than as a dtvtne person Mho LLteraLLg destgned our LLfe-contaLntng cosmos. [So the unLverse extsts because Lt shouLd.J (2) There extsts a Mortd EnsembLe [so the condtttons LeadLng to Ltfe are bound to occur someMhere (L2, p.55)J - and the attempt to dertve aLL the fundamentaL charactertstLcs of our cosmos from some untfted FLeLd Theorg Ls tn error. DavLes LnsLnuates that the obvtous Lnference from the cat3Logue of numerLcaL features Ls thts: a htdden prLncLpLe seems to be at Mork, organLstng the cosmos Ln a coherent Mag (p.110). Thts runs paraLLeL to argument from desLgn, hardLg an Lmprovement. One of the prLncLpLes htdden Ls hgpothests; but another Mhtch DavLes (unLtke LesLLe) generaLLg anthropLc prLncLpLe, to LncredLbLe accuracg 3nd Ls some sort of God favours Ls the a gutdtng prLncLpLe Mhtch serves to fLne-tune the cosmos for us (humans) - or Ltfe, or Ltfe-supportLng sgstems, or __ ? Or for observers,or LnteLLLgence, or not for angthtng. The chotce offered Ls reaLLg then an oLd famLLLar one, faced bg thtnkers at Least stnee the (so-caLLed) EnLtghtenment: God or Han, or after a recent ftrst correctton and Mtth a different emphasts, Humans -17- or God. In fact burted under �duaLitg, this is aLreadg as (Science) or Hunans or God. However the a nang tenpts favoured which option, Phgsics excLuded, in error . Rnd it is we as seen: have (coMprehensive) phgsics without netaphgsics, no scientific theorg no is Much scientist and phiLosopher, is increasinqLg seen as excLuded, as forbidden fruit or even as there at Least a three-wag choice: Phgsics giinpsed, without Large assunptions - which stands on its own. But further afieLd there is get is which option, another not excLuded: option here canvassed. The ciain to be eLaborated is this: no (deep-ecoLogicaL) principies of a tgpe not aLreadg required for Low LeveL senanticaL purposes worLd seLection principies) are caLLed for in expiaining the nunericaL (naMeig, features at Least as satisfactoriig as nor huMans Neither principies, gods such be upon popuiarig aLreadg foreshadowed, doing. in More in reMoving huMans features god-Like (and, universe. the principLe cones in a varietg of anthropic verg precise (incLuding Barrow's biocentric reforMutations). SoMe exaMptes give the inpression:- The existence as observers seLection bioLogicaL (D to the own used be can existence a as constants' (ibid). This presents severaL for renoving underiging ngsterg is verg different fron nunericat of expLanation, our p.viii); effect, ... to expLain the otherwise Mgsterious nuMericat disentangie; expLat,ning wiLL idea is to reiate basic worLd features to our own vaLues of the fundanentaL phgsicaL issues as such coLourfuL for nainstreaM phgsicists, atMost none of then prettg MostLg the upon hunans, associated inteLLigence) fron a new speciaL pLace Rs succeed options other the are essenti3t. Since gods do not figure in anthropic wiLL focus the incidentaLLg, forMS, object-theoru far-out the features. sorts, various or Rnd nag these turn in have further theg Mag be siMpig contingent, refLecting seLection without specific purpose. Sone phgsicists go so far as to ciain: our existence constrains the structure of the universe, indeed it even it (0 p-112), for to us , quote froM Hawking and CoLLins. connection in this sweeping context h3s been dubbed this j^s Davies the does, have nothing specificaLLg to do inteLLigence, or with Life, etc. The Dicke argunent, for Eddington-Dirac expLain coincidence, is based of principLe : anthropic the show with what work the or hunans, with designed exanpLe, to onig on the presence of heavg eieMents, and so gives but a hint of bioLogg, if that. So reversaL Invoking the huMan forMuLaticn of the principLe (D p.112)! But quite generaLLg the argunents advanced, which do principLe seLects reaLLg there is no spirit of the Copernican revoLution' in this fashion (pace D p.115, barter, and others). The conditionaL principLe estabLished bg the Dicke arguMent is essentiaLLg J) If [because, g^ven] there exist heavg eieMents, then the universe is such that the Eddington-Dirac coincidence ho ids. The fuLL expLanatorg argunent conprises, as weLL as the detaiLed phgsics that goes toward J), the nodus ponens inference: -18- �The Eddington-Dirac coincidence hotds. There exist heavy eLements, J) More generaLiy, the anthropic way gives principie to physicatiy a argued conditionai scheme of the enthymematic form K) if F then T, or its contrapositive K ) if not-F then not-T, where F is a hard factuai ciaim or more commoniy its existentiat reiativety generaiisation , and T is a more theoretic3i ciaim concerning typicaity features of the worLd, such as numericai features. The short form of anthropic exp Lanation, or better status quo expLanation, is then the argument form F, if F then T L) . .T. famiLiar ontoLogicaL proofs, for instance of an externaL worLd from the Moore s fact that exist, hands arguments. such omit typicaLLy proofs phiLosophers just are difference The is that the soLid argumentation that goes into estabLishing the conditionai schemes of status quo expianations; for instance, makes LittLe effort in this direction, and the required entaiLment rather Moore evidentLy faiLs to hoLd (see fn 30). Other formutations of the anthropic principie in the Literature are than better those hardLy 3tready exhibited. LesLie, who at Least (Like Barrow) moves humans a LittLe off centre stage, puts it in this counterfactuaL way: if our universe had been [everywhere] hostiie to Life then nobody wouLd be observing it (L2, p.66). If the consequent simpiy contextuaLLy impiies that something a Live is doing the observing, then the principie is ana Lytic, and scarceLy up to the intended expLanatory tasks (without requisite information that the the universe contains Life, and much eLse being separateLy pumped in). MhiLe if does not require this, it appears fatse; the Latest seeing-eye robot consequent did survive the hoLocaust, or did just happen as a resuLt of the quantum fLuctuation. In such as Dicke's most purported argument. offers faces reLated difficuLties: worLd appLications of the anthropic The other version of the principie LesLie NecessariLy we conscious beings observe a which is Life-containing (LI, p.lt+1). Rs it stands, this is faLse; for we mightn t exist. Nor wiLL appropriate deLetion consciousness retain we' of fix things. the worLd is, Me might but not be observers, aLL being in vats. But repaired the version is pretty use Less. It bears onLy tangentiaLLy (through that vacuum any case the formuiation Lacks sufficient generaLity; it faiLs to connect appropriateLy with scheme, the but contingency, Life its consequent, containing) on what is at issue concerning numericaL features. The materiaL on us, on observers and the Like, is strictLy irreLevant, a hang-over again presumabLy constructions of quantum theory. -1?- from bad ideaList �* The that the Copernican principte has suffered some sort of set-b3ck idea because of the essentiai rote of anthropic principies in explaining Large-number can be traced back through Carter, who heLped popuLarise the rote coincidences, between of anthropic principies and made the (rather obscure) distinction strong weak has been exaggerated subservience to the 'Copernican principte' [which is] that we must and not assume principies. anthropic gratuitoustg that we Recording to Carter, there occupg a priviLeged centraL position in the (C p.231). The regrettabLe tendency, he sags, has been to universe extend the to a most questionable dogma to the effect that our situation cannot principte be priviLeged in ang sense ... (in extreme form ... the 'perfect cosmoLogicaL principLe ...)'. The Latter assumption is certaintg untenabLe (as Dicke pointed because the universe is bg no means spatiaLLg homogeneous on a LocaL scaLe out) and speciaL conditions (of terrestrial temperature, chemicaL environment) do prevaiL on Earth. But its removaL does nothing to undercut Life the Copernican principLe, or to boost the anthropic principLe in the wag thinks Lt For does. is Carter his bracketed comment after his first formuiation of the anthropcc principle is that Lt for requisite aLthough our situation is not necessaritg centraL, inevitabLg priviLeged to some extent' (C p.291). It is doubtfuL that our position is centraL; whether it is so priviLeged depends on the intended contrast, but whatever the privilege is, it hardlg seems inevitabLe. Carter gives severaL non-equivaLent formuLations of the anthropic principLe, the first of which takes the quasi-anaLgtic but ambiguous form, LJhat we C3n expect to observe must be restricted bg the conditions necessarg for our presence as observers' (C p.291; repeated D p.119). This is certs inLg not the same as Davies condensation of it, what he caLLs the weak principLe, that observers construaL, restrict the observed'. On the obvious (but Less charitabLe) this is but rampant verificationism, of a tgpe verg familiar however from interpretations of quantum theorg. Uhat exists is independent of observers; and observers, especiaLLg remote ones, mag have no significant impact on what iL5 observed. The condensation is accordingLg false. So also, for different reasons, is what it condenses. For one thing, our expectations mag run astrag. True, what we observe is restricted bg the conditions for our doing just that, nameLg being as observers. But this tautologg imposes no phgsical constraints, being equaLLg true for Xing as observing; and no such connection is appeaied to in ang of the derivations of coincidences that Carter sketches. Once again aqain the present arguments never have angthing in detail to do with humans, or even "observers 4-c? -20- .2-1 �(and surety animats observe). Fit best the arguments are directed to the presence of water or carbon 12 or some such - things sometimes erroneousiy equated Life, and often, rather dubiousty, said to be necessary for Life.^S The situation is of this sort with Carter's "iiiustration" of the weak better Locat) anthropic principte, which he formutates as foitows: 'we must (or be prepared to take account of the fact that our Location in observers universe is existence as the necessariLy priviLeged to the extent of being compatibLe with our p.233). In order to get to grips with this recondite formuiation (C Let us remove the initiaL intensionaL functors (which my empiricist friends to with assure are me not essentiaL in physics, despite ubiquity, and their physicists procLivities to modaLs). Now our position can hardLy be priviLeged (despite Carter s tru necessariLy since human-types just might be itaLicization), uniformLy distributed through the universe or again might not exist at aLL. LJhat necessity there is enters in a different way. LJhat we are Left de Let ion, with since misLeading, probabiListic arguments suitabLe for Life in the universe (some detaiLs justified is Like more something unique (though principte this need require of Hh3t may be met. In this humans we are Long-Lived stars Rnd stiLL much more than a weak is dragged in. It is enough, for seLeet ion, universe contains Locations, neighbourhood Sag3n). we're working at it); even on Terra much of the rest of the animat kingdom is simitarLy favoured. seLeet ion in priviLege of habitats miLLions suggest are to this: we are favoured in that the physicaL conditions for our existence, as observers, are hardLy due Our Location in the universe is priviLeged to the extent of is then: be',ng compatibLe with our existence as observers'. But this ciaim cs after in where fact heavy Like the earth, in the metaLs occur, and so on (for certain other pureLy geotogicaL features). BoLtzmann s expLanation of the present high degree of which Ls extremety improbabLe cosmic organisation (in a thermodynamicaL setting) is aiso said to appLy a weak anthropic principte ; witness this the onLy reason that we are priviLeged to exceedingLy untikeiy occurrence is that our very existence [etc.J -21- O.2.2.. �* depends upon the condition which atone can be bg estabiished remarkabte that (D p.123). But again onLg gross phgsicaL organisationat principLes fLuctuation are seLected for; and no more than a weak seLection principte is required. beveraL expLained , so Carter and Davies ci3im, be cannot coincidences simpig bg a weak principte (at Least in the muLti-universes). of is made to the strong (or better gLobaL) principte: appeaL these absence The universe ... must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some in barter s (p.120). formuLation exist is for manifesttg faLse. So, Cartesian paraphrase Carter gives of the strong different cogito ergo mundus taLis est . The worLd wouLd presumabtg not be principte, verg theg is this appaLLing the necessarg; the universe does. Rnd since observers mag verg easiLg never given have evotved in the universe, reasons, stage R coroLLarg of the strong principte in this heaviLg necessitated guise is that observers are conditionaLLg must For so different were the contingent premiss faLse; and certainLg the premiss mag Least be true but the cone Lus ion faLse. But at Loading, necessitg gets and principte the appropriate conctusion. For, propertg ideaLLg this the inferentiaL form, with the into formuLated, abandons paraphrase scheme the as is before, Law Like conditionaL of basic form, if F then T, where however T is a a genuinetg gLobaL cLaim that the universe is such 3nd such (e.g. the universe now contains more matter than radiation). The scheme, so then, recast is feature distinctive some theoreticaL LocaL strong the that T is hoListic assertion 3bout the universe, incLuding essentiaL reference to it, not, as it mag be on about of the weak principte, of the universe, which can readiLg be features stated or restated without reference to the universe. But the distinction is not particuiarLg important. The robust, troubie is it from 3 worLd-seLection gives Lt a misLeading most LawLike Mag requisite within consequent. For exampLe, there is stiLL no (egocentric) thought matter; to phgsicaLLg without Descartes God to puLL him out. universe the taiLor-made is for framework of idea - in essence it cLaims a wag Living organisms are subsequentig assured of existence. [So it is]... akin mankind to inhabit. products secuLar expLanations. teteoLogicaL R duLg cLaims anthropic worLd for (D p.121). Such erroneous presentations have done much to encourage both a new anthropocentrism and the idea that are unLike habitation, 3nd that both the Laws of to traditionaL retigious expLanation of the worLd: that God made the are from Hard as it is to credit, Carter is phgsics and the initiaL conditions obLigingLg arrange themseLves in such that an procLivitg to ideaiism exceLLed bg Davies, who sags of the strong principte that that in route respectabLe Carter's (exhibited in C2)), he mag weLL get stuck in the argue to bounds to the intended phgsicaL given and of satisfactorg impression antecedents for the scheme, and makes it presentLg impossibLe appropriateLg verg perspective Carter's extravagant Cartesian paraphrase of the strong with that is principte nor on a par reformuLated Davies with, strong and in schema expLanations anthropic competition supports design with, none of the makes regarding the universe. Nor, as wiLL appear, expLanations, when made presentabLe, -22- akin to retigious �features of the worLd. The expLanations take different LogicaL of explanations forms and LnvoLve quite different ingredients. To see what is reaLLy required for the strong schema to operate, it pays to Look at Then appLications. it becomes evident observercentric that considerations are strictLy irreLevant. Once again far stronger, and biocentric more dubious, conditions than are required for the estimates actuaLLy made been For introduced. instance, (BoLtamann) K, is a good exampLe of a prediction based on what strong' anthropic principLe' (C p.23^); (8) is as foLLows: K aLL f < that is 2 " Tl_ 5 have according to Carter, his condition (8), which imposes an order of magnitude upper bound on cosmoLogicaL But and constant may be termed the 3 ' "P , P invoLved in obtaining this bound, retevance, is the of assumption that ' the un iverse is not radiation dominated aLL its [finite] Life (i.e. that the matter contribution ... to the mean mass density ... becomes greater at some stage Insofar this as is than the necessary radiation (C ...)' contribution pp.233-^.). at aLL - since the estimates concern onLy very broad features, and not LocaL variations - it is 3s necessary for Lichen as for Larkspurs. DLL that is required is a sLightLy stronger worLd seLection principLe than mereLy that worLd contain heavier eLements at some stage; but stiLL the onLy a gLobaL geophysicaL principLe. Rnd this is aLL that here. The same set of points amounts to appLies to Carter's further use of the strong principLe, to estimate the Lower bound on K, which appLies the conventionaL that gaLax Les ... are formed by condensation, starting as reLativeLy hypothesis smaLL density fLuctuations in an otherwise homogeneous further The strength tendentious assumption in background (C p.2St+). this appiication is that gaiaxies are necessary for the formation of stars and hence of Life (C p.23!*). NonetheLess there are arguments for the strong anthropic principLe, though faLLacious ones obviousLy. They come firstLy from positivism. It is cLaimed that if the universe exists then it must be observabLe; so there must be observers - a modaL faLLacy. Davies (in his exposition of Barrow and not argues universe which from the faLse premiss that onLy what is observed exists, that a did then others) admit observers is meaningLess' (D p.I21). This is ideaListic garbage. They come secondLy from an aLLeged expianatory rote, in expLaining coincidences. But it is unnecessary for this purpose as initiaL worLd seLection wiLL serve. They come thirdLy from human chauvinism; thus, too human existence is said to be responsibLe for the very speciaL structure of the universe' (D p.121)! The connection is not however causaL; so what is it supposed There is be: teLeoLogicaL? thus a serious probLem as to how this responsibitity, hardLy evident, is exercised. FinaLLy a strong principLe might uniformity to - one principLe to cover be argued for on grounds of aLL cases. But better a weaker correct -23- �principLe than a strong faLse or geophgsicaL principLe wouLd suffice Rnd principLe. dubious doubt no a weaker aLL phgsicaL constants. (Of course, for there reMains the natter of this worLd seLection. This worLd does exhibit Life, incLude hunans, and so on. But these features, Like the present species of does eucaLgpts expLanations, or reLevant, cLasses of worids.)"^ and are RnusingLg, astroLogicaL and More converses hunan affairs; white under gerMane not the to extravagant anthropic principies are to astroLogg, ceiestiaL events infLuence anthropic hunan anaLogue, affairs infLuence CeiestiaL events and processes incLude those of the sun. Moon events ceiestiaL its are abstracted fron in seLecting expLanatorg Recording other. each of wonbats, grazing of whereabouts and and other pLanets (especiaLLg). Rnd these certaintg appear to have an (indirect) weak infLuence, especiaLLg through the soLar atMosphere and pLanetarg Large pLasMas, on terrestriaL phenoMena (Fegerabend, p.93). The anthropic converse, in this forM danagingtg anthropocentric and exhibiting an excess of hubris, is Much further froM the truth. Not just the anthropocentric, but the eMphasis of nuMericat features. Rnd despite the bioLogicaL anaLogies, just Lt,ke explanation seLection without vaLues, so even Rs are there there is seLection without seLectors. More, RLthough seLection is sonetiMes accoMpiished through seLectors, often takes not is naturaL seLection. It is not seLection for, for fitness, survivaL, or whatever. Nor, More iMportant is it seLection bg, bg soMe agent. vaLues MispLaced. is insistence, Life is not essent-iaL in Mang worids Le^Lie Despite biocentric seLection without seLecters, randonig or otherwise - this tiMe as in naturaL pLace seLection, which does not require a personified Nature to do the have evoLutionarg theories as/oid ageneg. In avoiding ageneg, seLection is Like that seLecting, as enphasised. Such expLanation can straightforwardig of Darwinian evoLut- ionarg theorg; and seLection contrasts with direction as incLuded in aLternative evoLutionarg Though accounts (cf. DarLington, p.l^ff). anthropic principies coMe in a varietg of forMs, depending upon how the conditionaL scheMa ^nvoLved is fitted out, none of theM, then, does what is saud, none depends essentiaLLg on the presence of huMans, or of Life. SgntacticaLLg, theg etaborate usuaLLg status quo arguMents, of forM L), with factuaL fir^t preMis^ F concerning the state of the worLd LocaLLg (weak forM) whoLe (strong seLection forM). SenanticaLLg, or as a the factuaL preMisses function as worLd principies; theg serve to Mark out the cLass of phgsicaL wortds or to narrow then down to these or those, e.g. to those where heavier eieMents such as carbon occur, those where Long-Lived stars, such as the sun, appear. It is that carbon is sonetiMes taken to provide an "order-of-Magnitude" approxiMation for Life (that is the nearest Long-Lived star is supposed to to hunans provide that the the "approxinations" get); Life as the arguMents a steadg warMth required for the evoLution of Life (but Long-Lived stars, water, and heavier objects are as to true near need get). But these additionaL, and nore dubious, detaiis are unnecessarg for the Main thrust of status quo arguMents, as distinct -24- �from their anthropic 3nd biocentric augmentations. meet Given that the worids seiected are of this and that cast - in generai geophgsicai gross Less, up the to constraints — other features of them can be derived (more or standards rough accepted in and physics) in expLained, particuLar, how and that it is that certain (fundamentaL) physicaL constants Lie in restricted ranges, narrow and unexpected ranges. These arguments, duty fitted out, do provide exp Lanations, non-causat exp Lanations, of physicaL features of a contingent, mereLy LmprobabLe universe. Much there is, however, in these most ctaims, that has been contested, from the psycho LogicaL such of inadequacy a universe to the worth of such expLanations, if expLanations they are at aLL. objections to the cosmo-LogicaL synthesis; and finding unLikety, an in comfort and with Prob Lems mereLy universe. contingent, Somehow contingent universes have acquired the reputation of being coLd, remote and uncaring - a not habitat for sensitive creatures. But the reputation is undeserved, since fit contingency does not bear on any of these things. Mhat is contingent can be just as weLL as coLd or neither; caring or not, so far as the appLication sense aLL; at and hot makes so on. One can be warm and comfortabLe in bed on a wet and wintry night. One can be at home, comfortabLe in, in tune with, a tiny part of an improbabLe universe, as some tribaL peopLes are. None of these virtues are Ln any way undermined by contingency, matter of a necessary universe. or aLways assured by the quite separate a degree of harmony between us Furthermore, there can be, or have evoLved, and our surroundings , without principLes, as that our worse, that the universe is universe such exaggerated cLaims, on based anthropic are very speciaL and tuned to us' or, surroundings made for us'. Me humans can be in with tune the without having the universe tuned to us, as we can foLLow and ornament a song on the wind or in the woods. But so far, especiaLLy recentLy, we humans coLLectiveLy are not doing too weLL in attuning oursetves to the worLd. Rs this iLLustration begins to metaphysicaL and psychoLogicaL reveaL, predeLiction^ may pLay a not inconsiderabte rote in choice of, and ornamentation of, physicaL theory, especiaLLy of controvers LaL theories such as quantum theory and cosmoLogicaL theory. In the case of such theories there is a certain bag technicaL so to say tricks, tricks, equations and so on, which are de rigeur - a theory-skeLeton - and beyond that both an interpretation and setting for the bag integrating of theM and suppLying of with some sort of meaning, and them usuaLLy aLso some further formaLism connecting the tricks together or to a wider theoreticaL background. For exampLe, even in accounts of too much in the way of interpretation theory where is commonLy frowned upon, extensive correspondence ruLes Linking the formaLism with upon quantum cLassicaL physics are retied heaviLy. Rt Least for everything beyond the theory-skeLeton, which is what is appLied in most concrete day-to-day appLications of the theory, there is much room for rivaL fLeshing out of the skeLeton - Latitude -25- such as there is in �archeological reconstructions of peoples from some scattered bones. Recasting quantum theorg, as in the mang-worlds interpretation, offers not as merelg a basis for fleshing out the theorg non-idealisticallg, but for combining it with general to subject much of the criticism, much of it directed more broadlg at most Happilg as However such recasting, when not reLativitg. largelg ignored (the common fate of nonstandard theories), is criticism. well plural world theories in general, misses the neutral modification. There are firstlg a batch of aesthetic and ontological objections. These commonlg take off from the of unattractiveness duplication or replication of profligate such worLds. LJeLL, tastes and vaLues, Like intuitions, do varg with sub-cuLture. Some of us, who escaped over-exposure to worlds the ReaLitg do PrincipLe, stories illuminating and attractive, indeed verg inviting. So, next, the whole thing is said to be unbelievable: no one can reasonabLg existence believe worLds nonetheless, especiaLLg in explanation. these in (the these unlimited numbers of universes. Granted, we do not believe of) in this either. These other worLds do not exist; but we can make of neutral find heavg Load of objections carrging on about excess use extensive In this wag we avoid a baqgage. ontic also Ue main criticisms based on Occam s razor. (RLL these objections are short-circuit met, in much detail, in JB.) Linked to such Occamist protests are a batch of objections that are pictures worlds effect the to over-engineered, both too complex 3nd including too much baggage. Thus in thermodgnamics a smalt fluctuation producing some order is more LikeLg than one producing Lots of order, one galaxg more LikeLg than Lihg do similarlg we not find ourselves in a one galaxg universe, which is far more LikeLg? The answer is in part: because Less LikeLg contingencies hold. Is the ubiquitg No, (D p.123)? mgsterg instance, the on the commenting of of numbers approaches reasons. in these unwarranted presuppositions. The that the universe was set others Like be explained. For Dicke Thus and Peebles remark, in of the universe for a few conscious individuals, overdesign revealed well one of a thing is itself verg unlikelg. Find just special can, that a single galaxg cosmos might be ruled out bg the can observed galaxies in our universe ... therefore a such evolution further there mag be mang. up Mach's Moreover, principle. questions and remarks are based on various overdesign" for idea, for example, presupposes some individuals; but the worlds picture correctLg avoids thLS assumption. The things in this world that exist happen to be there, probable or not, and often, for reasons we can sometimes explain, not. But there is tittle solid evidence that theg are arranged, for us or others. In its original form the unfocussed "overdesign" objection was mainlg directed at cruder anthropic principles, as were unverifiabilitg and unfalsifiabilitg. a batch of objections The well-worn criticism, that notorious psgchoanalgtic and Marxist principles did too much, being so designed that covered everg protested that case, was redirected from against anthropic principles. it is hard to see how the anthropic principLe can be It used theg was to make testable predictions, because ang theorg inconsistent with our existence is �4 M3nLfestLg Not faLse . such protests been weakened bg avant garde have onLg phLLosophg of science, but, as Carter has poLnted out, anthropLc arguments couLd varLous Ln prLncLpLe have been used to predLct theg Rnd notLced. were faLsLfLcatLon, e.g. where erroneous that unLLkeLg assumptLons prLncLpLes, regards Rs fLrst). under but Ls worLd-sgnthesLs, aLL that worLds the whether Ln wLth cosmoLog Les and of verLfLcatLonLst seLectLon whLch semantLcs, or phgsLcs exLst, LnvoLved of themes objectLons do have some verLfLabLLLtg vLrtue of what Ls meant bg bg bg neutraLLsed ex Lsttng. But the force of these objectLons Ls theorg. as conversLon, object-theorg Granted LnterpretatLon. of Often, Lt (though of weaker forms wouLd be abandoned, other surrendered force agaLnst mang-worLds theories, assume derLved object Lons are LargeLg mLsdLrected, because what are at Lssue are phgsLcaL semantLcs, are coLncLdences premLss factuaL be wouLd verLfLabLLLtg not the anthropLc arguments do admLt of of 3ssumptLons the before coLncLdences numerLcaL neutraL worLds objectLons, the crLtLcLsms of mang-worLd such prLncLpLes anthropLc as geophgsLcaL or prLncLpLes are LntertwLned, and dLsentangLLng the crLtLcLsms Ls enough to partLg So them. def Late aLso wLth the reLated charge th3t the neutraL worLd- Ls Lt sgnthesLs theorg Ls unscLentLfLc or at much turns Least dubLousLg scLentLfLc.PLaLnLg on what Ls admLtted Lnto that esteemed categorg, scLentLfLc. But on most accounts, use of seLectLon prLncLpLes succeeds Ln gettLng LncLuded. Rnd so, pLaLnLg enough, does mang-worLds quantum theorg. Rfter 3LL, Lt has 3pproxLmateLg as the same sorts of predLcatLve and test capabLLLtLes more That fact of narrow empLrLcaL LndLstLnguLshabLLLtg mag be the source of theorg. other compLaLnts, but Lt gtves no ground for the charge worLd Ls seLectLon prLncLpLes excLuded! are It at hand. of scLentLfLc and theorLsLng experLmentLng true that some theoretLcaL and wouLd (per prefer LmpossLbLe) and wantLng to st Lek to a uLtLmate and unLfLed expLanatLons. No doubt such semantLcaL apparatus does faLL fouL of the the substance of the charge, consLder some of the crLterLa often beLng theLr theorg narrower sLmpLg reveaLs further serLous defects Ln such vLews. But to reach that vLews: fuLLer the narrower (hgpothetLco-deducttve) methodoLogg, are uneasg wLth worLds seLectLon, sureLg But phgsLcLsts, and mang phLLosophers, LosLng sLght of what enters Lnto range quantum orthodox scLentLfLc. UnfaLsLfLabLe? SureLg set down for Ln areas where the framework Ls not pLnned down bg phgsLcaL theorg. OvercompLLcated and LnsuffLcLentLg gLven what the worLds theorg Ls Lntended to accompLLsh sLmpLe? Not (e.g. the semantLcaLLg theoretLcaL work Lt Ls aLso put to Ln areas such 3s LLnguLstLcs). Etc., etc. Perhaps the most teLLLng theorLes LLke worLd—sgntheses objectLons whLch agaLnst LncLude status quo arguments, and them, concern theLr expLsnatorg capacLtg. StrangeLg theg have been condemned both as expLaLntng too much - ang thLng at aLL can be brought out Ln some worLd - and as expLaLnLng too LLttLe and beLng trLvLaL. Not both these objectLons are LLkeLg to succeed, as theg tend to undercut one another. IndependentLg, Lt seems cLear that the arguments do provLde expLanatLons, for LnvoLved Lnstance, of the strength of the strong nucLear force. It aLso seems cLear that the expLanatLons afforded are of vargLng -27- depth, �+ depending in part on the depth of the underlying physicaL theory invoLved, this and the pLausibiLity of the further assumptions made in the arguments. Better exempiific3tions of status quo arguments in physics satisfy not oniy more ordinary requirements for expLanation; they aLso meet assembLed conditions considerable time, by HempeL, mainstream the which conditions on position demanding for represented, some what counted as a scientific expLanation. Furthermore, the chief objections to have more the HempeLian the account that emerged have been to the effect that it is too rigorous, not that it faiLs to provide jointLy sufficient conditions for expLanation. To make a prima facie case that better status quo arguments do provide exp Lanations, it is enough then show to expLanation LogicaL HempeL s that conditions on the (p.2t+7ff) have been met. By contrast conditions design with scientific of the arguments, 3re satisfied. The expLanandum T is a LogicaL adequacy of pattern basic consequence of the physicaL argument eLaborating the schemas F, if F then T; the expLanans has empiricaL content, at Least in the shape of expLanans F; which connection if F then T, provides expLanans are true, Uere a foLLows from arguments using physicaL Laws. FinaLLy, the demanding empiricaL condition of adequacy, that the premisses used in the is satisfied in better status quo arguments. the basic pattern aLso necessary for scientific expLanation, it wouLd be an easy coroLLary that many poorer status quo arguments fait to provide expianations (beginning with Carter s and Descartes is there the and contains general, Laws which are actuaLLy used in the derivation. For, in better status quo arguments, the conditionaL schema, Law Like premiss much quo status that such Cogito arguments), and that arguments cannot presentLy expLain decentLy, '^ncLuding such major puzzLes as Life and inteLLigence in the LocaL worLd. It can be independentLy argued, moreover, that poorer status quo arguments, which patentLy (or short meeting HempeLian conditions, fait to generate satisfactory of satisfying) expianations. TriviaL, dogmatic, forms, such as that things 3re the way they are because that is how they are, represent a virtuaLLy worse of sort. this But possibie. weakening to principte, that what The universe is inhabitabie, because we are here, because ask Forrest so is aLso humans inhabit The universe is suited to inteLLigent Life because there are peopLe such questions upon). focusses inferences, is sLightLy embroidered, are arguments with connecting principLes Such, the earth , case better, or more informative, are those arguments scarceLy which appLy the possibility Like faLL (exampies adapted from the sorts of anthropic arguments These short; patentLy faLL arguments, which they LnvoLve offer no aimost immediate further appropriate basic (HempeLian) argumentation making use of generaL Laws. Given that better status quo arguments do afford scientific expianations, and given further that the arguments do serve to remove and not without predictive force, why have they been genuine puzzLement fauLted as expianations, and sometimes criticised 3S not providing expianations are at aLL (e.g. Forrest)? The main reason offered, that back-to-front , these "expianations" are appears to rest on the assumption that aLL genuine expLanation -28- �shouLd be broadLg causaL, and accordingLg exhibit (time-) the direction or controi. Status quo expLanations are certainLg not causaL, and mag causation weLL run counter to causaL direction, expLaining features of the earig the through of distribution present universe of eLements. That is, however, perfectLg in order. For satisfactorg expLanation is not causaLLg restricted either ordinariLg or scientificaLLg. HempeL suppLies severaL different sorts of pattern basic of causaLLg or controL directed (pp.352-3). EspeciaLLg striking in this exampLe opticaL straightforward his of his which are not causaL expLanation or expLanation scientific exampLes regard is a particuLar event...satisfactoriLg of expLained bg reference to subsequent occurrences'; but his exampLe of two-wag where the period of a penduLum serves to expLain the Length of the expLanation, penduLum as weLL as converseLg, is aLso highLg re Levant. For it is too expiaining commonLg assumed numericaL that shouLd coincidences be the presence of water, carbon and the Like in the universe, not vice versa. But there is no iLLuminating reason quo status whg direction shouLd expLanation the instead not in run the as weLL as, vice versa. That of, iLLuminating direction is after aLL from the famiLiar to the much Less famiLiar, and more in need of expLanation. such It is true of course that more simpig means that status quo expLanations ad hominem stgLe of status quo expLanation, for are. Like expLanations, most further unreasonabLg stop deeper expLanation. The expLanation-stopping forms are and form: contraposed inquirers verg for expLanation if it weren t so gou woutdn t be here to ask the question. However such put-downs (in the envisaged persistent Legitimate the those (which Forrest discusses) where the response to a request for the Long. wouLd contexts) not more charge, damaging feature of the universe, Then PF. seLecting worLds where PF hoLds. But the theorg. the then, is that worLd-sgnthesis can expLain too much. The charge is backed up bg the foLLowing sort of consideration. puzzLing deter Theg wouLd be awag in search of further expLanations, such as better status quo arguments mag furnish (at Least for t ime be ing). The not begin in the middLe wag. Nor do theg, except in speciaL, rather theg uLtimate: takes famiLiar, the presence of water and carbon, aLso caLLs for expLanation; but that as quest the charge it Take ang can be expLained simpig bg misrepresents worLd-sgnthesis There is more to it than this. There is a cruciaL argumentative Linkage aLso invoLved, between PF and gross geophgsicaL features of the worLds (near factuaL worLd T) which are seLected. Or, put differentig, the seLection does not take pLace on basis the of PF, but (mereLg) under the constraint of gross geophgsicaL features; accordingLg if the argumentative Linkage from satisfactorg status quo arguments worLd-sgnthesis. is missing, PF is not to be expLained through In short, then, worLd-sgnthesis theorg offers expLanations when bg and then the expLanations mag varg greatLg in quaLitg depending on the depth of the phgsicaL the framework is suitabLg fLeshed out phgsicaL theorg; information invoLved in the argumentative Linkage. EssentiaLLg the same points undermine Forrest's further objection to such -2?- �many-worLds explanation, truths; contingent have we aLL do to coaches easiLy as the pumpkins of turning numericsL coincidences. But there is no such free as seLection of phusicaL worLds - which do not incLude worLds vaLidating magicaL as faiL, can schema connecting arbitrary and practices. Status quo expianations may not be easy transformations at aLL, but physicaLLy comp Lex, they are not atways and they as is to posit suitabLy many and varied (p.9). Thus the theory is aLLeged to expLain worLds into that it "expLains" contingent faLsehoods as easiiy an when assumption invoLved easiLy avaiLabte, and the eLaboration of the in , and the argumentative schema issues in a contingent faiLs faLsehood. For a necessary condition that a status quo expianation be successfuL is that the argument be correct; but then given that the argument form is vaiid, the cone Lus ion cannot be simpiy f aLse. is It that satisfactory expianations, with conforming to such conditions of adequacy as deductive vaiidity in and quo status expianations winning in expianations differ from decisiveLy design which are sometimes seen as on an expianatory LeveL competition with status quo and expianations their piuraL-worLds setting (thus e.g. LesLie), and sometimes even confused with them. Design arguments characteristicaLLy take the deductiveLy invaLid abductive modus toLLens form: Things are (surprisingLy) so and so F If a design hypothesis heLd (e.g. the universe anticipated observers, a design-force operated), things woutd be (unsurprisingLy) so and so. If H then F Therefore, a design hypothesis (probabLy) hoLds. .. H Nor in design arguments is the connecting schema normaLLy eLaborated by appropriate scientific argument; nor, where God is invoked, i§; there any way of suitabLy confining the argument scientificaLLy. Thus support first the LesLie's of Larger cLaims is faLse:- the LiorLd EnsembLe hypothesis rather than the God hypothesis. !^e do not have...strong evidence of an EnsembLe' (LI, p.150). for Science does not their existence No branch of physics in a way commanding wide acceptance (LI, p.S3). The main reason is that the Bod hypothesis is not part of a physicaL theory that many-worLd theory is caLLs in the way of quantum theory (thus, e.g., there is no physics text corresponding to DeLiitt and Graham for the God hypothesis), [^hiie the Last cLaim is true, it does not teLL against the truth of neutraL many-worLds theory. Uhat science supports is science, not the the metaphysics it presupposes. Physics is not however aLL of science by any means, and even science doesn't do everything, onLy a rather narrow seLection of things. Richard SyLvan -30- 11 �RPPENDIX 1. Some Rncient Rntecedents The Non-Limited is the originaL materiaL of existing things; further the source] from which existing things derive their existence is a iso that to which they' return at their destruction, according to necessity [for reparation]... —----- So, in the 6th Century B.C., said Rnaximander, perhaps among the first aLso to set down a story of the evoLution of humankind.Something the same was said in text, though on the favoured taLe a Heideggerean and Taoist touch was Lent, the with Nothingness repLacing the Non-Limited. In the on beginning, there was nothing; and uLtimateLy, too, there wiLL be nothing. have been paid. The p3raLLeL with Rnaximander can be pressed further. In account origins, of of worLd the contemporary charged pairs of particLes are created in the oppositeLy 'the order, wiLL Reparation process of pair formation from the vacuum; white in Rnaximander's story formation story, this opposites the of which are present Ln the one [the Non-Limited], are separated out from it' (but 'the "opposites" are the hot, coLd, the dry the , the moist, and the rest : see Robinson p.25). There is aLso a phenomenon which corresponds to some Limited extent to the Big Bang, nameLy Vortex. the It seems cLear, however, from the materiaL Burnet assembLes, that Rnaximander's position amounted to the first Less satisfactory resoiution, matter or substance aLways. For the BoundLess or Infinite was a materiaL cause, -^*-*dstance (p. 5k<); it is eternaL and ageLess is brought about the origin of the worids. did — Further, according to SimpLicius, not ascribe the origin of things to any aLteration of matter, but said that the oppositions separated encompasses aLL worids substance". RLso there is in it eternaL motion, in which which makes it a queer he and out . If in that the substratum was which a boundLess body, were is right — and it may not be, especiaLLy given Later ontotogicaL infLuences (cf. p.61) - then the matter is cLear. Rnaximander beiieved there were innumerabLe worids (p.58). These worids were concurrent, not successive. coex istent remains uncLear, but Later in the Whether Bound Less" they tradition (biassed) took them exist, making Rnaximander's position a many-existent-wortds theory. The to Law of compensation, under which for borrowing or variation reparation must be made, becomes the Law of repayment aLL were of conservation. The reparation paraLLeLs the borrowed" mass-energy. The more generaL steering of aLL things - overarching order in naturaL processes - becomes the Laws of nature which govern (reguLate) the processes. 'The orderLiness ... is grounded in the nature of things as such . Rnaximander's account represents an immenseLy -31- important stage in the �transition from world-order is myth from science. to first to ... Last 'Hesiod's account of the origin of the anthropomorphic. account Rnaximanders represents, in principLe, a complete break with this mode of thought (Robinson p.27). From this angle the anthropic and idealistic fixes of contemporary science show marked regression. That transition, beyond anthropic creation stories, is also accomplished in the main philosophical essentials of the favoured resolution can where Taoism, be found. Something flowed from nothing, in a seemingly paradoxical way? but not through ang creation or agency. There was a the before time when beginning nothing at aLL existed. The problem of Laws (of nature) was also recognised, and resolved. did Laws not exist (independently at least of things that did) but were exhibited in in things that did exist. So it seems to follow that, stage at restricted property to duty what separated, and was mainly Lacking ascriptions Taoism Such nothing. a and deep in cosmogonic tales, then, from the ^.th C. B.C. until the 20th C., was a plausible explanatory story as to how come from together. of does exist. (Fuller details of Taoist cosmology, under this type of interpretation, are ventured in ecology', written with D. Bennett.) Mhat the which nothing existed, the taws could hold without having 3ny sort of existence, i.e. truth and existence were existence at story a few something could humans are Just beginning to piece NOTES Thi^ passage from Misner, Thorne and Uheeter, p.1212, is given an appropriately grander setting Ln the text. The passage Ls also quoted by DavLes, G p.222, who Lt to Wheeler. In Davies the idea of ascribes foundations for cosmology simple and unassailable Logical is given a different exposure, and is then linked with restrictions, to zero, on God s range of choice of universe to make. 2 Especially by those whose inquisitiveness and sense of blunted or destroyed by the mainstream culture and its wonder h3s educational not been practices, practices much mainstream philosophy reinforces and tries to justify. 3 Indolent philosophers tend to assign those of these questions that they write off (e.g. as semantically defective or as betraying philosophical uonfuslon or hang—upz?) to science. But they are not Just a matter for and scientists tend to come up with philosophically loaded, naive, theories scientists remain, insofar as they address the cannot questions and at often science; enough all. Too many Like too many RustraLian phiLosophers, in the grips of awfuL metaphysics, such as narrow empiricism and/or physicaiism. -32- �^The anaLysis semantical It of naturaL a is Law is that' Law-constrained worLds, naturaL worids. The interpretation ruLe for necessity. Terra, appLy but to Like is It shouLd be noted that geophysicaL features, appLied in seLecting worLds, are not of course confined to systems. in terns of geophysicaL pLanetary other "Rn eLaboration of this type of answer can be further expLoited to heLp why actuaL the standard ot worLd is science expLain comparativeLy so that simpLe, mathematicaLLy tractabLe, etc. HameLy, it is convenientLy so because the actuaL worLd seLection invoLved impLicitLy to render it so, by choice of a serves worLd with the compLexity of richer worLds removed and onLy tractabLe ideaL etements (such as scientific universaLs) adjoined. &RLtern3tiveLy, through quantum and borrowing positive feedback, a massive firebaLL forms. The story admits of much variation. ? The prob Lems, as the questions of the Lattice in diagram 2 indicate, what expLaining phiLosophers does exist, Lie with what does not. In a reLated way, 3LL those not papers on the prob Lems nonexistence of and nonexistents have misjudged the prob Lernatic, and misconceived the onus of proof. For commonLy the probLems concern existents and their behaviour; nonexistents, especiaLLy those functioning in expLanatory rotes as regards existentiai often behaviour, are very weLL behaved by comparison with existents. It has been suggested, by D. Lewis, that the underLying theory of items (of JB) renders everything exists. But it nonexistent, is and makes it 3 reaL probLem, how anything patentiy faLse that the theory of items render everything nonexistent. There are criteria for existence, which are often JB, chapter 9). Every thing nominaLists normaLLy take to satisfied (cf. exist satisfies the to be justified; it cannot (with any pretension to satisfactoriness) just be cLaimed, in the fashion of so many phiLosophers. In any case, Lewis can be simuLated: whatever ind iv idua Ls exist criteria. Beyond that existence has in Lewis worLds wiLL exist in worids-seLection theory. Rnd it is. a genuine phiLosophicaL probLem how anything exists. g in 19t+6; see his cosmoLogicaL text. Llhitrow aLso appLied, more than RpparentLy a quarter of a century ago, PrincipLe , in his what has now been eLevated to the Rnthropic answer to why the dimensions of space are three; nameLy, th3t this atone permits the evoLution of Nan, the formuiator of the probLem'. However 'Uhitrow's reasons concern not mankind but stabLe pLanetary orbits and compLex neurai networks' (LI, p.!^). g Compare the binding energy which keeps etectrons bound to a nucLeus, where correiativeiy energy stored up in overcoming forces of repuLsion is positive. -33- �e a story couLd be totd to bring Laws within the expLanation framework. However It wouid teLLing invoLve Laws first evoLved or happened to hoLd, the how before vacuum fLuctuations. (For some interesting specuLation, from which the ontic and anthropic commitment can be removed without totaL Loss, see Barrow pp. 151-2, where "chaotic gauge theory" is considered.) The issue of uLtimate is expLanation again up taken seLf-justifying postulate as serving refLexive, expLanation. Note that in UQ, to the resoLve the matter the especiaLLy of probLem uLtimate, PostuLate Characterisation a of of object-theory is an initiaLLy promising candidate for such a principte. issue is that, on the story as toLd, quantum phenomena assume Another serious decidedLy they course Of macro-dimensions. may, Schrodinger s cat iLLustrates, but perhaps not in the parabLe the as supposed of catastrophic form. In the absence of any approved quantization of general, reLativity, there onLy are Lax physicaL controis on what is in and what is out in specuLation here. Rnd, of course, the second story couid There are other mechanisms for the sudden be rise in eLaborsted other ways. e.g. white mass-energy, of ho Les in geometrodynamics. In his second paper, Tryon makes a rather casuaL beginning on meeting some of difficuLties the with the vacuum fLuctuation theory the cosmos, and of expLains the advantages of combining the theory with that of a (stiLL probLematic) "infLationary" universe, to boost the fLuctuation. But the theory stiLL awaits aporopriateLy detaiLed deveiopment and modeLLing. 12 There are various other issues concerning the physicaL constants, incLuding the question of the (sLow) evoLution of "constants" over time. LJeLL, do evoLve, the they if same sort of probLems arise for the parameters which repLace them (L.e. at each time t, for c(t)). There are putative arguments to the effect that there can be no very grand unified theory, and no finaL eLimination of constants, because any such theory wouid do too much in determ in ing the worLd (and things). But it is unctear at present how such an argument gets duty eLaborated. R tight argument uneLiminabiLity of some physicaL constants from physicaL principLes for the wouLd be of much interest. 13 Th',s is what is reaLLy accompLLshed in Carter. To some extent we have emerging in this area a contemporary scientific numeroLogy. 1L Convergence arguments, e.g. for such things as the Church-Turing thesis, underLying connections, but not co-operation. l^Even Less, seemingLy, is the universe an accident, 'an event proceeding from an unknown cause; something unexpected; a casuaLty, a mishap, l&If however the worLd reaLLy were necessary, such improbabiLity must be grossLy -34- �reduced. How can that be: how can these contingencies be not what theg seem? 1? How M3ng worLds? ContinuousLg mang worLds? There is no reason whg not. But the answer is: as mang at Least as required. In object-theorg numbers don t short matter though much, so difficuLties technccaL controL Ls advantage. an are There as to measures, e.g. of fewness, in infinite modeLLings. Yet the notions are Ln order, e.g. among the naturaL numbers primes are few. 18 point, ThL^, and the inestimabLLitg specific of probabLLLties Ln (e.g. Ls argued, though in insufficient detaiL, bg TouLmLn among others meteoroLogg) Bg the wag, sureLg a creator wouLd have increased probabLLitLes bg seeing to a unLverse for fit decent habitation; a variation upon the argument from evLL infiltrates itseLf Ln probabiLitg guise here. 13 worked There are in fact mang proposed soLutions, most of them not theg (because far verg out have onLg few proponents), most of them not comprehensive certainLg (but it couLd be argued that this is a faLse ideaL), severaL of them discussed bg Everett, DeMLtt, Lande and others. 20 MheeLer s sequentiaL modeL another, so satisfgLng the theorg (Like certain offers a simitar range of worLds, but one after 'reaLLtg principLe". EarLLer MheeLer had adopted cosmoLogies) Eastern with in muLtLpLLcitg a both sequent La LLg and Lnto the possibLe; but recent Lg he has abandoned dimen^Lon^,, the Latter, partig on erroneous ontoLogLcaL grounds. 21 It Ls of course not the onLg reaLLstLc-stgie LnterpretatLon whLch does thLs: envisage everu Lande s LnterpretatLon is another. 22 From a neutraL viewpoint, Lt ts entLreLg taLse that atom ... as Me must constantLg engaging in this tgpe of scattering sctLvitg, therebg spLLtting the worLd again and again Lnto a stupendous number carbon-copLes of of LtseLf. The unLverse must therefore be LLkened to a tree, whLch branches 3nd (D p.I25). Nor Ls rebranches universe. 23 To anticipate, schemas of what the form, happens "if the tree-structured sgstern of universes the is as foLLows:- The antecedents of "anthropic" there exist so and so [e.g. observers] then ang phgsLcaL worLds must be such and such", are appLLed to phgsLcaL worLds. Rs there certainLg do exist so and so, narrow ctass the phgsLcaL worLds of are restricted to those that are such and such. gL It cs stLLL reasonabLe to 3sk whg - indeed to e.g. whg do we inhabit it?, whence a Long pose' severaL whg questions, evoLutionarg storg. Mhg are the constants those theg are?, then aLternative answers, LncLudLng brute fact, are among the possibiLities. -35- �roundLg defeated Shapiro. 26 bg the sorts considerations advanced bg Feinberg and of Davies aLso suggests that mang-worLds theorg can provide a pLausibLe phgsicaL (as opposed to phiLosophicaL) justification for the strong principte (D p.122 middLe). In fact he never reaLLg shows this satisfactoriig (nor can it be so shown), and in pointing to the power of the m3ng—universe theorg he undermines the strong principte, showing it otiose. 2? arguments are presented in modat form, with the connecting quo status Often scheme set in either necessitated form, if F that) (e.g. T if exist there necessaritg then (it if possibLe modaLities are de dicto and and that invoLved cLaims the It such). if F then T. The modaLitg invoLved is not one of LogicaL contingent nomic of that strength, but can be adequateLg NecessariLg, necessitg, an The error. argument guarantee the concLusion, NecessariLg T, nor does it pretend form these or even in Lowest common denominator form. To attach the (reLative) modaLitg simpig to consequent T wouLd be second is 'it is more than mereLg rather reads that seems represented, as usuaL, through a necessitated connecting schema, one F form, (e.g. what is the case LocaLLg (what observers observe, T etc.) is onLg possibLe if phgsics is such aLwags be and so, then the universe must have, or so conform to, such and such features), or, in quasi-transcendentaL onLg must to do does not so. The is a LittLe more probLematic; but it appears to assert that F is inconsistent with not-T, and so, through obvious connections, the same as the rectified first form. 28 Mhat we have are devices, that fragments of theories, ruLes thumb, of appear to work in a range of cases. and caLcuLating It is these parts that mag generate successfuL technoiogg. The picture is Like engineering. 29 R main charge made bg LesLie against mang-worid cosmoLogies, e.g. LI, p.l^Sff. It is a surprising turn, given the popuLaritg of hgpothetico-deductive methodoLogg, to have it aLso objected that mang-worLd theorg voids induction. Putting chance in controL of inter-worLd differences erodes confidence in our sampLe of ReaLitg, on which our inductions are based' (LI, p.1^.3). this objection gets off the ground (it is transparentLg Insofar cLear as that it does), it depends on assuming the reaLitg of the entire worLd ensembLe. So Lt not Lapses against a neutraL theorg. 30 R reLated phitosophicaLLg important exampLe where the schema does so far is in Moore s proof of an externaL worLd, noted above. The reason is that the existence of arbitrarg materiaL objects, such as hands or does f3it not guarantee that the requirements (order, isoLated unitg, cabbages, coherence, mcnd-cndependence, etc.) for an externaL worLd are satisfied. 31 Rn earLier version of this paper was presented at the RustraLasian Rssociation of PhiLosophg Conference, Rugust 138^. The -36- heLpfuL comments bg David �Rrmstrong, Brian Ellis and David Lewis, unreferenced above, were the discussion. commentaries; Both several made during John Leslie and Jack Smart supplied me with worthwhile their points have been incorporated, but some have of been resisted. The initial Univerity preprint series. version W3S published in an Rustralian National 32^ See Freeman, p.IS. for fuller discussion of need for reparation, see Burnet. Rnaximander's on position; the REFERENCES J.D. Barrow, Rnthropic definitions', Quarterly Journal of Royal the Rstroncmical Society 21^ ( 1983) lt+6-153 H. Bondi, Cosmology, Second edition, Cambridge University Press, I960. R, Brout, F. Englert and F. Gunzig, The creation of the universe as a quantum phenomenon' RnnaIs of Physics 115 (1978) 78-106. J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, Fourth edition, Rdam & Charles Black, London, 1930. B. Carter, Large number coincidence and the anthropcc principle is in Longair, 291-98. B. Carter, The anthropic principle and its implications cosmology', biological for evolution , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London (1983) St* 7-363. C.B. Collins and S.U. Hawk eng, Uhy is the universe isotrophic?', 19310 Rstrophqsics Journal 180 (1973) 317. C.D. Darlington, Darwin's Place in History, Blackwell, Oxford, 1959. P. Davies, The Rccidental Universe, Cambridge Universitu Press, Cambridge, 1982; referred to as D. P. Davies, God and the New Physics, Dent, London,1983; B.S. DeUitt referred to as G. and N. Graham, The Many-Uorlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1973. R.H. Dicke and P.J.E. Peebles, in S.U. Hawking and U. The big bang cosmology - enigmas and nostrums , Israel, eds, Genera 1 relativity: an Einstein centenary survey, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979, pp. 501^-517. -37- �G.F.R. ELLis, 'is the universe expanding?', GeneraL Reiativitg and Gravitation 9(2) (L973) 87-9L. G. Feinberg and R. Shapiro, Life Beyond Earth, Morrow, New York, 1980. P. Feyerabend, Science Ln a Free Society, New Left Books, London, 1978. 'RnthropLc answers and the existence of P. Forrest, Proceedings God', of the Russet Lan Society, University of Sydney, 7 (1982) 1-13. K. Freeman, RncLLLa to the Pre-Socratic Phitosophers, BLackweLL, Oxford, 1971. N. Griffin and R. SyLvan, Provisionai Rnswers to ULtimate Questions, typescript, Canberra, 1981}.; referred to as UQ. S. Hawking and G.F. ELiis, The Large-Scaie Structure of Space-time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973. M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, (trans. R. Mannheim), YaLe University Press, New Haven, 1959. C.G. HempeL, Rspects of Scientific Exp LanatLon, Free Press, New York, 1965. Lande, The Laws behLnd the quantum Laws , BrLtLsh JournaL for the PhiLosophu of Science 27 (1976) 27-^3. J. L^sLLe, RnthropLc prLncLpLe, worLd ensembLe, desLgn , RmerLcan PhLLosophLcaL QuarterLy, 19 (1982) l^l-lSl; referred to as LI. J. LesLLe, Cosmo Logy, probabLLity and the need to exp La Ln LLfe', Ln ScLentLfLc ExpLanatLon and UnderstandLng (ed. N. Rescher), UnLversLty Press of RmerLea, MaryLand, M.S. LongaLr 1983, 53-82; referred to as L2. (ed.), Confrontat Lon of Cosmo Log LeaL Theories wLth ObsservatLonaL Data, ReLdeL, Dordrecht, 1971}.. C.U. MLsner, K.S. Thorne and J.R. UheeLer, GravLtatLon, Freeman, San 1973. G.E. Moore, PhLLosophLcaL Papers, RLLen and UnwLn, London, FrancLsco, 1959. R. RobLnson, Essays Ln Greek PhLLosophg, CLarendon Press, Oxford, 1969. R. RoutLey, ExpLorLng MeLnong's JungLe and Beyond, Research SchooL ScLences, RustraLLan NatLonaL UnLversity, 1980; referred to as JB. -38- of SociaL �Sagan Broca's Brain: Ref Leet ions on the Romance of Science, New York, Random House, 1973. S.Tou Lm in, The Return to CosmoLogy: Postmodern Nature, University of CaLifornia Press, BerkeLey Ca., 1982. Is the universe a vacuum fLuctuation?', Nature 2^6 (1973) 396-7 E.P. Tryon, E.P. Tryon, Science and the Theo Logy of *Mhat made the worLd?', New Scientist 101 (198!+) It+00, 1!+-16 FLN. Mhitehead, Process and ReaLity, Cambridge University Press, 1929. 6.H. Uhitrow, The Structure and Evo Lution of the Universe, Harper, New York, 1959. Second edition, � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document RBSTRRCT The proposed syntheses Ls set Mithin generat object-theorg. tde3 The undertging the sgnthesis ts that the 3tternative Mortds sewantics - arrived 3t tn of pursuit of a tnctudtng senanttes universat ones) retevant and, semantics generat (a as connectedLg, part for of att a Languages, comprehensive object-theorg - be apptted atso tn fundamentat phgstcs, Most importanttg to the natter of the ortgtn, htstorg, 3nd phgstcat features of the cosmos, but as Mett, agatn connectedtg, theorg. etseMhere, Ln particutar Ln the LnterpretatLon of quantum a The unLversat semantics Ls a mang Mortds - theorg. The poLnt of such apptgLng an mang nonexistent Mortds - LnterpretatLon Ln cosmotogg atso Ls exptained bg Mag of examp Les, concernLng the understandLng of the contLngencg of exLstence and of present arrangements. improbabititg the R resotutton of the basLc question, sketched, a as Marm-up exerctse 'Nhg does angthLng at for exLst?' att questions as to Mhg various other the prominent features of the universe are as theg are, notabtg Mhg the constants of phgstcs appear to have. have the fundamentat parttcutar surprtstngtg senstttve vatues theg Chauvinistic ansMers through anthroptc prLnctptes are crLttcattg Ln favour of resotutLon bg Mag of Mortd sgntactLcattg, status quo arguments, MhLch use setection^ and gross rejected, correspondLng features geophgsLcat thLs and neLghbourLng unLverses to exp La Ln the surprLsLng vatues of The character of the Mortd—sgnthests resotutton - reaLLg a resotutton Ls ts of constants. frameMork fLLLed out Ln the course of countering a Mide SMeep of objections, and of exp La LnLng Mhg the resotutton frameMork invotving seLeet ion satisfactorg of the main tgpes LLLustrated in the four-fotd: is the most IMPROVED CO3MO-LOCICRL 3YMTHE3I3 TOWRRD RH There Logicai is a foundations tradition persistent - impiging simpLe and get undiscovered - for the whoLe of cosmoLogg. The as tradition, which peaked in modern rationaiism, continues strong in cosmoLogicai specuLation. unassaiiabLe Thus, contemporarg for exampLe, recent rationaiistic theories of the universe, ambitiousLg aimed at mathematico-iogicai expression and capture of nature. Thus, of MheeLer: for exampLe, the bottom Line to the mang theoreticaL enterprises LittLe astonishment shouLd there be, therefore, if the description of nature carries one in the end to Logic, the ethereat egrie at the center of mathematics. If, as one beiieves, aLL mathematics reduces to the mathematics of Logic, and aLL phgsics reduces to mathematics, what aLtemative is there but for aLL phgsics to reduce to the mathematics of Log ic ? Logic is the ontg branch of mathematics that can think about itse Lf'. Logic reassumes its ancient roLe 3S the fundamentaL science; the Mord expresses a LogicaL recipe. Even white abandoning some of the it Lus ions of grand reduct ion istic schemes, and undermining the EnLightenment power guest for the LogicaL the theoreticaL capture and can The sgnthesis outiined in setting. contribute what foLLows LiberaLised bg are semantics and to the organisation of a unified fits into this more modest It is achieved bg suitabig reLocating cosmoLogg as a part of semantics (generousig construed, for exampie, to admit contextuaL eLements). then, to controt of the universe, there is much of a more modest character that recent LogicaL theorg, as nonstandard sgstematisation, worid picture. kegs universaL So unified, semantics, re Levant semantics and cosmoLogg, as suggested in a preLiminarg wag in diagram 1. RCTURL X L ORLD(S) GEOPHYSICRL SYSTEMS SUBSPRCE PHYSICRL SYSTEMS SUBSPRCE RELEVRHT SYSTEMS SUBSPRCE MORLD SPRCE Comment. The subspaces are Marked out by ctosure and other requirements, that of by cLosure of each worLd under deducibiLity (reLevant deriva— systems reLevant biLity), that of physicaL systems by cLosure aLso under physicaL Laws formuLated terMS Ln (suitabLy of condLtLonaLs) and perhaps factuaL constraints as weLL. actuaL (or better t3ctuai) worLd Ls a seLect coMMon worLd the to nested spaces. The underLytng Lde3 of the synthesis is siMpiy this: a subspace of is aLso a suitabLe framework for cosmoLogy, for an interpret— semantics worids neutrai *3 L Lon of the Log iceL theory of the universe as a whoLe. In Less condensed form, the ide3 is that the aLternative worids semantics arrived at in the pursuit of a semantics universaL part connectedLy, as semantics comprehensive (a theory the of aLL of for aLL be objects, Languages) and, aLso appLied physics - most importantiy to the matter of the origin, history and fundamentaL physicaL features of this cosmos, but 3S weLL eLsewhere, in interpretation theory. quantum of particuLar Ln That stripping. ontoLogicai of Load MorLd-ensembLe terms of nonexistent Mortds. Hot surprisingiy, in the recasting the in theory j^s for is, the theory can be recast in existentiaLLy neutraL terms, wcthout the originaL object ionabLe theory, the Rnd in the case of quantum theory there is aLready, most convenientiy, a many-universe or worLd-ensembLe theory, ready neutrai in (e.g. changed unobservabLe the spiitting worLd of the Everett other worids interpretation gives way to future— directed worLd branching). The setting in terms of do which objects not exist, especiaLLy, is essentiaL. For one reason, the idea grew out of investigation (with Griffin for the provisionaL but so far nonexistent book UQ) of what is normaLLy taken to be a phiLosophicaL question, indeed by some such as as the fundamentaL question of metaphysics, nameLy exist? . Reset in worLd terms this becomes a question worLd such Mhy does anything at aLL of seiection the - a contains be to taken exist. For then the oLd circLe is simpiy reentered, expiaining existence in terms of more existents. Here the circLe is metaphysics: 3 much more tractabLe question. But the recasting Loses expLanatory merit shouLd aLL the worids invoived objectionabie of that we find ourseLves in which contains something existent (us as among other existent things) as opposed to an aLternative worLd, which nothing Heidegger cf. JB broken, as it is eLsewhere (particuLarLy in chapter 2), by expiaining what exists by way of what does not. It is the faiLure to duty aLLow for and -2- acknowLedge this pattern of expLsnatLons, though Lt represents coMMon practLce Ln the theoretLcaL sciences, that has wade Lssues LLke the Lntractab Le. In fact quest Lons Lihg Hetdeggerean the concernLng does angthLng quest Lon onLg Ls exLst? question LLke Lt so ftrst of a LattLce of the the character and nature of the cosMos Ln whLch Me happen to be, that are LLabLe to be asked , questLons ascendLng to (Just) seen Ls? ; questLons Uhg Ls thLs cosMos Mhtch MorLd ModeLLLngs wag fruLtfuLLg be to appLLed, as an Lwportant fLrst step Ln eLLcLtLng sone ansMers. (Bounded) LattLce of questLons. DIRGRRM 2. 7 Uhg does Mhg does angthLng evergthLng at aLL exLst? exLst as Lt Uhg do 7 Hhg do eLectrons Lihg does Lnte L L Lgent ex Lst? (Ln LLf e LLfe forns the nunbers exLst? (Ln the ex Lst? theg do?) forM Lt does?) In the reorLentatLon of MorLds senantLcs fron Languages to cosnoLog Les, f row Language to the MorLd, there are certaLn features that shouLd be kept fLrriLg Ln vLeM - apart fron such notorLous features as that anong the MorLds of the node L L Lngs are a range of bLzarre, absurd, LncoMpLete and MaverLck MorLds, and that each (nonexLstent) MorLd has a LncLudes donaLn of objects though Lt a subdoMatn (perhaps nuLL) of ent Lt Les, tgpLcaLLg contaLns nonexLstent objects, both posstbLe and not, phgsLcaLLg reaLLsabLe and the MhLch, feature of not. In partLcuLar, MorLd seLectLon shouLd not be Lost sLght of. For Lnstance, Ln assessing truth, a factuaL MorLd T Ls seLected - Ln one Mag or' another, but tgpLcaLLg bg a choLce functLon on a cLrcunscrLbed evaLuatLons are Morked out (recursLveLg) at I. cLass NaturaLLg and ho LdLng the assessnent of truth MLLL generaLLg Lead begond MorLd T LtseLf. For (reLevant) <deducLbLLLtg a subsgstew of dertvatLonaLLg cLosed MorLds Ls defLned; for poss Lb L L Ltg a subsgsteM coMprLsLng consLstent MorLds Ls Marked out; for naturaL LaMLLkeness a subsgsteM of phgsLcaL MorLds Ls dLstLnguLshed^; and so on for other cases of subsgstew and group seLectLon. $I- The Mang MorLds approach to the "Uhg does angthLng at aLL exLst?" quest Lon. -3- There ere Many canvassed answers to thts questton, and stLLL More Mays of trytng to dtsMtss Lt. RLL dtsposat the atteMpts are defective, 3nd Most of the canvassed answers are unsattsfytng (so Grtfftn and I devote a good deat of space tn UQ to showtng). One approach that ts not inadequate — but perMtts however devetopMent tn severat dtfferent dtrecttons - ts the Many wortds approach. It ts true (and argued eLsewhere, e.g. JB) that R) SoMe thtngs extst. Thts truth enjoys a Modat status, that of conttngency tn fact. weaker ctatM sufftees, naMety But, to begtn, a C) It ts conttngentty true that sone thtngs extst. For the extstence that Most thtngs enjoy or regret ts conttngent. The obvious truth of the More controverstat ctatM that nothtng necessartty Left open for the present. extsts, can be NeutraL wortds ModeLLtng of theMe C) yteLds dtreetty a Many wortds picture, wtth soMe wortds, tnctudtng the actuat wortd T, contatntng extstents, and wtth soMe posstbte wortds contatntng no extstents (but perhaps soMe nonextstents). Likened to a dtsp Lay of baLLoons: DIRGRRH 3. Static pteture of a 0 : 0 : 0 Object doMatns contatn 0 ____ _________ extstents 0 0 : 0 0 worLds ModeLLtng for theMe 0). 0 : 0 0 It can be 0 00 DoMatns contatn no 0 extstents posstbte worLds Such a neutraL nodeLLLng begs no sertous onto Log teat questions, invotves no ontoLogtcaL prodtgaLLty. For tt ts not assuMed that any of these Ln worLds extst, any way. (It ts not dtfftcuLt to represent what does not extst.) Nor need Lt prejudtee Matters unduty agatnst necesstty theMes such even were Lt Lf Lnterpretatton MistakenLy Lnststed, as as agatnst God-hypotheses. the For stratghtforward of C), whtch aLLows Lt ts necessartty true (under soMe necesstty deterMtnabLe) that soMe thtngs extst, a retated Many worLds pteture woutd resuLt; the dashed LLne woutd stMpty Move down the diagraM). But Let us st Lek wtth what ts rtght, C. It ts More reveattng to take theMe C) as tensed - after aLL extstence ts existence now (JB chapter 2) - and to tntroduce, what further Lnvesttgatton wLLL require, dynaMtcat ModeLLLngs. Then, wtth soMe evtdent eMbrotdery, the foLLowtng sort of pteture eMerges: -4- Dgnantc ptcture untverses. DIRGRRfl t*. MorLds of nodeLLLng of thene C), ML th sanpLe t 3 EXI5TEHTS (FULL CONSERVRTION) RLse and faLL of HD ] A Lt SOMET IME EXISTENTS^ R NULL LJORLD f* ExternaL ttne scats (tsLgnLfLes the Locat present) Consents. r-bjch Ls presupposed Ln the wag the pLcture Ls draMn (e.g. that sone Measure of exLstents C3n be obtained, bg Mag of partLcLe nunbers)^ but these presupposLtLons can be nodLfLed or renoved. The such as sane sort nodeLLLng serves aLso to vaLLdate thenes LLnked to C), of D) There mag have been a tLne Mhen nothLng exLsted. ConsLder seLectLon, noM (or done Ln terns of of the cructat wetter of T-seLectLon, L.e. factuat Mortd 6-seLectLon, L.e. referentLaL sub-Mortd seLectLon). ThLs Ls certaLn features these Mortds have, such as contaLnLng entttLes, LncLudLng observers, exhLbLtLng LLfe, nanLfestLng LnteLLLgence or wLnd - to antLcLpate features conLng up and sonetLnes proposed for MorLd seLectLon. Such seLectLon pLcks out thts MorLd fron the ensenbLe of MorLds (our Mortd aLso, as Lt happens). Rnd the Mortd thus seLected LncLudes exLstents. Mhg does angthLng at aLL exLst? Because thts MorLd, T, LncLudes, happens to LncLude, extstent objects. To thts extent Lt Ls -5- a natter of fortune - qood it night be hazarded, since the worLd exhibits enough that is good 3nd fortune, enough potentiaL for good. Rs a contingent Matter, this worLd contains (in its object donain) '.tens that exist. So T-setection deLivers a worLd n3king it true objectiveLg that sone things exist.^ The answer Mag seeM trite; that but is in Measure Large because the and answer are taken in isoLation, apart froM issues as to the detaiLs question of the process, the how questions, such as H) How does it happen that soMething exists? The issue can be considered in uLtinateLg exists is question terns this of of nass-energg, since evergthing that kind (so it is argued in JB chapter 9). To the H ) How does it happen that sone Mass-energg exists? tMo sorts of answer are possibte. FirstLg, there is the conservative answer: sone atwags existed. There is an end Less ongoing sea of Mass-energg, which sinpLg fLuctuates, Moves, recgcLes, etc. There are pLentg of probLens with this answer; for instance, phgsicaL prob Lens, such as how did the Big Bang of standard cosMOLogg occur, what was happening before it? But there are aLternative MatheMaticai stories now being toLd, for instance, of a Massive singuLaritg Located in space (rather than at phgsic3t tine t = 0 as with the Big Bang), which trg to offer a phgsicaL account of a continuous universe (see e.g. G. ELLis). Rnd the singuLaritg stories offered can be enriched (aiong Lines rather Like what wiLL be ventured in the case of the second answer). RLnost aLL traditionaL phiiosophicai and theoLogicat accounts, aLL v^rtuaLLg honage paging to ontoLogicaL assunptions, shouLd be inciuded aMong the conservative, existence-aiwags answers. But the nonnateriaLLst accounts anong these characteristicaLLg invoLve LeveL shifts^^Thei is back to the existence of God or the (uLtinate) One, who, on a higher LeveL, serves as eternaL sustainer, and perhaps fashioner, of the MateriaL universe. The conceptual and other probtens of such answers are sufficientLg notorious. SecondLg, there is stage nothcng existed. The energg. the Rt More appeaiing and siMpLe radicaL answer: at sone that difficuLtg before tiMe, the that anccent Long-received probLeM orthodox of how prejudice, sonething that nchLi fct, is invariabLg reinforced bg again Bang, there was no for this picture is how Mass-energg ever appeared froM the MacroscopicaLLg tranquiL sea of nothingness. past Big can It is no great feat to get coMe froM nothing. The froM nothing nothing cones, ex nihiLo Mistaken ontoLogicaL assunptions (see JB chapter 2). Yet even when these ontoLogicaL assunptions are set aside, there is the awkward natter of C3usai nechanisn. But an unLikeig storg can be toLd, a ngth retated, expLaining how sonething -6- a may (suddenly) emerge from nothing, jet of mass-energy the from sea of nothingness. The story borrows from the quantum theory of the vacuum (or rather, ot suitabie vacuums). There is suddeniy an avaianche of energy borrowing , 3nd mass creation of particies in a concentrated area.& This is the beginning of the Big Bang (at internaL time zero). It is unigue (in experience) because such a singuiarity is very improbabte. (Even a SmaLL Bang wouid be rather improbabie.) The net energy "borrowed" is borrowed on a very Long term (at high interest?), with a gradu3i repLayment pLan. This ties concerning the run-down eventuaL eventuaLLy (though perhaps over this of very a with principLes universe. protracted of thermodynamics, On this story, it wiLL time) subside back into From nothing everything existent originaLLy came; into nothingness everything existent wiLL uitimateLy process. nothingness. It is one thing to such devise 3 story, or rather the (or outLine scaffoLding) of a story; it is another to condense it into science. before But scorn is poured on such a story, Let it be noted that the story is Less bizarre, more and informative, than other extant phiiosophicaL stories. For exampLe, it appears more piausibie than the ideaList story of the construction of the physicaL worid from idea, or than the set-theoreticaL myth of the construction of the entire universe from the nuLL set - undoubtedLy a it as earLy encompasses existent individuaLs, construction, insofar of something existent from nothing, not since, despite orthodox cLaims to the contrary, the nuLL set certainty does exist (JB 9.9). There are reasons for much preferring the second styLe of story to the first - though it may appear to some to viotate conservation principLes such that mass-energy: of as in fact it need not. One is that the end Less mass-energy story faits to account for the presence of mass-energy. By contrast, nothingness does not reguire expLanation: it is, so to speak, the rest position. In terms of the range of possibiiities here, existence is what is unusuaL, what is atypicaL, what especiaLLy caLLs for expLanation, not nonexistence.? Hence the expLanatory superiority of the radicaL answer. Rs one might expect in varying such an obvious and ancient story, and as is easity discovered, scientific condensation and assessment has begun, especiaLLy in the Last decade. The idea that the totaL energy of the universe is zero was considered a human generation ago by Mhitrow&, refLecting on Flach s phiLosophy of motion. More recentLy, Tryon has argued the zero totaL energy theme, assuming a cLcsed universe and appeaLing the standard treatment of gravitationai to If the universe contains just enough potentiaL energy as negative energy. mass to cLose it, then the negative energy must more or Less exactLy canceL the energy (mc^) invoLved in the existence of that mass. Hence, the argument runs, even a a cosmos as impressiveLy Large and ancient as this universe couLd exist as deveLopment quantum vacuum through in borrowing fLuctuation on a a zero-energy vacuum, that is, through grand scaLe in a reiativistic setting. Such vacuum fLuctuations can occur by dispensation of the AE.At --h; when the mass-energy AE of a physicaL object -7- uncertainty principLe approaches zero, its LLfe,tLMe At can becoMe verg targe. OnLg the Merest begLnnLng on reMOvtng certaLn object Lons and to wore scLenttfLc storg MtLL be atteMpted. FLrstLg, there are, LnevLtabLg a such obstacLes Lt seews, onto Log LeaL and verLfteat Lontst object Lons. Hang of these turn hoMever on assuMtng that a vacuuM and ewptg space Must soMehoM exLst, at Least bg Mag of sort of exLstLng contaLner or structure. Such assuMpttons are wtstaken: no (pre-) exLstence need be assuwed. Such objects 3s vacuuws and unoccupLed space sone nonexLstent are and dLstLnctLve Mtth objects assessLbLe MatheMatLcaLLg propertLes. Though theg nag not be access LbLe to observatton, and Ln thLs narroM respect are outsLde the range of experLence, then concernLng tnvesttgattons exactLng for there to LnfornatLon Ls suffLcLent be Made of theLr features. SLnLLar potnts teLL agaLnst the objection that Lt Ls Mrong to Lwpose an externat spatLaL or tewporaL Measure on (Mass-energg) cLosed space-tLMe; for exawpLe, Mhat happened before the BLg Bang, or to ewbed the curved space-ttMe of LnquLre the unLverse Ln a Larger spatLaL or tenporaL settLng. Rs a Matter of fact, cosMOLogLsts wang exh Lb Lt no unease Ln ashLng Mhat happened before the BLg Bang even Mhen assuwLng no Matter before that, though verLftcattonLsM MouLd no doubt such to ruLe guesttons out as weanLngLess or otherMtse out of order. More to the potnt, bounded Metrtcs can atMags be extended (HubbLe ttMe Ls just wtstahe though fruLtfuLLg, soMettnes bounds vertfLcatLontst one are exaMpte), exceeded. and Rnother has been to assuwe that NothLng, stnee nonexLstent, Ls entLreLg Mtthout structure or organLsatton and ungoverned. Indeed tMo dtaMetrtcaLLg opposed poLar v,eMS of Lt have prevented, and even been run together: of NothLng chaottc, as and so excessLveLg rtch, and of Nothing as entLreLg bLank, and so excessLveLg tMpovertshed. Both are Lnadequate. R More tnteresttng ontoLogtcaL objeetton (ratsed bg Rrwstrong) Ls that such an account of the ortgtn of the unLverse takes granted for exLstence the naturaL LaMS, and so does not expLaLn hoM sowethLng ex Latent cane frow objecttons Such confuse truth neo-PLaton Law. LaMS hoLd, but do not vteMs, Mhere LaMS Mtth exLstence, exLst - bg after contrast Mtth nothLng. fashLon the of of neo-PLatonLc reLatLons of unLversaLs, MhLch exLst. On object-theorg are (such as that of JB), hoMever, unLversaLs do not exLst, and so LaMS are not thus extstentLaLLg Loaded. Once truth Ls duLg separated frow exLstence, there Ls of course the further questton of Mhg the LaMS that hoLd or evoLve do hoLd. But thts Ls a separate, and vextng, questton of uLttMate expLanatton.^ SecondLg, are there More technLcaL adwLttedLg shakg phgstcaL account; for quantuM nuwbers of objeettons, instance, that dtrected But Lt the Mtth the the vacuuw MtLL constst equaLLg of Matter and antt-Matter, and qutckLg vantsh agatn, Mhereas features of the unLverse perstst tMbaLance. agaLnst fLuctuattons and suggest noM seeMs that a verg sLLght (and, so Lt Ls satd, deLLcate) tMbaLance earLg Ln the evoLutton of the unLverse after the BLg Bang Ls just Mhat Ls required for present perMLtted features of the unLverse; and such an LMbaLance, on recent (GUT) theorLes, catastrophtc fLuctuatton hardLg excLudes. R thLrd connected obstacLe used to be sertous: Lt -8- has been presupposed that a state can be assigned to the whoLe universe.^ But that is now aLright; quantuM according for neutraL to of) (adaptation the Everett Many-universe interpretation of quantuM theory, a state function i covers the behaviour of the P worLds phgsicaL I (with P c K), which presuMabig evoLve according to a e reLativised Schrodinger equation of the fom SE(T). To soMe expLain of the recent appeaL of this sort of wortd-ensewbLe interpretation, it is worth turning to the interesting and curious business of the phgsicaL constants. The §2. of constants of phgsics and sone of their neat interreLations. natter The interesting cLaiM is that the setting or adjustMent of certain constants surprisingLg deLicate, and if the constants (and soMe of their constant that ratios) were different bg ontg sMaLL Margins, then the actuaL universe woutd very is be with the resuLt, aMong Mang other things, that we shoutdn't be different, here to observe ang of its LocaL passing show. Now the possibiLity of exp Lanation of the specific vaLues of these the in terMS of phgsicaL theory itseLf is not so far exciuded. Perhaps no constants constants in physics are uLtiMateLy fundaMentai, Various ways eiiMinating of constants though seeMS that unLikeLy. are now faMitiar, e.g. soMe represent new scaie factors and are eiiMinated by re-scaLing or choice of coordinates. Others are reMoved by More radicaL ways of reLooking at things, as in Einstein s treatMent of gravitation. But sone resist eiiMination - so far. in For, phgsicaL any theory, what case, fundaMentai is depends and soMe previousLg fundaMentat constants (such as Rvogadro s nuMber) have turned out to be derivative as theory constants on the given shape of advanced new and (deeper) were introduced. There is the reMote possibiLity, obviousLy cherished that bg soMe scientists, that in the end aLL phgsicaL constants can be reMoved, a constant-free (very grand unified) theorg in which aLL constants can be reMoved wiLL resuLt. This is not obviousLg iMpossibLe in the wag that a coMpLete eiiMination of LogicaL constants froM Log teat theorg is, that a finat triuMphant reMovat of the Scheffer stroke froM cLassicaL propositionaL Logic is iMpossibLe. However, it is too Much to expect that a "deep MatheM3tic3i anaLgsis" aLways do the job. For one thing, exp Lanations of this sort do give is an arguMent for this out. can There froM the backward proceeding character of deductive expLanations to More generaL preMisses (appLging the content-incLusion character of deduction proper). There are no MatheMaticaL anaigses without assuMptions, without a systeM of postutates. The hope (expressed by MatheMaticat Carter and others), that generaLLy deeper underlying theories can be found, wiLL not 3iwags be fuLfiLLed, of necessity. Since transforMations, such as seating, aLter or reMove constants, can transfer the Big Bang back to Minus-infinity, and so on, there is no soLid to expLain, underLying the ELLis, for one, aLLegedLy probLeMatic nuMericaL features (so data B. contends). UhiLe it is true that which constants feature, and what their vaLues are, wiLL depend on initiaL choice of units, whatever that at Least some of the constants wiLL emerge. Thus there wiLL be features choice, and vatues which require expianation, and exptanation of the however transforming the done. is For S3me broad tgpe, the present, 3nd immediate future at Least, there is no getting rid of the constants, and white theg to continue figure their numericaL vatues and ratios set some trickg prob Lems. There is the probtem, first of aLL, of describing the reLevant phgsicat data neutraL non—prejudiciaL fashion. The facts of the matter are more or Less a Ln as foLLows:- Present phgsicat theories incLude mang (phgsicaL) constants, which occur in the formutation of Laws and principtes. R number of these constants are fundamentsL, in that theg are not derived from other constants (or deduced from deeper phgsicat theorg). Two things have been noticed concerning fundamentat constants of present phgsicat theorg, both of which caLL for expLanation:If 1) the of certain constants Lag outside a rather narrow band (sur­ vatues rounding their perhaps universe wouLd be ascertained vatue), gross features of the geophgsicaL different. this - hopefuttg without CaLL prejudice, since its contra­ position represents the substantiat core of the anthropic poss ib Le principte - the sens i t iv i tg numer teat f eature. va Lues For record, the the geophgsicaL principte resuLting from contraposition takes the foLLowing form: certain gross features of the geophgsicaL universe are onLg possibie in present form if the numericaL vatues of certain constants Lie within a narrow sensitivitg band. Examptes of such gross features are isLand gataxies, Long-Lived stars, ptanets, recognised ittustrate, water, hgdrogen, heavg carbon, metats. RLL the forces, for instance, exhibit the sensitivitg features. To phgsicat the strong nuctear force were marginattg stronger, nuctei coutd if grow much begond the present Limits and att hgdrogen woutd Long have ago been converted to heLium, with the resutt that there wouLd be no Long-Lived stars (of present tgpe) and no water. On the other side, a decrease in the strong force wouLd prevent the formation of nucLei of heavg metaLs. R dozen further and more of simitar phgsics Literature. sensitivitg mag be assembLed from the re Levant easiLg 2) The Pgthagorean feature. Large numbers arrived at in ions famous turn of Eddington s out these to coincide Large reLation, exampLes astronomicaL computat­ (to within order of magnitudes). Perhaps the most number stating coincidences', the universe is the inverse square of the number as theg are mostLg caLLed, of gravitationaL other exampLes are assembLed in Bondi.) -10- particLes coupLing in the constant. is visibLe (Mang These two nunericaL features sensitivitg features co inc idences. are are (or can be) These nunericaL features are cited LaMs) conservation of inportanttg that in Large exptain to used nunber as evidence Justifging the introduction of various exotic theories (e.g. invoLving phgsicaL Most interconnected, departures exaMpies earLg Mhich froM accepted norMaLLg Mere the "verging G theories of Dirac and Jordan . So Mrites Carter, Mho appeais to soMe differentig exotic principies, anthropic principtes, Mithin features in order froM far opposite the phgsics Bang) thesis: (GeneraL cosMoLogg and Mhich couLd in principLe have been used to unsurprisingLg, the order of the dag in Mag and be great fun. It cosnoLogg. course Of that the is distiLLation specuLation is is Mith the conversion of this stuff to in received MisdoM, or even knoMLedge, that caveats shouLd be Mhen cLaiM froM evidentLg estabLished. But Large cLains on fLinsg foundations are, far fine, i.e. ReLativistic predict theM 3LL in advance of their observation' (p.291) - 3 Large is nuMericat evidence in favour of exotic theories these coincidences being shouLd rather be considered as confirMing "conventionat" Big the noM received cosMoiogicai setting. Mith the heLp of these the anthropic principies he canvasses, as he puts it, that expLain to prejudiciaL, in e.g. that entered, especiaLLg it points to favoured cone Lus ions such as priviLege or design (for huMans) in the universe. Much capitaL has aireadg been Made of the nuMericat features, of Mhat is referred to - gou C3n see the Loading straightaMag - as a cataLogue of extra­ ordinarg phgsicaL coincidence and apparentig accidentsL co-operation' (0 p.110). Here is a tgpicaL beat-up, bg Davies: The structure of the phgsicaL MorLd is deiicsteig dependent on a varietg of apparent nunericaL accidents. hang of the rather basic features of the universe are deternined in essence bg the vaLues that are assigned to the fundanentaL constants of nature, such as G, a, Mp and so on, and these features MouLd be drasticsLLg aLtered if the constants assuned even noderateig different vaLues. ... for nature to produce a cosnos even renoteLg resenbLing our own, Mang apparentLg unconnected branches of phgsics have to co-operate to a renarkabLe degree (D p.lll; sone of the prejudiciaL terninoLogg is under L ined). The part Last is particuiarig Meak: so our ignorance of interconnections is disclosed, ignorance Me Might have forestaLLed froM arguMent theorg integrated resist apparentLg fitting of unreLated phgsics: together. the topics' present if Carter serves is right. RLL the to reveaL is Lack of an theorg is bits and pieces, Mhich Nor do Large nunber coincidences point to ang hidden co-operation, but rather to over Looked connections Mhich can be argued toHards (as bg Dicke, Carter and others) using fairLg conventionaL phgsicaL equations.^ Rs for the hidden purpose terMinotogg, for nature to produce ...', MeLL, the Justificatorg case for its use is not Mereig not evident, but entireLg The sane appLies to other Lacking. terns Mhich Davies and others infiLtrate, such as -11- * 'conspire' (Dp.Ill), 'fine-tuned', deiicateiy baianced', 3ii of which suggests agents with certain purposes. Re Lated happening not objections te rm ino Logy, be some against Lodged accident , it accidentaL; be shouLd of the improbab Le coincidence , etc. R contingent worLd need is not accidentaL that Griffin Lives in Troy, Ontario, though it is contingent certainty. Rn improbabLe worLd need not be accidentaL either. RccidentaL means, according to the Concise EngLish Dictionary (CED), Occurring by chance, unexpectedLy, not according to the usuaL order of non-essentiaL'. The misp Laced for the actuaL worLd; and adventitious, th ings; generaL thrust of the notion is decidedLy accidentaL universe is a misdescription.^ To be sure, there is some considerabLe sLackness in terms Like accidentaL', wh Lch can come cLose aLso, when appLied as in schoLastic theory, to meaning contingent. The term vac i L La t ion, as its of condition dictionary coinciding; concurrence nicety coincidence' a definition remarkabLe iLLustrates makes instance the The pLain: of we L L-known act, fact or apparentLy fortu itous Large-number The coincidences are of the first type; there is LittLe case for making them out as of the second type. argue, To however, that the actuaL worLd is not mereLy contingent, but improbabLe, Lt is hardLy necessary to go so far afieLd as advanced physics. Some more homeiy exampies have managed ho Les wiLL do, such as the matter of aLL the Lucky goLfers who in one. consider Or foLLowing the from argument contingencies, to the improbabiLity of the actuaL worLd. Take some contingency, e.g. that person 1 in some ordering of the audience <^s wearing a green top. She might have been wearing any other cotour. Say there are 100 shades to choose from in the cLothing coLour cards. Then the probabiLity that she is in green is no more than 1 in 100. eut the same sort of probabiLity hoids for every other person on the earth presentLy wearing 3 top, and these probabiLities are LargeLy independent, say in I(US) bit Lion cases, i.e. 10^ cases. That is, the probabiLity of the present array of tops is no more than 1 in loH. That aLready makes present arrangements exceedingiy unLikeLy, before we go into the coLours of other bits of appareL peopie are customariLy bedecked in, the coLours towards 16 improbabLe. Lead of the NonetheLess, of motor cars and so on. So even surface contingencies books, cone Lus ion that the worLd actuaL is astronomicaLLu the situation with the fundamentaL constants does differ. Rn important difference between these day-to-day improbabilities, such as have the spouses we do, and those the constants induce is things these this:- Even that if aLL (coLours, e.g.) had been different, the worLd wouLd not be a very different pLace. Contrast the constants: their significant variation wouLd the we make worLd a very different pLace. Is there a difference in kind, with 3 radicaL improbabiLity appearing as regards the constants, degree? OnLy in degree, picture wiLL serve for the bridging range exampies of cases, or tend for -12- mereLy a difference in to suggest. The same broad everyday and cosmoLogicaL contingencg. §3- Back to mang worLds: improbabiLities and the universaL quantum theorg. Mhere that broad - Leads picture so sgnthesis sought the suggests, as does an increasing amount of cosmoLogicaL theorg - is to the mang-worLds of interpretation Quite evidentLg, worLds semantics are not the onLg semantics improbabiLitg. that can be offered for probabiLitg. few But other offer semantics simitar universaLLtg and informativeness, and some of the aLLeged competitors (not to be taken too serioustg as face damaging circuLaritg in this area, e.g. rivaLs) probabiListic semantics, urn semantics. The idea of the modeLLing naturaLLg It is improbabLe that gou have the spouse gou have , is true bg virtue of this: fact the is that in onLg a few worLds of the modeLLing, incLuding the actuaL one, do gou have gour current spouse; mostLg (insofar as gou occur) gou do not. In preciseLg the same improbabiLities, cosmic wag such particuLar as numericaL vaLues for phgsicaL constants, Lead to mang universe modeLLings. is argument to mang-universes from improbabiLities . The description of the the situation phgsicaL coincidence of probabiListic requires remarkabLe constants, notions, features', e.g. etc. extraordinarg semantics But probabiListic notions caLLs for aLternative worLds. (Thus Davies archerg Les Lie s and This goLf exampLe Of course Davies tends to see worLds used for exampLe). probabiLities as a conceptuaL device (D p.128); Everett invariabLg sees them That reaL. is, what we have emerging is repLag then do improbabiLities the as of universaLs issue! But universaLs do not exist, and nor do these expLanatorg worLds (cf. JB onLg of 8.8). Not Lead to a mang-nonexistent-worLds picture; converseLg the muLti-universe theorg expLains the improbabiLities. envisaged modeL contains ref Leet a huge coLLection of certain intervaL of accuracg); thus worLds the range of (naturaL) vaLues of the fundamentaL constants. RLL initiaL arrangements of matter and motion are refLected in worLds is The worLds. the chances of the present smaLL, exceedingig which expLains (at Least within universe a resuLting various improbabiLities. Does it than matter that we can t normaLLg quantifg these improbabiLities? Rng more we can quantifg the (Large) probabiLitg of nucLear war? No; there is something offensive about the repeated demand for quantification.^ Quantum theorg circumscribed affords situations, a the aLternative phgsicaL situations. actuaL worLd - is seLected, simiLar state mang worLds function is On measurement, one apparentLg at random picture. Least Rt for a superposition of severaL particuLar worLd - the (D p.12!*). This approach enab Les immediate resoLution of an important prob Lem in orthodox quantum theorg. R standing probLem with a compLete universe state function is that sgstem we must have some measuring apparatus that is sgstem. ... Mhen the not itseLf to measure a part of the sgstem is the entire universe, the notion of a piece of externaL measuring apparatus is meaningLess (D p.I2t+). So emerges the famiLiar conundrum for quantum theorg presented aLong orthodox (von Neumann) Lines: If there is nothing Left with which to measure [or otherwise interfere with] the -13- state the of how universe, universe the can transition from a the make superposition of many possibLe worids to one, concrete, actu3t wortd?' (D p.12^) is, There asserts, Davies interpretation many-universes one oniy - which comprehensive however a resoLution 'accept[s] simuitaneous the reaiity of aLL the possibte atternative universes' (D p.I2i+). But, given the route we have come, it is easy to ontccaLLy atternative neutrai this, to direct that see from there an is object-theory. atternative assumes many universes atso, but onty some at any stage are This actuat. It is obvious enough is that the probabilistic spread of quantum states does not require existent states, any more than the range of atternative dress states for someone probabty attired in requires green, the existence of the person in different ctothes. Measurement now shows which wortd/state an object such as etectron or person in. actuatty is an In these terms it does not cotLapse the probabiLity wave packet, or set of worLds, but marks one out. Lihat isn't known measurement is which worLd (or narrower set of worLds) is actuaL (or the before actuat etectron is in). quantum description, Uhen nothing the entire cosmos encompassed is the within Left to coLLapse the wave' (D p,12S). Rather is nothing in the way of externat measurements is avaiLabLe to determine which is the actuaL worLd; however internaL information can be made use of in the usuaL experimentaL ways. To set interpretations many-worids Everett the quantum of theory and in the contrasting neutrai worLds perspective, here (adapting OeLJitt and Graham) are some Leading features: i) R separate cLassicaL sphere externaL to any and every is not required; quantum set-up it makes sense to consider and investigate a state vector for the whoLe universe. ii) The state vector covering the totaL system never universes) (of coLLapses, and so the totatity it describes can be deterministic. iii) LJhat is described through variabLes dynamicaL the jointLy, comprehensive is not aLL equaLLy reaL; vector and the the actuaL worLd but a system comprising many worLds. (On the Everett are state interpretation on the neutraL worLds these interpretation they are not, other worLds than actuaL ones Lacking of any sort of reaLity.) iv) Through chronoLogicaL deveLopment of the dynamicaL the state vector decomposes naturaLLy ref Leeting a progressing branching of the into system orthogonaL universe worLds) into a set of mutuaLLy unobservabLe worLds. variabLes, (and (On account this is described as a continuaL spLitting into vectors system the of Everett equaLLy reaL worLds; but not in neutraL theory which disposes of this reLativism.) v) In each worLd good" measurements yieLd definite resuLts, and in many -14- worLds, incLuding the actuaL, famiLiar statisticaL quantum Laws hoLd, indeed C3n be derived or approximated. *- -^ince the neutraL version directLg avoids mang of the to theorg, what is the case for the Everett form? In main part it consists Everett simptg of mistaken ontoLogicaL assumptions, as such objections the what that ReaLitg overactive an principte, has phgsicaL properties must exist.The further argument that aLL branches must be equaLLg reaL, is not compeLLing. Thus DeMitt contends: Because there exists neither a mechanism within the framework of the formaiism nor, bg definition, an entitg outside of the universe that can designate which branch of the grand superposition is the reaL worLd, aLL branches must be regarded as equaLLg reaL (p.178). But we can easiLg incLude actuaL worLd seLection (as group worLd seLection) within cone Lus ion does not foLLow. the weLL and framework; other as given difficuLties the Everett specific, there is, Ln the first pLace, reaList theories such Everett's. as permissive regarding such worLds. In reaList-reLativist a demarcation SecondLg, fact, the however, interpretation theorg avoids. To be faced prob Lem not neutraL theorg the of this the intended It has been objected (e.g. bg Lewis) that the neutraL worLd encounters kinds neutraL bg is too theorg is restrictive about worLds; and few or none of worLds of contemporarg reaLists (^uch as Lewis) get into the picture, since aLL such worLds incLude as existents certain universaLs. OnLg neutraLised anaLogues of such worLds appear fn case, the theorg can be as restrictive as is appropriate about ang In 7). aLso (see which worLds are phgsLeaL, or phgsicaLLg possible. Requisite subcLasses such worLds phgsicaL can marked be out conform tig to phgsicaL Laws and through framework requirements (e.g. that the ensembLe forms a HLLbert space). it is an iLLusion that reaLism as Moreover soLves the reLevant demarcation probLem. It simpLg covers it up, in an unsatisfactorg wag. highLight To us varg a in stock of coupLe pertations, some of what is different in a neutraL iLLustrations of reaListic interpretation, the ontic mang-worLds Let inter- the famiLLar two sLit interfer­ wag. Consider first ence affair. On a straightforward the neutraL approach, we appear forced to concLude that each eLectron traverses both sLits in a wave Like form' (Les Lie LI, p.I!+6), is to the dcaLectic interpretation that the eLectron goes through that both sLits. The mang- worLds approach avoids such contradiction^, aLLowing eLectron to traverse just one sLit in the actuaL worLd - onLg in another branching from this, the the worLd, eLectron traverses the other sLit, therebg inducing probabiListic interference with the actuaL-case eLectron. The wave function provides a superposition of two such possibLe cases, not two actuaL cases. In the transition other worLds are not mang-worLds theorg). from phgsicaL (or potentiaL) worLds to the actuaL one, 'destroged' (as LesLie suggests in his criticism of Nor is the interaction of worLds causaL. There are few or -15- no causaL effects even on the Everett reaLity version; is spiitting thus not not actuaity observed (cf. virtuai worLds, reLations, etc.). Though there seen, are transworLd interreLations on object-theory these do further criticaL point is that physicaL worLds are not probabiListicaLLy The entities. as exist not independent. But that s aLright; since probabiLity is an natter, intensionaL probabiListic interference is unprobLenatic (cf. "possibiLity" interference). scattering exanpLe where an eLectron is Consider next Davies at fired a proton. The probabiLity wave in such scattering represents a set of worLds for the eLectron. 'The quantun wave provides a Measure of the probabiLity of finding the eLectron 3t the Location: where the eLectron is Most LikeLy to be found ation, and disturbance is greatest there the wave (D p.l2i*). Fleasurenent deterMines the Loc­ so aLters the probabiLities, thus on the orthodox view reducing the wave. Recording to the Everett on however, interpretation, neasurenent the universe divides into two, ... one containing a right Moving eLectron ... Each worLd is equaLLy rest inhabiting each since it is not The observer conscious upon that MeasureMent down-right is spiitting so thus, by occurs; the for there certain a is so near­ probabiLities, anending scattering, that, possibie the because of the uncertainties physicaL states of universe, corres­ ponding to the probabiLity wave, are increased. Lihere there was one for the actuaL possibLities). worLd in possibiLity regard, now there are N Many (N Mirroring the this R nany-worids interpretation of physicaL theory provides a naturaL for neutraL a new state function resuits, appearing to coLLapse 'the wave. since RLL that happens wuth worLd branching is guaranteed copy worLds. But onLy one worLd is actuaL, and represents the (reaL) of universe. Heasurenent can deterMine which this is, and one spLits, MisLeading. There is no spiitting; rather in quantuM processes worLd-branching takes pLace, rep Licat ion atso wortd . Even on the Everett interpretation this is inaccurate, it interpretation ... principLes which aMong seLect detinit or wortds, as setting what are caLLed anthropic principLes, and aLso non-chauvinistic reptaceMents for then such as geophysicaL principLes, can serve to do.^ Rnd in this setting expLanations, of a sort and of varying adequacy, The of aLL the nunericaL features can be furnished. under Lying reason is not (siMpty) that there wiLL aLways be sone universes, which are duty seLected, where the nuMbers coMe out right, but that sone and universes conditions (for of the right sort are aLso decent physicaL universes (a Much More difficuLt requirenent to satisfy). sone such coincidences) It is as these, furtherMore, that are observed (by us), contain universes carbon and water LocaLLy, and so forth. It is then no surprise that we perceive a universe to which so Many speciaL conditions pertain, for we have seLected fron the enseMbLe onLy by our very existence' (0 p.126). But it again, taLk of our seLecting is MisLeading (though taLk of seLection, or naturaL seLection, is not). It is rather that, as a contingent natter, we happen to inhabit such universes^. Rnd such taLk negLects the iMportant point that further work is required, for satisfactory expianation - that piausibte argunents, not invoLving us, but connecting gross geophysicaL features with nuMericaL features, have aLso -16- to be suppLLed. In thts Mag, ustng the MorLd-ensembLe hgpothests ... [but] MLth[out] the Meak anthropLc prLncLpLe, Lt Ls possLbte to discover pLausLbLe arguments to pLn doMn the vaLues of aLmost aLL of the fundamentaL parameters p.129, a centraL part of hLs cLatm). Indeed DavLes hotds out the negatLng but (D prospect of beLng abte to do much more, constraLnLng the dtmensLonaLttg of space and ttme, the number of quarks and Leptons, numbers of fundamentaL forces, That reaLLg MouLd a sgnthesLs of consLderabLe poMer. It Ls a sgnthesLs, gtve moreover, MhLch can be absorbed or sLmuLated MLth Ln a upon mang-MorLds neutraLLsLng prLncLpLes MorLd bg etc. quantum seLectLon theorg prLncLpLes. and cosmo-Log LeaL repLacLng NonetheLess sgnthesLs, the anthropLc DavLes, the LLke maLnstream phgsLcLsts he artLcuLateLg represents, Ls uncomfortabLe MLth ang such that he LndLcates, ang such grand pLcture, and rLghtLg so, as the 3S sgnthesLs anthropLc expLanattons LnvoLved are far from entLreLg satLsfactorg. HostLg he seems to hope Lnstead that contLngencLes MLLL aLL be expLaLned as necessLtLes of (proposLtLons phgsLcs grand a pLcture, necessarg grand at Least Ln foLLoMLng Log LeaLLg from another theorg). But the hope Ls mLspLaced; Ln Large unLfLed measure Lt represents 17thC ratLonaLLsm over agatn. SometLmes, hoMever, he seems to feet desLgn Ln the untverse. - Ls Mhat features: to supposed emerge, and does emerge, from the numerLcaL Mhat anthropLc prLncLpLes vs. MorLd seLectLon prLncLpLes. Uhat Ls supposed to emerge depends upon hoM the matter Ls set up, hoM the pLcture emphasLaed. Ls Mhat presented, For exampLe, DavLes and LesLLe both set thtngs up so onLg tMo optLons are supposed to be open. In hLs Preface to Da^Le^ Ls The RcctdentaL UnLverse, suggests the sgstematLc aLternatLves are eLther reLLgLon or an anthropLc prLncLpLe. R sLmLLar cLaLm appears Ln LesLLe, Mho puts the aLternatLves as (ethtcaL) necessttg or anthropLc assumptLons. Thus hLs concLusLon (to L2, p.81) The cosmotogLcaL evidence can suppLg __ forcefut grounds for vLeMLng at Least one of these thtngs ss true. (1) God Ls reaL, though presumabLg as a creattve ethtcaLrequtrement rather than as a dtvtne person Mho LLteraLLg destgned our LLfe-contaLntng cosmos. [So the unLverse extsts because Lt shouLd.J (2) There extsts a Mortd EnsembLe [so the condtttons LeadLng to Ltfe are bound to occur someMhere (L2, p.55)J - and the attempt to dertve aLL the fundamentaL charactertstLcs of our cosmos from some untfted FLeLd Theorg Ls tn error. DavLes LnsLnuates that the obvtous Lnference from the cat3Logue of numerLcaL features Ls thts: a htdden prLncLpLe seems to be at Mork, organLstng the cosmos Ln a coherent Mag (p.110). Thts runs paraLLeL to argument from desLgn, hardLg an Lmprovement. One of the prLncLpLes htdden Ls hgpothests; but another Mhtch DavLes (unLtke LesLLe) generaLLg anthropLc prLncLpLe, to LncredLbLe accuracg 3nd Ls some sort of God favours Ls the a gutdtng prLncLpLe Mhtch serves to fLne-tune the cosmos for us (humans) - or Ltfe, or Ltfe-supportLng sgstems, or __ ? Or for observers,or LnteLLLgence, or not for angthtng. The chotce offered Ls reaLLg then an oLd famLLLar one, faced bg thtnkers at Least stnee the (so-caLLed) EnLtghtenment: God or Han, or after a recent ftrst correctton and Mtth a different emphasts, Humans -17- or God. In fact burted under duaLitg, this is aLreadg as (Science) or Hunans or God. However the a nang tenpts favoured which option, Phgsics excLuded, in error . Rnd it is we as seen: have (coMprehensive) phgsics without netaphgsics, no scientific theorg no is Much scientist and phiLosopher, is increasinqLg seen as excLuded, as forbidden fruit or even as there at Least a three-wag choice: Phgsics giinpsed, without Large assunptions - which stands on its own. But further afieLd there is get is which option, another not excLuded: option here canvassed. The ciain to be eLaborated is this: no (deep-ecoLogicaL) principies of a tgpe not aLreadg required for Low LeveL senanticaL purposes worLd seLection principies) are caLLed for in expiaining the nunericaL (naMeig, features at Least as satisfactoriig as nor huMans Neither principies, gods such be upon popuiarig aLreadg foreshadowed, doing. in More in reMoving huMans features god-Like (and, universe. the principLe cones in a varietg of anthropic verg precise (incLuding Barrow's biocentric reforMutations). SoMe exaMptes give the inpression:- The existence as observers seLection bioLogicaL (D to the own used be can existence a as constants' (ibid). This presents severaL for renoving underiging ngsterg is verg different fron nunericat of expLanation, our p.viii); effect, ... to expLain the otherwise Mgsterious nuMericat disentangie; expLat,ning wiLL idea is to reiate basic worLd features to our own vaLues of the fundanentaL phgsicaL issues as such coLourfuL for nainstreaM phgsicists, atMost none of then prettg MostLg the upon hunans, associated inteLLigence) fron a new speciaL pLace Rs succeed options other the are essenti3t. Since gods do not figure in anthropic wiLL focus the incidentaLLg, forMS, object-theoru far-out the features. sorts, various or Rnd nag these turn in have further theg Mag be siMpig contingent, refLecting seLection without specific purpose. Sone phgsicists go so far as to ciain: our existence constrains the structure of the universe, indeed it even it (0 p-112), for to us , quote froM Hawking and CoLLins. connection in this sweeping context h3s been dubbed this j^s Davies the does, have nothing specificaLLg to do inteLLigence, or with Life, etc. The Dicke argunent, for Eddington-Dirac expLain coincidence, is based of principLe : anthropic the show with what work the or hunans, with designed exanpLe, to onig on the presence of heavg eieMents, and so gives but a hint of bioLogg, if that. So reversaL Invoking the huMan forMuLaticn of the principLe (D p.112)! But quite generaLLg the argunents advanced, which do principLe seLects reaLLg there is no spirit of the Copernican revoLution' in this fashion (pace D p.115, barter, and others). The conditionaL principLe estabLished bg the Dicke arguMent is essentiaLLg J) If [because, g^ven] there exist heavg eieMents, then the universe is such that the Eddington-Dirac coincidence ho ids. The fuLL expLanatorg argunent conprises, as weLL as the detaiLed phgsics that goes toward J), the nodus ponens inference: -18- The Eddington-Dirac coincidence hotds. There exist heavy eLements, J) More generaLiy, the anthropic way gives principie to physicatiy a argued conditionai scheme of the enthymematic form K) if F then T, or its contrapositive K ) if not-F then not-T, where F is a hard factuai ciaim or more commoniy its existentiat reiativety generaiisation , and T is a more theoretic3i ciaim concerning typicaity features of the worLd, such as numericai features. The short form of anthropic exp Lanation, or better status quo expLanation, is then the argument form F, if F then T L) . .T. famiLiar ontoLogicaL proofs, for instance of an externaL worLd from the Moore s fact that exist, hands arguments. such omit typicaLLy proofs phiLosophers just are difference The is that the soLid argumentation that goes into estabLishing the conditionai schemes of status quo expianations; for instance, makes LittLe effort in this direction, and the required entaiLment rather Moore evidentLy faiLs to hoLd (see fn 30). Other formutations of the anthropic principie in the Literature are than better those hardLy 3tready exhibited. LesLie, who at Least (Like Barrow) moves humans a LittLe off centre stage, puts it in this counterfactuaL way: if our universe had been [everywhere] hostiie to Life then nobody wouLd be observing it (L2, p.66). If the consequent simpiy contextuaLLy impiies that something a Live is doing the observing, then the principie is ana Lytic, and scarceLy up to the intended expLanatory tasks (without requisite information that the the universe contains Life, and much eLse being separateLy pumped in). MhiLe if does not require this, it appears fatse; the Latest seeing-eye robot consequent did survive the hoLocaust, or did just happen as a resuLt of the quantum fLuctuation. In such as Dicke's most purported argument. offers faces reLated difficuLties: worLd appLications of the anthropic The other version of the principie LesLie NecessariLy we conscious beings observe a which is Life-containing (LI, p.lt+1). Rs it stands, this is faLse; for we mightn t exist. Nor wiLL appropriate deLetion consciousness retain we' of fix things. the worLd is, Me might but not be observers, aLL being in vats. But repaired the version is pretty use Less. It bears onLy tangentiaLLy (through that vacuum any case the formuiation Lacks sufficient generaLity; it faiLs to connect appropriateLy with scheme, the but contingency, Life its consequent, containing) on what is at issue concerning numericaL features. The materiaL on us, on observers and the Like, is strictLy irreLevant, a hang-over again presumabLy constructions of quantum theory. -1?- from bad ideaList * The that the Copernican principte has suffered some sort of set-b3ck idea because of the essentiai rote of anthropic principies in explaining Large-number can be traced back through Carter, who heLped popuLarise the rote coincidences, between of anthropic principies and made the (rather obscure) distinction strong weak has been exaggerated subservience to the 'Copernican principte' [which is] that we must and not assume principies. anthropic gratuitoustg that we Recording to Carter, there occupg a priviLeged centraL position in the (C p.231). The regrettabLe tendency, he sags, has been to universe extend the to a most questionable dogma to the effect that our situation cannot principte be priviLeged in ang sense ... (in extreme form ... the 'perfect cosmoLogicaL principLe ...)'. The Latter assumption is certaintg untenabLe (as Dicke pointed because the universe is bg no means spatiaLLg homogeneous on a LocaL scaLe out) and speciaL conditions (of terrestrial temperature, chemicaL environment) do prevaiL on Earth. But its removaL does nothing to undercut Life the Copernican principLe, or to boost the anthropic principLe in the wag thinks Lt For does. is Carter his bracketed comment after his first formuiation of the anthropcc principle is that Lt for requisite aLthough our situation is not necessaritg centraL, inevitabLg priviLeged to some extent' (C p.291). It is doubtfuL that our position is centraL; whether it is so priviLeged depends on the intended contrast, but whatever the privilege is, it hardlg seems inevitabLe. Carter gives severaL non-equivaLent formuLations of the anthropic principLe, the first of which takes the quasi-anaLgtic but ambiguous form, LJhat we C3n expect to observe must be restricted bg the conditions necessarg for our presence as observers' (C p.291; repeated D p.119). This is certs inLg not the same as Davies condensation of it, what he caLLs the weak principLe, that observers construaL, restrict the observed'. On the obvious (but Less charitabLe) this is but rampant verificationism, of a tgpe verg familiar however from interpretations of quantum theorg. Uhat exists is independent of observers; and observers, especiaLLg remote ones, mag have no significant impact on what iL5 observed. The condensation is accordingLg false. So also, for different reasons, is what it condenses. For one thing, our expectations mag run astrag. True, what we observe is restricted bg the conditions for our doing just that, nameLg being as observers. But this tautologg imposes no phgsical constraints, being equaLLg true for Xing as observing; and no such connection is appeaied to in ang of the derivations of coincidences that Carter sketches. Once again aqain the present arguments never have angthing in detail to do with humans, or even "observers 4-c? -20- .2-1 (and surety animats observe). Fit best the arguments are directed to the presence of water or carbon 12 or some such - things sometimes erroneousiy equated Life, and often, rather dubiousty, said to be necessary for Life.^S The situation is of this sort with Carter's "iiiustration" of the weak better Locat) anthropic principte, which he formutates as foitows: 'we must (or be prepared to take account of the fact that our Location in observers universe is existence as the necessariLy priviLeged to the extent of being compatibLe with our p.233). In order to get to grips with this recondite formuiation (C Let us remove the initiaL intensionaL functors (which my empiricist friends to with assure are me not essentiaL in physics, despite ubiquity, and their physicists procLivities to modaLs). Now our position can hardLy be priviLeged (despite Carter s tru necessariLy since human-types just might be itaLicization), uniformLy distributed through the universe or again might not exist at aLL. LJhat necessity there is enters in a different way. LJhat we are Left de Let ion, with since misLeading, probabiListic arguments suitabLe for Life in the universe (some detaiLs justified is Like more something unique (though principte this need require of Hh3t may be met. In this humans we are Long-Lived stars Rnd stiLL much more than a weak is dragged in. It is enough, for seLeet ion, universe contains Locations, neighbourhood Sag3n). we're working at it); even on Terra much of the rest of the animat kingdom is simitarLy favoured. seLeet ion in priviLege of habitats miLLions suggest are to this: we are favoured in that the physicaL conditions for our existence, as observers, are hardLy due Our Location in the universe is priviLeged to the extent of is then: be',ng compatibLe with our existence as observers'. But this ciaim cs after in where fact heavy Like the earth, in the metaLs occur, and so on (for certain other pureLy geotogicaL features). BoLtzmann s expLanation of the present high degree of which Ls extremety improbabLe cosmic organisation (in a thermodynamicaL setting) is aiso said to appLy a weak anthropic principte ; witness this the onLy reason that we are priviLeged to exceedingLy untikeiy occurrence is that our very existence [etc.J -21- O.2.2.. * depends upon the condition which atone can be bg estabiished remarkabte that (D p.123). But again onLg gross phgsicaL organisationat principLes fLuctuation are seLected for; and no more than a weak seLection principte is required. beveraL expLained , so Carter and Davies ci3im, be cannot coincidences simpig bg a weak principte (at Least in the muLti-universes). of is made to the strong (or better gLobaL) principte: appeaL these absence The universe ... must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some in barter s (p.120). formuLation exist is for manifesttg faLse. So, Cartesian paraphrase Carter gives of the strong different cogito ergo mundus taLis est . The worLd wouLd presumabtg not be principte, verg theg is this appaLLing the necessarg; the universe does. Rnd since observers mag verg easiLg never given have evotved in the universe, reasons, stage R coroLLarg of the strong principte in this heaviLg necessitated guise is that observers are conditionaLLg must For so different were the contingent premiss faLse; and certainLg the premiss mag Least be true but the cone Lus ion faLse. But at Loading, necessitg gets and principte the appropriate conctusion. For, propertg ideaLLg this the inferentiaL form, with the into formuLated, abandons paraphrase scheme the as is before, Law Like conditionaL of basic form, if F then T, where however T is a a genuinetg gLobaL cLaim that the universe is such 3nd such (e.g. the universe now contains more matter than radiation). The scheme, so then, recast is feature distinctive some theoreticaL LocaL strong the that T is hoListic assertion 3bout the universe, incLuding essentiaL reference to it, not, as it mag be on about of the weak principte, of the universe, which can readiLg be features stated or restated without reference to the universe. But the distinction is not particuiarLg important. The robust, troubie is it from 3 worLd-seLection gives Lt a misLeading most LawLike Mag requisite within consequent. For exampLe, there is stiLL no (egocentric) thought matter; to phgsicaLLg without Descartes God to puLL him out. universe the taiLor-made is for framework of idea - in essence it cLaims a wag Living organisms are subsequentig assured of existence. [So it is]... akin mankind to inhabit. products secuLar expLanations. teteoLogicaL R duLg cLaims anthropic worLd for (D p.121). Such erroneous presentations have done much to encourage both a new anthropocentrism and the idea that are unLike habitation, 3nd that both the Laws of to traditionaL retigious expLanation of the worLd: that God made the are from Hard as it is to credit, Carter is phgsics and the initiaL conditions obLigingLg arrange themseLves in such that an procLivitg to ideaiism exceLLed bg Davies, who sags of the strong principte that that in route respectabLe Carter's (exhibited in C2)), he mag weLL get stuck in the argue to bounds to the intended phgsicaL given and of satisfactorg impression antecedents for the scheme, and makes it presentLg impossibLe appropriateLg verg perspective Carter's extravagant Cartesian paraphrase of the strong with that is principte nor on a par reformuLated Davies with, strong and in schema expLanations anthropic competition supports design with, none of the makes regarding the universe. Nor, as wiLL appear, expLanations, when made presentabLe, -22- akin to retigious features of the worLd. The expLanations take different LogicaL of explanations forms and LnvoLve quite different ingredients. To see what is reaLLy required for the strong schema to operate, it pays to Look at Then appLications. it becomes evident observercentric that considerations are strictLy irreLevant. Once again far stronger, and biocentric more dubious, conditions than are required for the estimates actuaLLy made been For introduced. instance, (BoLtamann) K, is a good exampLe of a prediction based on what strong' anthropic principLe' (C p.23^); (8) is as foLLows: K aLL f < that is 2 " Tl_ 5 have according to Carter, his condition (8), which imposes an order of magnitude upper bound on cosmoLogicaL But and constant may be termed the 3 ' "P , P invoLved in obtaining this bound, retevance, is the of assumption that ' the un iverse is not radiation dominated aLL its [finite] Life (i.e. that the matter contribution ... to the mean mass density ... becomes greater at some stage Insofar this as is than the necessary radiation (C ...)' contribution pp.233-^.). at aLL - since the estimates concern onLy very broad features, and not LocaL variations - it is 3s necessary for Lichen as for Larkspurs. DLL that is required is a sLightLy stronger worLd seLection principLe than mereLy that worLd contain heavier eLements at some stage; but stiLL the onLy a gLobaL geophysicaL principLe. Rnd this is aLL that here. The same set of points amounts to appLies to Carter's further use of the strong principLe, to estimate the Lower bound on K, which appLies the conventionaL that gaLax Les ... are formed by condensation, starting as reLativeLy hypothesis smaLL density fLuctuations in an otherwise homogeneous further The strength tendentious assumption in background (C p.2St+). this appiication is that gaiaxies are necessary for the formation of stars and hence of Life (C p.23!*). NonetheLess there are arguments for the strong anthropic principLe, though faLLacious ones obviousLy. They come firstLy from positivism. It is cLaimed that if the universe exists then it must be observabLe; so there must be observers - a modaL faLLacy. Davies (in his exposition of Barrow and not argues universe which from the faLse premiss that onLy what is observed exists, that a did then others) admit observers is meaningLess' (D p.I21). This is ideaListic garbage. They come secondLy from an aLLeged expianatory rote, in expLaining coincidences. But it is unnecessary for this purpose as initiaL worLd seLection wiLL serve. They come thirdLy from human chauvinism; thus, too human existence is said to be responsibLe for the very speciaL structure of the universe' (D p.121)! The connection is not however causaL; so what is it supposed There is be: teLeoLogicaL? thus a serious probLem as to how this responsibitity, hardLy evident, is exercised. FinaLLy a strong principLe might uniformity to - one principLe to cover be argued for on grounds of aLL cases. But better a weaker correct -23- principLe than a strong faLse or geophgsicaL principLe wouLd suffice Rnd principLe. dubious doubt no a weaker aLL phgsicaL constants. (Of course, for there reMains the natter of this worLd seLection. This worLd does exhibit Life, incLude hunans, and so on. But these features, Like the present species of does eucaLgpts expLanations, or reLevant, cLasses of worids.)"^ and are RnusingLg, astroLogicaL and More converses hunan affairs; white under gerMane not the to extravagant anthropic principies are to astroLogg, ceiestiaL events infLuence anthropic hunan anaLogue, affairs infLuence CeiestiaL events and processes incLude those of the sun. Moon events ceiestiaL its are abstracted fron in seLecting expLanatorg Recording other. each of wonbats, grazing of whereabouts and and other pLanets (especiaLLg). Rnd these certaintg appear to have an (indirect) weak infLuence, especiaLLg through the soLar atMosphere and pLanetarg Large pLasMas, on terrestriaL phenoMena (Fegerabend, p.93). The anthropic converse, in this forM danagingtg anthropocentric and exhibiting an excess of hubris, is Much further froM the truth. Not just the anthropocentric, but the eMphasis of nuMericat features. Rnd despite the bioLogicaL anaLogies, just Lt,ke explanation seLection without vaLues, so even Rs are there there is seLection without seLectors. More, RLthough seLection is sonetiMes accoMpiished through seLectors, often takes not is naturaL seLection. It is not seLection for, for fitness, survivaL, or whatever. Nor, More iMportant is it seLection bg, bg soMe agent. vaLues MispLaced. is insistence, Life is not essent-iaL in Mang worids Le^Lie Despite biocentric seLection without seLecters, randonig or otherwise - this tiMe as in naturaL pLace seLection, which does not require a personified Nature to do the have evoLutionarg theories as/oid ageneg. In avoiding ageneg, seLection is Like that seLecting, as enphasised. Such expLanation can straightforwardig of Darwinian evoLut- ionarg theorg; and seLection contrasts with direction as incLuded in aLternative evoLutionarg Though accounts (cf. DarLington, p.l^ff). anthropic principies coMe in a varietg of forMs, depending upon how the conditionaL scheMa ^nvoLved is fitted out, none of theM, then, does what is saud, none depends essentiaLLg on the presence of huMans, or of Life. SgntacticaLLg, theg etaborate usuaLLg status quo arguMents, of forM L), with factuaL fir^t preMis^ F concerning the state of the worLd LocaLLg (weak forM) whoLe (strong seLection forM). SenanticaLLg, or as a the factuaL preMisses function as worLd principies; theg serve to Mark out the cLass of phgsicaL wortds or to narrow then down to these or those, e.g. to those where heavier eieMents such as carbon occur, those where Long-Lived stars, such as the sun, appear. It is that carbon is sonetiMes taken to provide an "order-of-Magnitude" approxiMation for Life (that is the nearest Long-Lived star is supposed to to hunans provide that the the "approxinations" get); Life as the arguMents a steadg warMth required for the evoLution of Life (but Long-Lived stars, water, and heavier objects are as to true near need get). But these additionaL, and nore dubious, detaiis are unnecessarg for the Main thrust of status quo arguMents, as distinct -24- from their anthropic 3nd biocentric augmentations. meet Given that the worids seiected are of this and that cast - in generai geophgsicai gross Less, up the to constraints — other features of them can be derived (more or standards rough accepted in and physics) in expLained, particuLar, how and that it is that certain (fundamentaL) physicaL constants Lie in restricted ranges, narrow and unexpected ranges. These arguments, duty fitted out, do provide exp Lanations, non-causat exp Lanations, of physicaL features of a contingent, mereLy LmprobabLe universe. Much there is, however, in these most ctaims, that has been contested, from the psycho LogicaL such of inadequacy a universe to the worth of such expLanations, if expLanations they are at aLL. objections to the cosmo-LogicaL synthesis; and finding unLikety, an in comfort and with Prob Lems mereLy universe. contingent, Somehow contingent universes have acquired the reputation of being coLd, remote and uncaring - a not habitat for sensitive creatures. But the reputation is undeserved, since fit contingency does not bear on any of these things. Mhat is contingent can be just as weLL as coLd or neither; caring or not, so far as the appLication sense aLL; at and hot makes so on. One can be warm and comfortabLe in bed on a wet and wintry night. One can be at home, comfortabLe in, in tune with, a tiny part of an improbabLe universe, as some tribaL peopLes are. None of these virtues are Ln any way undermined by contingency, matter of a necessary universe. or aLways assured by the quite separate a degree of harmony between us Furthermore, there can be, or have evoLved, and our surroundings , without principLes, as that our worse, that the universe is universe such exaggerated cLaims, on based anthropic are very speciaL and tuned to us' or, surroundings made for us'. Me humans can be in with tune the without having the universe tuned to us, as we can foLLow and ornament a song on the wind or in the woods. But so far, especiaLLy recentLy, we humans coLLectiveLy are not doing too weLL in attuning oursetves to the worLd. Rs this iLLustration begins to metaphysicaL and psychoLogicaL reveaL, predeLiction^ may pLay a not inconsiderabte rote in choice of, and ornamentation of, physicaL theory, especiaLLy of controvers LaL theories such as quantum theory and cosmoLogicaL theory. In the case of such theories there is a certain bag technicaL so to say tricks, tricks, equations and so on, which are de rigeur - a theory-skeLeton - and beyond that both an interpretation and setting for the bag integrating of theM and suppLying of with some sort of meaning, and them usuaLLy aLso some further formaLism connecting the tricks together or to a wider theoreticaL background. For exampLe, even in accounts of too much in the way of interpretation theory where is commonLy frowned upon, extensive correspondence ruLes Linking the formaLism with upon quantum cLassicaL physics are retied heaviLy. Rt Least for everything beyond the theory-skeLeton, which is what is appLied in most concrete day-to-day appLications of the theory, there is much room for rivaL fLeshing out of the skeLeton - Latitude -25- such as there is in archeological reconstructions of peoples from some scattered bones. Recasting quantum theorg, as in the mang-worlds interpretation, offers not as merelg a basis for fleshing out the theorg non-idealisticallg, but for combining it with general to subject much of the criticism, much of it directed more broadlg at most Happilg as However such recasting, when not reLativitg. largelg ignored (the common fate of nonstandard theories), is criticism. well plural world theories in general, misses the neutral modification. There are firstlg a batch of aesthetic and ontological objections. These commonlg take off from the of unattractiveness duplication or replication of profligate such worLds. LJeLL, tastes and vaLues, Like intuitions, do varg with sub-cuLture. Some of us, who escaped over-exposure to worlds the ReaLitg do PrincipLe, stories illuminating and attractive, indeed verg inviting. So, next, the whole thing is said to be unbelievable: no one can reasonabLg existence believe worLds nonetheless, especiaLLg in explanation. these in (the these unlimited numbers of universes. Granted, we do not believe of) in this either. These other worLds do not exist; but we can make of neutral find heavg Load of objections carrging on about excess use extensive In this wag we avoid a baqgage. ontic also Ue main criticisms based on Occam s razor. (RLL these objections are short-circuit met, in much detail, in JB.) Linked to such Occamist protests are a batch of objections that are pictures worlds effect the to over-engineered, both too complex 3nd including too much baggage. Thus in thermodgnamics a smalt fluctuation producing some order is more LikeLg than one producing Lots of order, one galaxg more LikeLg than Lihg do similarlg we not find ourselves in a one galaxg universe, which is far more LikeLg? The answer is in part: because Less LikeLg contingencies hold. Is the ubiquitg No, (D p.123)? mgsterg instance, the on the commenting of of numbers approaches reasons. in these unwarranted presuppositions. The that the universe was set others Like be explained. For Dicke Thus and Peebles remark, in of the universe for a few conscious individuals, overdesign revealed well one of a thing is itself verg unlikelg. Find just special can, that a single galaxg cosmos might be ruled out bg the can observed galaxies in our universe ... therefore a such evolution further there mag be mang. up Mach's Moreover, principle. questions and remarks are based on various overdesign" for idea, for example, presupposes some individuals; but the worlds picture correctLg avoids thLS assumption. The things in this world that exist happen to be there, probable or not, and often, for reasons we can sometimes explain, not. But there is tittle solid evidence that theg are arranged, for us or others. In its original form the unfocussed "overdesign" objection was mainlg directed at cruder anthropic principles, as were unverifiabilitg and unfalsifiabilitg. a batch of objections The well-worn criticism, that notorious psgchoanalgtic and Marxist principles did too much, being so designed that covered everg protested that case, was redirected from against anthropic principles. it is hard to see how the anthropic principLe can be It used theg was to make testable predictions, because ang theorg inconsistent with our existence is 4 M3nLfestLg Not faLse . such protests been weakened bg avant garde have onLg phLLosophg of science, but, as Carter has poLnted out, anthropLc arguments couLd varLous Ln prLncLpLe have been used to predLct theg Rnd notLced. were faLsLfLcatLon, e.g. where erroneous that unLLkeLg assumptLons prLncLpLes, regards Rs fLrst). under but Ls worLd-sgnthesLs, aLL that worLds the whether Ln wLth cosmoLog Les and of verLfLcatLonLst seLectLon whLch semantLcs, or phgsLcs exLst, LnvoLved of themes objectLons do have some verLfLabLLLtg vLrtue of what Ls meant bg bg bg neutraLLsed ex Lsttng. But the force of these objectLons Ls theorg. as conversLon, object-theorg Granted LnterpretatLon. of Often, Lt (though of weaker forms wouLd be abandoned, other surrendered force agaLnst mang-worLds theories, assume derLved object Lons are LargeLg mLsdLrected, because what are at Lssue are phgsLcaL semantLcs, are coLncLdences premLss factuaL be wouLd verLfLabLLLtg not the anthropLc arguments do admLt of of 3ssumptLons the before coLncLdences numerLcaL neutraL worLds objectLons, the crLtLcLsms of mang-worLd such prLncLpLes anthropLc as geophgsLcaL or prLncLpLes are LntertwLned, and dLsentangLLng the crLtLcLsms Ls enough to partLg So them. def Late aLso wLth the reLated charge th3t the neutraL worLd- Ls Lt sgnthesLs theorg Ls unscLentLfLc or at much turns Least dubLousLg scLentLfLc.PLaLnLg on what Ls admLtted Lnto that esteemed categorg, scLentLfLc. But on most accounts, use of seLectLon prLncLpLes succeeds Ln gettLng LncLuded. Rnd so, pLaLnLg enough, does mang-worLds quantum theorg. Rfter 3LL, Lt has 3pproxLmateLg as the same sorts of predLcatLve and test capabLLLtLes more That fact of narrow empLrLcaL LndLstLnguLshabLLLtg mag be the source of theorg. other compLaLnts, but Lt gtves no ground for the charge worLd Ls seLectLon prLncLpLes excLuded! are It at hand. of scLentLfLc and theorLsLng experLmentLng true that some theoretLcaL and wouLd (per prefer LmpossLbLe) and wantLng to st Lek to a uLtLmate and unLfLed expLanatLons. No doubt such semantLcaL apparatus does faLL fouL of the the substance of the charge, consLder some of the crLterLa often beLng theLr theorg narrower sLmpLg reveaLs further serLous defects Ln such vLews. But to reach that vLews: fuLLer the narrower (hgpothetLco-deducttve) methodoLogg, are uneasg wLth worLds seLectLon, sureLg But phgsLcLsts, and mang phLLosophers, LosLng sLght of what enters Lnto range quantum orthodox scLentLfLc. UnfaLsLfLabLe? SureLg set down for Ln areas where the framework Ls not pLnned down bg phgsLcaL theorg. OvercompLLcated and LnsuffLcLentLg gLven what the worLds theorg Ls Lntended to accompLLsh sLmpLe? Not (e.g. the semantLcaLLg theoretLcaL work Lt Ls aLso put to Ln areas such 3s LLnguLstLcs). Etc., etc. Perhaps the most teLLLng theorLes LLke worLd—sgntheses objectLons whLch agaLnst LncLude status quo arguments, and them, concern theLr expLsnatorg capacLtg. StrangeLg theg have been condemned both as expLaLntng too much - ang thLng at aLL can be brought out Ln some worLd - and as expLaLnLng too LLttLe and beLng trLvLaL. Not both these objectLons are LLkeLg to succeed, as theg tend to undercut one another. IndependentLg, Lt seems cLear that the arguments do provLde expLanatLons, for LnvoLved Lnstance, of the strength of the strong nucLear force. It aLso seems cLear that the expLanatLons afforded are of vargLng -27- depth, + depending in part on the depth of the underlying physicaL theory invoLved, this and the pLausibiLity of the further assumptions made in the arguments. Better exempiific3tions of status quo arguments in physics satisfy not oniy more ordinary requirements for expLanation; they aLso meet assembLed conditions considerable time, by HempeL, mainstream the which conditions on position demanding for represented, some what counted as a scientific expLanation. Furthermore, the chief objections to have more the HempeLian the account that emerged have been to the effect that it is too rigorous, not that it faiLs to provide jointLy sufficient conditions for expLanation. To make a prima facie case that better status quo arguments do provide exp Lanations, it is enough then show to expLanation LogicaL HempeL s that conditions on the (p.2t+7ff) have been met. By contrast conditions design with scientific of the arguments, 3re satisfied. The expLanandum T is a LogicaL adequacy of pattern basic consequence of the physicaL argument eLaborating the schemas F, if F then T; the expLanans has empiricaL content, at Least in the shape of expLanans F; which connection if F then T, provides expLanans are true, Uere a foLLows from arguments using physicaL Laws. FinaLLy, the demanding empiricaL condition of adequacy, that the premisses used in the is satisfied in better status quo arguments. the basic pattern aLso necessary for scientific expLanation, it wouLd be an easy coroLLary that many poorer status quo arguments fait to provide expianations (beginning with Carter s and Descartes is there the and contains general, Laws which are actuaLLy used in the derivation. For, in better status quo arguments, the conditionaL schema, Law Like premiss much quo status that such Cogito arguments), and that arguments cannot presentLy expLain decentLy, '^ncLuding such major puzzLes as Life and inteLLigence in the LocaL worLd. It can be independentLy argued, moreover, that poorer status quo arguments, which patentLy (or short meeting HempeLian conditions, fait to generate satisfactory of satisfying) expianations. TriviaL, dogmatic, forms, such as that things 3re the way they are because that is how they are, represent a virtuaLLy worse of sort. this But possibie. weakening to principte, that what The universe is inhabitabie, because we are here, because ask Forrest so is aLso humans inhabit The universe is suited to inteLLigent Life because there are peopLe such questions upon). focusses inferences, is sLightLy embroidered, are arguments with connecting principLes Such, the earth , case better, or more informative, are those arguments scarceLy which appLy the possibility Like faLL (exampies adapted from the sorts of anthropic arguments These short; patentLy faLL arguments, which they LnvoLve offer no aimost immediate further appropriate basic (HempeLian) argumentation making use of generaL Laws. Given that better status quo arguments do afford scientific expianations, and given further that the arguments do serve to remove and not without predictive force, why have they been genuine puzzLement fauLted as expianations, and sometimes criticised 3S not providing expianations are at aLL (e.g. Forrest)? The main reason offered, that back-to-front , these "expianations" are appears to rest on the assumption that aLL genuine expLanation -28- shouLd be broadLg causaL, and accordingLg exhibit (time-) the direction or controi. Status quo expLanations are certainLg not causaL, and mag causation weLL run counter to causaL direction, expLaining features of the earig the through of distribution present universe of eLements. That is, however, perfectLg in order. For satisfactorg expLanation is not causaLLg restricted either ordinariLg or scientificaLLg. HempeL suppLies severaL different sorts of pattern basic of causaLLg or controL directed (pp.352-3). EspeciaLLg striking in this exampLe opticaL straightforward his of his which are not causaL expLanation or expLanation scientific exampLes regard is a particuLar event...satisfactoriLg of expLained bg reference to subsequent occurrences'; but his exampLe of two-wag where the period of a penduLum serves to expLain the Length of the expLanation, penduLum as weLL as converseLg, is aLso highLg re Levant. For it is too expiaining commonLg assumed numericaL that shouLd coincidences be the presence of water, carbon and the Like in the universe, not vice versa. But there is no iLLuminating reason quo status whg direction shouLd expLanation the instead not in run the as weLL as, vice versa. That of, iLLuminating direction is after aLL from the famiLiar to the much Less famiLiar, and more in need of expLanation. such It is true of course that more simpig means that status quo expLanations ad hominem stgLe of status quo expLanation, for are. Like expLanations, most further unreasonabLg stop deeper expLanation. The expLanation-stopping forms are and form: contraposed inquirers verg for expLanation if it weren t so gou woutdn t be here to ask the question. However such put-downs (in the envisaged persistent Legitimate the those (which Forrest discusses) where the response to a request for the Long. wouLd contexts) not more charge, damaging feature of the universe, Then PF. seLecting worLds where PF hoLds. But the theorg. the then, is that worLd-sgnthesis can expLain too much. The charge is backed up bg the foLLowing sort of consideration. puzzLing deter Theg wouLd be awag in search of further expLanations, such as better status quo arguments mag furnish (at Least for t ime be ing). The not begin in the middLe wag. Nor do theg, except in speciaL, rather theg uLtimate: takes famiLiar, the presence of water and carbon, aLso caLLs for expLanation; but that as quest the charge it Take ang can be expLained simpig bg misrepresents worLd-sgnthesis There is more to it than this. There is a cruciaL argumentative Linkage aLso invoLved, between PF and gross geophgsicaL features of the worLds (near factuaL worLd T) which are seLected. Or, put differentig, the seLection does not take pLace on basis the of PF, but (mereLg) under the constraint of gross geophgsicaL features; accordingLg if the argumentative Linkage from satisfactorg status quo arguments worLd-sgnthesis. is missing, PF is not to be expLained through In short, then, worLd-sgnthesis theorg offers expLanations when bg and then the expLanations mag varg greatLg in quaLitg depending on the depth of the phgsicaL the framework is suitabLg fLeshed out phgsicaL theorg; information invoLved in the argumentative Linkage. EssentiaLLg the same points undermine Forrest's further objection to such -2?- many-worLds explanation, truths; contingent have we aLL do to coaches easiLy as the pumpkins of turning numericsL coincidences. But there is no such free as seLection of phusicaL worLds - which do not incLude worLds vaLidating magicaL as faiL, can schema connecting arbitrary and practices. Status quo expianations may not be easy transformations at aLL, but physicaLLy comp Lex, they are not atways and they as is to posit suitabLy many and varied (p.9). Thus the theory is aLLeged to expLain worLds into that it "expLains" contingent faLsehoods as easiiy an when assumption invoLved easiLy avaiLabte, and the eLaboration of the in , and the argumentative schema issues in a contingent faiLs faLsehood. For a necessary condition that a status quo expianation be successfuL is that the argument be correct; but then given that the argument form is vaiid, the cone Lus ion cannot be simpiy f aLse. is It that satisfactory expianations, with conforming to such conditions of adequacy as deductive vaiidity in and quo status expianations winning in expianations differ from decisiveLy design which are sometimes seen as on an expianatory LeveL competition with status quo and expianations their piuraL-worLds setting (thus e.g. LesLie), and sometimes even confused with them. Design arguments characteristicaLLy take the deductiveLy invaLid abductive modus toLLens form: Things are (surprisingLy) so and so F If a design hypothesis heLd (e.g. the universe anticipated observers, a design-force operated), things woutd be (unsurprisingLy) so and so. If H then F Therefore, a design hypothesis (probabLy) hoLds. .. H Nor in design arguments is the connecting schema normaLLy eLaborated by appropriate scientific argument; nor, where God is invoked, i§; there any way of suitabLy confining the argument scientificaLLy. Thus support first the LesLie's of Larger cLaims is faLse:- the LiorLd EnsembLe hypothesis rather than the God hypothesis. !^e do not have...strong evidence of an EnsembLe' (LI, p.150). for Science does not their existence No branch of physics in a way commanding wide acceptance (LI, p.S3). The main reason is that the Bod hypothesis is not part of a physicaL theory that many-worLd theory is caLLs in the way of quantum theory (thus, e.g., there is no physics text corresponding to DeLiitt and Graham for the God hypothesis), [^hiie the Last cLaim is true, it does not teLL against the truth of neutraL many-worLds theory. Uhat science supports is science, not the the metaphysics it presupposes. Physics is not however aLL of science by any means, and even science doesn't do everything, onLy a rather narrow seLection of things. Richard SyLvan -30- 11 RPPENDIX 1. Some Rncient Rntecedents The Non-Limited is the originaL materiaL of existing things; further the source] from which existing things derive their existence is a iso that to which they' return at their destruction, according to necessity [for reparation]... —----- So, in the 6th Century B.C., said Rnaximander, perhaps among the first aLso to set down a story of the evoLution of humankind.Something the same was said in text, though on the favoured taLe a Heideggerean and Taoist touch was Lent, the with Nothingness repLacing the Non-Limited. In the on beginning, there was nothing; and uLtimateLy, too, there wiLL be nothing. have been paid. The p3raLLeL with Rnaximander can be pressed further. In account origins, of of worLd the contemporary charged pairs of particLes are created in the oppositeLy 'the order, wiLL Reparation process of pair formation from the vacuum; white in Rnaximander's story formation story, this opposites the of which are present Ln the one [the Non-Limited], are separated out from it' (but 'the "opposites" are the hot, coLd, the dry the , the moist, and the rest : see Robinson p.25). There is aLso a phenomenon which corresponds to some Limited extent to the Big Bang, nameLy Vortex. the It seems cLear, however, from the materiaL Burnet assembLes, that Rnaximander's position amounted to the first Less satisfactory resoiution, matter or substance aLways. For the BoundLess or Infinite was a materiaL cause, -^*-*dstance (p. 5k<); it is eternaL and ageLess is brought about the origin of the worids. did — Further, according to SimpLicius, not ascribe the origin of things to any aLteration of matter, but said that the oppositions separated encompasses aLL worids substance". RLso there is in it eternaL motion, in which which makes it a queer he and out . If in that the substratum was which a boundLess body, were is right — and it may not be, especiaLLy given Later ontotogicaL infLuences (cf. p.61) - then the matter is cLear. Rnaximander beiieved there were innumerabLe worids (p.58). These worids were concurrent, not successive. coex istent remains uncLear, but Later in the Whether Bound Less" they tradition (biassed) took them exist, making Rnaximander's position a many-existent-wortds theory. The to Law of compensation, under which for borrowing or variation reparation must be made, becomes the Law of repayment aLL were of conservation. The reparation paraLLeLs the borrowed" mass-energy. The more generaL steering of aLL things - overarching order in naturaL processes - becomes the Laws of nature which govern (reguLate) the processes. 'The orderLiness ... is grounded in the nature of things as such . Rnaximander's account represents an immenseLy -31- important stage in the transition from world-order is myth from science. to first to ... Last 'Hesiod's account of the origin of the anthropomorphic. account Rnaximanders represents, in principLe, a complete break with this mode of thought (Robinson p.27). From this angle the anthropic and idealistic fixes of contemporary science show marked regression. That transition, beyond anthropic creation stories, is also accomplished in the main philosophical essentials of the favoured resolution can where Taoism, be found. Something flowed from nothing, in a seemingly paradoxical way? but not through ang creation or agency. There was a the before time when beginning nothing at aLL existed. The problem of Laws (of nature) was also recognised, and resolved. did Laws not exist (independently at least of things that did) but were exhibited in in things that did exist. So it seems to follow that, stage at restricted property to duty what separated, and was mainly Lacking ascriptions Taoism Such nothing. a and deep in cosmogonic tales, then, from the ^.th C. B.C. until the 20th C., was a plausible explanatory story as to how come from together. of does exist. (Fuller details of Taoist cosmology, under this type of interpretation, are ventured in ecology', written with D. Bennett.) Mhat the which nothing existed, the taws could hold without having 3ny sort of existence, i.e. truth and existence were existence at story a few something could humans are Just beginning to piece NOTES Thi^ passage from Misner, Thorne and Uheeter, p.1212, is given an appropriately grander setting Ln the text. The passage Ls also quoted by DavLes, G p.222, who Lt to Wheeler. In Davies the idea of ascribes foundations for cosmology simple and unassailable Logical is given a different exposure, and is then linked with restrictions, to zero, on God s range of choice of universe to make. 2 Especially by those whose inquisitiveness and sense of blunted or destroyed by the mainstream culture and its wonder h3s educational not been practices, practices much mainstream philosophy reinforces and tries to justify. 3 Indolent philosophers tend to assign those of these questions that they write off (e.g. as semantically defective or as betraying philosophical uonfuslon or hang—upz?) to science. But they are not Just a matter for and scientists tend to come up with philosophically loaded, naive, theories scientists remain, insofar as they address the cannot questions and at often science; enough all. Too many Like too many RustraLian phiLosophers, in the grips of awfuL metaphysics, such as narrow empiricism and/or physicaiism. -32- ^The anaLysis semantical It of naturaL a is Law is that' Law-constrained worLds, naturaL worids. The interpretation ruLe for necessity. Terra, appLy but to Like is It shouLd be noted that geophysicaL features, appLied in seLecting worLds, are not of course confined to systems. in terns of geophysicaL pLanetary other "Rn eLaboration of this type of answer can be further expLoited to heLp why actuaL the standard ot worLd is science expLain comparativeLy so that simpLe, mathematicaLLy tractabLe, etc. HameLy, it is convenientLy so because the actuaL worLd seLection invoLved impLicitLy to render it so, by choice of a serves worLd with the compLexity of richer worLds removed and onLy tractabLe ideaL etements (such as scientific universaLs) adjoined. &RLtern3tiveLy, through quantum and borrowing positive feedback, a massive firebaLL forms. The story admits of much variation. ? The prob Lems, as the questions of the Lattice in diagram 2 indicate, what expLaining phiLosophers does exist, Lie with what does not. In a reLated way, 3LL those not papers on the prob Lems nonexistence of and nonexistents have misjudged the prob Lernatic, and misconceived the onus of proof. For commonLy the probLems concern existents and their behaviour; nonexistents, especiaLLy those functioning in expLanatory rotes as regards existentiai often behaviour, are very weLL behaved by comparison with existents. It has been suggested, by D. Lewis, that the underLying theory of items (of JB) renders everything exists. But it nonexistent, is and makes it 3 reaL probLem, how anything patentiy faLse that the theory of items render everything nonexistent. There are criteria for existence, which are often JB, chapter 9). Every thing nominaLists normaLLy take to satisfied (cf. exist satisfies the to be justified; it cannot (with any pretension to satisfactoriness) just be cLaimed, in the fashion of so many phiLosophers. In any case, Lewis can be simuLated: whatever ind iv idua Ls exist criteria. Beyond that existence has in Lewis worLds wiLL exist in worids-seLection theory. Rnd it is. a genuine phiLosophicaL probLem how anything exists. g in 19t+6; see his cosmoLogicaL text. Llhitrow aLso appLied, more than RpparentLy a quarter of a century ago, PrincipLe , in his what has now been eLevated to the Rnthropic answer to why the dimensions of space are three; nameLy, th3t this atone permits the evoLution of Nan, the formuiator of the probLem'. However 'Uhitrow's reasons concern not mankind but stabLe pLanetary orbits and compLex neurai networks' (LI, p.!^). g Compare the binding energy which keeps etectrons bound to a nucLeus, where correiativeiy energy stored up in overcoming forces of repuLsion is positive. -33- e a story couLd be totd to bring Laws within the expLanation framework. However It wouid teLLing invoLve Laws first evoLved or happened to hoLd, the how before vacuum fLuctuations. (For some interesting specuLation, from which the ontic and anthropic commitment can be removed without totaL Loss, see Barrow pp. 151-2, where "chaotic gauge theory" is considered.) The issue of uLtimate is expLanation again up taken seLf-justifying postulate as serving refLexive, expLanation. Note that in UQ, to the resoLve the matter the especiaLLy of probLem uLtimate, PostuLate Characterisation a of of object-theory is an initiaLLy promising candidate for such a principte. issue is that, on the story as toLd, quantum phenomena assume Another serious decidedLy they course Of macro-dimensions. may, Schrodinger s cat iLLustrates, but perhaps not in the parabLe the as supposed of catastrophic form. In the absence of any approved quantization of general, reLativity, there onLy are Lax physicaL controis on what is in and what is out in specuLation here. Rnd, of course, the second story couid There are other mechanisms for the sudden be rise in eLaborsted other ways. e.g. white mass-energy, of ho Les in geometrodynamics. In his second paper, Tryon makes a rather casuaL beginning on meeting some of difficuLties the with the vacuum fLuctuation theory the cosmos, and of expLains the advantages of combining the theory with that of a (stiLL probLematic) "infLationary" universe, to boost the fLuctuation. But the theory stiLL awaits aporopriateLy detaiLed deveiopment and modeLLing. 12 There are various other issues concerning the physicaL constants, incLuding the question of the (sLow) evoLution of "constants" over time. LJeLL, do evoLve, the they if same sort of probLems arise for the parameters which repLace them (L.e. at each time t, for c(t)). There are putative arguments to the effect that there can be no very grand unified theory, and no finaL eLimination of constants, because any such theory wouid do too much in determ in ing the worLd (and things). But it is unctear at present how such an argument gets duty eLaborated. R tight argument uneLiminabiLity of some physicaL constants from physicaL principLes for the wouLd be of much interest. 13 Th',s is what is reaLLy accompLLshed in Carter. To some extent we have emerging in this area a contemporary scientific numeroLogy. 1L Convergence arguments, e.g. for such things as the Church-Turing thesis, underLying connections, but not co-operation. l^Even Less, seemingLy, is the universe an accident, 'an event proceeding from an unknown cause; something unexpected; a casuaLty, a mishap, l&If however the worLd reaLLy were necessary, such improbabiLity must be grossLy -34- reduced. How can that be: how can these contingencies be not what theg seem? 1? How M3ng worLds? ContinuousLg mang worLds? There is no reason whg not. But the answer is: as mang at Least as required. In object-theorg numbers don t short matter though much, so difficuLties technccaL controL Ls advantage. an are There as to measures, e.g. of fewness, in infinite modeLLings. Yet the notions are Ln order, e.g. among the naturaL numbers primes are few. 18 point, ThL^, and the inestimabLLitg specific of probabLLLties Ln (e.g. Ls argued, though in insufficient detaiL, bg TouLmLn among others meteoroLogg) Bg the wag, sureLg a creator wouLd have increased probabLLitLes bg seeing to a unLverse for fit decent habitation; a variation upon the argument from evLL infiltrates itseLf Ln probabiLitg guise here. 13 worked There are in fact mang proposed soLutions, most of them not theg (because far verg out have onLg few proponents), most of them not comprehensive certainLg (but it couLd be argued that this is a faLse ideaL), severaL of them discussed bg Everett, DeMLtt, Lande and others. 20 MheeLer s sequentiaL modeL another, so satisfgLng the theorg (Like certain offers a simitar range of worLds, but one after 'reaLLtg principLe". EarLLer MheeLer had adopted cosmoLogies) Eastern with in muLtLpLLcitg a both sequent La LLg and Lnto the possibLe; but recent Lg he has abandoned dimen^Lon^,, the Latter, partig on erroneous ontoLogLcaL grounds. 21 It Ls of course not the onLg reaLLstLc-stgie LnterpretatLon whLch does thLs: envisage everu Lande s LnterpretatLon is another. 22 From a neutraL viewpoint, Lt ts entLreLg taLse that atom ... as Me must constantLg engaging in this tgpe of scattering sctLvitg, therebg spLLtting the worLd again and again Lnto a stupendous number carbon-copLes of of LtseLf. The unLverse must therefore be LLkened to a tree, whLch branches 3nd (D p.I25). Nor Ls rebranches universe. 23 To anticipate, schemas of what the form, happens "if the tree-structured sgstern of universes the is as foLLows:- The antecedents of "anthropic" there exist so and so [e.g. observers] then ang phgsLcaL worLds must be such and such", are appLLed to phgsLcaL worLds. Rs there certainLg do exist so and so, narrow ctass the phgsLcaL worLds of are restricted to those that are such and such. gL It cs stLLL reasonabLe to 3sk whg - indeed to e.g. whg do we inhabit it?, whence a Long pose' severaL whg questions, evoLutionarg storg. Mhg are the constants those theg are?, then aLternative answers, LncLudLng brute fact, are among the possibiLities. -35- roundLg defeated Shapiro. 26 bg the sorts considerations advanced bg Feinberg and of Davies aLso suggests that mang-worLds theorg can provide a pLausibLe phgsicaL (as opposed to phiLosophicaL) justification for the strong principte (D p.122 middLe). In fact he never reaLLg shows this satisfactoriig (nor can it be so shown), and in pointing to the power of the m3ng—universe theorg he undermines the strong principte, showing it otiose. 2? arguments are presented in modat form, with the connecting quo status Often scheme set in either necessitated form, if F that) (e.g. T if exist there necessaritg then (it if possibLe modaLities are de dicto and and that invoLved cLaims the It such). if F then T. The modaLitg invoLved is not one of LogicaL contingent nomic of that strength, but can be adequateLg NecessariLg, necessitg, an The error. argument guarantee the concLusion, NecessariLg T, nor does it pretend form these or even in Lowest common denominator form. To attach the (reLative) modaLitg simpig to consequent T wouLd be second is 'it is more than mereLg rather reads that seems represented, as usuaL, through a necessitated connecting schema, one F form, (e.g. what is the case LocaLLg (what observers observe, T etc.) is onLg possibLe if phgsics is such aLwags be and so, then the universe must have, or so conform to, such and such features), or, in quasi-transcendentaL onLg must to do does not so. The is a LittLe more probLematic; but it appears to assert that F is inconsistent with not-T, and so, through obvious connections, the same as the rectified first form. 28 Mhat we have are devices, that fragments of theories, ruLes thumb, of appear to work in a range of cases. and caLcuLating It is these parts that mag generate successfuL technoiogg. The picture is Like engineering. 29 R main charge made bg LesLie against mang-worid cosmoLogies, e.g. LI, p.l^Sff. It is a surprising turn, given the popuLaritg of hgpothetico-deductive methodoLogg, to have it aLso objected that mang-worLd theorg voids induction. Putting chance in controL of inter-worLd differences erodes confidence in our sampLe of ReaLitg, on which our inductions are based' (LI, p.1^.3). this objection gets off the ground (it is transparentLg Insofar cLear as that it does), it depends on assuming the reaLitg of the entire worLd ensembLe. So Lt not Lapses against a neutraL theorg. 30 R reLated phitosophicaLLg important exampLe where the schema does so far is in Moore s proof of an externaL worLd, noted above. The reason is that the existence of arbitrarg materiaL objects, such as hands or does f3it not guarantee that the requirements (order, isoLated unitg, cabbages, coherence, mcnd-cndependence, etc.) for an externaL worLd are satisfied. 31 Rn earLier version of this paper was presented at the RustraLasian Rssociation of PhiLosophg Conference, Rugust 138^. The -36- heLpfuL comments bg David Rrmstrong, Brian Ellis and David Lewis, unreferenced above, were the discussion. commentaries; Both several made during John Leslie and Jack Smart supplied me with worthwhile their points have been incorporated, but some have of been resisted. The initial Univerity preprint series. version W3S published in an Rustralian National 32^ See Freeman, p.IS. for fuller discussion of need for reparation, see Burnet. Rnaximander's on position; the REFERENCES J.D. Barrow, Rnthropic definitions', Quarterly Journal of Royal the Rstroncmical Society 21^ ( 1983) lt+6-153 H. Bondi, Cosmology, Second edition, Cambridge University Press, I960. R, Brout, F. Englert and F. Gunzig, The creation of the universe as a quantum phenomenon' RnnaIs of Physics 115 (1978) 78-106. J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, Fourth edition, Rdam & Charles Black, London, 1930. B. Carter, Large number coincidence and the anthropcc principle is in Longair, 291-98. B. Carter, The anthropic principle and its implications cosmology', biological for evolution , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London (1983) St* 7-363. C.B. Collins and S.U. Hawk eng, Uhy is the universe isotrophic?', 19310 Rstrophqsics Journal 180 (1973) 317. C.D. Darlington, Darwin's Place in History, Blackwell, Oxford, 1959. P. Davies, The Rccidental Universe, Cambridge Universitu Press, Cambridge, 1982; referred to as D. P. Davies, God and the New Physics, Dent, London,1983; B.S. DeUitt referred to as G. and N. Graham, The Many-Uorlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1973. R.H. Dicke and P.J.E. Peebles, in S.U. Hawking and U. The big bang cosmology - enigmas and nostrums , Israel, eds, Genera 1 relativity: an Einstein centenary survey, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979, pp. 501^-517. -37- G.F.R. ELLis, 'is the universe expanding?', GeneraL Reiativitg and Gravitation 9(2) (L973) 87-9L. G. Feinberg and R. Shapiro, Life Beyond Earth, Morrow, New York, 1980. P. Feyerabend, Science Ln a Free Society, New Left Books, London, 1978. 'RnthropLc answers and the existence of P. Forrest, Proceedings God', of the Russet Lan Society, University of Sydney, 7 (1982) 1-13. K. Freeman, RncLLLa to the Pre-Socratic Phitosophers, BLackweLL, Oxford, 1971. N. Griffin and R. SyLvan, Provisionai Rnswers to ULtimate Questions, typescript, Canberra, 1981}.; referred to as UQ. S. Hawking and G.F. ELiis, The Large-Scaie Structure of Space-time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973. M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, (trans. R. Mannheim), YaLe University Press, New Haven, 1959. C.G. HempeL, Rspects of Scientific Exp LanatLon, Free Press, New York, 1965. Lande, The Laws behLnd the quantum Laws , BrLtLsh JournaL for the PhiLosophu of Science 27 (1976) 27-^3. J. L^sLLe, RnthropLc prLncLpLe, worLd ensembLe, desLgn , RmerLcan PhLLosophLcaL QuarterLy, 19 (1982) l^l-lSl; referred to as LI. J. LesLLe, Cosmo Logy, probabLLity and the need to exp La Ln LLfe', Ln ScLentLfLc ExpLanatLon and UnderstandLng (ed. N. Rescher), UnLversLty Press of RmerLea, MaryLand, M.S. LongaLr 1983, 53-82; referred to as L2. (ed.), Confrontat Lon of Cosmo Log LeaL Theories wLth ObsservatLonaL Data, ReLdeL, Dordrecht, 1971}.. C.U. MLsner, K.S. Thorne and J.R. UheeLer, GravLtatLon, Freeman, San 1973. G.E. Moore, PhLLosophLcaL Papers, RLLen and UnwLn, London, FrancLsco, 1959. R. RobLnson, Essays Ln Greek PhLLosophg, CLarendon Press, Oxford, 1969. R. RoutLey, ExpLorLng MeLnong's JungLe and Beyond, Research SchooL ScLences, RustraLLan NatLonaL UnLversity, 1980; referred to as JB. -38- of SociaL Sagan Broca's Brain: Ref Leet ions on the Romance of Science, New York, Random House, 1973. S.Tou Lm in, The Return to CosmoLogy: Postmodern Nature, University of CaLifornia Press, BerkeLey Ca., 1982. Is the universe a vacuum fLuctuation?', Nature 2^6 (1973) 396-7 E.P. Tryon, E.P. Tryon, Science and the Theo Logy of *Mhat made the worLd?', New Scientist 101 (198!+) It+00, 1!+-16 FLN. Mhitehead, Process and ReaLity, Cambridge University Press, 1929. 6.H. Uhitrow, The Structure and Evo Lution of the Universe, Harper, New York, 1959. Second edition,  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 57, Item 2: Draft of Toward an improved cosmo-logical synthesis Subject The topic of the resource Typescript draft, correction version. Paper published, Sylvan R (1985) 'Toward an improved cosmo-logical synthesis', Grazer philosophische Studien, 25:135-179. Description An account of the resource Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 57, Item 2 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource <span>This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, </span><a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a><span>.</span> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [40] leaves. 33.04 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:991d123">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:991d123</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant n/a - location not listed in manuscript finding aid Box 57: Miscellaneous Logic https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/bc6906f973b58155fcdff1d8fbf5c13e.pdf cdee1d9f8cd9703c694e69ab3507018e PDF Text Text IS The UNIVERSE THE argument design HRTERHUTP existence of a designer, a planner, a God, the for RN (LIKE) regularly deploys the model of the universe as an artefact, A noteworthy part of plants from universe, the planets on through naturally evolved systems, If the whole arrangement Is an artefact, contrasts with artefacts. 'artefact' has been and Its contexts, etc., and to lose both Its normal contrasts, place, much stretched, e.g. of then, firstly tools applied by external living external creatures, and secondly, the relevant features are extremely well hidden. In the face of elaboration of these points the artefact claim Is eroded or weakened to-, the universe like an artefact. Is like In having a maker. Is usually meant, 'like' some are There It s as If It were an artefact, etc. And by features curious about Wilkinson s argument In his universe Is artefact'. The usual moves to the artefact model the Intelligibility universe the of e.g. (thus premissed are Heynell). But concentrates on the limits to human knowledge and the apparent extent the universe product on Wilkinson which to not Intelligible to us and may never be. Wilkinson however Is Is Idealism: not arguing for design In the universe, but for a kind of the The nature as of the human mind! The traditional case for design In the universe Is strangely subverted Into an argument for Idealism. God's. Everything Intended by It Is our not artefact, tells against this: but redefinition Is artefact one order of the day In philosophical argument. Consider first Mrs. four arguments, none decvscve, but all with to limits to knowledge, human limits severe practical limits to etc. equipment, ascertaining larger And that limits 1. Levels of detail. There are Is. very the also, appeal, such Size small. as and spaceship cost earth, of men s lifetimes, etc. (One experiment-careers). 2. forces? Variety The (and number) of forces. How many (1) Ignorance lead us Into l> super-weak , «« super-strong ” Issue of completeness Is serious here (as with Kant s philosophy). As with forces, so with objects, NB. It major laws, etc. of an (undiscovered) moderating or compensating force could about error features world, of e.g. Into postulating granularity of space and time. (2) Classlf Icatlon of forces In sort of periodic table, and then deeper explanation. 3. Limits to human conception? Macro-objects of our dimensions can have no conceptions of very small (micro seconds) Involves a slide from or very no real personal experience large. to No?? The argument no Imagination of to no conception of . Argues for limits to conception In both tIme and space. Goes on to suggest limits to description using everyday -1- household language, but �the argument Is bad: It depends on standard (Copenhagen) quantum theory. Ideas that limits of' conception tied to limits of language. 4-. Human nature and Its essential prejudice-, limits to what we are prepared to accept or understand. Set of prejudices, etc., e.g. prejudices In of favour numbers (In a fuaay world). Our constitution prevents understanding of world. Wilkinson's further argument Is that In view of limits we humans cannot but value to resort 'in reaching his judgements as to how the natural world Is - constructed, man cannot ultimately do more than say this Is how It has to be (p.96). Value ImposItIon, has to be', lie know that whether or [whether 'should be', quarks No, (p.98): Is here like Leslie? not we This Is how It get can good' feel at quarks we shall continue to talk about them and discuss their exist] (p.97). Nature Is going to be what the mind anatomy and domestic economy It me this makes the same makes of [our] theory with the thing confusion theorised that pervades Idealistic approaches. Wilkinson also to wants (as above and especially from orthodox proceed quantum theory) to reject any theme of the closure of nature to mind. He contends (p.80) that objectivity - looking at nature from outside - dissolves to be replaced by something Involving man essentially. The natural world depends on man for Its definition: hence the universe as an artefact. But this Is In no way established. The argument depends on the fallacy of of theory nature again, find nature equating with the It makes the erroneous assumption that the only criteria for theory selection are at bottom those of value or feeling. R question Wilkinson suggests, but sets aside (In the too-hard basket) Is: How It Is that we manage to understand the universe, or It s e.g. the much of It? mostly good luck. Historically rather different answers were favoured, universe Intelligible, Is natural, the world Is Intelligible. It's Since sufficiently Intelligent creatures can come to understand It. The Intelligibility theme Is not lacking for exponents. Here, In summary. Is Heynell argues for and applies It: R. If the It would not be that we can In world were not Intelligible, principle come to know. But the world Is that which we can In principle come to know. Therefore the world Is Intelligible. B. If Very like: We don't; or, So far as we different repsonses quickly suggest themselves, do so there were not something analogous to human Intelligence In the constitution of the world? the world would not be Intelligible. Therefore there Is something analogous to human Intelligence In constitution of the world (68). -2- the how �The preMiss first of B is flat out false, but present concern is with fl. The Minor preMiss of fl is false, by virtue of llMltatlon arguments such as those Wilkinson and elsewhere take an analytical shape is suffIclently (e.g. a of Routley). find the Major preMiss, though it can distortion. For Instance, the world May be intelligible for us to come to understand what we do of It without being completely intelligible. -3- �f~. i— i— i— r—i f— k i r^. ez. r- ez. r*--. ez. i -i H. fl e g n e 11, London, The Intelligible Universe r— «~- ez. - -=• A cosMologlcal arguwent , flacwll I an, 1982. D.H. Ullklnson, The universe as an artefact Models and Han, Clarendon, Oxford, In H. 1976, 88-98. -4- Harris (ed. ) Sc tent itto �Lj / 1 -\ L/ A C'T'Zf^ £ X J -/■■».*> -K f. / (/ W7 e (/ 7^77 sy J e 4^-?'')'? ] '^7' 4~r>l*'< > & '' ( //// O ' a � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document IS The UNIVERSE THE argument design HRTERHUTP existence of a designer, a planner, a God, the for RN (LIKE) regularly deploys the model of the universe as an artefact, A noteworthy part of plants from universe, the planets on through naturally evolved systems, If the whole arrangement Is an artefact, contrasts with artefacts. 'artefact' has been and Its contexts, etc., and to lose both Its normal contrasts, place, much stretched, e.g. of then, firstly tools applied by external living external creatures, and secondly, the relevant features are extremely well hidden. In the face of elaboration of these points the artefact claim Is eroded or weakened to-, the universe like an artefact. Is like In having a maker. Is usually meant, 'like' some are There It s as If It were an artefact, etc. And by features curious about Wilkinson s argument In his universe Is artefact'. The usual moves to the artefact model the Intelligibility universe the of e.g. (thus premissed are Heynell). But concentrates on the limits to human knowledge and the apparent extent the universe product on Wilkinson which to not Intelligible to us and may never be. Wilkinson however Is Is Idealism: not arguing for design In the universe, but for a kind of the The nature as of the human mind! The traditional case for design In the universe Is strangely subverted Into an argument for Idealism. God's. Everything Intended by It Is our not artefact, tells against this: but redefinition Is artefact one order of the day In philosophical argument. Consider first Mrs. four arguments, none decvscve, but all with to limits to knowledge, human limits severe practical limits to etc. equipment, ascertaining larger And that limits 1. Levels of detail. There are Is. very the also, appeal, such Size small. as and spaceship cost earth, of men s lifetimes, etc. (One experiment-careers). 2. forces? Variety The (and number) of forces. How many (1) Ignorance lead us Into l> super-weak , «« super-strong ” Issue of completeness Is serious here (as with Kant s philosophy). As with forces, so with objects, NB. It major laws, etc. of an (undiscovered) moderating or compensating force could about error features world, of e.g. Into postulating granularity of space and time. (2) Classlf Icatlon of forces In sort of periodic table, and then deeper explanation. 3. Limits to human conception? Macro-objects of our dimensions can have no conceptions of very small (micro seconds) Involves a slide from or very no real personal experience large. to No?? The argument no Imagination of to no conception of . Argues for limits to conception In both tIme and space. Goes on to suggest limits to description using everyday -1- household language, but the argument Is bad: It depends on standard (Copenhagen) quantum theory. Ideas that limits of' conception tied to limits of language. 4-. Human nature and Its essential prejudice-, limits to what we are prepared to accept or understand. Set of prejudices, etc., e.g. prejudices In of favour numbers (In a fuaay world). Our constitution prevents understanding of world. Wilkinson's further argument Is that In view of limits we humans cannot but value to resort 'in reaching his judgements as to how the natural world Is - constructed, man cannot ultimately do more than say this Is how It has to be (p.96). Value ImposItIon, has to be', lie know that whether or [whether 'should be', quarks No, (p.98): Is here like Leslie? not we This Is how It get can good' feel at quarks we shall continue to talk about them and discuss their exist] (p.97). Nature Is going to be what the mind anatomy and domestic economy It me this makes the same makes of [our] theory with the thing confusion theorised that pervades Idealistic approaches. Wilkinson also to wants (as above and especially from orthodox proceed quantum theory) to reject any theme of the closure of nature to mind. He contends (p.80) that objectivity - looking at nature from outside - dissolves to be replaced by something Involving man essentially. The natural world depends on man for Its definition: hence the universe as an artefact. But this Is In no way established. The argument depends on the fallacy of of theory nature again, find nature equating with the It makes the erroneous assumption that the only criteria for theory selection are at bottom those of value or feeling. R question Wilkinson suggests, but sets aside (In the too-hard basket) Is: How It Is that we manage to understand the universe, or It s e.g. the much of It? mostly good luck. Historically rather different answers were favoured, universe Intelligible, Is natural, the world Is Intelligible. It's Since sufficiently Intelligent creatures can come to understand It. The Intelligibility theme Is not lacking for exponents. Here, In summary. Is Heynell argues for and applies It: R. If the It would not be that we can In world were not Intelligible, principle come to know. But the world Is that which we can In principle come to know. Therefore the world Is Intelligible. B. If Very like: We don't; or, So far as we different repsonses quickly suggest themselves, do so there were not something analogous to human Intelligence In the constitution of the world? the world would not be Intelligible. Therefore there Is something analogous to human Intelligence In constitution of the world (68). -2- the how The preMiss first of B is flat out false, but present concern is with fl. The Minor preMiss of fl is false, by virtue of llMltatlon arguments such as those Wilkinson and elsewhere take an analytical shape is suffIclently (e.g. a of Routley). find the Major preMiss, though it can distortion. For Instance, the world May be intelligible for us to come to understand what we do of It without being completely intelligible. -3- f~. i— i— i— r—i f— k i r^. ez. r- ez. r*--. ez. i -i H. fl e g n e 11, London, The Intelligible Universe r— «~- ez. - -=• A cosMologlcal arguwent , flacwll I an, 1982. D.H. Ullklnson, The universe as an artefact Models and Han, Clarendon, Oxford, In H. 1976, 88-98. -4- Harris (ed. ) Sc tent itto Lj / 1 -\ L/ A C'T'Zf^ £ X J -/■■».*> -K f. / (/ W7 e (/ 7^77 sy J e 4^-?'')'? ] '^7' 4~r>l*'< > & '' ( //// O ' a  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 7, Item 792: Is the universe (like) an artefact? Subject The topic of the resource Computer printout with handwritten amendments, and handwritten notes on scrap paper. Description An account of the resource Note, one item digitised from item 792. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 7, Item 792 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [4] leaves + [1] leaf. 2.68 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:acc747a">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:acc747a</a> Australian National University Office Box 7: Environmental Ethics Como House > Shelves > Bottom > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/a712372fc5eb6f4fbc060ed2fdbafa53.pdf 201a8b138801518733d5f3bcd3bc60e3 PDF Text Text The Research Schoot oi Sociai Sciences Post Office Box 4 Canberra ACT 2600 Telegrams & cables NATUNiv Canberra Telex AA 62694 sopAC Telephone 062-49 5111 Department of Philosophy reference 10 February 1981. The Editor, A.N.U. Reporter Dear Editor, In the eyes of many the A.N.U. had already abandoned any semblance of neutrality on the issue of nuclear power and uranium mining ^me time ago, especially by the use of official university resources for the promotion of Professor Ringwood and his pro-nuclear position. Now we have the news that the A.N.U. has even more thoroughly compromised its neutrality on the issue through the purchase of /2(^0,00^ -weath'TKf shares in uranium mining. In view of the university's use of its funds and other resources to sponsor nuclear development, the initials A.N.U. could perhaps be better taken to stand for Australian Nuclear University. This suggests some possible ways in which the many people within the university who object to uranium mining and nuclear development could protest and express their awareness of and distaste for its pronuclear character, for example: * Sign published work with the home address to avoid the embarrassment of being associated with this thoroughly compromised institution, adding a note to explain why. * Sign published work 'Australian Nuclear University', appending a footnote to explain why this name is more appropriate. * Substitute 'Australian Nuclear University' on letterheads, envelopes, in letters to colleagues, and in other appropriate places, so that the character of the university and its political commitments become more widely known. No doubt others will be able to think of many appropriate variations on the theme, Yours, Richard Routley. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia Description An account of the resource In one obituary, Sylvan's handwriting was said to have "looked like the oscilloscope for a patient in intensive care", and thus "not for the timid". Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document The Research Schoot oi Sociai Sciences Post Office Box 4 Canberra ACT 2600 Telegrams & cables NATUNiv Canberra Telex AA 62694 sopAC Telephone 062-49 5111 Department of Philosophy reference 10 February 1981. The Editor, A.N.U. Reporter Dear Editor, In the eyes of many the A.N.U. had already abandoned any semblance of neutrality on the issue of nuclear power and uranium mining ^me time ago, especially by the use of official university resources for the promotion of Professor Ringwood and his pro-nuclear position. Now we have the news that the A.N.U. has even more thoroughly compromised its neutrality on the issue through the purchase of /2(^0,00^ -weath'TKf shares in uranium mining. In view of the university's use of its funds and other resources to sponsor nuclear development, the initials A.N.U. could perhaps be better taken to stand for Australian Nuclear University. This suggests some possible ways in which the many people within the university who object to uranium mining and nuclear development could protest and express their awareness of and distaste for its pronuclear character, for example: * Sign published work with the home address to avoid the embarrassment of being associated with this thoroughly compromised institution, adding a note to explain why. * Sign published work 'Australian Nuclear University', appending a footnote to explain why this name is more appropriate. * Substitute 'Australian Nuclear University' on letterheads, envelopes, in letters to colleagues, and in other appropriate places, so that the character of the university and its political commitments become more widely known. No doubt others will be able to think of many appropriate variations on the theme, Yours, Richard Routley.  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 98, Item 1865: Richard Routley to The Editor, ANU Reporter, 10 Feb 1981 Subject The topic of the resource Typescript letter, with emendations. Letter on a Australian National University letter head. Richard Routley (later Sylvan) writes about ANU’s "…abandoned any semblance of neutrality on the issue of nuclear and uranium mining…", through the promotion of Professor Ringwood and "his pro-nuclear position", and the purchase of shares in uranium mining. Sylvan suggests some possible ways staff could protest. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 98, Item 1865 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource February 10, 1981 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Letter, [1] leaf. 2.12 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Correspondences Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:2e5219e">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:2e5219e</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Australian National University - Far Bookcase - Second Bay - Second Shelf - Pile 1 Australian National University Office Australian National University Office > Far Bookcase > Second Bay > Second Shelf > Pile 1 Box 98: Richard's Professional Work-refereeing - examining - reports etc and Philosophy of Language https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/581b87e4d67a33473f084886196c0964.pdf 9c80f2dae98c9b0e7076149ee0387602 PDF Text Text ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY AND MORAL INSENSITIVITY OF PACIFISM Pacifism , despite its.revival lit the nonviolent action movement A respectable philooophieg-1 press. another, the within tradition Catholic church , It is commonly portrayed characteristically as as inconsistent. as a continues to have a bad incoherent in one way or Even philosophical defences of pacifism are liable to be extremely defensive, conceding only that consistent, and pacifism is but insisting otherwise that^is as false as a moral position can be 2 and morally insensitive . What follows challenges the prevailing wisdom put out in the philosophical press, but using its approved analytic methods. §1. Slide arguments to inconsistency;and arguments from irresponsibili ty and from rights. In an influential and widely disseminated series of articles attacking . pacficism3 , Narveson says that the pacifist's position is not only that [Tl] violence is evil but also that [T2] it is morally wrong to use force [violence] to resist, punish, or prevent violence. This further step makes pacifism a radical moral doctrine. What I shall try to establish below is that it is in fact, more than merely radical - it is actually incoherent because self-contradictory (p.408, italics added). Subsequently (p.414) he characterises pacifism by way of T2, though it would better characterised by P2. be A It is morally wrong to use violence. However T2 captures the cases that orthodox opposition. The separate comprehensive pacifism from the main form of pacifism under investigation is called 'comprehensive' to distinguish it from standard pacifism, in the usual 1 narrower �sense which is restricted to certain theses concerning (state) order, notably opposition to (violence in) war, and does not rule necessarily out violence elsewhere. Narveson's location of incoherence in pacifism depends on several connected slides, all of which the pacifist should resist - without force. The initial slide is from the theme T2 italicised above to what results by deletion the of crucial phase 'to use force', or as it should be 'to use violence', namely R2. It is morally wrong to resist, punish, or prevent violence - and similarly from special and related cases of T2 to special and related of R2 (e.g. from T2S, It is forbidden to use force to resist violence, to R2S, forbidden It is cases to violence). resist The slide is illegitimate because commitment to T2 does not entail commitment to the rejected proposition R2; for one thing there are many ways of confronting, reducing and controlling violence, worked out by pacifists and others, which do not involve use of violence (or perhaps force). The initial slide is however that assault on pacifism (after clearing Narveson several exploits confusions, explain the popularity of pacifism, out of the way). irresponsibility of pacifism, in This his first main which he takes to argument, from the does not actually lead to contradiction, but it does suggest that there is a serious tension between pacifism and any method maintaining social order, so serious that pacifism is socially irresponsible: ... to hold the pacifist position as a genuine full-blooded moral principle is to hold nobody has a right to fight back when attacked ... It means that we are all mistaken in supposing that we have the right of self-protection ... It appears to mean, for instance, that we have no right to punish criminals, that all our machinery of criminal justice is, in fact, unjust. Robbers, murderers, rapists, and miscellaneous delinquents ought, on 2 of �this [irresponsible] theory, to be let loose (pp.415-6). Since one can protect oneself and avoid and resist aggression back violence), (with pacifism unless a slide is made. (tentatively) by Nor does T1 and theses does without fighting not mean what Narveson claims it means, comprehensive .pacifism, T2 , imply that we as characterised have no right to punish criminals, but simply that such punishment will not apply violent methods. Nor does it imply that all the conventional machinery of criminal justice therefore is unjust, but only that some - perhaps a good deal - of that machinery is. One hardly needs to be a comprehensive pacifist to coherently think the latter. All this provides some confirmation for the key point, which is that far at there is, so least, no inconsistency evident in maintaining that those who hold that violent methods are morally legitimate are mistaken. The next slide is closely connected with, and really generalises upon, initial slide. The stunt is to imbue a range of more neutral terms with the connotation of -------------------------------------violence, or at least of -----------------------force which Narveson proceeds to with violence. Thus from among admissible pacifist methods. of force is taken to by implied in R2. resist cannot excluded be Hence the conflation of T2 and R2; Hence too Narveson’s assumption Hence (p.415). also Narveson’s that against attack' (pp.417-8). use a unwarranted "recharacterisation" of pacifism as the position that 'no one ought ever defended equate such activities as resisting, punishing, preventing, and defending are taken to imply (use of) force or violence, and so to pacifist the to be If the stunt were got away with, it would deprive pacifism of, for instance, the general methods of nonviolent action and defensible position. But resistance, and so render pacifism a much less positions can be defended, as in this paper or on the field, 3 without violence. �Things be can resisted, even things like arrest, without violence (e.g. sliding out of handcuffs and running away). by Force can be applied, as in opening Violence implies force, but not vice versa; and it is violence, not all applications of force, that.comprehensive pacifists are a jam jar, without violence. bound to exclude. The attempt nonviolent castrate to depriving It enjoys some popularity even any case indefensible. and by it of among those of advocating expansion of nonviolent methods, who no doubt want: to distance themselves from older standard pacifism, whose methods they see as confined to mediation, negotiation, and including the granting of concessions . compromise, But nothing in standard, range the is not confined to those who (want to) think pacifism in practices, development pacifism, so the characterisation its limits of pacifism, admissible methods: whether comprehensive or nothing exclude^ uncompromising methods and imposition of sanctions which offer no concessions. ? It is simply that standard pacifism has not yet developed its fuller potential, especially in conflict resolution. Subsequent slides in the elaboration of the argument against just variations qualifier. in those pacifism are given, writing violence-involving in as an internal Thus the measure of a person’s opposition to something in terms of ’the amount of effort he is willing to put forth against it’ is taken - somewhat perversely - to be violence-involving effort or opposition in the pacifist’s ’opposition to violence'. If this slide were pacifist would be caught in an elementary inconsistency since in case of the permissible any being opposed to violence, by definition, he is prepared to use violence and so is not opposed �Even Narveson ’cannot make too much* of this inconsistency, though to violence. it not so far removed from the alleged inconsistencies he does want to make is much of in his main inconsistency argument. A similar slide, together with a further slide, Is made in the argument based inconsistency the on to notion of rights, especially as it figures in the pacifist’s thesis as transformed to the claim that no one has a right to indulge in violence (p.418). Narveson violence in the notion of right. tries to incorporate the right to indulge in The initial move is to work in assumptions of defence from breaches of a right and of preventative action against infringement Because ’a right just is a status of it. preventative action ... does follow logically is that one has a right to whatever may be necessary what to justifying prevent necessary’ infringements of right' his (p.419). That 'whatever may be out to include force, now very generously construed - here is turns the further slide - to incorporate such things as social pressure. Moreover ’it is a logical truth, not merely a contingent one, that what might be necessary is force’ (p.421). of preventative For the presupposed logical transformations to work, the notion action must have the notion of violence built into it. argument accordingly begs the question against pacifism. it enough is for preventative To block the The argument action associated with rights to be, or to be limited to, nonviolent action. How the argument from rights leads to inconsistency is summed up thus (p.421): SAI. ’If we have any rights at all then we have a right to use force to prevent the deprivation of the thing to which we are said to have a right’. �SA2. We have, according to the pacifist ’the right not to have violence done to us’, as have the a consequence of the obligation to avoid violence. right self-contradictory, to use both violence, granting so the pacifist’s position Narveson is that 'our standard concept of rights' yields SAI (cf. right can be sustained by right-supporting or right-defending require that that action is violent. is and not granting the right to use violence. The argument fails because SAI is readily rejected. claiming But, therefore, we mistaken p.423). action in That a does not Pacifists can provide an adequate analysis of rights - essentially the usual one - without letting themselves in for SAI by 6 simply rejecting the Narveson slide . What appears in place of SAI is something like SAI#. If we have any rights at all then we have a right to uphold them. But the right to uphold them, defend them, protect them, etc., give facto, an entitlement to the use of violence. no dilemma for the pacifist. does not, ipso Without the slide there is The "pacifist's dilemma" and Narveson’s slide are two aspects of the one thing. The arguments from lesser §2. argument violence and evil. lesser In outline the - which is independent of the notion of rights - is that the pacifists must admit, in terms of their own principles, that there are cases where the use of violence those where Inconsistency would be morally permissible and morally justified. some is use of immediate violence by T2. would prevent evil, some greater violence. More explicitly, and in Narveson’s terms which also import the notion of evil, pacifists have lesser much The cases are to admit both that the use of evil, is admissible, in preventing greater evil, and that it is not admissible, because it involves violence. 6 Narveson summarizes an �argument like this as follows It seems to me logically true, in any moral theory whatever, that [LI] the lesser evil must be preferred to the greater. If the use of force by me, now, is necessary to avoid the use of more physical force (by others, perhaps) later, then to say that physical force is the supreme (kind of) evil is precisely to say that under these circumstances I am committed to the use of physical force'7. Now there are several somewhat different arguments snarled up in these sketches, p It is important to get them unsnagged , especially if a clearer view of the ethical role pacifism can assume is to result. lesser The basic argument, from violence, goes as follows Cl. There are cases where use of violence would prevent greater violence. C2. One ought to minimize violence. Therefore C3. There are cases where one ought to use violence, since in this way, in any arbitrary one of the cases indicated, violence is minimized. Therefore ~P2. It is not (always) morally wrong to use violence, contradicting the pacifist principle, P2, according which to it is morally wrong, always, to resort to violence. All the ingredients premisses, can be of argument, this together with pulled together from Narveson’s work. support for He not only expouses C2, but suggests two distinct arguments for it, the first of which connects argument with the lesser evil argument El. (Use of) violence is an evil. E2. Evil should be minimized. 9 The second argument to C2 is simply from the pacifist premiss, varying P2, 7 the the �E3. One ought not to undertake violence - period; that the is, level of violence ought to be zero. Neither argument is decisive; of that reference both in fact begin easing.pacifists into a should they resist, where moral absolutes are warped into moral relatives, where obligations give, way to obligations all, and says nothing about minimizing it when one compatible being does it. into got has E3 is directives quite different from minimization where violence is with involved, e.g. E3 things other In any event E3 only directs one not to get involved in violence at equal, etc. Thus frame rooting it out which may involve strategies. non-minimization not entail E2, and commitment to E3 does not commit pacifists to C2. Nor do El and E2 entail C2; so neither does commitment, by to El and E2 oblige them to accept C2. instance, 10 , e.g. evil-perpetrating but argument Narveson's well-known Such nonviolent fails for similar some as cases hypothetical dictators. for For in particular violence is not the only evil and (so) evil may sometimes be reduced by violence pacifists Regan’s increases in slaying of the reconstruction of Regan argues from premisses reasons. concerning the ranking of evil and a premiss like E2, specifically 3. 4. The use of force is a substantive evil. Therefore, a lesser quuantity of force must great quantity of force (Rp.79). The argument is invalid: ordering of an ordering of evils force, even though force is an evil. increasing force may still reduce evil, and so, on be preferrable \ 8 does be preferred not induce to a a similar It is enough to observe that Regan-Narveson assumptions, �Resort to the theme that Elt, Violence is an irredeemable evil in (proposed by Regan by investigated his Narveson, Np.118) irredeemable evil is figuratively (lesser or evils) whites pacifism, of "defence" promises so black Rp.80, and subsequently a way around the difficulty. that no combination (goods) will lighten its hue; with An grays it always dominates. Elt together with E2 will yield C2, but now the problem with Che argument shifts to What are the grounds for that? Elt. not widely acceptable, most people being amount of As Narveson points out (Np.119), it is prepared to countenance violence in exchange for considerable goods. some (But then, not so long ago, most people were tolerant of cruelty to animals so long as it was gross.) small /not too Moreover, so Narveson implies, appeal to Elt does not get. pacifists out of the argument from lesser violence; underwriting C2. indeed it seems to get them in deeper, by for it removes Cl and, more importantly, It does not however; the corresponding premiss of the more difficult argument from lesser evil, which starts from DI. There are cases where the use of violence would avoid greater evil. For given, by Elt, that use of greater evil than that cases such as DI requires. Rp.80ff.), which however violence is irredeemably with violence; tainted evil, there is no and there are accordingly no This is the core of Regan's defence in pacifism (see he sees as converting pacifism into a 'bizarre and vaguely ludicrous’ position (Rp.86), extreme pacifism, some of the 12 which he outlines 9 features of �The approach through violence as an irredeemable evil is mistaken a (utilitarian inspired) attempt to get at moral absolutes, which is what pacifism is, like other deontological positions, grounded upon. But such absolutes expressed in such commandments as, One ought not to commit violence, adequately meaning thereby, as it says, ought not, not just for the time being, or so as reasons prima are facie, otherwise don’t arise, or other things being equal, or acting for ought but long come not what may, period. old-fashioned Such deontological, moral absolutist positions such as pacifism is at bottom, collide head-on with utilitarianism both that pacifism'. For the moral ’utilitarianism 'that utility will be ... who is incompatible brought out by doing some violence may be greater than that produced by any alternative' he like positions and Regan (at the time) were working from. Narveson The reason for collision is simply that with malleable highly fashionable, more (Np.121) 13 . So acccording to the utilitarian-commandment to maximize utility may acts sometimes commit violence, contravening pacifist principles. On its own inconsistency with a false doctrine such as utilitarianism shows little: position every suffers inconsistency with very many false doctrines. Narveson does have another (small) argument to the effect that pacifism is at odds with contractarianism. correct, if other the the ethical positions he presents, libertarianism and But this argument would only carry weight, were it. positions were suitably exhaustive; including no deeper ecological position for instance. is more also otherwise however they are not, What has happened which insidious, however, is that utilitarian thinking has permeated much of the rest of ethical thought, thus helping to establish a climate unfavourable to incompatible ethical positions such as pacifism. 10 There are two more specific �features. damaging consequentalist Firstly, as more approaches have we of consequentialist Secondly, facie prima principles positions out utilitarianism, of This is entirely mistaken. The is a theory-saving device, designed to get difficulties such dilemmas. moral as consequentialist positions tend to suggest that only consequentialist reasons carry argumentative weight, and so try to ease rival positions, such pacifism, and generally, have made it seem as if no deontic principle were firm, but all are provisional. theory seen, into as sometimes incongruous consequential support for their offering themes. Narveson takes such procedures a assumptions upon violence is that it These (p.425). thus pacifists: produces stage further, and foists utilitarian says that the pacifist's 'objection to he suffering, unwanted pain, in the recipients' incongrous utilitarian grounds are something of a travesty of pacifists' reasons for objecting to violence, which concern rather the action involved and what it does, not astonishing such of only or always at all in the way of suffering, to the perpetrators as well as those in whom it is more type inflicted. Even utilitarian-style considerations are supposed to commit the pacifist to the follow three statements, one of which however he must deny (!): [N]l. To will the end (as mostly good) is to will the means to it (at least pjotTce prima facie). [N]2. Other things being equal, the lesser evil is to be preferred to the greater. [N]3. There are no "privileged" moral persons ... (p.425^ ' . 'These three principles' which appear in Narveson's 'sum up [of] the problem', 11 pacifist's �among them imply, as far as I can see, both the commitment to force when it is necessary to prevent more violence and also the conception of a right as an entitlement to defense. And they therefore leave pacifism, as a moral doctrine, in a logically untenable position (p.425). consequences out of the substantive terms such as implicans; otherwise but logic, It would take not merely statements ’violence’ the deal good a of magic, coax to given. For implications to hold the , /''I <</<<-</ ,■/" < F^ and ’right’ must also figure , in the just fail implications on formal grounds. intended argument to the "commitment to force” conclusion appears however to some for e.g. The be of variant, on the lesser violence argument, with N2 replacing, as it sort may C2. such (N3 and N1 then have oblique roles, N3 to stop exceptions being made oneself, N1 to ensure that violence adopted as a means has its full import, in as reflected in Cl, construction work the ethical an end). But, without need not worry pacifists; arguments much further they hardly leave pacifism as untenable. Much more threatening is the argument from lesser evil, which has yet to be This countered. is argument from DI (cases of violence to avoid greater the evil) and N2 or E2 (minimization of evil) to C3 (admissibility of violence) inconsistency in comprehensive stock examples concern murder, What are these cases^? pacifism. one of them being the Narveson’s situation where (Narveson in fact) must kill the (potential) mass-murderer B (Np.119). is the moral situation here? Narveson ought to prevent but mass-murder, that of a paradigmatic moral In fact the example is dilemma, that of very similar also The to Pedro and Jim, where Pedro volunteers to call off his firing squad about to shoot several captives 12 one But what Narveson ought not to kill B, because that is murder and involves violence. situation is that of a moral dilemma. and if Jim �one shoots Now almost everything turns on what account is given of What a comprehensive pacifist does moral dilemmas. trouble, coherence . of them is to take do, not inadequate utilitarian line of trying to the explain moral dilemmas away, as if they didn’t ever, occur an than initial intuitive negotiable, etc., etc. is as level), wants he unless if (at at least other all obligations were prime facie, The conflicting obligations stand. What is to done be however a very consequentialist thing, to try to determine the best thing to do in the circumstances. action In trying to determine what circumstances is a satisfied. violent sense this the best e.g. Narveson had better a fix. Narveson dilemma, but no B. shoot (not a deontic one) evil should be minimized; not ought circumstances, he had better do so moral of 17 . to the in course Granted, it is preferable to minimize follow that Narveson ought to resort to violence. remains course best that Suppose one, inconsistency in pacifism follows. in the principles like N2 and its mate, N2M, that it is preferrable to minimize evil, will presumably be and is evil, it does not On the contrary the situation shoot B, but in the appalling There is the real-life complication of inconsistency No a through arguments like that from lesser evil. Narveson’s jackpot question, entangled in his discussion from rights, can now be met. of the argument The question presents a dilemma: If force is the only way to prevent violence in a given case, use justified in that case? (p.420) is its Narveson is thinking of cases where one is about to be murdered, Regan where one is to be raped. qualified No: Given that force again entails violence, the pacifist answer is No, it is not deontically 13 justified 18 . It is certainly not �morally it is not justified in the sense of ’justified* which and obligatory, reflects its deontic origin in ’making right*. may and because just some might force in solution, a making to amount dilemma be out But justification is The response is qualified then a case. consequentially situation. ambiguous, as justified, a second-best Narveson, proposes on the contrary, that enough violence for the given occasion is morally justified - it can go at least as as killing another person - but he presents no back-up argument, taking far his proposal as evident. jackpot the question As it is not - the pacifist can simply does not dispute it to a decisive a^rument against pacifism lead (though Narveson gives the impression that it does, e.g. , p.423). What it can lead to is the argument from lesser evil over again. The charge of moral insensitivity. §3. This is less argument an than a damaging charge: A person committed to an extreme pacifism, though he need make no logical mistake, yet lacks a fully developed moral sensitivity to the vagaries and complexities of human existence (Rp.86). The smear is not without basis. is applied avert to greater Regan is envisaging situations evil; where violence and he points to what he takes to be the evident moral permissibility of a woman's using ’what physical power she has free herself from an Interestingly, Regan has not aspiring rapist* (Rp.86). described the situation in a way which is incompatible with there is violence, which implies What is at issue the intentional, non-negligible damage, including pain, injury or (cf. a pacifist stand: nothing in that to prevent a woman wriggling free (even in a way that involves some force) and fleeing. using to is (or death, the permissibility of infliction of wilful) by forceful means / Np.110), that is, which involves much more than mere use of physical force �And it is by no means so or power. violence inflict upon evident A rapist. aspiring the the that woman is entitled to can hardly now be pacifist accused, in a way that can be made to stick, of crass moral insensitivity. More generally, arguments pacifism, the on like Regan’s the to insensitivity moral of basis of pacifists' not taking obvious steps to prevent evil I occurrences, depend upon a confusion of passivity and pacifity. Narveson p.425) (e.g. Both Regan and assume that pacifism is a passive do-nothing position. 20 This is far from true, as the variety of nonviolent action methods groups has made plain. comprehend the real possibilities of considered or adopted by Neither Regan nor Narveson correctly nonviolent action. Otherwise, Narveson would hardly be able to assert, in the automatic (but carping) way he does, that the pacifist is Narveson's standing negative later 'not by doing assessment does not change the situation: anything about’ violence (p.425). of what he calls 'poslLlve nonviolence' for this positive approach is simply nonviolence practised in an exemplary way, as by Christ, in the hope that others will follow suit, and fails to recognise the potential of nonviolent training and the and effectiveness when assembled 21 , of nonviolent practices. much reduce the impact scope Fuller details of these practices, of the argument from social irresponsiblity, which is part of what lies behind the change of insensitivity. Pacifism, however, like most positions, has them 22 its weaknesses, one of undoubtedly derives from the fact that violence is a quantitative matter and there is no sharp cut-off point at the bottom end of the amounts and of violence greater than zero. Yet scale with minute (non-foot-in-the-door ) amounts do not seem to matter all that much morally, at least compared with 15 small the �that evils gross us confront on most sides when we look. Morally sensitive pacifists will not focus or fixate on small quantities of violence to the of exclusion larger moral They problems. give certainly will understood that by ’violence' in principles such as. P2 mean they it undue to be 'non-trivial violence'. §4. and The argument from radical political corollaries The corollaries. out war by definition. so clear. Although War situations? normally would Standard war always would be what excluded, be morally counted brought progressively then second dilemma the impermissible, best but in thing to closer to Comprehensive pacifism can of course extreme principles emphasizing the evil of violence. weighing of Comprehensive pacifism thus does not include standard A strange pacifism! pacifism, in contrast to extreme pacifism. be pacifism But the position of comprehensive pacifism is not exceptional extenuating circumstances it might be the (second-) do. awkward of extreme pacifism would certainly eliminate war. practice For war involves violence, typically on an extensive scale. takes other from best choices will pacifism, in practice, through If evil is given a suitably yield the large same results as extreme A pacifism does (deontically), and entirely exclude war. Now it can hardly be cogently argued that it tells against pacifism that it would eliminate wars, since wars are exchanges that should certainly be avoided at all reasonable costs; nor therefore can an argument Wz/Acuf desirability fHur/l of war as an institution against pacifism,! mounted from the or Cldc. However wars are by no be means the only social arrangements or institutions which dispense^ or rely u violence extensively. The state and many of its institutions, most obviously �police inadmissibility of characteriscally are contraposition do. also forces, coercive 23 institutions and hence ; pacifism Comprehensive it as such implies police anarchism provides no refutation of pacifism.. the implies 24 moral forces and states But once again For anarchism itself is (to 25 stick with a bold claim) irrefutable Pacifism as an ideal brought not is .down by its political corollaries. Pacifism yields not only a qualified anarchism but qualified vegetarianism. While does it not eating of meat, it does morally forbid violence to forbid animals. At least it does this so long as what normally counts as violence, animals, continues to rank as valence, and is not removed from the category by restriction of the application of violence to humans little good for however basis corollaries naturally spread suicide, capt^al euthenasia, (or such a chauvinistic restriction. several into punishment, controversial indeed There persons). is The radical moral, wherever to e.g. areas, violence plays a significant role in many cases'1. The sheer moral power of pacifism is one reason /7j Qc4> for giving it some pause. And there are others. / One is that, like vegetarianism, it runs counter to "natural" behaviour of creatures to which the principles are supposed to apply. Aggression is a fairly S' X common feature of animal and human behavioZur, and it sometimes (though by no means so often is as made out) involves violence. /Ze /cVXC o/1 //>£ Ao'jje.tjw enable ct/ony Ac /Aggression is assumed to be an evolutionary adaption /ZeSG- creatures offspring) in their artificial h to be better natural environments fitted environment. substantially 17 developed to for survival (of themselves and their most humans removed from now live situations in for rather which �there is no way they are evolution gradually adapted their features: adapt in time to absorb massive doses of radiation for instance. have substantially living their adjusted adjust environment, along so with ^oing to Much as humans should they it their social practices - including aggressive and violent practices, now ill-adapted to their situation and mostly counter productive. There is a residual problem, practices of living creatures like in that confronting natural (relatively) vegetarianism. conditions, such as predators and tribal people, to be condemned as morally wrong when they Sometimes, violence? involve when the violence grossly exceeds what is required yes, Though a way can be beaten around the given the end to be attained; but always? edge of this problem Are 26 it is an unsatisfactory way. What this suggests is that <u t be^t nonviolence is not an absolute but^an ideal. The arguments for nonviolence which are mostly violence and do not strictly suggest a to apply since it in creatures natural surroundings opens door the a approaches would categorically exclude. chink to other options The further suggestion that emerges is that moral thinking and associated principles in this area are pretty primitive aimed, among principles state; other than P2. and what - But the suggestion is a dangerous one, sort of conclusion. similar practically at least, nonviolent arguments which do not exclude occasional uses of practical is things, at sharper, This is to in a called for is much more investigation more concede an sensitive, attentuated and less charge insensitivity against comprehensive pacifism so long as P2 remains blanket of moral unqualified. There is no reason however why a genuine pacifism (making for real peace) should not be built on a modified version of P2 which permits such natural phenomena as predation. Nothing logically rules 18 out such a genuine and more sensitive �pacifism 27 There are other requiriments the position to be worked out should meet. in should, particular, be integrated into a Larger framework of nondestructive practices, which are involve violence, e.g. a of a practices metaphorically, damaging wild nonviolent* practices. are practices But, except destructive to the environment, for instance, do not such river, with piece things dumping vandalism. wastes toxic But mining strip as extended sense, which gets beyond the confines these It of in a valley, fertile in streams and oceans. the property In an picture, all even metaphorically, vandalism does not such cover violence against persons (and certainly not nonphysical violence as I "psychological violence"). What is sought /is an appropriate synthesis of these notions covering destructive practices - and better than 'vandolence'. an Then P2 is superseded accompanying synthetic term, 4/Z2°. It is morally wrong to use vandolence./ It remains to characterise the cluster of destructive practices (/V that count as vandolence and to try to justify the principle - no easy tasks. FOOTNOTES 1. ’a valid Christian According to the US Catholic Bishops, pacifism is to Christ and the early long tradition going back position’, with a lifestyle: see Origins Christians who were committed to a nonviolent pp.310-311. 2. Thus, in particular, T. Regan ’A defence of pacifism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1972) 73-86. Page references to this article are prefixed by _ 3. J. Narveson 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis’, Ethics 75 (1968) and ’Is pacifism consistent’, Ethics 78 (1868). The first article is reprinted in War and Morality (ed. R. Wasserstrom) Wadsworth, Belmont, California, T97O7 pp.63-77. The first article is also rewritten and combined with part of the second in 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis’, Moral Problems (ed. 19 77ju / /A ZAC A IZ(M2 �J. Rachels), Third Edition, Harper .Row, New York, 1979, pp.408-425. Page references without further citation are to this latter article. Narveson's theme that pacifism is incoherent is headlined and further elaborated in his ’Violence and war’, Matters of Life and Death (ed. T. Regan), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1980, pp.109-147. Page references prefixed by 'N' are to this article. 4. Pacifism, as involving the active use of defensive methods, can be traced back as far as the Mohist philosophers of ancient China. On modern methods see especially G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. As will emerge, it is important to distinguish fas Narveson does not in his earlier work) force from violence; they not equivalent. /\ 5. Thus, e.g., G. Sharp in several works: see for instance the unduly narrow definition of pacifism given in Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent Publishers, Boston, 1980, p.198. 6. Narveson, in responding to a suggestion of Armour (pp.423-4) sees nothing between (0) defence of rights, with the slide to violence in, and (1) nothing really answering to rights at all, where words like 'rights’ occur without stuffing. This shows a serious blindspot. What lies in between are a range of notions which do not guarantee the slide to violence. An account of rights which will serve is that given in R. and V. Routley ’Human chauvinism and environment ethics' in Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others) Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980; see especially p. Narveson 'Is pacifism inconsistent' Ethics 78 (1968) p.148. 7. J. 8. Without getting into the level of complication, not to say epicycling, that Regan lands himself in: he is obliged to distinguish three mirage-like senses of 'lesser evil': quantitative, qualitative, and resultant (Rp.78). 9. See Np.127 where it is asserted that violence as a source of evil should be minimized, and Np.119> where the point is put in terms of absolute evil. That way of putting it already starts to give the game away, since Narveson is all too evidently interested in negotiable evil which can be traded off against other evils. 10. An argument like the argument from lesser violence itself would appear to undercut the argument for El and E2 to premiss 02 for the argument for lesser violence. 11. That is by no means the onlyelement in Regan's torturous reformulation of Narveson's argument that can be faulted. Consider, for example, premiss '5. If any given action, A, is necessary to bring about a lesser rather than a greater quantity of qualitatively equivalent evil, then one's obligation is to do A.' While the premiss has considerable appeal as a principle of supererogation, there is little reason to accept it as one supplying obligations. 20 �12. Extreme pacifism can be seen as taking the rule that one ought never to use violence as having priority over all other moral rules - which Is indeed an extreme position even if a consistent one. Such a priority rule is an unsatisfactory way to deal with moral dilemmas. 13. To show what Narveson goes on to claim that people are sometimes justified in using force rather more is required, as Regan points out, Rp 85, n.18. It has also to be shown that there are cases of these types (as in Cl) and that agents can know that use of force will increase utility, reduce evil, etc. A pacifist, rightly sceptical of utilitarian tracing of consequences, and fond of noting that violence begets violence, could, with a small dose of scepticism also, dig in at this point and claim that because no one can be sure that use of force will reduce evil, so no one is justified in using force. This is sceptically-based pacifism. 14. Narveson also wants to contend that ’all of these may be defended on purely logical or "meta-ethical" grounds’. This is likely false, especially the claim as to logical status, since some of the principles are rejected in substantive ethical theories. 15. A surprising feature of Narveson’s argument, also Regan’s "reconstruction", is that these cases are nowhere in sight, as if again one got to conclusions logically out of the air, without any of the hard work the cases involve. 16. The example was first discussed in B. 17. This terminology matches the account of moral dilemma, given in much more technical detail in R. Routley and V. Plumwood ’Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’ in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest and others) 1983, to appear. 18. An extreme pacifist would answer with an unqualified No. 19. Directed against other creatures and more generally against ecological systems such as ecosystems which can be hurt. There is a difference here between live(go al-direct ed")~systerns and property, and comprehensive pacifism does not necessarily exclude wilful damage to property. Thus eco-pacifists may destroy, or at least disable, bulldozers but not harm those who use bulldozers to destroy habitat. However sensitive eco-pacifists will not condone "violent" destruction of property either: disab^ling of equipment is different. 20. The methods also include anticipatory action, e.g., the policemen going off to enact violence find their vehicles won’t start, e.g. because components have been removed 21 the peace movement should be preparing for B. Martin ’How See e.g of Peace Proposals 13 (1982) 149-159, and references Bulletin war ’ nuclear cited therein pp.152-3. Williams, //.( Zc (V, /, ( 1 J n l »' /? o C-, / / /' /\ <. ? / < / / i ’'i *7 z* //4 ’Conflict: of values’. �22. Another comes from the necessary circumscription of permissible nonviolent action, to ensure that it does not include actions worse than nontrivial violent action. 23. These organisations may be ruled out directly as violence-dispensing or else because they have individuals, delegates, who effect violence on their behalf. 24. In the sufficiently comprehensive form that the coercive state is without moral basis or legitimacy. Of course the "state" may have nonviolent methods available to it; it may not be a purely voluntary arrangement. 25. See R. Routley and V. Alternatives, (1982). 26. As Singer has in the analogous case of vegetarianism. 27. The position has been called 'pacificism*. Plumwood 'The irrefutability of 22 anarchism’, Social �On the alleged impracticality of pacifism in the real world. Appendix §5. Even if it is conceded that pacifism is a viable moral ideal, that it does not fall down as incoherent or ludicrous, still the feasibility of pacifism as a sensible practice to live by will bo contested - despite, or perhaps because of, major examples such as Christ and Gandhi. And it has to be admitted that the real world, with all its horror and squalor, does put pacifism to severe tests. Nowhere is the practice of nonviolence than in replacing war \ succeed usually been given a dress rehearsal. defence of a region can vary convention observed is or less likely to Yet nonviolent defence methods, to replace the 2 detail , usual violent methods, have been described in some never thought though they have The prospects for success of nonviolent significantly, depending upon whether the war If the convention Is observed then pacifism not. stands reasonable prospects of success. The difficult cases are where the war convention unleashed, perhaps broken, is in massive ways, on noncombatants. his superficially sympathetic sketch and assessment of resistance, 'success ... may all sorts of this: According to Walzer, in nonviolent defence and This is presumably false. that The invaders may give up and depart reasons, some of them irrelevant, e.g., they needed a quick decisive victory, they got homesick. like is attained - there is never any guarantee of it, without or with be war - even if some conventions are flouted. for violence is possible only if the invaders are committed to the 3 war convention - and they won’t always be’ (Wp.331~). Success and sufficiently What Walzer no doubt ruthless invaders sufficient time and sufficient support lines, etc. 23 means is something in sufficient numbers with can eventually succeed. But �sort of thing is also true even if the defending side resorts to violence. that The difference lies in the pattern of events; is more difficult and costly for if the defence is invaders the to well-armed it with and easier start afterwards than with well-prepared civil resistance-. Walzer is thinking, however, like many who jump to the that conclusion nonviolent defence cannot succeed when the war convention is abandoned, in terms of inappropriate examples. command, total in the He is thinking of an extreme totalitarian state, way the Nazis were in Germany, the Jews of Germany The providing the model of the enslaved population, the ’‘resistance". is highly misleading. picture The Nazis, who never invaded Germany, were in control of all the infrastructure and had the cooperation (at least) of the bulk of the For Walzer‘s comparison to work, there would have to be an enormous population. occupying army which took over and managed all key infrastructure. island With such as Australia it is not even so clear that this is logistically territories feasible against a largely united and actively resisting of impression in the acquiscence (e.g. resistance Walzer's population. fragmenting and the populace moving into dulled Wp.332) might have got things the wrong way around, the test with 4 disbelieving and frustrated soldiers ready to leave . Nonviolent resistance is however unlikely to be put adequate way in present state-determined prepared to risk training its populace (civil defence the police: is different). in to any No state would be circumstances. full in action nonviolent techniques It would then be. all to easy for them to "rout" civil obedience, for example, could no longer customary violent means. 24 be ensured by the �FOOTNOTES The replacement of the state is considered op.cit. For example, in Sharp, op.cit. given there. See also in Routley Martin, All page references prefixed by ’W’ are to M. Allen Lane, London, 1977. and op.cit., Plumwood, and 82, references Walzer, Just and Unjust: Wars, The argument suggested in Walzer (e.g. p.333) that nonviolent methods would increase evil, or at least its distribution, is weak. It is countered by Sharp’s observation that the suffering likely to be induced is less than in comparable wars. �§6. On the positive case for pacifism. defensive, meeting itself is revealing. deviations enough: a The argument thus far has been largely That in of objections to comprehensive pacifism. range Pacifism is the rest position from it are what require explanation. and state) (inertial -The reason for this is simple violence is, on most ethical systems, at least a prima facie evil, so use of it has to be justified. Positive arguments for pacifdism position and merely try supposed to be justified. violent opponent: to can advantage take of privileged dispose of "exceptional cases" where violence is The favourite exception is self-defence against a the case is curious in that the defender (person or nation) is already in a morally-excluded situation, since the attacker moral bounds. its has overstepped Still the defender is not normally committed to violence whatever he does - as in a dilemma situation. And since it is at least facie prima wrong, and he does not have to use it, he should not resort to it. An elementary syllogistic argument, given by Narveson (Np.117), can be adapted to give a similar result:Violence is (intrinsically) wrong Violence in any excepted cases (e.g. self-defence) is still violence Violence in any excepted cases is still (intrinsically) wrong. Naturally those opposed to pacifism will challenge the first premiss, and a dialectic already glimpsed will begin. None of the arguments are arguments for pacifism are conclusive, since even where deductively tight assumptions can be challenged (as above). are all the arguments for pacificism particularly good ones. 26 One of the Nor poorer �positive arguments for pacifism, for example, makes similar assumptions to those of the classic theory of war, namely that once war is embarked upon it cannot be limited, the e.g. that hope or nuclear selectively and restrictively is an illusion, (moral) limits in Although the chances overstated. war - of whatever they eXcalation are exchanges Limited escalation are be used inevitable. The weapons chemical is will - are bound to be overstepped. often real enough, and confrontation are possible. more social arrangements and much more conventional than the the case is Wars are much theory classical Wars can, for example, be started and stopped in midstream should more allows. important things intervene (e.g. pollution a crisis affecting other neighbouring states). The main reasons for pacifism are, inevitably, those for nonviolence. They include (as support for the first premiss above) a range of consequentialist and practical reasons, e.g. suffering of modern industrial societies, the broader popular avoidance and anguish of support base obtained None of these well-known types are separately decisive, but their cumulative effect is considerable. ' Cz/ // Z'1 1 Is Ct' i L> ) s' *4 / / 27 — > A by of violence, the desirable social consequences of nonviolence such as a more open, less furtive, society. ) violent futility and counterproductiveness of violence within the setting the methods, the cost in pain, ? . z.. z . of reason � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY AND MORAL INSENSITIVITY OF PACIFISM Pacifism , despite its.revival lit the nonviolent action movement A respectable philooophieg-1 press. another, the within tradition Catholic church , It is commonly portrayed characteristically as as inconsistent. as a continues to have a bad incoherent in one way or Even philosophical defences of pacifism are liable to be extremely defensive, conceding only that consistent, and pacifism is but insisting otherwise that^is as false as a moral position can be 2 and morally insensitive . What follows challenges the prevailing wisdom put out in the philosophical press, but using its approved analytic methods. §1. Slide arguments to inconsistency;and arguments from irresponsibili ty and from rights. In an influential and widely disseminated series of articles attacking . pacficism3 , Narveson says that the pacifist's position is not only that [Tl] violence is evil but also that [T2] it is morally wrong to use force [violence] to resist, punish, or prevent violence. This further step makes pacifism a radical moral doctrine. What I shall try to establish below is that it is in fact, more than merely radical - it is actually incoherent because self-contradictory (p.408, italics added). Subsequently (p.414) he characterises pacifism by way of T2, though it would better characterised by P2. be A It is morally wrong to use violence. However T2 captures the cases that orthodox opposition. The separate comprehensive pacifism from the main form of pacifism under investigation is called 'comprehensive' to distinguish it from standard pacifism, in the usual 1 narrower sense which is restricted to certain theses concerning (state) order, notably opposition to (violence in) war, and does not rule necessarily out violence elsewhere. Narveson's location of incoherence in pacifism depends on several connected slides, all of which the pacifist should resist - without force. The initial slide is from the theme T2 italicised above to what results by deletion the of crucial phase 'to use force', or as it should be 'to use violence', namely R2. It is morally wrong to resist, punish, or prevent violence - and similarly from special and related cases of T2 to special and related of R2 (e.g. from T2S, It is forbidden to use force to resist violence, to R2S, forbidden It is cases to violence). resist The slide is illegitimate because commitment to T2 does not entail commitment to the rejected proposition R2; for one thing there are many ways of confronting, reducing and controlling violence, worked out by pacifists and others, which do not involve use of violence (or perhaps force). The initial slide is however that assault on pacifism (after clearing Narveson several exploits confusions, explain the popularity of pacifism, out of the way). irresponsibility of pacifism, in This his first main which he takes to argument, from the does not actually lead to contradiction, but it does suggest that there is a serious tension between pacifism and any method maintaining social order, so serious that pacifism is socially irresponsible: ... to hold the pacifist position as a genuine full-blooded moral principle is to hold nobody has a right to fight back when attacked ... It means that we are all mistaken in supposing that we have the right of self-protection ... It appears to mean, for instance, that we have no right to punish criminals, that all our machinery of criminal justice is, in fact, unjust. Robbers, murderers, rapists, and miscellaneous delinquents ought, on 2 of this [irresponsible] theory, to be let loose (pp.415-6). Since one can protect oneself and avoid and resist aggression back violence), (with pacifism unless a slide is made. (tentatively) by Nor does T1 and theses does without fighting not mean what Narveson claims it means, comprehensive .pacifism, T2 , imply that we as characterised have no right to punish criminals, but simply that such punishment will not apply violent methods. Nor does it imply that all the conventional machinery of criminal justice therefore is unjust, but only that some - perhaps a good deal - of that machinery is. One hardly needs to be a comprehensive pacifist to coherently think the latter. All this provides some confirmation for the key point, which is that far at there is, so least, no inconsistency evident in maintaining that those who hold that violent methods are morally legitimate are mistaken. The next slide is closely connected with, and really generalises upon, initial slide. The stunt is to imbue a range of more neutral terms with the connotation of -------------------------------------violence, or at least of -----------------------force which Narveson proceeds to with violence. Thus from among admissible pacifist methods. of force is taken to by implied in R2. resist cannot excluded be Hence the conflation of T2 and R2; Hence too Narveson’s assumption Hence (p.415). also Narveson’s that against attack' (pp.417-8). use a unwarranted "recharacterisation" of pacifism as the position that 'no one ought ever defended equate such activities as resisting, punishing, preventing, and defending are taken to imply (use of) force or violence, and so to pacifist the to be If the stunt were got away with, it would deprive pacifism of, for instance, the general methods of nonviolent action and defensible position. But resistance, and so render pacifism a much less positions can be defended, as in this paper or on the field, 3 without violence. Things be can resisted, even things like arrest, without violence (e.g. sliding out of handcuffs and running away). by Force can be applied, as in opening Violence implies force, but not vice versa; and it is violence, not all applications of force, that.comprehensive pacifists are a jam jar, without violence. bound to exclude. The attempt nonviolent castrate to depriving It enjoys some popularity even any case indefensible. and by it of among those of advocating expansion of nonviolent methods, who no doubt want: to distance themselves from older standard pacifism, whose methods they see as confined to mediation, negotiation, and including the granting of concessions . compromise, But nothing in standard, range the is not confined to those who (want to) think pacifism in practices, development pacifism, so the characterisation its limits of pacifism, admissible methods: whether comprehensive or nothing exclude^ uncompromising methods and imposition of sanctions which offer no concessions. ? It is simply that standard pacifism has not yet developed its fuller potential, especially in conflict resolution. Subsequent slides in the elaboration of the argument against just variations qualifier. in those pacifism are given, writing violence-involving in as an internal Thus the measure of a person’s opposition to something in terms of ’the amount of effort he is willing to put forth against it’ is taken - somewhat perversely - to be violence-involving effort or opposition in the pacifist’s ’opposition to violence'. If this slide were pacifist would be caught in an elementary inconsistency since in case of the permissible any being opposed to violence, by definition, he is prepared to use violence and so is not opposed Even Narveson ’cannot make too much* of this inconsistency, though to violence. it not so far removed from the alleged inconsistencies he does want to make is much of in his main inconsistency argument. A similar slide, together with a further slide, Is made in the argument based inconsistency the on to notion of rights, especially as it figures in the pacifist’s thesis as transformed to the claim that no one has a right to indulge in violence (p.418). Narveson violence in the notion of right. tries to incorporate the right to indulge in The initial move is to work in assumptions of defence from breaches of a right and of preventative action against infringement Because ’a right just is a status of it. preventative action ... does follow logically is that one has a right to whatever may be necessary what to justifying prevent necessary’ infringements of right' his (p.419). That 'whatever may be out to include force, now very generously construed - here is turns the further slide - to incorporate such things as social pressure. Moreover ’it is a logical truth, not merely a contingent one, that what might be necessary is force’ (p.421). of preventative For the presupposed logical transformations to work, the notion action must have the notion of violence built into it. argument accordingly begs the question against pacifism. it enough is for preventative To block the The argument action associated with rights to be, or to be limited to, nonviolent action. How the argument from rights leads to inconsistency is summed up thus (p.421): SAI. ’If we have any rights at all then we have a right to use force to prevent the deprivation of the thing to which we are said to have a right’. SA2. We have, according to the pacifist ’the right not to have violence done to us’, as have the a consequence of the obligation to avoid violence. right self-contradictory, to use both violence, granting so the pacifist’s position Narveson is that 'our standard concept of rights' yields SAI (cf. right can be sustained by right-supporting or right-defending require that that action is violent. is and not granting the right to use violence. The argument fails because SAI is readily rejected. claiming But, therefore, we mistaken p.423). action in That a does not Pacifists can provide an adequate analysis of rights - essentially the usual one - without letting themselves in for SAI by 6 simply rejecting the Narveson slide . What appears in place of SAI is something like SAI#. If we have any rights at all then we have a right to uphold them. But the right to uphold them, defend them, protect them, etc., give facto, an entitlement to the use of violence. no dilemma for the pacifist. does not, ipso Without the slide there is The "pacifist's dilemma" and Narveson’s slide are two aspects of the one thing. The arguments from lesser §2. argument violence and evil. lesser In outline the - which is independent of the notion of rights - is that the pacifists must admit, in terms of their own principles, that there are cases where the use of violence those where Inconsistency would be morally permissible and morally justified. some is use of immediate violence by T2. would prevent evil, some greater violence. More explicitly, and in Narveson’s terms which also import the notion of evil, pacifists have lesser much The cases are to admit both that the use of evil, is admissible, in preventing greater evil, and that it is not admissible, because it involves violence. 6 Narveson summarizes an argument like this as follows It seems to me logically true, in any moral theory whatever, that [LI] the lesser evil must be preferred to the greater. If the use of force by me, now, is necessary to avoid the use of more physical force (by others, perhaps) later, then to say that physical force is the supreme (kind of) evil is precisely to say that under these circumstances I am committed to the use of physical force'7. Now there are several somewhat different arguments snarled up in these sketches, p It is important to get them unsnagged , especially if a clearer view of the ethical role pacifism can assume is to result. lesser The basic argument, from violence, goes as follows Cl. There are cases where use of violence would prevent greater violence. C2. One ought to minimize violence. Therefore C3. There are cases where one ought to use violence, since in this way, in any arbitrary one of the cases indicated, violence is minimized. Therefore ~P2. It is not (always) morally wrong to use violence, contradicting the pacifist principle, P2, according which to it is morally wrong, always, to resort to violence. All the ingredients premisses, can be of argument, this together with pulled together from Narveson’s work. support for He not only expouses C2, but suggests two distinct arguments for it, the first of which connects argument with the lesser evil argument El. (Use of) violence is an evil. E2. Evil should be minimized. 9 The second argument to C2 is simply from the pacifist premiss, varying P2, 7 the the E3. One ought not to undertake violence - period; that the is, level of violence ought to be zero. Neither argument is decisive; of that reference both in fact begin easing.pacifists into a should they resist, where moral absolutes are warped into moral relatives, where obligations give, way to obligations all, and says nothing about minimizing it when one compatible being does it. into got has E3 is directives quite different from minimization where violence is with involved, e.g. E3 things other In any event E3 only directs one not to get involved in violence at equal, etc. Thus frame rooting it out which may involve strategies. non-minimization not entail E2, and commitment to E3 does not commit pacifists to C2. Nor do El and E2 entail C2; so neither does commitment, by to El and E2 oblige them to accept C2. instance, 10 , e.g. evil-perpetrating but argument Narveson's well-known Such nonviolent fails for similar some as cases hypothetical dictators. for For in particular violence is not the only evil and (so) evil may sometimes be reduced by violence pacifists Regan’s increases in slaying of the reconstruction of Regan argues from premisses reasons. concerning the ranking of evil and a premiss like E2, specifically 3. 4. The use of force is a substantive evil. Therefore, a lesser quuantity of force must great quantity of force (Rp.79). The argument is invalid: ordering of an ordering of evils force, even though force is an evil. increasing force may still reduce evil, and so, on be preferrable \ 8 does be preferred not induce to a a similar It is enough to observe that Regan-Narveson assumptions, Resort to the theme that Elt, Violence is an irredeemable evil in (proposed by Regan by investigated his Narveson, Np.118) irredeemable evil is figuratively (lesser or evils) whites pacifism, of "defence" promises so black Rp.80, and subsequently a way around the difficulty. that no combination (goods) will lighten its hue; with An grays it always dominates. Elt together with E2 will yield C2, but now the problem with Che argument shifts to What are the grounds for that? Elt. not widely acceptable, most people being amount of As Narveson points out (Np.119), it is prepared to countenance violence in exchange for considerable goods. some (But then, not so long ago, most people were tolerant of cruelty to animals so long as it was gross.) small /not too Moreover, so Narveson implies, appeal to Elt does not get. pacifists out of the argument from lesser violence; underwriting C2. indeed it seems to get them in deeper, by for it removes Cl and, more importantly, It does not however; the corresponding premiss of the more difficult argument from lesser evil, which starts from DI. There are cases where the use of violence would avoid greater evil. For given, by Elt, that use of greater evil than that cases such as DI requires. Rp.80ff.), which however violence is irredeemably with violence; tainted evil, there is no and there are accordingly no This is the core of Regan's defence in pacifism (see he sees as converting pacifism into a 'bizarre and vaguely ludicrous’ position (Rp.86), extreme pacifism, some of the 12 which he outlines 9 features of The approach through violence as an irredeemable evil is mistaken a (utilitarian inspired) attempt to get at moral absolutes, which is what pacifism is, like other deontological positions, grounded upon. But such absolutes expressed in such commandments as, One ought not to commit violence, adequately meaning thereby, as it says, ought not, not just for the time being, or so as reasons prima are facie, otherwise don’t arise, or other things being equal, or acting for ought but long come not what may, period. old-fashioned Such deontological, moral absolutist positions such as pacifism is at bottom, collide head-on with utilitarianism both that pacifism'. For the moral ’utilitarianism 'that utility will be ... who is incompatible brought out by doing some violence may be greater than that produced by any alternative' he like positions and Regan (at the time) were working from. Narveson The reason for collision is simply that with malleable highly fashionable, more (Np.121) 13 . So acccording to the utilitarian-commandment to maximize utility may acts sometimes commit violence, contravening pacifist principles. On its own inconsistency with a false doctrine such as utilitarianism shows little: position every suffers inconsistency with very many false doctrines. Narveson does have another (small) argument to the effect that pacifism is at odds with contractarianism. correct, if other the the ethical positions he presents, libertarianism and But this argument would only carry weight, were it. positions were suitably exhaustive; including no deeper ecological position for instance. is more also otherwise however they are not, What has happened which insidious, however, is that utilitarian thinking has permeated much of the rest of ethical thought, thus helping to establish a climate unfavourable to incompatible ethical positions such as pacifism. 10 There are two more specific features. damaging consequentalist Firstly, as more approaches have we of consequentialist Secondly, facie prima principles positions out utilitarianism, of This is entirely mistaken. The is a theory-saving device, designed to get difficulties such dilemmas. moral as consequentialist positions tend to suggest that only consequentialist reasons carry argumentative weight, and so try to ease rival positions, such pacifism, and generally, have made it seem as if no deontic principle were firm, but all are provisional. theory seen, into as sometimes incongruous consequential support for their offering themes. Narveson takes such procedures a assumptions upon violence is that it These (p.425). thus pacifists: produces stage further, and foists utilitarian says that the pacifist's 'objection to he suffering, unwanted pain, in the recipients' incongrous utilitarian grounds are something of a travesty of pacifists' reasons for objecting to violence, which concern rather the action involved and what it does, not astonishing such of only or always at all in the way of suffering, to the perpetrators as well as those in whom it is more type inflicted. Even utilitarian-style considerations are supposed to commit the pacifist to the follow three statements, one of which however he must deny (!): [N]l. To will the end (as mostly good) is to will the means to it (at least pjotTce prima facie). [N]2. Other things being equal, the lesser evil is to be preferred to the greater. [N]3. There are no "privileged" moral persons ... (p.425^ ' . 'These three principles' which appear in Narveson's 'sum up [of] the problem', 11 pacifist's among them imply, as far as I can see, both the commitment to force when it is necessary to prevent more violence and also the conception of a right as an entitlement to defense. And they therefore leave pacifism, as a moral doctrine, in a logically untenable position (p.425). consequences out of the substantive terms such as implicans; otherwise but logic, It would take not merely statements ’violence’ the deal good a of magic, coax to given. For implications to hold the , /''I <</<<-</ ,■/" < F^ and ’right’ must also figure , in the just fail implications on formal grounds. intended argument to the "commitment to force” conclusion appears however to some for e.g. The be of variant, on the lesser violence argument, with N2 replacing, as it sort may C2. such (N3 and N1 then have oblique roles, N3 to stop exceptions being made oneself, N1 to ensure that violence adopted as a means has its full import, in as reflected in Cl, construction work the ethical an end). But, without need not worry pacifists; arguments much further they hardly leave pacifism as untenable. Much more threatening is the argument from lesser evil, which has yet to be This countered. is argument from DI (cases of violence to avoid greater the evil) and N2 or E2 (minimization of evil) to C3 (admissibility of violence) inconsistency in comprehensive stock examples concern murder, What are these cases^? pacifism. one of them being the Narveson’s situation where (Narveson in fact) must kill the (potential) mass-murderer B (Np.119). is the moral situation here? Narveson ought to prevent but mass-murder, that of a paradigmatic moral In fact the example is dilemma, that of very similar also The to Pedro and Jim, where Pedro volunteers to call off his firing squad about to shoot several captives 12 one But what Narveson ought not to kill B, because that is murder and involves violence. situation is that of a moral dilemma. and if Jim one shoots Now almost everything turns on what account is given of What a comprehensive pacifist does moral dilemmas. trouble, coherence . of them is to take do, not inadequate utilitarian line of trying to the explain moral dilemmas away, as if they didn’t ever, occur an than initial intuitive negotiable, etc., etc. is as level), wants he unless if (at at least other all obligations were prime facie, The conflicting obligations stand. What is to done be however a very consequentialist thing, to try to determine the best thing to do in the circumstances. action In trying to determine what circumstances is a satisfied. violent sense this the best e.g. Narveson had better a fix. Narveson dilemma, but no B. shoot (not a deontic one) evil should be minimized; not ought circumstances, he had better do so moral of 17 . to the in course Granted, it is preferable to minimize follow that Narveson ought to resort to violence. remains course best that Suppose one, inconsistency in pacifism follows. in the principles like N2 and its mate, N2M, that it is preferrable to minimize evil, will presumably be and is evil, it does not On the contrary the situation shoot B, but in the appalling There is the real-life complication of inconsistency No a through arguments like that from lesser evil. Narveson’s jackpot question, entangled in his discussion from rights, can now be met. of the argument The question presents a dilemma: If force is the only way to prevent violence in a given case, use justified in that case? (p.420) is its Narveson is thinking of cases where one is about to be murdered, Regan where one is to be raped. qualified No: Given that force again entails violence, the pacifist answer is No, it is not deontically 13 justified 18 . It is certainly not morally it is not justified in the sense of ’justified* which and obligatory, reflects its deontic origin in ’making right*. may and because just some might force in solution, a making to amount dilemma be out But justification is The response is qualified then a case. consequentially situation. ambiguous, as justified, a second-best Narveson, proposes on the contrary, that enough violence for the given occasion is morally justified - it can go at least as as killing another person - but he presents no back-up argument, taking far his proposal as evident. jackpot the question As it is not - the pacifist can simply does not dispute it to a decisive a^rument against pacifism lead (though Narveson gives the impression that it does, e.g. , p.423). What it can lead to is the argument from lesser evil over again. The charge of moral insensitivity. §3. This is less argument an than a damaging charge: A person committed to an extreme pacifism, though he need make no logical mistake, yet lacks a fully developed moral sensitivity to the vagaries and complexities of human existence (Rp.86). The smear is not without basis. is applied avert to greater Regan is envisaging situations evil; where violence and he points to what he takes to be the evident moral permissibility of a woman's using ’what physical power she has free herself from an Interestingly, Regan has not aspiring rapist* (Rp.86). described the situation in a way which is incompatible with there is violence, which implies What is at issue the intentional, non-negligible damage, including pain, injury or (cf. a pacifist stand: nothing in that to prevent a woman wriggling free (even in a way that involves some force) and fleeing. using to is (or death, the permissibility of infliction of wilful) by forceful means / Np.110), that is, which involves much more than mere use of physical force And it is by no means so or power. violence inflict upon evident A rapist. aspiring the the that woman is entitled to can hardly now be pacifist accused, in a way that can be made to stick, of crass moral insensitivity. More generally, arguments pacifism, the on like Regan’s the to insensitivity moral of basis of pacifists' not taking obvious steps to prevent evil I occurrences, depend upon a confusion of passivity and pacifity. Narveson p.425) (e.g. Both Regan and assume that pacifism is a passive do-nothing position. 20 This is far from true, as the variety of nonviolent action methods groups has made plain. comprehend the real possibilities of considered or adopted by Neither Regan nor Narveson correctly nonviolent action. Otherwise, Narveson would hardly be able to assert, in the automatic (but carping) way he does, that the pacifist is Narveson's standing negative later 'not by doing assessment does not change the situation: anything about’ violence (p.425). of what he calls 'poslLlve nonviolence' for this positive approach is simply nonviolence practised in an exemplary way, as by Christ, in the hope that others will follow suit, and fails to recognise the potential of nonviolent training and the and effectiveness when assembled 21 , of nonviolent practices. much reduce the impact scope Fuller details of these practices, of the argument from social irresponsiblity, which is part of what lies behind the change of insensitivity. Pacifism, however, like most positions, has them 22 its weaknesses, one of undoubtedly derives from the fact that violence is a quantitative matter and there is no sharp cut-off point at the bottom end of the amounts and of violence greater than zero. Yet scale with minute (non-foot-in-the-door ) amounts do not seem to matter all that much morally, at least compared with 15 small the that evils gross us confront on most sides when we look. Morally sensitive pacifists will not focus or fixate on small quantities of violence to the of exclusion larger moral They problems. give certainly will understood that by ’violence' in principles such as. P2 mean they it undue to be 'non-trivial violence'. §4. and The argument from radical political corollaries The corollaries. out war by definition. so clear. Although War situations? normally would Standard war always would be what excluded, be morally counted brought progressively then second dilemma the impermissible, best but in thing to closer to Comprehensive pacifism can of course extreme principles emphasizing the evil of violence. weighing of Comprehensive pacifism thus does not include standard A strange pacifism! pacifism, in contrast to extreme pacifism. be pacifism But the position of comprehensive pacifism is not exceptional extenuating circumstances it might be the (second-) do. awkward of extreme pacifism would certainly eliminate war. practice For war involves violence, typically on an extensive scale. takes other from best choices will pacifism, in practice, through If evil is given a suitably yield the large same results as extreme A pacifism does (deontically), and entirely exclude war. Now it can hardly be cogently argued that it tells against pacifism that it would eliminate wars, since wars are exchanges that should certainly be avoided at all reasonable costs; nor therefore can an argument Wz/Acuf desirability fHur/l of war as an institution against pacifism,! mounted from the or Cldc. However wars are by no be means the only social arrangements or institutions which dispense^ or rely u violence extensively. The state and many of its institutions, most obviously police inadmissibility of characteriscally are contraposition do. also forces, coercive 23 institutions and hence ; pacifism Comprehensive it as such implies police anarchism provides no refutation of pacifism.. the implies 24 moral forces and states But once again For anarchism itself is (to 25 stick with a bold claim) irrefutable Pacifism as an ideal brought not is .down by its political corollaries. Pacifism yields not only a qualified anarchism but qualified vegetarianism. While does it not eating of meat, it does morally forbid violence to forbid animals. At least it does this so long as what normally counts as violence, animals, continues to rank as valence, and is not removed from the category by restriction of the application of violence to humans little good for however basis corollaries naturally spread suicide, capt^al euthenasia, (or such a chauvinistic restriction. several into punishment, controversial indeed There persons). is The radical moral, wherever to e.g. areas, violence plays a significant role in many cases'1. The sheer moral power of pacifism is one reason /7j Qc4> for giving it some pause. And there are others. / One is that, like vegetarianism, it runs counter to "natural" behaviour of creatures to which the principles are supposed to apply. Aggression is a fairly S' X common feature of animal and human behavioZur, and it sometimes (though by no means so often is as made out) involves violence. /Ze /cVXC o/1 //>£ Ao'jje.tjw enable ct/ony Ac /Aggression is assumed to be an evolutionary adaption /ZeSG- creatures offspring) in their artificial h to be better natural environments fitted environment. substantially 17 developed to for survival (of themselves and their most humans removed from now live situations in for rather which there is no way they are evolution gradually adapted their features: adapt in time to absorb massive doses of radiation for instance. have substantially living their adjusted adjust environment, along so with ^oing to Much as humans should they it their social practices - including aggressive and violent practices, now ill-adapted to their situation and mostly counter productive. There is a residual problem, practices of living creatures like in that confronting natural (relatively) vegetarianism. conditions, such as predators and tribal people, to be condemned as morally wrong when they Sometimes, violence? involve when the violence grossly exceeds what is required yes, Though a way can be beaten around the given the end to be attained; but always? edge of this problem Are 26 it is an unsatisfactory way. What this suggests is that <u t be^t nonviolence is not an absolute but^an ideal. The arguments for nonviolence which are mostly violence and do not strictly suggest a to apply since it in creatures natural surroundings opens door the a approaches would categorically exclude. chink to other options The further suggestion that emerges is that moral thinking and associated principles in this area are pretty primitive aimed, among principles state; other than P2. and what - But the suggestion is a dangerous one, sort of conclusion. similar practically at least, nonviolent arguments which do not exclude occasional uses of practical is things, at sharper, This is to in a called for is much more investigation more concede an sensitive, attentuated and less charge insensitivity against comprehensive pacifism so long as P2 remains blanket of moral unqualified. There is no reason however why a genuine pacifism (making for real peace) should not be built on a modified version of P2 which permits such natural phenomena as predation. Nothing logically rules 18 out such a genuine and more sensitive pacifism 27 There are other requiriments the position to be worked out should meet. in should, particular, be integrated into a Larger framework of nondestructive practices, which are involve violence, e.g. a of a practices metaphorically, damaging wild nonviolent* practices. are practices But, except destructive to the environment, for instance, do not such river, with piece things dumping vandalism. wastes toxic But mining strip as extended sense, which gets beyond the confines these It of in a valley, fertile in streams and oceans. the property In an picture, all even metaphorically, vandalism does not such cover violence against persons (and certainly not nonphysical violence as I "psychological violence"). What is sought /is an appropriate synthesis of these notions covering destructive practices - and better than 'vandolence'. an Then P2 is superseded accompanying synthetic term, 4/Z2°. It is morally wrong to use vandolence./ It remains to characterise the cluster of destructive practices (/V that count as vandolence and to try to justify the principle - no easy tasks. FOOTNOTES 1. ’a valid Christian According to the US Catholic Bishops, pacifism is to Christ and the early long tradition going back position’, with a lifestyle: see Origins Christians who were committed to a nonviolent pp.310-311. 2. Thus, in particular, T. Regan ’A defence of pacifism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1972) 73-86. Page references to this article are prefixed by _ 3. J. Narveson 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis’, Ethics 75 (1968) and ’Is pacifism consistent’, Ethics 78 (1868). The first article is reprinted in War and Morality (ed. R. Wasserstrom) Wadsworth, Belmont, California, T97O7 pp.63-77. The first article is also rewritten and combined with part of the second in 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis’, Moral Problems (ed. 19 77ju / /A ZAC A IZ(M2 J. Rachels), Third Edition, Harper .Row, New York, 1979, pp.408-425. Page references without further citation are to this latter article. Narveson's theme that pacifism is incoherent is headlined and further elaborated in his ’Violence and war’, Matters of Life and Death (ed. T. Regan), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1980, pp.109-147. Page references prefixed by 'N' are to this article. 4. Pacifism, as involving the active use of defensive methods, can be traced back as far as the Mohist philosophers of ancient China. On modern methods see especially G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. As will emerge, it is important to distinguish fas Narveson does not in his earlier work) force from violence; they not equivalent. /\ 5. Thus, e.g., G. Sharp in several works: see for instance the unduly narrow definition of pacifism given in Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent Publishers, Boston, 1980, p.198. 6. Narveson, in responding to a suggestion of Armour (pp.423-4) sees nothing between (0) defence of rights, with the slide to violence in, and (1) nothing really answering to rights at all, where words like 'rights’ occur without stuffing. This shows a serious blindspot. What lies in between are a range of notions which do not guarantee the slide to violence. An account of rights which will serve is that given in R. and V. Routley ’Human chauvinism and environment ethics' in Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others) Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980; see especially p. Narveson 'Is pacifism inconsistent' Ethics 78 (1968) p.148. 7. J. 8. Without getting into the level of complication, not to say epicycling, that Regan lands himself in: he is obliged to distinguish three mirage-like senses of 'lesser evil': quantitative, qualitative, and resultant (Rp.78). 9. See Np.127 where it is asserted that violence as a source of evil should be minimized, and Np.119> where the point is put in terms of absolute evil. That way of putting it already starts to give the game away, since Narveson is all too evidently interested in negotiable evil which can be traded off against other evils. 10. An argument like the argument from lesser violence itself would appear to undercut the argument for El and E2 to premiss 02 for the argument for lesser violence. 11. That is by no means the onlyelement in Regan's torturous reformulation of Narveson's argument that can be faulted. Consider, for example, premiss '5. If any given action, A, is necessary to bring about a lesser rather than a greater quantity of qualitatively equivalent evil, then one's obligation is to do A.' While the premiss has considerable appeal as a principle of supererogation, there is little reason to accept it as one supplying obligations. 20 12. Extreme pacifism can be seen as taking the rule that one ought never to use violence as having priority over all other moral rules - which Is indeed an extreme position even if a consistent one. Such a priority rule is an unsatisfactory way to deal with moral dilemmas. 13. To show what Narveson goes on to claim that people are sometimes justified in using force rather more is required, as Regan points out, Rp 85, n.18. It has also to be shown that there are cases of these types (as in Cl) and that agents can know that use of force will increase utility, reduce evil, etc. A pacifist, rightly sceptical of utilitarian tracing of consequences, and fond of noting that violence begets violence, could, with a small dose of scepticism also, dig in at this point and claim that because no one can be sure that use of force will reduce evil, so no one is justified in using force. This is sceptically-based pacifism. 14. Narveson also wants to contend that ’all of these may be defended on purely logical or "meta-ethical" grounds’. This is likely false, especially the claim as to logical status, since some of the principles are rejected in substantive ethical theories. 15. A surprising feature of Narveson’s argument, also Regan’s "reconstruction", is that these cases are nowhere in sight, as if again one got to conclusions logically out of the air, without any of the hard work the cases involve. 16. The example was first discussed in B. 17. This terminology matches the account of moral dilemma, given in much more technical detail in R. Routley and V. Plumwood ’Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’ in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest and others) 1983, to appear. 18. An extreme pacifist would answer with an unqualified No. 19. Directed against other creatures and more generally against ecological systems such as ecosystems which can be hurt. There is a difference here between live(go al-direct ed")~systerns and property, and comprehensive pacifism does not necessarily exclude wilful damage to property. Thus eco-pacifists may destroy, or at least disable, bulldozers but not harm those who use bulldozers to destroy habitat. However sensitive eco-pacifists will not condone "violent" destruction of property either: disab^ling of equipment is different. 20. The methods also include anticipatory action, e.g., the policemen going off to enact violence find their vehicles won’t start, e.g. because components have been removed 21 the peace movement should be preparing for B. Martin ’How See e.g of Peace Proposals 13 (1982) 149-159, and references Bulletin war ’ nuclear cited therein pp.152-3. Williams, //.( Zc (V, /, ( 1 J n l »' /? o C-, / / /' /\ <. ? / < / / i ’'i *7 z* //4 ’Conflict: of values’. 22. Another comes from the necessary circumscription of permissible nonviolent action, to ensure that it does not include actions worse than nontrivial violent action. 23. These organisations may be ruled out directly as violence-dispensing or else because they have individuals, delegates, who effect violence on their behalf. 24. In the sufficiently comprehensive form that the coercive state is without moral basis or legitimacy. Of course the "state" may have nonviolent methods available to it; it may not be a purely voluntary arrangement. 25. See R. Routley and V. Alternatives, (1982). 26. As Singer has in the analogous case of vegetarianism. 27. The position has been called 'pacificism*. Plumwood 'The irrefutability of 22 anarchism’, Social On the alleged impracticality of pacifism in the real world. Appendix §5. Even if it is conceded that pacifism is a viable moral ideal, that it does not fall down as incoherent or ludicrous, still the feasibility of pacifism as a sensible practice to live by will bo contested - despite, or perhaps because of, major examples such as Christ and Gandhi. And it has to be admitted that the real world, with all its horror and squalor, does put pacifism to severe tests. Nowhere is the practice of nonviolence than in replacing war \ succeed usually been given a dress rehearsal. defence of a region can vary convention observed is or less likely to Yet nonviolent defence methods, to replace the 2 detail , usual violent methods, have been described in some never thought though they have The prospects for success of nonviolent significantly, depending upon whether the war If the convention Is observed then pacifism not. stands reasonable prospects of success. The difficult cases are where the war convention unleashed, perhaps broken, is in massive ways, on noncombatants. his superficially sympathetic sketch and assessment of resistance, 'success ... may all sorts of this: According to Walzer, in nonviolent defence and This is presumably false. that The invaders may give up and depart reasons, some of them irrelevant, e.g., they needed a quick decisive victory, they got homesick. like is attained - there is never any guarantee of it, without or with be war - even if some conventions are flouted. for violence is possible only if the invaders are committed to the 3 war convention - and they won’t always be’ (Wp.331~). Success and sufficiently What Walzer no doubt ruthless invaders sufficient time and sufficient support lines, etc. 23 means is something in sufficient numbers with can eventually succeed. But sort of thing is also true even if the defending side resorts to violence. that The difference lies in the pattern of events; is more difficult and costly for if the defence is invaders the to well-armed it with and easier start afterwards than with well-prepared civil resistance-. Walzer is thinking, however, like many who jump to the that conclusion nonviolent defence cannot succeed when the war convention is abandoned, in terms of inappropriate examples. command, total in the He is thinking of an extreme totalitarian state, way the Nazis were in Germany, the Jews of Germany The providing the model of the enslaved population, the ’‘resistance". is highly misleading. picture The Nazis, who never invaded Germany, were in control of all the infrastructure and had the cooperation (at least) of the bulk of the For Walzer‘s comparison to work, there would have to be an enormous population. occupying army which took over and managed all key infrastructure. island With such as Australia it is not even so clear that this is logistically territories feasible against a largely united and actively resisting of impression in the acquiscence (e.g. resistance Walzer's population. fragmenting and the populace moving into dulled Wp.332) might have got things the wrong way around, the test with 4 disbelieving and frustrated soldiers ready to leave . Nonviolent resistance is however unlikely to be put adequate way in present state-determined prepared to risk training its populace (civil defence the police: is different). in to any No state would be circumstances. full in action nonviolent techniques It would then be. all to easy for them to "rout" civil obedience, for example, could no longer customary violent means. 24 be ensured by the FOOTNOTES The replacement of the state is considered op.cit. For example, in Sharp, op.cit. given there. See also in Routley Martin, All page references prefixed by ’W’ are to M. Allen Lane, London, 1977. and op.cit., Plumwood, and 82, references Walzer, Just and Unjust: Wars, The argument suggested in Walzer (e.g. p.333) that nonviolent methods would increase evil, or at least its distribution, is weak. It is countered by Sharp’s observation that the suffering likely to be induced is less than in comparable wars. §6. On the positive case for pacifism. defensive, meeting itself is revealing. deviations enough: a The argument thus far has been largely That in of objections to comprehensive pacifism. range Pacifism is the rest position from it are what require explanation. and state) (inertial -The reason for this is simple violence is, on most ethical systems, at least a prima facie evil, so use of it has to be justified. Positive arguments for pacifdism position and merely try supposed to be justified. violent opponent: to can advantage take of privileged dispose of "exceptional cases" where violence is The favourite exception is self-defence against a the case is curious in that the defender (person or nation) is already in a morally-excluded situation, since the attacker moral bounds. its has overstepped Still the defender is not normally committed to violence whatever he does - as in a dilemma situation. And since it is at least facie prima wrong, and he does not have to use it, he should not resort to it. An elementary syllogistic argument, given by Narveson (Np.117), can be adapted to give a similar result:Violence is (intrinsically) wrong Violence in any excepted cases (e.g. self-defence) is still violence Violence in any excepted cases is still (intrinsically) wrong. Naturally those opposed to pacifism will challenge the first premiss, and a dialectic already glimpsed will begin. None of the arguments are arguments for pacifism are conclusive, since even where deductively tight assumptions can be challenged (as above). are all the arguments for pacificism particularly good ones. 26 One of the Nor poorer positive arguments for pacifism, for example, makes similar assumptions to those of the classic theory of war, namely that once war is embarked upon it cannot be limited, the e.g. that hope or nuclear selectively and restrictively is an illusion, (moral) limits in Although the chances overstated. war - of whatever they eXcalation are exchanges Limited escalation are be used inevitable. The weapons chemical is will - are bound to be overstepped. often real enough, and confrontation are possible. more social arrangements and much more conventional than the the case is Wars are much theory classical Wars can, for example, be started and stopped in midstream should more allows. important things intervene (e.g. pollution a crisis affecting other neighbouring states). The main reasons for pacifism are, inevitably, those for nonviolence. They include (as support for the first premiss above) a range of consequentialist and practical reasons, e.g. suffering of modern industrial societies, the broader popular avoidance and anguish of support base obtained None of these well-known types are separately decisive, but their cumulative effect is considerable. ' Cz/ // Z'1 1 Is Ct' i L> ) s' *4 / / 27 — > A by of violence, the desirable social consequences of nonviolence such as a more open, less furtive, society. ) violent futility and counterproductiveness of violence within the setting the methods, the cost in pain, ? . z.. z . of reason  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 680: Draft of On the alleged inconsistency and moral insensitivity of pacifism Subject The topic of the resource Computer printout (photocopy), with emendations and annotations. Paper published, Routley R (1984) 'On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism', Inquiry (Oslo), 27(1): 117-136. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201748408602030. Description An account of the resource Note, one of four papers digitised from item 680. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 680 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [27] leaves. 12.83 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:6b11360">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:6b11360</a> Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Como - Cupboard - Pile 3 Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/65f3e2936d457cb014383be187407f8d.pdf 0a542b3e86e1dad187a99b772d2f6c88 PDF Text Text - • 00681 ' ' {; /) f¼i:<:LL I f ~sif0l J �IN DEFENCE OF CANNIBALISM I. TYPES OF ADMISSIBLE AND INADMISSIBLE CANNIBALISM Richard Routley Philosophy Department Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University and Environmental Studies University of Victoria Canada �IN DEFENCE OF CANNIBALISM~ It is a commonplace of mainstream Western thought that cannibalism - the eating of human flesh by humans, and, more generally, the feeding of animals on members of their own species is, at least in the human case, morally outrageous. © Ri chard Routley, 1982 This repugnan cy thesis appears to be a legacy especially (but not only) of Christianity, probably derived from Jewish teaching, which went much further and excluded the eating of pig, for instance, as well as "long pig". Also in this series: It is a thesis reinforced by the substitution of Man for God of the World rainforest destruction - the social factors "Enlightenment" and consequent elevation and separation of humans Semantical foundations for value theory from other creatures. Unravelling the meanings of life substantially undermined, have for the most part been observed to Nihilisms and nihilist logics rest on a tangle of false views and prejudices about the world, its Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions origin, evolution and purposes , and about the creatures that inl~bit Now that all these positions have been it, their separateness, and their order (in an a lleged chain of be in g ) Disappearing species and vanishing rainforests: wrong directions and the philosophical roots of the problem with humans at the apex, it is past time that major moral theses that these positions have sustained are re-examined and reassessed. The irrefutability of anarchism, enlarged Up for re-examination are, in particular, all theses that Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action depend essentially on the common but mistaken assumption that there is something morally very special or distinctive about simply being a human, that Homo sapiens as a species deserves special treatment. On the contrary, there is no morally relevant distinction between humans and all other creatures. Of course there are various morally relevant distinctions between things, but none concerns the biological species Homo sapiens. What holds rather is an annular 1 model which can be depicted schematically as follows:- �3 instance in removing the idea that the wrongness of such practices 2 as cannibalism is not even open to question 3 . Diagram 1: High in a list of inherited moral assumptions that are ripe ANNULAR PICTURE OF MORAL RINGS IN OBJECT SPACE (and the position of humans). of sapiens for reassessment are those concerning the almost universal ~oral prohibition of and repugnance to cannibalism, a practice that used to be extremely widespread, but that has now been almost e;.tirely extirpated 4 with the very successful cultural conquest of the world by Western thought. But instead of the re-examination that should follow the intellectual erosion of mainstream Western social thought, the growing recognition of its theoretical inadequacy, not to say ~:Notional labels for the interiors of such morally relevant rings (or ellipses), from outer to inner: Objects of value, objects of moral concern Objects having well-being Preference havers, choice makers Rights holders Obligation holders, responsibility bearers Contractual obligation makers poverty, what has followed is the often shoddy defence of many of its leading moral theses, mostly on anthropocentric grounds, but sometimes on other grounds, some of them drawn from contemporary philosophy (e.g. the conventionalistic rejection of cannibalism of Diamond, considered below). Many of the defences preferred of total prohibition of There are also more comprehensive philosophical reasons cannibalism are ludicrously weak, and withstand little examination. for the periodic intellectual review of deeper assumptions (and Consider, to illustrate, the main argument in (what was until very prejudices), reasons furnished by dialectics in combination with recently one of the few books in English on cannibalism) Hogg, the theory of objects. namely 'the innate repugnance of contemporary man to touch human According to the theory of objects there is no assumption that has to be held,that cannot be disbelieved, flesh' (p . 188, also earlier) . while according to dialectics proper every assumption is open to represented as a matter of fact, it does not appear to hold generally, questioning and reconsideration by its methods , and assumptions in and may be largely a matter of background and conditioning. order to be rationally maintained should withstand such critical scrutiny. imply 2 Naturally these (methodological) considerations do not that assumptions under examination do not (frequently) withstand critical discussion, or that there are not (or never could be) good reasons for adhering to them. But the considerations are important in opening larger moral assumptions to due reconsideration, for Insofar as the repugnance is There is no evidence that - what seems unlikely given the former prevalence of cannibalism - it is innate; and insofar as it is a matter of fact it does not support moral prohibition of eating human flesh, any more than the apparently very widespread repugnance of urban Americans �5 4 as observed, it has recently been argued, successfully, that this to eating raw snake underwrites a moral prohibition on consumption of raw snake meat. distinction will not carry very much of the moral weight that has been imposed upon it. 7 On the other hand, if the repugnance in With the breakdown of this sharp moral distinction question is (intended to be) warranted moral repugnance, then the argument is trivially circular, the premiss assuming the point at between humans and other species.orthod ox anthropocentr ic options, which sanction human consumption of animals other than humans but issue. never humans, collapse. One reason why the proferred defences look weak is that it has not been thought necessary to provide any defence; for 'Directly daylight falls on the habit it withers away' 5 - the "daylight" is that of contemporary Western civilization. appears in Langton (initial page): A similar theme cannibalism is 'a custom that of civilization' - or, one might say, before the triumph of human (pure) vegeta!ian options and on the other, cannibal(istic ) options (mixes of these options which allow some human flesh eating will it will be seen that by no means all forms of cannibalism are morally inadmissable. present exercise. Showing as much is the main object of the Though the results arrived at are part of the process of elaborating a non-chauvinis tic ethics, and accordingly have implications for policy, no policy conclusions are drawn in what no recommendatio ns for the implementation , or institution- The vegetarian options face, it certainly seems, insuperable difficulties, especially concerning such issues as animal predation (which is an important, immensely frequent, and often _<!~~rab.!!'_, What will be argued is that, on the contrary, when some daylight does penetrate to the issues concerning cannibalism, follows: (at least as regards "higher" creatures) are, on the one side fall under the latter head). must soon become extinct all over the world before the great march chauvinism. Among the important options left open ecological fact), and concerning the reduction in numbers of animals, especially introduced animals, which build up to "pest proportions" (some reduction is often required for vegetable growing to operate successfully) . But it is unnecessary to elaborate these and connected points here because there are cases where consumption of human flesh is perfectly admissible. The main argument advanced is modelled upon simple inductive arguments: a base case is argued, and this base is expanded step by step to cover other cases. alisation, of cannibalistic practices are made 6. Hardly necessary to say, better defences of the mainstream anti-cannibal istic tradition can be devised or pieced together from the literature than those so far alluded to. for example, on the assumption of sanctity Such defences - based, of all human life, on the theme that cannibalism is a brutalising experience, which puts humans in the same category as the brutes - characteristic ally rely on a sharp distinction between humans and other creatures. But, §1. The Base Cases: Eating the Dead. In setting out the first of these cases it is taken for granted that the practice in some American states and Canadian provinces of allowing accident victims (e.g. those of automobile casualties) to consent to the use of parts of their bodies for organ transplants and also for other medical purposes is admissible, and that the use itself in such cases is �Restricted forms of cannibalism in the interests of 6 survival are now quite widely accepted as admissible. admissible 8. Then, is there any good reason why persons should So there is really nothing extravagant at all in contending that sometimes not similarly consent to the use of their bodies for food upon cannibalism is perfectly alright: their death? fact that the admissible cases lead, naturally and coherently, once For food transfusions, instead of blood or transfuslons · or transplants. plasma And if they do, or so bequeath their bodies, why should their bodies not be eaten? What differences human chauvinism is properly cases. any extravagance is due to the left behind, to much more controversial There are several examples of human cannibalism undertaken there are in the types of cases can be minimized, and those that for survival, which have won establishment approval, from remain seem not to make much - or any relevant - moral difference. or church hierarchies. For example, in order for human parts to be intially taken and used, of members of a Uruguayan rugby party who survived an airplane crash the bodies have to be more or less butchered; in the high Andes (dramatised by Read). but then they may be in much less pretty shape after a serious accident. Again, in each typ e of case, the parts may - or may not - be supplied to people who are in genuine need; etc. Nor does internal ingestion appear to differ, in any way that matters morally, from internal connection, from organ transplantation. It could be objected that with an organ transplant a specific organ is required, whereas with a starving or undernourished person alternative sources of food are - or ought legal A striking recent example is the cannibalism Their eating of dead companions, evidently necessary for survival, was condoned by the Catholic Church of Uruguay and by other prominent Catholic thinkers. Interestingly, Rubio, Auxiliary Bishop of Montevideo, justified such cannibalism, necessary for survival, through a medical transplant comparison 10 .•• Eating someone who has died in order to survive is incorporating their substance, and it is quite possible to compare this with a graft. Flesh survives when assimilated by someone in extreme need, to be - available. But where the parts are used for nonspecific just as it does when an eye or heart of a dead man is grafted onto a living man ••. (as quoted in Read, p. 308). medical testing, e.g. cell culture, or just disposed of (e.g. by But the Bishop tactfully rejected, except 'as a source of inspiration', incineration) without any other use, the specific need consideration the equivalence, appealed to by some members of the team, between does not work. Anyway what would it show? eating the flesh of their friends and participating in communion, as The claim staked is accordingly this:_ where the human initiated by Christ at the Last Supper, where he (figuratively) shared eaten is dead, and certain other conditions are satisfied, cannibalism his flesh and blood with his apostles (Read, p.309; is admissr e. also p. 299). The other conditions~ comprise such things as Exactly why this correlation, which undoubtedly helped the survivors, the following: that the whole thing is done decently (in ways, gets discounted, remains tantalisingly obscure. that is . LO be spelled out specifically); that the person eaten consented (or, differently, would consent) to being eaten, perhaps by the parties concerned, or more strongly that the person directed tha t he or .;he be eaten (or otherwise used); or differently again, tha t the ~onsumption was necessary for survival or well-being. etc. seems worth pursuing further. The correlation For though survival was not a problem �9 Suc h d es pi cable motives as those of the ge t-even s yndrome ("we'll 8 fix the ba s t a rd, we'll eat him") are pointl ess (as well as stup id l y for the apostles at the Last Supper (so destroying a strict correlation), survival is not the only basis justifying the eating of human flesh. As with blood, the gift relation is another v i ndi c tiv e ) wh e re the part y is already dead. It can be argued that eating certain pieces of human flesh out of respect is an exceptional case (like eating a fellow creature to avoid starvation), and that a general principle of respect for important basis. A consent or bequeathal clause 11 is important in under- the dead overrides any consent that may be given. The short cutting various objections to the consumption of dead humans, for answe r to this is, firstly, that grantin g of exceptional cases alr eady in s tance, that it is an affront to human dignity, that it is a mark allows that some cases of cannibalism are admissible, and secondly , of total d isr espec t, that the 'sanctity of the human being' is that no general principle applies in a decisive way to exclude the compl e tely disregarded (Hp. 186), that it is impious (Dp. 467). exampl es alr ea dy considered. Fo r if the person consents it can hardly be an affront to that general principles can always be thwarted, it is instructive to consider per s on's dignity, or violate that person's sanctity (as seen from one po int of view). Nor is it an affront to the dignity of creatures of an irreligious cast, for whom a dead body whether of a human or an animal is a d ead body - though perhaps a dead body of a fellow creature o r of a friend. So it is an affront only to those of particular ( religious) groups, perhaps the same groups for whom dead human bodies are sacred and their disfigurement by humans (whether for medical or 5 other purposes) impious . Just as it is legitimate for one to discount the often illfounded views of such groups - insofar as the views are int ended to have universal applicability - as regards medical use of (forme rly ) consenting humans, as regards sexual relations, abortion, e uthanasia, and so forth, so it is legitimate to discount them in the case at hand. Dev ine ' s argument against cannibalism, namely as a paradigmatic applica tion of his overflow principle. On the contrary, the eating of certain parts of the bodies of dead humans was, amon g certain tribes who used to practice cannibalism, for it was thought that in that way the eaters could acquire or participate in some of the (former) virtues o f the dead , e. g . wisdom, strength, hunting skills, etc. still be, that eating is not disrespectful: So it can what is sometimes dis- respectful is raising for food nnd killing, e.g. in order to ent. The overflow principle~ formed -chiefly to cope with the treatment of animals, is this: Act towaPds that which, while not itself a pePson, is clos ely associated with pePsonhood in a way cohePent with an attitude of Pespect fop pePsons (Vp . 503) . Instead of arguing directly for the principle, Devine suggests firstl y that it may be argued for in rule-cons equ e ntial fashion, secondly tha t it may be made plausible as part of a way of life having respect for persons at its centre, and thirdly that th e prin ciple is well ensconced in the moral consciousness of the plain man. Each of these suggestions can be faulted both in general and as regards the relevant application. For instance, plain men mostly do not object to the bulldozing of old cemeteries to make way for a development. Nor need the eating of a dead human be a mark of disrespect. an act of consider a ble res pect; To illustrate how application of suc h On the other hand, the principle can be rendered analytic by taking up the slack in "associated with" and "coherent with" appropriately - only then it won't yield the relevant substantive application. In application of the principle Devine makes two alternative moves. First, �11 It is by no means obvious, however, that a cons~n 10 is required. similarly if it is going to be incinerated and the ashes s pread, it might better be carefully composted. The point ma de does not exclude organ transplants, eating, and so ecological alternatives to burial or cremation. The most the overflow principle The suggestion that the already dead can, at least in s e ems to show, under this move, is - what does not exclude consumption, certain circumstances, be eaten without moral qualm, innocuous though and what one may well concur with - that the dead (and not merely the human dead) ought to be eaten respectfully; it is, is liable to spark off a series of protests. and even this much some ugly scenes could result i f "long pig" caught on; is not shown if the tense change, the transformation from alive to dead, destroys the requisite closeness of association. outback Australia) competing to pick up "accident" victims. ambulances or tow trucks, are readily enough avoided (by suitable body, which forms the visible aspect of the bulk of persons with whom we are acquainted, and which persists when the person ceases to exist in death. (Vp. 593) organization), and more respectful practices adopted. would, if the objection is to have force - lead to what is normally a~sumcs, overflow to the subsequently dead body (which is no longer inadmissible, for example, to a perverse lust for human flesh, and And again respectful eating be marketable commodities, if there was commerce not just in human flesh. but in bags, shoes, and belts made from human hides, decorations from human bones and teeth, glue and fertilizer from other parts and so on 12 in the way that there is commerce in animal parts? Perhaps, disre sp ec t wo uld be an outcome, but perhaps for the wrong re aso ns. What s ee ms clear is that giving human flesh to the ne edful, s ~y , i s one thing, a llowing commerce in human parts is another. More serious is the objection that such "admissible cannibalism" could - or rather ov e rflow to thl' llvlng body docs not however guarantee, what Devine Wouldn't disrespect be inevitable if human parts become But these types of scenes, which can already occur with competing ... respect for persons overflows to the human to dead bodies. e.g. the the way that refrigerated trucks follow the kangaroo shooters in some heavy assumptions as to features of persons, reveals: could, it appears, be coherent with the alleged overflow of respect It is true that spectacle of the refrigerated vans patrolling the highways (in much Devine assumes it does not, as his second move which begins to buy into the "visible aspect" of a person). so in nci cher case is value diminished, it seems, by (respectful) cannibalism or ordinary garbage (in the literal sense) is not eaten (except in desperation, etc.). A dead body does nee have the value of the person whose body it is in life; Garbage is commonly thrown away, things in these end uses are mostly not; For i f a body is going to be buried and "eat,~" by bacteria, or various carnivores, it might as well be eaten; although a dead body is not a person, still the fact that it (so to speak) was a person means that it ought not to be treated like ordinary garbage (Vp. 503). forth. clause perhaps, thereby to the deliberate killing of humans for food. Hogg makes much of the first of these points, the (unintended) impression he gives being that human flesh is so delicious that it is highly addictive. Whether this is so or not (it would seem unlikely with a preponderance of older stringier humans, though the number of "battery humans" is increasing).it appears not to matter, unless it does lead to what would be more disconcerting, e.g. the establishment of a black market or the like in human flesh, with inputs from killer or Mafia syndicates. But the problem is not substantially different �13 12 of our unwillingness to kill people for food or other purposes, from problems that already arise with the treatment of animals (e.g. traffic in rare species), and over the distribution of dangerous drugs to humans, and can be met in similar ways, i.e. through a similar range of political or organizationa l options. The usual utilitarian defence of vegetarianism based on suffering, pain, and the like caused in raising and killing creatures for food, co llapses. 13 For no direct suff~ring, pain or the like occurs, with the creatures eaten already dead; and any sorts of suffering that might be marshalled among some of the still living who are pained by the consumption can be more than compensated for by th e alleviation of suffering of the meat consumers, for a suitable and secondly not a (direct) consequence of our unwillingness to cause distress to people - not that it always would (contrary to Diamond's assumption) - but rather 'what conditions our attitude to not dining on ourselves is the view that a person is not something The argument turns however on a slide on the mi.ddl.e term 'something to eat' which is ambiguous between (i) something that may be eaten and (ii) something that is eaten; In the second sense the justification given of the fact dead people are not eaten, namely people are not eaten, while in a sense "logically adequate" is trivial, and proves no requisite grounding, and the "justification " does not imply that dead people may not be eaten. In the first sense, a nontrivial justification is offered, that it is impermissible choice of consumers. to eat people,but in this case we cend to repeat the initial question; Some vegetarians however (rightly) reject utilitarian defenses; Diamond, in particular, tries to argue that they involve 'fundamental confusions about the moral relations between people and people and between people and animals ' (Dp. 465), and introduces instead convent ionalist arguments - unfortunately of wide philosophical appea l - against eating people. Some of the reasons for not eating people, she subsequently argues, extend to grounds for not eating animals either. Diamond's argument begins from certain quite central facts ... We do not eat our dead, even when they have died in auto- mobile accidents or been struck by lightning • .. (Dp. 467) An immediate objection is that this is little more than a local fact, Why is it? Diamond has a surprising answer: in effect that it is analytic on, or at least a consequence of, our notion of what a person or human being is. ••• it is not respect for our interests which is involved in our not eating each other . These are all things which go to determine what sort of concept 'human being' is it is one of those things which go to build our notion of human beings (Opp. 469-70). But such a thing as not eating other people is certainly not part of the concept 'human being', indeed it is not merely ~ot analytic or normic (near-analytic ) of human beings,it is not even true of them - good for certain ' we ' but by no means generally, as the history of given that, on well-authentic ated evidence, cannibalism was formerly canniba lism shows. widespread, and that it still persists in isolated place s today. It is equally a fact in the context of quite extensive groups, that .EE~L2o not eat l'i~.· So either the central fact has to be morally grounded or has to have moral consequences. The second option would involve a prescriptive fallacy (deduction of an ought from an is); followin g fashion:- in any case, Diamond tries the first, in the The fact is, firstly, not a (direct) consequence The answer is, in short, radically unsatisfactory . That this is �15 Tt may s eem ... I should find myself havin g t o jus tify slav e ry. For do we not learn - if 14 we liv e in a slav e soci e ty - what slaves ar e the answer Diamond is offering is however at once confirmed by how she goes on (writing in speciesist assumptions 15 in the same revolting fashion): and what masters are through the structure of a life in which we are here and do this, and they are there and do that? Do we not learn the difference between a master and a slave that way? (Dp. 470) Diamond does not manage to escape these difficulties, though sh e And so too - very much so - [built into the notion] the idea of the difference between human beings and animals. We learn what a human being is in - among other things sitting at a table where WE eat THEM. We 16 are around the table and they are on it (Dp. 470) . While we may learn something about what some human beings - not makes various attempts (p. 470 and especially pp. 476-7): the notion of a slave or an enemy or an outlaw assumes a background of response to persons, and recognition that what happens in these cases is that we have something which ;;;;-;;,::-e not treating as what it - in a way - is ( Dp. 476). vegetarians - are like in this way, in the way we can learn what But this is to assume a background of norms, of how things morally some other human beings are like from cannibal feasts where 11 we" are, that a person is not something to enslave, etc. (and to attempt are on the table as well as around it, we learn little of the once more to build a presupposed morality into conv entional facts). notion of human being in this way. Nor does what correct information Furthermore, as this reveals, the same ploy could be worked in the we acquire in this way provide a firm basis for moral judgements case of animals, namely that in hunting them, killing them, serving about the possibility of eating humans, though Diamond appears to them up for dinner, we are ~ treating them as what - in a way think that it does; for she later says that the source of moral they are (or, more accurately, as they mora lly deserve treating). life derives from ways in which we mark what human life is (Dp. 418), Such comparisons make it evident then what Diamond is about, and that another move which involves a prescriptive fallacy, as well as he r conventionalistic approach fails. obvious anthropoce ntri cit y . However, to remove objections to eating the already dead, Indeed many of the sorts of conventional patterns of response under specified conditions, is simply to avoid, rather than face up a nd conventional facts that Diamond alludes to are a fairly direct to, the real opposition to even qualified cannibalism. For an o utcome of human chauvinism, e.g. that drivers mostly stop for important part of the real opposition to qualified canniba lism relies injured humans, not for injured animals, that humans are commonly upon illicit assimilation of cases of eating already dead people given funerals, animals mostly not. Diamond needs to say, and with killing humans for food, and, differently again, rearing some proceeds to say, that these sorts of differences are appropriate, but that is to slide to a value judgement which concedes to he rself part of what is at issue. Diamond's approach encounters serious difficulties when applied to such matters as slavery, the treatment of outlaws and enemies of them, e.g. certain infants, for food . and in an obvious sense ! .!1.~~~., Thus Devine's ambiguous, �17 what is entire l y different, permitting the killin g of humans for 16 food, or to, what is different again, the deliberate raisin g of human s for food. claim that 'a meat diet requires that animals be killed' (Vp. 483). And thus Diamond again, the cases are entirely different. involved both rearing and slaughtering Swift's "proposal" of children for food. Nor is the base position so far reached a new one, but an ancient proposition. it i s one thin g morally to eat an already dead deer, another to let a deer die and then eat it, another again to shoo t What we should be going against in adopting Swift 's "Modest proposal" is something one should be going against in salvaging the dead, more generally useful organs for transplantation, and the rest for supper or the compost heap. (Dp. 469) 17 Not a t all: animals: The differences are already clea r as rega rds For instance, Chrysippus, the Stoic, in his or otherwise kill it and then (perhaps) eat it, and yet another to eat a deer raised (in one or another of very different ways) for food. Within each of these different categories, it is important to distinguish cases. For while eating a dead human, even after it has been allowed to die (by omission), may be admissible, killing humans for food is often not, and raising a human for food (and other goods) is, it is now generally assumed by humans, certainly not. treatise On Justice, 'permitt ed eating of the corpses of the dead• 18 There are several separate issues here, in particular the So also apparently did Diogenes in his Republic, Zeno in his Republic, ~~ban~ or raising for food issue, on which much literature on and Cleanthes, all of whom may have authorised cannibalism on a the moral basis of vegetarianism has in fact focussed, and the broader scale. general l?I~'!_ati~ issue, which includes matters of killing and letting die. Limited extensions of cannibalism beyond the base cases, where humans are allowed to die or are killed . eat ing of (certain of) their parts . Eating dead humans involves But if eating such parts is (often) The issues are separate because creatures may be killed for food, e.g . in hunting, though they are not raised for food, and conversely creatures may be raised for food (or treated as slaves) without, for one reason or another, being killed. Cases of humans admiss ibl e , then so also presumably is consumption of such parts when raising humans for food have apparently never occurred, though humans they are (irrevocably or freely) severed from a living human, e.g. have sometimes been fed up for the pot (e.g. in the Aztec empire and in Fiji). ea ting the amputated limb of a friend or enemy or drinking the blood Humans are the only creatures we in fact know who might (having l ost consider- donated by another, able touch with the natural world) just adopt such a practice: These rather special cases, involving (what is no other ca lled, for s h o r t ) ~ human parts, provide a first set of extensions animals ever raise creatures for food, not did cannibalistic cu ltures of the base cases. ever apparently raise humans for food. These extensions include some bizarre cases, in particular where the part concerned is one's own. However, allowing the eating of dead humans and nonlive hum~ n parts under certai n conditions offers no slippery slide to, It is a serious and difficult question (to which moral philosophers have not sufficiently addressed themselves) why it is that if humans are not under !!.!!i'. conditions entitled to raise other humans for food, they are entitled under many �19 18 th e gene ral i ss ue as to wh e n, or wh e n prec i se l y , killin g f o r food i s jus tifiable can be largely skirt ed. For it is justifiable , it is conditions - indeed, it is often assumed, under a sweeping ra~ th e n claimed, whe n and only when killing itself i s justified, whe ne ve r of factory conditions - to raise other animals for food? that is. They can only be justified in so doing if there are significant and While one half of the italicised equivalence is uncontrover s ial - relevant differences between humans and other creatures raised, if killing for food (or for purpose P) is permissible, so is what it or that might be raised, for human or animal food. involves, killing - the converse is not. Yet there are, For consider some circum- it has already been pointed out, no such appropriate species-wide stances (assuming you can find them) where killing of person x is differences. justifie d, e.g. in war, in retribution, in self-defence, in r e ducin g g reat A fresh start can be made on the issue from a cannibalistic perspective. evil. Since it is not eating human f l e s h ~ that is Th e n killing x for these reasons is not killing for food, even if x is in fact subsequently eaten. There is an important intensional wrong, what is it that is wrong, if anything, with raising humans difference, so that being justified in killing x for some crime say , or other creatures for food? does not justify killing him for food, much as thinking of killing him or is it both? both. Is it the raising, or is it the killing, The answer is, of course, that trouble lies with for the one reason is very different from thinking of killing him for Raising of creatures frequently has one or both of two dama ging features accompanying it: first, the other purpose. deprivation of the What can be argued given the permissibility of- eating dead rai s ed creatures, and secondly, treatment of the raised animal humans, is that where killing of z is permissible, cannibalism of z merely as a means (not as an end). is also IN FACT permissible. The second, attitudinal, difference may have little or no impact beyond the first. For example, if infanticide i s alri ght under certain conditions (as Tooley contends, and others have hinted), And the first may be avoided, e.g. whe re the creatures stay by choice but then in fact cannibalism of infants is alright also under the given could depart if they wished. conditions (but the issues as regards the raising of infants for fo od Kept geese, for instance, may be in that position; they are seemingly not deprived, but may live in rather are, of course, not thereby resolved). natural conditions (except that migration and much that goes with it is permissible can, to this limited extent, be bypassed. II has been lost). Thus the issue of when killing It is worth elaborating these points, since important Killing involves something different again: extensions - not the only extensions - of cannibalism beyond the base all that goes with removing of a life, the termination of projects, purposes, cases depend upon them, and since - very differently - they furnish associations of value, etc. (and also the definitive end of con- clear cases of inadmissible cannibalism. sciousness, etc.). of situations to distinguish:- With the predation issue also, a central issue ls as to when killing an animal for food is permissible. It may be thought indeed that the killing for food issue just is, or is t a ntamount to, the general issue of killing, and that accordingly • There are several clas se s �21 survive themselves, the survivors of an aircrash in a remote area, 20 people on a life raft, etc. Such examples, where defensible, as they sometimes are, provide a further class of examples of admissible la. Killing , causing to die, is impermissible. cannibalism - what might be called exceptional cannibalism, since the lb. Letting die (passive killing, as it is sometimes misleadingly , but conveniently , called) is circumstances are, at present anyway, among higher mammals, rather impermissible . exceptional . Then, in either case , killing or letting die for eating or followed by An important and often times questionable practice, which eating is also impermissible, by preceding principles (essentially can in principle at any rate, deliver exceptional examples 20 , is ~Pp ➔ ~P (p & q)), hunting (in the intransitive form, which involves capture or killing So in particular it is where the creature is of the same species. That is, cannibalism is in these cases inadmissible . But some of these cases are clear; for instance, where creature (or if the object sought is duly located). Men continue to hunt in the French fields, and sometimes still their own species 21 , not at present human) x is leading a worthwhile nonaggressive independent and pro- in the shape of enemy soldiers , but those cast as outlaws (manhunts) . ductive life in a peaceful countryside. (Intransitive) Hunting divides into several types, according to its 2a. Killing is permissible. 2b. Letting die is permissible. end purpose, for sport , for food, for extermination, for capture. Hunting humans for sport (hunting for "sport " , so called, typically In common reckoning there are many examples of both second classes, involves killing) is a practice that has persisted well into this "passive" infanticide, suicide and gambling with life, euthanasia, century, in Australia for example . killing or allowing to die to maximise community values where there though it can be given philosophical support by chauvinistic theories are large numbers of people or choices between them, execution and such as a limited and racially prejudiced group-utilitarianism or by assassination, self-defence , killing in war (the list follows roughly appeal to the "ideal" of pure subspecies (the stud ideal). t he later chapter headings in Glover, where these well-known types such hunting is impermissible, so, for the same sorts of reasons, is of examp les are set out in some detail). the hunting of many animals for sport . In all these types of cases, It has nothing to recommend it, But if Hunting otherwise, except for death can be followed by eating, provided the base class conditions capture, is a restricted form of killing, and to what extent it is are satisfied . permissible turns on when that sort of killing is permissible . In such cases, henceforth called de facto extensions, cannibalism is also in fact admissible . The position arrived at thus far is pulled together in rhe Almost always the killing or letting die in 2a and 2b is not spec ifically for eating. conjoined: Eating the resulting dead is simply th e source of food is adventitious. Sometimes, however, in unusual circumstances some members of a party of the one species kill certain members of the party or allow them to die in order to fo ll owing diagram, which subsequent sections (and parts) endeavol1r to fil l out and render more precise:- �23 §3. 22 Unavoidable detours: when is killing a creature wrong, and when is letting a creature die wrong? It is not necessary, nor is it easy or desirable, to avoid entirely the issues of when killing Diagram 2: TYPES OF ADMISSIBLE AND INADMISSIBLE CANNIBALISM is wrong and when killing for food is wrong, and when such kinds of l( ,- killing are not wrong . Type 1 cases (exemplified e.g. in hunting for sport) - - -- ___ _] Base case I ,< conditions fail I X other than rather weak or circular principles. had seemed to be clear turn out on further reflection to be much l ess ,< obvious. \ ESSENTIAL / ,-...__ _ _ _ _ _'-! \ PREDATION..,, For example, it had seemed evident that the onus of jus tification (where this makes sense) characteristically lay with the WATERSHED J(. XCEPTIONAL EXTENSIONS Worse, things chat INADMISSIBLE ADMISSIBLE BASE CASES But it is not so easy to elicit or to defend action-taking party; \t 'I,( that it is the killing or removal of life that muse be justified, not the letting live. Some things, however, are clearer . 'J{ NONLIVE EXTENSIONS First and foremost, a satisfacto ry (nonchauvinistic) a c count K -J KILLING BOUNDARY of when and why killing a creature is wrong won't make exceptions for REARING FOR SLAUGHTER BOUNDARY humans and, more generally, won't contain the term 'human' or logical So far, in considering examples of killing, issue has not equivalents. This important requirement disposes of much of the been taken with enlightened conventional wisdom, with the result chat philosophical literature. a serious , and perhaps unwarranted, discrepancy between the treatment (9p. 135-9), which refer to the (contractual) conditions for human dished out to animals and that accorded humans is beginning to emerge. social life (the mixed account given should be faulted on several other So the judgements made tend to follow conventional practice: grounds as well). killing It wipes out, for example, Ewin's attempts Similarly it removes the main condition eventually humans for food is admitted but happens only in exceptional circumstances, achieved in Glover (a whole text devoted to moral issues concerning killing killing, which fails to present, or seriously address, the matter of animals for food is a pervasive practice. More generally, killing animals for food is considered permissible in a wide range of circumstances where killing humans is not , yet on what solid grounds? . As regards killing, even enlightened conventional moral wisdom returns us to the heartlands of human chauvinism. necessary and sufficient conditions for when killing is wrong) . The first main condition Glover arrives at is that ' taking human life is normally directly wrong: that most acts of killing people would be J/ To avoid it, the matter of wrong in the absence of harmful side-effects' (Gp . 42), i.e . so long killing and letting die will have (like most moral issues) to be as 'the best total outcome' does not involve killing (cf. p . 286), to reconsidered, nonchauvinistically. set down the underlying utilitarian recipe . Other conditions Glover outlines - similarly unacceptable even to their author when 'animal' replaces 'human' - are likewise faulted as damagingly cha,·vinistic, �25 24 for instance that it is wrong to kill a human whose life is worth l iv i ng (Gp . 53) , whenever that is. e . g. burning a collection of seeds (er seedlings) is one thing, burning Secondly , unremarkably, most of the recipes suggested in the a forest is another, slicing up or eating a raw egg is one thing, slicing literature are defective, first among them utili t arian proposals , which, as is well-known can sanction unjust killing. 22 up or eating an eagle is another, etc. Other (non- utilitarian) potential ys me rit the same consideration as ys, as if th ey we r e ys. recipes are also problematic, as a proposal by Young, wh i ch will he l p Call the r.esult of making the required deletio n, th e us on our way, serves to indicate: modified proposal . . . . what makes killing another person [more genera lly a considered . realisation either of the victim's life purposes or of such life- purposes as the victim may reasonably have been narrower utilitarian frameworks and induces a decided circularity, The proposa l requires some brief explanation. The term ' unjust ' , which takes the proposal outside is qualified in the final proposal (p.519) by 'maximally' , the point expected to resume or to come to have (Yp.518; repeated p.519 with 'maximally ' included). of which (though it is not fully explained) is to permit killing or The qualifying term sacrificing of one person in order to save others . 'irrevocable' is inserted to separate killing from life imprisonment I It is the modified proposal that will be chiefly creature] wrong on occasions is its characte r as an irrevocable, [maximally] unjust preventing of their I It is a popular fallacy that which may, as a matter of fact , defeat the prisoner ' s purposes . The long some members of a group (on a lifeboat or from a remote airplane crash) final disjunction is designed to delegitimize killing of sometime comatose are sacrificed for, or by, others of the group . persons (it also would include people undergoing reform programs) - -,hat is ac counled [maximally] unjust. an additional clause is required - and killing of potential future in way, and almost (but not) captial punishment. debatable judgements , such as that in the common case (on Young ' s ified' (p . 528) , ified. 23 from which it follows that abortion is commonly unjust- The disjunct should, it certainly seems, be deleted - especially since what justifies the main part of Young ' s proposal, considerations of what has value, does not justify the final disjunct, because merely potential persons do not appear to have requisite value, though they might (or might not) come to have such. Generally, potential ys do not have the same range of features (including acquired value, etc.) ll Similarly what one is entitled t o do , or feels like doing with r espect to them may differ; If , however, there are no just wars then most killing in war is wrong; and if punishment by death is sometimes just , capital punishment is sometimes not wr.ong. If, for instance, a person's life purposes are sufficiently evil~ e.g. they include genocide, then their fulfilment is certainly pro1, ~ rJ y , justly, thwarted. 0 1· Thus some proviso as to the chara c t e r or qua lit y of life purposes , such as the term 'unjustly ' obliquely supplies , is essential (but often omitted in ethical discussions) . It is not evident however that killing such a person (as distinct, e.g. from imprisonment , re-education, etc.) is permissible, exc ept perhaps in worst cases. ~ • what they become if their potential is realised . For example, Young claims (Ypp.520-1) that the proposal lets through various types of killing persons such as infants and foetl1ses - thereby writing in some very has only 'morally trivial or no moral support abortion will be unjust- But generally what the proposal permits and what it excludes depends critically upon cases already apparently covered, so that it is not obvious that such construal of 'moral') where the expressed wish of the pregnant woman The qualification makes way for certain cases of cannibalism, for instance those where �I 26 Ther e is no good r eason to restrict the proposal to persons , and Young does not intend to. 27 Many killings of animals constitute , he t ells us (Yp.526), maximally unjust prevention of their realisation of life purposes, and accordingl y are wrong. ' Killing such animals for food is only justifiable when no adequate of other crea tures). acts are avoided. food supply is available and food i s needful' (Yp . 526), in which event, presumably, justice prevails. A characteris tic remnant of Further it is simply assumed - though it could no doubt be argued (rather as below) - that requisite unjust Young's proposal as applied has bite; human chauvinism also intrudes , with Young a ppealing to the ' greater eschewing killing of creatures for food. 25 range of life-purpose s normally human beings have' (Yp.527, italics that the modified proposal has bite: amended) ; 24 and thereby smuggling in a greater value assumptio n as regards humans. Here, as elsewl1ere also , the account of when killin g is wrong is progressive ly l oaded , almost manipulated , to yield the sought r esults : in particular , what is unjust - including which killings are unjust and which class of life-purpos es are more valuable relevant to det e rmining maximal injustice - are bot h open to rigging. These points help to bring out too how back of Young's accoun t and application s of his proposal lie more basic consideratio ns of justice and value (and it is to such considera tions that we should no doubt eventually turn). Consider, for instance, the route to the permissibil ity of systematic cullings of a herd. Wants , now substituting for li fe -purpose s , are simply supposed to be summed up utilitarian- fashion, except th at (somewhat as with Mill ' s utilitariani sm) a weighting is imposed to reflect the respective values of different wants (those of humans, e . g ., as opposed to those It is an illusion however the bite all turns on Young's cunning application , since the modified proposal itself reduces to near tautologous ness. purposes occur? taken. For when does irrevocable prevention of a life's When, and only when (since it is irrevocable) that life is So the modified proposal reduces effectively to AP. Killing x is wrong iff taking x's life is maximally unjust. But killing x is, according to OED, causing the death of x, which is tantamount, in terms of sense, to taking the life of x. And what is wrong is, according to OED again, what is unjust, and would be, if the OED were sharpened 1,1p a little, what is maximally unjust. Whence the adjusted proposal, AP. The proposal does not rule out killings which have the effect overall of fostering th e wants of the largest subset of some group like a wild herd where otherwise the wants of an even larger subset will be thwarted. Systematic cullings in the absence of feasible alternative s, therefore, may be morally pe rmissible. (Yp.527) for example, it would oblige most of us to adopt a largely vegetarian life-style We have come round a circle, but much was glimpsed on the way, so the circuitous route was not without its rewards. By working through other l ess chauvinistic accounts of the wrongness of killing (e.g. the nonchauvin istic base of Ewin's account) we can come a similar circular way and arrive at the same fairly stable result. Moveover, in the adjusted proposal we do have an account, not yet a hi ghly usable account, since circular, but an account nonetheless . In terms of this account clear cases where cannibalism is morally inadmissable can be distinguishe d, for example as follows: Cannibalism of x is wrong wherever it involves maximally unjust taking of x's life. Conversely, there are many cases where �28 the killing of one creature by another creature is, because not maximally unjust, quite permissible; 29 e.g. certain instances of killing in self-defenc e, exceptional cannibalism , abortion, etc . But if the creature is killed, then it is dead, so by the earli er Now let x and y be of the same species, say Homo Sapiens: argument it is permissible to eat it (under certain conditions) . CAP provides exact conditions for when cannibalism is wrong, in So there are many cases where killing a creature and then eating it, cases where cannibalism involves killing. or its then being eaten, are permissible . conditions are satisfied; If some of the many cases of permissible killing are, as they seem to be, cases of killing a then Sometimes these often they are not. Sorting out when they are, and when they are not, will occupy many a controversi al creature of the same species, then active cannibalism involving killing is, in such cases, permissible . The argument needs of course filling out in crucial respects, especially by some enumeration of types of cases where killing is permissible , and a sub-listing of cases where these are intra-specie s killings. Would this suffice? However, it of the) distinction between killing and letting die, by blurring or rejecting the distinction on which it is based~ that betweem omission and One question is whether the account determines (even in its circular way) the precise conditions under which killing for food can permissibly occur. Letting die is not the same as (active) killing . has recently become fashionable to try to remove the (moral significance The question reduces commission (or else it is pretended that it is frightfully difficl1lt to make this distinction s out, etc.). Rejection of the omission/ commission distinction appears to rest on a mix of fallacious moves:- to the logical issue of whether AP as a strong logical equivalence FMl. A some to all argument, warrants intersubsti tutivity in more highly intensional frames such FM2. A confusion of the thesis that the distinction is morally as those declaring purposes. Though I've tended to vacillate on this issue, my feeling increasingly is that substitutiv ity is warranted, important with the quite different thesis that only commi.ssions can be morally blameworthy and that omissions are morally guiltless (the the reason being that the equivalence of AP is of virtually synonymity position reportedly held by some religious groups in the past). strength, which legitimates replacement in all but quotational (type) FM3. An extensional approach to nonextensio nal differences . sentence contexts. But purpose sentence contexts, such as' ... for eating' are not quotational . FAP. Hence it follows using AP that Killing x for food purposes is wrong iff taking x's life for food is maximally unjust, heavily upon the fact that there are some cases where it is morally difficult to distinguish between certain commissions and certain and that CAP. These points are considered briefly in turn:- ad FMl. Those attempting to discredit the distinction usually rely y's killing x for (and followed by) eating is wrong iff y's taking x's life for eating is maximally unjust. omissions, e.g. that in appropriate circumstanc es exposing the baby may be little different morally from directly smothering it. (The Greeks believed it wasn't but that was because exposure gave the gods a chance to intervene and save from death those who were fated to perform especially important tasks). �r JO But the fact that there a r c ~ cases where the JI distinctio n is not of great moral significan ce does not show that it is dispensabl e. In order to show that lt is dispensabl e it is extension ality assumption which removes scope. The principle necessa ry to show that there are no cases where it is needed, that appears to be that failing to provide a condition which would have for all cases failing to provide a condition which would prevent been causally responsibl e for preventing x is morally equivalent to ~x is (morally) equivalent to providing a condition for x. providing a condition which is causally responsibl e for x . But Moral it is easy to produce some cases where the distinctio n seems to be equivalenc e requires interchang eability witin deonitic contexts, essential if we are to account for what we wish intuitivel y to say. indeed it could be characteri sed in terms of such substituti bility . For example, to take a case those who wish to abolish the distinctio n The equivalenc e yielded is of the form -F-x are fnnd nf appealing to, we may wish to say that the people who did commonly falls, especially where Fis not extensiona l. not attempt to help in the Kitty Genovese case were morally culpable, moveover that the causal responsib ility functor is not extension al, perhaps to a high degree, but few of us would wish to say that their and that such a principle fails for it. moral culpabilit y was exactly the same or of exactly the same kind as that of the murderer, and that they should equally be brought to trial on murder ch~rges. Or, to take another case, placing poison in your husband ' s tea is not the moral equivalent of failing to give him the antidote when he has placed it in himself. In order to say +-> Fx. But such a principle It is clear Though letting die differs significan tly, then, from killing, conditions upon when it is wrong may be reached in similar ways. How the condition for letting die correspond ing to AP should go becomes rather more obvious if the righthand side of AP is expanded to: taking (the) action which terminates x's life is maximally unjust. what is evident in such cases, some equivalent of the omission/c ommission The parallel passive condition can th en presumably be formulated distinctio n is needed . thus:- ad FM2. But the thesis that the distinctio n is needed and is morally DP. significan t in many, or at l e a s t ~ , cases must be clearly dis- which continues x ' s life is maximally unjust. 26 tinguished from the very much stronger thesis that all omissions are blameless, and that any commission s are morally open ~o blame - or praisewort hy. This thesis is, rather plainly, indefensib le, yet has been responsibl e for much of the bad light in which appeal to distinctio n appears . ad FMJ. Then in turn, substituti on principles again yield clauses EDP and CDP, correspond ing to EAP and CAP, special cases of which yield conditions under which cannibalism is wrong where it involves letting die. Principle CDP which supplies this condition, where x and y are of the same species, runs as follows:- The principle of moral symmetry between omissions and commission s is in fact refutable. Letting x die is wrong iff refraining from taking (the) action It appears to be based on an CDP. y ' s letting x die for eating purposes is wrong iff y's refraining from taking (the) action which continues x's life, for purposes of eating x, is maximally unjust. Since letting die is, for the most �32 part, less heinous than killing, cannibalism involving letting die 33 i s more widely permissible than cannibalism involving killing . 27 §4 . The matter of predation, and important cases of l egit imat e killing and letting die for food. One tempting model that underlies the conflict picture of Paradigmatic examples of legitimate predation, of predation as basically undesirable but an unavoidable killing are provided by predation, where bis prey of a and a depen ds fact, a model that leads to human vegetarianism, is the following (essentially) for its livelihood, indeed for its survival, on eating kind of atomistic axiological theory (or utilitarianism):- bs.28 Such predat ion i s a n essential part of any su ffici e ntl y rich ecosystem . Essential pr eda tio n i s pre dation which is essent i a l to according to the initial positive value thesis, every living creature (every sentient creature , every higher animal , etc .) has an initial positive the nor,~11 livelihood of tl1e predat or , and where the prcd alor takes non-instrumental value which it retains unless it does something to for itself no more than it requires for it s livelihood. forf eit that value. carn.ivores , such as the big cats , but some humans, such traditional Eskimos, are essential predators. Not only ilS some (On the even simpler position of biospheric egalitarianism, discussed below, all living things have equal worth, The fact that humans ar e part of the natural predatory food chains should not be lost s i g ht o[ . Observe that the argument to permissibility of essential pre- in some nontrivial sense.) These positive values just sum ; and maximisation of value (or suitably averaged value) is, of course , the (or an) ethical objective . Then killing is generally undesirable , dation does ~ take the invalid form: such predation is a fact (a fact because it results in a reduction in net value, and survival is generally of life), therefore it is permissible. That arguments of this type , desirable. 29 The exceptions occur when a creature has forfeited its selectively relied upon by Diamond and (earlier) Hegel, are inval id is value, e . g . it per sists in value-reducing behaviour, so that killing well-enough known (they commit a prescriptive fallacy), and is evident it would prevent a further decline in net value or lead to increase in from such fallacious arguments as the diplomacists' argument, e.g. it is total value . a fact of life that Indonesia has occupied (absorbed) East Timar; when it leads to an overall reduction in value . the re- The underlying theme is that killing is unjustifiable The onus of proof, fore it is pe rfectly alright that Indonesia occupied (absorbed) East Timar. when it can be assigned, lies with those who make the exceptions, who Naturally it would be decidedly awkward if the fact of essential predation do or license the killing . turned out to be impermissible: since, with one item of value consuming another item of value, it trouble. the whole natural order would be in moral This brings us to another defect of the argument from· "facts", Predation now appears as an awkward fact , leads to an overall reduction in value. Since inessential preda tion that it suggests that essential predation is really, at base, something is inessential, it is ruled out as inadmissible. pretty undesirable, but nonetheless something we have to live with - in (nonindigenous) humans for whom predation is, it is plausibl~ argu ed , Thus in particular, contrast with predation, in its associated meaning, as plunder, which we iness en tial, are not entitled to kill for f ood : do n't, or rather oughtn 't to, have to live with morally, and which is usual rai si ng of animals for food, etc . are all excluded in one st r oke , commonly reprehensible. and a l eading feature of vegetarianism imposed . therewith hunting, �34 35 Essential predation is not so satisfactorily dispos ed o f, but introduces conflict. For either one creature, the prey, is sacrificed or another creature, the predator, is: value de c lines . Similar objections apply against biological egalitarianism, either way tot 8 1 In the interim, while vegetarian scientists work even when it is qualified as in Drengson and Naess by an in principle 30 on new diets and new lifestyles for predators, there is an obvious clause. recipe to be applied, which while not eliminating conflict, minimises that predation is rather suboptimal: its effe c t: is strictly ruled out as a general practice. just as steam gives way to sail, so the less valuable gives way to t h e ~ valuable. Thus if humans are reckoned to be It is not (or not only) that it is taken for granted the trouble is that predation Since each lion and each antelope is assigned one unit of whatever is assigned equally, mo re valuable than polar bears - the usual human evaluation - then there is no way of justifying the lifestyle of a lion that consumes polar bea rs are not going to be entitled to prey on humans, in the sens e several antelopes. at least that their predation is not justified. Any equalitarian approach that is E££ atomistic is liable Application of the recip e 31 presupposes a value ranking on creatures under which some are more valuabl e to further incoherence, as Drengson's holism reveals. than others: some living system of living things, e.g . the Earth as on the Gaia otherwise if all are equal, predation is never admissible, and Lets be essential predators just die out - at least that is the simple ethical pic t - hypothesis (p. 233). ure. least of the living things that comprise it, has the same value as This points up one of the many problems for biological egaltarianism. But the picture presented so far is too simple, and tl1e recipes suggested dubious. Then s, which should(?) have the value at each of them (in effect 1 = n, for n>l). Some of t~e ecological consequences of implementing the For if the matter is properly considered not at a given time, but over a time interval, dynamically and not suggested recipes, and reform of essential predators, can now be just statically, it is not so simple, and a rather different result gauged. emerges . the chains of predation are long and complex; One predator takes, over a typical lifetime, rather a lot of prey . Unless the predator ranks very much more highly than Massive environmental interference would be required, since distortions especially in lower-level prey would occur, with resulting the prey, the value of the sum of the prey will exceed that of the ecological instability and often catastrophe. predator. that is, are ecologically highly undesirable. These considerations, in combination with a positive and gross population The consequences, What this and the value thesis, suggest a very different result, that predators should summation problems begin to reveal is that the initial atomistic be allowed to, or encouraged to, die out - unless they are somehow, value distribution picture is inadequate because it leaves out systems what seems improbable for predators that remain wild, converted to and systemic connections such as a more ecological approach would vegetarianism, include, The dynamic picture resorted to is still too simple in one important respect, that over a time interval, prey, which would often exceed natural (and sometimes reasonable) population levels without predation, are replaced. Where population of a preyed-upon species of creature is at an ecological limit, and minor culling of the sort �36 natural predation induces does not, owing to replacement, reduce 37 population levels significantly below that limit, predation has no significant effect on total value, So results yet another, different, recipe, one which is a little nearer the ecologica l mark. 32 farm animals (all of them) can be appropriately filled out, to Some utilitarians, Singer in particular, have recognised exclude replacement of animals with unusual or special properties, the role of replacement a·,1d made some allowance for it (at a serious cost to Singer ' s vegetarianism , it should be added), e.g. those carrying valuable genes, and to allow slaughter, without Singer now allows for killing and replacement of nonselfconscious life, but advances a nonreplaceabllity thesis for self-conscious life. Furthermore, even if a replacement thesis for free-range shorter-term replacement, of those carrying damaging diseases or genes - as it no doubt can, in a modified replacement thesis - still For the basic division Singer appeals to 'Tooley 's distinction' between a nonreplacement thesis fails to allow even for essential predation of selfconscious creatures, and accordingly should be scrapped, beings that are merely conscious and ••• those that Since this pronouncement is likely to be disputed, at least are also self -conscious, in the sense of being able to conceive of themselves as distinct entities, existing by some vegetarians, it is worth trying to indicate why essential over time with a past and a future (Sp.151), At the same time it can be In fact most of the sorts of free-range farmyard animals that Singer predation is perfectly admissible, seems to be envisaging as nonselfconscious, and accordingly replaceable, explained what is still wrong with the tempting dynamic picture and creatures, for instance geese and hens, appear to satisfy Tooley's the initial positive value thesis. tests for selfconsciousness. what is put in as what is left out, Geese are certainly aware of themselves they value members of their own community ; trees, and inanimate such as rocks and buildings,~ have initial and they remember value, but that complexes and wholes, in particular ecosystems, may elements of their past and, in things like nest building (practice), anticipate the future. More important, what has selfconsciousness (reflex- ive consciousness), or consciousness to do with the moral dimension? Until well have initial value, The reduction assumptions underlying value decomposition thereof, itself, because by no means all consciousness of conscious life is _ 32 a to atoms fail , Singer's theses lack foundation and look, while perhaps convenient for that it cannot be duly explained; There are grounds for anticipating for instance, being too valuable to be Such wholes may have value furthermore which is not dissolvable into values of component parts, or atoms this is duly explained - it is not satisfactorily explained as valuable in some traditional farmers, rather ad hoe, What is left out is not just that objects other than living creatures, both animate such as plants and as distinct entities, and of geese as distinct from (and superior to) hens; What is wrong is not So much In terms of the value of wholes such as ecosystems, one of the arguments for essential predation is disarmingly elementary . It takes the form: (sufficiently) rich (natural) ecosystems are Predation is an essential part of these systems . simply replaced, in the sense of having irreplaceable experiences, worth- very valuable, while projects, etc., does not have the requisite linkage with self- What is an essential part of what is very valuable is admissible. consc iousness. Therefore, predation is admissible. Such predation, which may be argued for in other ways , admits of extension by the following principle : �38 EP. If something is entitled to kill for food under certain 39 conditions, e.g. respectfully and when in need, then so are others under the same conditions. §5. The argument for EP is of the same type as that for other Postscript . The paper is very incomplete . It fails to address several issues intimately connected with cannibalism, such as hunting similar indifference, or interchangeability, principles in ethics. of humans and other animals, in particular for food, and as raising It follows from EP and essential predation that, since a tiger may humans and other animals, especially defective infants, for food. when in need kill a cow to eat, then so may humans in need. If Worse, it is evasive on some fundamental issues, and it fails to penetrate very taking the cow's life is not maximally unjust in the one case, nor deeply into some of the issues it does begin to consider, such as is it in the other, since the circumstances are similar. predation, or as the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for admiss- The results reached may be alternatively argued for using principle CP. 33 Perhaps Singer is also on the right track, though he has latched onto the wrong distinction. Perhaps there is a (descriptive) condition q (or a condition qs for each sorts of agent), appropriately ible killing. position. It is little consolation that others are in the same Hopefully some of these deficiencies will be compensated for in subsequent parts. At the same time several themes will be developed that may tied with causing to die, such that while killing creatures without q not have been evident so far, e.g. that in under suitable conditions is permissible, killing creatures with q is far too much killing taken much too lightly, but far too little is not, except under special conditions . 34 general experience of killing and death when it does occur, that is Given that q is 11 modern 11 societies there appropriately morally connected such a procedure would fit into the except usually among small groups mostly of inured professionals, annular picture (given earlier: q would mark out the interior of the which "shield" most humans from the phenomena involved. dotted elipse). Nor need the distinction be chauvinistic, because it cuts across species in a morally defensible way. anything, is q? located? made good? But, what, if Can a suitable morally-unloaded category-based distinction And how disconcerting would it be if some such distinction could no Wait for the next exciting episode . 35 �' 40 FOOTNOTES 41 It was singularly appropriate that this paper should have otained its first (and only) public presentation at the Alfred E. Packer Memorial Center, University of Colorado. I am indepted to several members of the audience for comments and references, and in particular for the first extension of the base case . It is noticeable how people who have never been cannibals despise the horrible thing; and how quickly it disappears when a cannibal tribe comes into contact with a wider world than that Directly merely of their own bush village. daylight falls on the habit, it Withers away . This is remarkable when we remember the sanctity The cannibal of it in primitive man's eyes . is not necessarily a hopelessly degraded brute, but-;-man who has not yet lived out of the dark obscurity of bush tribalism, and so had bli~dly_ followed a practice deep-rooted in the sacrificial These themes are defended, and the annular model explained, in The themes are also defended in HC, p. 103ff., and in AHC. other recent work, e.g. by Tooley and Singer. As the schematic diagram shows, humans do not occupy a central ring. Thus adoption of the model does not imply, what Pickering assumes (p. 374), that 'humans are more~ntral ' or, for that matter, that 'humans are owed more extensive moral consideration Nothing in the model itself depends on humans . than plants'. The model is not species based, or biologically based, but category basect";-and designed to reflect the different sorts of things there are, e . g. things capable of entering into contracts conferring obligations, and things not so capable, things that can have preferences and make choices as opposed to things that cannot (truly, or significantly), things, including systems and Nor, therefore, organisations, with a telos and things without. does the model write in a new type of chauvinism, or confer privilege or moral advantage on things in more central rings. Indeed, things in central rings will have obligations and commitments, and be subject to limitations on what they do, in ways that things further out cannot be; so there will be some As this moral disadvantages in occupying a more central place. indicates, the categories selected are intended to have moral And different sorts of behaviour are morally linkages . appropriate with respect to the different categories of objects. 2. 3. 4. The popular view that dialectics and adoption fraction of assumption themes are dangerous is partly based on a modal fallacy, For the fallacy e.g. that what can be believed is believed . in operation in more intellectually respectable quarters see WW. the Epilogue of Harris Some dialectics are accordingly recommended for anyone convinced that cannibalism must be wrong. The investigations undertaken in this paper alwshare other features with (classic) dialectics: there are many loose ends, and in several crucial areas firm conclusions are not reached. Later parts of the paper will take care of some of these things. Thus Hogg (p. 188), Cannibalism . .. can hardly be said to exist in There may be isolated the world of today. pockets of survival in the heart of New Guinea and among some of the tribes in the remotest corner of South America or African jungles; but they will be no more than the rarest of phenomena. 5. Hopkins, given the last word by Hogg, p. 192. quote from Hopkins is of passing interest: The whole ideas common to man the world over from his earliest days. 6. Some of the advantages of institutionalisation of certain cannibalistic practices are evident, e.g. a_much enh~nced Various disadvantages if not evident should supply of protein. become so in the course of the text. 7. See again in HC and similar. Although the human/nonhuman distinction is not, so it is argued, one of moral significance, not all Other distinctions of moral importance distinctions vanish. - those of the annular model - naturally remain. 8. Of coures, this practice is (still) controversial, and But a offensive to various religious and other groups. great advantage of a pluralistic society is t~at it can acconnnodate (better than alternatives) such differences Issues such as human_ . over the morality of practices . burial and restricted cannibalism, however, make the limits of present pluralism evident . 9. Or else did not incur official establishment disapproval, though the acts strictly appeared to infringe the Every s~~ond_ra~onteur has prevailing law of the land. examples of cannibals not brought to Justice . 10. . This clearly anticipates an initial argument of this My thanks to W. Berryman for drawing my attention paper. to the attitude of the Catholic Church, as presented in Read. 11. Consent in principle will carry the requisited load, and for this it is normally enough that the person would consent. This indicates one logical route to the liberalisation, and removal, of the consent clause. 12. There would (so far) be no trophies, e.g. Z's head ~n the hall, Y's skull on a stand, because trophies involve hunting and killing (for which see below). 13. As some vegetarians would freely admit; other 11 vegetar i ans II f rther and regard the killing of certain (nonself) an1•mals for food as admissible provided no suffering u, go i conscious is incurred and that the animals are replaced. . But it s true that usually 'vegeta;ians do not touch the issue of our attitudes to the dead (D., p.9) . �42 14. 15. In a like vein it is suggested that Singer and Regan do not see that 'a cow is not something to eat; (for them) it is only that one must not help the process along' (D., p. 468). The latter incidentally would not exclude the use of dead creatures for food, leather goods, etc.; things that animal liberationists like Singer definitely exclude. 43 21. Diamond recognizes this objection, p. 471, but does not meet Pace K. Bell, according to whom, Men have always hunted in the fields around Potigny and Falaise . They still do, but no longer their it. own species. 16. 17. 18. In similar ways we are said to gain the concept of an animal; s~~ p. 476. -Diamond introduces this piece of serious confusion in the course of emphasizing why the 'assumption that we all agree that it is morally wrong to raise people for meat ... is not, or not merely, ... too weak' (D.• p . 469). Diogenes Laertius, vol. 11, p. 297. Some of the complex issues concerning hunting will be considered in subsequent parts, others elsewhere. 22. See, e.g., Henson, and also Ewin and RKU . 23. A notable piece of male chauvinism also slides through, in the suggestion that, in Lhe absence of more weighty moral backing, the expressed wish of a pregnant woman is morally trivial. And Sayre reports (p. 25), Cannibalism (uv0pwno~ayCa) is alleged to have been a practice of the Cynics by Philodemus and by Theophilus Antiochenus; but, if so, it must have been confined to their early history, for they had a number of critics during the Christian era who would have mentioned it if they had known of it. Both Philodemus and Theophilus were biassed and we must remember that similar stories were told of the early Christians. However, cannibalism is said to have been authorized by the Republic and Thyestes (or Atreus) attributed to Diogenes and also by the Republic of Zeno and by Cleanthes and Chrysippus (Philodemus, On the Stoics; Theophilus Antiochenus, Ad. Autolycum 3, 5; D.L. 6, 73; Ibid. 7, 188; cf. 28th Letter of Diogenes; Dio Chrysostom 8, 14). As Diogenes Laertius goes on to explain, that 'Chrysippus did countenance the eating of dead humans was one of the points brought against him by those who 'ran him down as having written much in a tone that was gross and indecent'. As regards such attitudes to the dead, times have not changed that much. The (idea of) eating "the dead" (dead humans, of course), under ~ circumstances, is still widely regarded as scandalous, and highly newsworthy (see Read, p . 296 ff). 19. Cannibalism which involves explicit killing for food is a kind of reflexive predation, but generally (cases of) cannibalism and predation only properly overlap. 20. An example would be where some of the survivors of a crash or wreck hunt other "survivors" in order to survive; cf. W. Golding, Lord of the Flies. 24. But one's life-purposes are diminished lhow can this be on Young's picture?) if they jeopDrdise those of others. Hence Young's preparedness to let Amin be killed by the stampeding horses, Yp. 527. 25 . Indeed it leads, as Young interprets it, to a more sensible vegetarianism than Singer's initial position (in Animal Liberation, not as significantly modified in Sp.153). neither culling nor predation are simply ruled out. 26. For Action and taking action should be construed in a wide, but common enough fashion, e.g. the action taken may amount to doing nothing or getting-the-hell-out-of-it. 27. It is tempting to try to prove this on the basis of a proper inclusion assumption, that where letting die is wrong so is killing, but not conversely. The assumption may, however, need qualification; e . g. killing may sometimes be preferable to letting died in a lingering way . 28. 'Predation" is a singularly unfortunate word to be stuck with to describe this universal phenomenon. It is unfortunate both because of its etymology, and because of its other meaning . At to the first, ' predation' derives from praedari, 'to plunder', which derives in turn from praedo, 'booty', As to the second, 'predation' also means a 'practice or addiction to plunder or robbery'. Both carry strong negative connotations. There is a similar damaging duality in the expressions 'prey' and 'prey upon'. 29. These defective considerations also lead to a maximisati~n of population of creatures of the base class assigned values, up to the limit - if any (on frontier philosophers there are none) where declining returns set in . Where, further, humans are typically, but erroneously, assigned greater value than other creatures, the considerations support the rapid biassing of terrestial fauna! population in favour of humans that we are witnessing. The second point does not apply, in that form, . against biol0gical egalitarianism, and the first objection fails where total value is replaced, as under some utilitarianisms (with what justification is less clear, since surely we want to maximise value so far as constraints permit: see RKU), by average value, average value per (base class) life lived, etc. �44 The argument in the text is not affected materially by switching from value analogues of total utilitarianism to analogues of some form of average utilitarianism. On some of the serious problems with these utilitarianisms, see Jamieson. 30. Drengson, following Naess and others, espouses 'biospheric egalitarianism and the intrinsic value of all life' (p. 222). According to the theory, each (living) being has intrinsic value (pp.233-4), and hence each presumably has equal worth (and is entitled, in Singer's terms, to equal consideration , if not equal treatment). In Naess and Drengson this biospheric egalitarianism is qualified by an in principle clause. According to Naess, 'The 'in principle' clause is inserted because any realistic praxis necessitates some killing, exploitation and suppression' (p.95), and according to Drengson, 'This qualification is made with the simple recognition that we cannot live without affecting the world to some degree' (the latter claim is inadequate, because it is not just 'we' who are involved). 31. Axiological approaches that are atomistic have other problems, some reminiscent of those Wittgenstein discusses for logical atomism. In particular, how do we locate the atoms to which value is supposed to adhere fundamentally. A first bad feature of this approach is invariance failure: it matters for final summations how the atoms are chosen, for different choices will assign complexes quite different values. Secondly (Wittgenstein's question), why are some things said to be atoms not complexes, and vice versa. A third group of problems, brought out in HC, concerns the choice of a base class. 32. An environmental ethic s:1oul.:l. also be an ccologic:1 I et!dc, sense of an ecologically realistic ethic. facts are certainly relevant. 32a. A detailed case for this claim 33. j:1 t lH· In this resepct too the appears in Routley and Griffin. Thus rp can be made to yield a good deal more than Young's application of his proposal (for which he offers no proper justification): A creature is entitled to kill another creature of lesser value when its life (and so all its functions, prospects, etc.) depends on it and when it does not kill more creatures than it needs for these purposes. And the dubious business of imposing such order rankings on creatures can be bypassed. 34. The qualifications are necessary. If the latter exceptional conditions clause were not adjoined, the prospe ct of finding a condition q would be wiped out by such cases of essential predation as exceptional human cannibalism. The qualifications, although they enhance the prospects of locating such a q, do not appear to make it analytic or near analytic that such a descriptive q can be found. 45 35. Not only are there many proposals for q to sift through - most of which however seem to fail for reasons already indicated in the text - but also there are apparent options to finding such a distinction, such as resetting the problem, in a less individualistic way, in the framework of (ecological) communities. �REFERENCES K. Bell, Not in Vain, University of Toronto Press, 1973, REFERENCES CONTINUED P.E, Devine, 'The moral basis of vegetarianism ', Philosophy 53 (1978) · 481-505 . (all references prefixed with 'V' are to this article) , C. Diamond, ' Eating meat and eating people', Philosophy (references hereto are prefixed by 'D'). 53 (1978) 465-77, Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (edited, with English translation, by R. D. Hicks), Heinemann , London, 1925, A.R . Drengson, ' Shifting paradigms: from the Technocratic to the PersonPlanetary', Environmental Ethics 2 (1980) 221-40, R. E. Ewin, ' What is wrong with killing people? ' Philosophical Quarterly tl..<. (197;t) 126-39. M, Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, Fontana, London , 1977 (hereafter prefixed by 'W.W.'). M, Harris, Cannibals and Kings , Collins , London, 1978 (hereafter prefixed by ' CK '), R. Henson, ' Utilitarianism and the wrongness of killing', Philosophical Review 80 (1971) :1.u,- n7. D. Jamieson,'Utilitarianis m and the value of life', typescript, University of Colorado, 1981. J, Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives, Penguin, Middlesex, England, 1977 . L.P. Pickering, Review of ' Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century ', Environmental£.£,.~-~ 2 (1980) 373-78 . G. Hogg , Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, Robert Hale, London, 1958. (references hereto are prefixed by 'H'), R. and V. Routley, 'Against the inevitability of human chauvinism ' in Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, eds , K, E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979, (Hereafter prefixed by ' AHC') . J. Langton, Cannibal Feast, Herbert Joseph, London, 1937. L, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1953. A. Naess, 'Self-realisation in a mixed community of humans ·, bears, sheep and wolves', Inquiry 22 (1971) 231-41 , A. Naess, ' The shallow and the deep . long-range ecology movement. Inquiry A s11mmr1ry'~ 16 (1':173) 95-100. P.P, Read, Alive, Avon, New York, 1974. R. and V. Routley, 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism', typescript 1976 (hereafter referred to as ' RKU ' ). R. and V, Routley, ' Human chauvinism and environmental ethics' in Environmental Philos~ (ed. D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley), RSSS , Australian National University , 1980 (the article is referred to as ' HC' , the book as ' EP ' ), F. Sayre, Diogenes of Sinope , A study of Greek Cynicism, Johns Hopkins University , Baltimore, 1938. P. Singer, 'Killing humans and killing animals', Inquiry 22 (1979) 146- 56, (references hereto are prefixed by ' S '). R. Tannahill, Flesh and Blood. A History of the Cannibal Complex , Hamilton , London, 1975 . Hamish M. Tooley , Abortion and Infanticide, typescript, Australian National University, 1980, R. Young, ' What is so wrong with killing people?' Philosophy 5¥ (1979) (all references prefixed with ' Y' are to this article) , 515-528 R. Routley and N. Griffin, 'Unravelling the meanings of life', available in this series , 1982. �) /.o,..,.,,,, l. ~ / , . ~ tA-- ~ <'"'1 ---- 3/ }o/t/v/~}~4--( ~~ ·~~O·\o ~ --..., \0~'203.l\. <;c..c.tt.,. ~ ~ a.I) . ~~ ~✓:. ,;,,tf �~ .r. ..... ---,(7> o-,.J /' ,,,((; 11 / c, ~ I ( _ ///,;.,/ /c/ (',.,./// 1' ,. ~ L: 1 -=y' 1/ ,/L ~ -=~ t<..,(' •.r<-- <-r-? ,r"'t, 7 ; /4... I ~,. �/J/4/,JJ ( 0 -/4, -;IL l r~ rk . rr_!j, ~lb f f.o fvr-~ ~tf?>J ;_/.. « ~ YL r1.M- ~~ J'fM~J Cif ~✓ ,/.~ ) . <=<- ,,._., wh ~ 1 ~ ~ ~ ?/;1 ~ ~~ rry~t ~ ,t(!__ 16;=,·~--f:; ~ h ~ ¥,-I- ..<-D /4 ~ :f f/-L -. J,¥i~~ f 9~ (3/-~~) (I ~~ 1- h,c>_~ x /~~ -/2-(;:L r J,?-- l ~re:- )( 07A~ c/4;t-~ ,4,,.~ 7' ~rrvf j e1~,k 'U"- 0 ~ vl'f.. /411-1 ~~ 1 ,...~,._£.~ I~ 7"Y-'? ,• or ' 7 ,/.tL~ =- #--~✓ " -,/ ~~ "'~ e.~.,__,,., ..l<A--C- , 7 l'/4~ (k/v( ~ A-Ld , c-£-{,~.,.,. t-/~r;;,;-,,.:__ , C, - ~1 < "'t: ~ 4- 7,1; ,..~~ I �/Jo N T T,,f'/c,- y•1 1//;rE r,vt{l. /2 <",I!.,.. '::.. {-,A/ j,._~ __:_ /,._,_ 'd / ~~-;. ,, 11 o,r ;i'a '7 .~/2 ?,(_ C/ I /;,(if'-:J;J__(;1:,-· J',(J; JJ;<~'r;b,f'/ ... Y ,1,f; ;,;--,ftlfr -~, £' .r.::._/, /•;· /''"/.' f.// / /, (cf,,,_;..,<-f (,_) :y;-._7 ,//<--"f .j•,/7 • C ~ • ~.:!__,,_ •-v, f//dl#l£ , < ~, r/ • 1,-e.--., t. ~ �#J tq- 7' : ~ , ,.':_ J/'C4(. ~ &nJltJ[e "71fLt..H "1/'~ c~ "4 C/1 .. 't ,.,. ... ~;: .. t.t..4 r~ c~ /~J I~ ~~ ,H" ._ ~t/ ~l-d_ I (' rt-lrC , I ,,I, /.,_,.. .,.,.____ /4-..- C- ,,,,_ ~ , /4,L._ '-- . ,.__,_ te(A~ / 4 ~ , , fc. ~,;,,d~ t;, ~~7Y24~ h /c r n.., ,W·r ht<I I t!l"--vv-t_. t : - ;{ c.--<- u....., ( , It ~'-? I 1 ,JKc} ~ ~-✓f ;,z.. M~ / tkl-· .:I- / 1 t.~ ,.,e1 ;,-,:. ~ ~"7 f cjrl; ~ I_;.,_ 1 L,,3:-:r;-,1 •-v->-1- • 4, pS,.,(£-.,-. . ftr~ J/4. /red-,~ , _;, ~·~/~<l ' /""= cd/7 ;/ ~<¥<- J,r 7""° 1,/,,:,A -z/1.,/h/7 /,(~ • t:i.C.1 / /d'tr 7 ;:. rJ- ~:,,1 "l j 1 ( ,"'p> '(. f (,~ 0 11/'- 1 t<~ ~ ~ 4-7/J t /2-c. ) 7 /~ ?'~J 1/)):-/. ( / ~r,,.,,__,, ~,:,,..,,...,~ . l)';•.:Z:~-e-M-;I /fa ! ") ;; ,' ~ ~~ L ' A-7~ J~j 1/ ~ ~£" v:_._i eye- ,c. y),6 7 ) \ d,; ~ 1 a,___ r/ d't .ru), Cl»,~ ' ~L �The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Cutting, Scholfield B (17 August 1988) 'A human role for the pig', The Weekly Times, 14. (1 leaf) �- / / / . -7 / <et ? -·- -·-- C:; /~ ~, u / f l ~ Jc,._ '? ~ (,, ?0_/~ c c:i--l 7 ,5'<.. / 17 -~ ,..-tt'!' . : . - - - ---- ·-- - · · - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- ~oc-. r-c- a., r..,_,/- t .)I~ , ) / ~ ?! / . / c..rc.v ~~ //._ J �OAJ 77/c /~/?t:J/f??pvc~ c:>~ 77rr" , I /}(,ifth('i/l'J7lt>p)( ;T//VC/73 ,v - cJ,,,C ~E ./,PH/6:-J ,,f/t;I~ I �The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • Typescript, with handwritten emendations and annotation. Two reference reports on Cannibalism I. (2 leaves) Cutting (photocopy) of 'Necessity as a common law doctrine? [6.40] R v Dudley and Systems', The system of criminal law: cases and materials, 544-551. (4 leaves) ��The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • Cutting (photocopy) of 20 pages from unidentified publication on Pioneers-Donner Party-The Mormons, 526-545. (10 leaves) Letter, Bill to Richard, 7 Oct 1981 re feedback on Richard Sylvan's paper on cannibalism. (2 leaves) Letter, Robert to Richard, 7 Oct 1981 re feedback on Richard Sylvan’s paper on cannibalism. (2 leaves) �I I - I :/.,, f. - - - -- ----------------- - - - - - ----- ---- ----- ___________, --------- ----------·------------- - - ----- - - -- - - -- - - - - - - - -- ------ - - - - - - - - --- $ ~ /~ .2Z- - - - --- - _ _L __ /4 r<./ ...---a~ l 2, ck?- _.:., t';_.~ ~ o_ _s_ ,,. .,/:,_ ~ , {- ~ M7-e;:__ /4?-l, _:., /.: ~ / ; ~ / /--/ ,a-~~ ,4d - - ~ c 1 /dLC4'--=·- - C4--~ _,t:?~7 ,-4,-,/4._ / - /2.; ~<"F' �§5 . Raising humans and other animals for food. Humans have lit tle compuncti on, for the most part, in rearing other animals for food . Since healthy animals that are raised for food often excell humans, especially humans that are "defective " in one way or another , little , except considera tions of species , seems to stand in the way of raising such humans for food . We are in the region of Swift ' s modest proposal again . What distinguis hes creatures humans (and other creatures capable of animal husbandry) are entitled to raise for food from creatures that they are not? It is not difficult to state some constrain ts on t he solution of this problem, which also rule out usual solutions . First , the distinctio n should be independe nt of reference to particula r species , especially of reference to the human species , and also indirect reference thereto, by way of phrases such as ' standard ... ' , ' normal ... . ' 'potential ... ' . Secondly - and this furnishes the ground of the first requireme nt the basis of the distinctio n should be morally relevant i n the way that mere zoologica l distinctio ns are not: otherwise chauvinism is not avoided . ' The replaceme nt principle Singer adopts for benign farmyard husbandry fails on this score , among others (the others being that many farmyard animals seem to satisfy the requireme nts for being selfconsci ous beings) . Not being selfconsc ious , which is supposed to justify replaceme nt, under ideal farming condition s , lacks requisite moral linkage . Singer ' s move does however emphasi ze �' 31. two important things . First , the familiar objections to animal husbandry, e.g. on grounds of cruelty or deprivation to animals, are remove.e\ by considering only (ideal) free-range individualised farmyard husbandry . Secondly, some distinction (fit to take its place in the annular picture) with requisite moral linkage is what is sought . Any distinction that is going to work will have to involve the capacities of the creatures concerned , in such a way that the capacities tie with moral features . The capacities concerned are, obviously, capacities connected with being aware of being raised for food . But this is not sufficiently general, being raised for killing or for cartage or for skin or fur or feathers would be similar, and similarly bad or whatever; lacks moral connection . and it still What all the cases have in common which is general, one which has (as already noted) moral connections , is being used as a means . The sought distinction is accordingly made in terms of creatures that are capable of being aware of their case primarily as means for other, for their food , etc. U-creatures, say, as opposed to A-creatures . 21 no means all, are A-creatures: infants are not . Many humans, but Why this distinction? 21 There are probably other requir e ments as we ll: e . g. that not in midst of present worthwhile projects; e.g. Mrs. Goose is not raising young, etc. �The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • • • Photocopy of Young R (1979) 'What is so wrong with killing people?', Philosophy, 54(21):515-528, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100063531. (8 leaves) Cutting, Ewin R (1972) 'What is so wrong with killing people?', The Philosophical Quarterly, 22(87): 126-139, https://doi.org/10.2307/2217540. (14 leaves) Typescript (carbon copy) of untitled paper attached to Ewin cutting. (18 leaves) Photocopy of Singer P (1979) 'Killing humans and killing animals', Inquiry, 22:1-4, 145156, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747908601869. (6 leaves) Photocopy of one page (157) from Lockwood M (1979) 'Singer on killing and the preference for Life', Inquiry, 22:1-4, 157-170, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747908601870. (1 leaf) �t . • �~ /,o.R-,4-.. ~t ~,, ,,_,;L ~ C~"'1 /C'.tt---? ,.... ,._._ ~ e.-;- __ jf1~ ~ rur 6 ""efc7'/ ~ ,,,<e,,,.,;z,r4? ~ c,,__,,,- .1 ------~ ,,-v-9"' ~ "'-<- r = c:e/4 /4--,- ~/~~-~ P.f.?4 ,..,.,,PE' r e ~ 7~~ y?f /2 ~c;k__/"7'/~ 7 ~ / 7~ / /,..,;,, ~ ,?£ / ~J" r-tr= / t:t_ ~7, /9-7 r~ o-/4-~ ,.ve- / _,/~,/ ;:7'/ /re-v -~ (~ ,,{~9 C'l<-,r /4 ~vr,, 1~ /c{. rL r ,' ~ ,~ 7-£ ~ - - ~ ~ . , , ~; / " ' - - /c~V-- ~ ~ -~ ~ L <r7J\ _0 / ~ ~~ 0 - ~ 7L 7 C-£-..,/,4c,.~~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ /.? ~ ~ =,/---6-- ~ . ~(' ~ ~ cv;·n! ' To -J~ > /~&:, -6-,e> ~ ~ ~7f 7~ ~ /~~ ~,,,_7 ,;,_~ 4/ ~/ C ~~ o/· //4- ~ / ~ /~ 7~ �~ ?¼_ 11 ~ M,- '--+-€- /~1) / ~ ,~ --/?~/ 4:- ..,,.,,,, ,,./" &-"'7/<" c, /4 Ye-/ U.:.... ~ ;/ / 7'~L. . ~ ~,, i 7,2 ~ ~ .,/4 /< ; e-.,, ' ~ ;,I'£ .Y CJ/-?!' , ,_, ·/,,.r.,.-........-,. , ,,__ s « ~ ?< 0~ /~L,, ,4_._ / Cb- i,_,.__1 c-.r r~ /2 re:_ ~ h'L 7 '---71J r-"-"- 3-.. d..-. ~~:; d:....-../ ~ ~_/~ �The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • • • • Photocopy of Diamond C (1978). 'Eating meat and eating people', Philosophy, 53(206): 465-479, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3749876. (8 leaves) Photocopy from The Encyclopedia Americana (1978) 'Cannibalism', The Encyclopedia Americana, 2: 543-544. (2 leaves) Photocopy from Britannica Encyclopedia (1969) 'Cannibalism', Britannica Encyclopedia, 4: 785. (1 leaf) Photocopy from Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1966) 'Cannibalism', Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 3: 50. (1 leaf) Photocopy of Naess A (1979) 'Self‐realization in mixed communities of humans, bears, Sheep, and Wolves', Inquiry, 22:1-4, 231-241, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747908601874. (6 leaves). Photocopy of one page (2273) from unidentified dictionary, Pre-collection to Predecree. (1 leaf) �r)I':, t; 1 ·-et I r o-f 6 ?\/ih'i I Jet ~t·.?t'cc If33 •• 11t1;,.,_4,, ;; w ; ~ ) ~,,c._! / //,,,,.---: J:~w ~ J/4 ~"~t New- f'-w1r- > ~:/~4-;-, L 1/75 /I ~-~erY �/, • ,I J �Lcz ~ ' d cc c e::es ,f c::::e.. ~ �.. . -1~ ~~ ;/w,;.,L;:;,',,,._ ,;/ a,~}:z;:__ dL-0~ " 7 1 f,t} 0 ~ ~ A. ~~ - 7'~ - . ' -f ~i,t;i,:___ ~✓~ ~~ . - - /z;j/M?!, ,<4 n/41"? r - / ·~ ·7 - Jo - ~ C:~~ - ~..,;t,J;j,,. - ... c.-C~1/~ - 7"1(~ /'<d~ ..£.... ,;:_~ 74::,,,'~ /k,,. ~~ ~ -4- . ~/17 '_ ~ �1IIE !1i l/lL/7? . ··• .,. Men have always hunted in the fields around They still do, but no • longer their own species. (K. Bell, Not in Vain, University of ~oronto Press, 1973) .,, Petigny and Falaise . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Draft Papers Description An account of the resource Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed. Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document - • 00681 ' ' {; /) f¼i:<:LL I f ~sif0l J IN DEFENCE OF CANNIBALISM I. TYPES OF ADMISSIBLE AND INADMISSIBLE CANNIBALISM Richard Routley Philosophy Department Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University and Environmental Studies University of Victoria Canada IN DEFENCE OF CANNIBALISM~ It is a commonplace of mainstream Western thought that cannibalism - the eating of human flesh by humans, and, more generally, the feeding of animals on members of their own species is, at least in the human case, morally outrageous. © Ri chard Routley, 1982 This repugnan cy thesis appears to be a legacy especially (but not only) of Christianity, probably derived from Jewish teaching, which went much further and excluded the eating of pig, for instance, as well as "long pig". Also in this series: It is a thesis reinforced by the substitution of Man for God of the World rainforest destruction - the social factors "Enlightenment" and consequent elevation and separation of humans Semantical foundations for value theory from other creatures. Unravelling the meanings of life substantially undermined, have for the most part been observed to Nihilisms and nihilist logics rest on a tangle of false views and prejudices about the world, its Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions origin, evolution and purposes , and about the creatures that inl~bit Now that all these positions have been it, their separateness, and their order (in an a lleged chain of be in g ) Disappearing species and vanishing rainforests: wrong directions and the philosophical roots of the problem with humans at the apex, it is past time that major moral theses that these positions have sustained are re-examined and reassessed. The irrefutability of anarchism, enlarged Up for re-examination are, in particular, all theses that Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action depend essentially on the common but mistaken assumption that there is something morally very special or distinctive about simply being a human, that Homo sapiens as a species deserves special treatment. On the contrary, there is no morally relevant distinction between humans and all other creatures. Of course there are various morally relevant distinctions between things, but none concerns the biological species Homo sapiens. What holds rather is an annular 1 model which can be depicted schematically as follows:- 3 instance in removing the idea that the wrongness of such practices 2 as cannibalism is not even open to question 3 . Diagram 1: High in a list of inherited moral assumptions that are ripe ANNULAR PICTURE OF MORAL RINGS IN OBJECT SPACE (and the position of humans). of sapiens for reassessment are those concerning the almost universal ~oral prohibition of and repugnance to cannibalism, a practice that used to be extremely widespread, but that has now been almost e;.tirely extirpated 4 with the very successful cultural conquest of the world by Western thought. But instead of the re-examination that should follow the intellectual erosion of mainstream Western social thought, the growing recognition of its theoretical inadequacy, not to say ~:Notional labels for the interiors of such morally relevant rings (or ellipses), from outer to inner: Objects of value, objects of moral concern Objects having well-being Preference havers, choice makers Rights holders Obligation holders, responsibility bearers Contractual obligation makers poverty, what has followed is the often shoddy defence of many of its leading moral theses, mostly on anthropocentric grounds, but sometimes on other grounds, some of them drawn from contemporary philosophy (e.g. the conventionalistic rejection of cannibalism of Diamond, considered below). Many of the defences preferred of total prohibition of There are also more comprehensive philosophical reasons cannibalism are ludicrously weak, and withstand little examination. for the periodic intellectual review of deeper assumptions (and Consider, to illustrate, the main argument in (what was until very prejudices), reasons furnished by dialectics in combination with recently one of the few books in English on cannibalism) Hogg, the theory of objects. namely 'the innate repugnance of contemporary man to touch human According to the theory of objects there is no assumption that has to be held,that cannot be disbelieved, flesh' (p . 188, also earlier) . while according to dialectics proper every assumption is open to represented as a matter of fact, it does not appear to hold generally, questioning and reconsideration by its methods , and assumptions in and may be largely a matter of background and conditioning. order to be rationally maintained should withstand such critical scrutiny. imply 2 Naturally these (methodological) considerations do not that assumptions under examination do not (frequently) withstand critical discussion, or that there are not (or never could be) good reasons for adhering to them. But the considerations are important in opening larger moral assumptions to due reconsideration, for Insofar as the repugnance is There is no evidence that - what seems unlikely given the former prevalence of cannibalism - it is innate; and insofar as it is a matter of fact it does not support moral prohibition of eating human flesh, any more than the apparently very widespread repugnance of urban Americans 5 4 as observed, it has recently been argued, successfully, that this to eating raw snake underwrites a moral prohibition on consumption of raw snake meat. distinction will not carry very much of the moral weight that has been imposed upon it. 7 On the other hand, if the repugnance in With the breakdown of this sharp moral distinction question is (intended to be) warranted moral repugnance, then the argument is trivially circular, the premiss assuming the point at between humans and other species.orthod ox anthropocentr ic options, which sanction human consumption of animals other than humans but issue. never humans, collapse. One reason why the proferred defences look weak is that it has not been thought necessary to provide any defence; for 'Directly daylight falls on the habit it withers away' 5 - the "daylight" is that of contemporary Western civilization. appears in Langton (initial page): A similar theme cannibalism is 'a custom that of civilization' - or, one might say, before the triumph of human (pure) vegeta!ian options and on the other, cannibal(istic ) options (mixes of these options which allow some human flesh eating will it will be seen that by no means all forms of cannibalism are morally inadmissable. present exercise. Showing as much is the main object of the Though the results arrived at are part of the process of elaborating a non-chauvinis tic ethics, and accordingly have implications for policy, no policy conclusions are drawn in what no recommendatio ns for the implementation , or institution- The vegetarian options face, it certainly seems, insuperable difficulties, especially concerning such issues as animal predation (which is an important, immensely frequent, and often _<!~~rab.!!'_, What will be argued is that, on the contrary, when some daylight does penetrate to the issues concerning cannibalism, follows: (at least as regards "higher" creatures) are, on the one side fall under the latter head). must soon become extinct all over the world before the great march chauvinism. Among the important options left open ecological fact), and concerning the reduction in numbers of animals, especially introduced animals, which build up to "pest proportions" (some reduction is often required for vegetable growing to operate successfully) . But it is unnecessary to elaborate these and connected points here because there are cases where consumption of human flesh is perfectly admissible. The main argument advanced is modelled upon simple inductive arguments: a base case is argued, and this base is expanded step by step to cover other cases. alisation, of cannibalistic practices are made 6. Hardly necessary to say, better defences of the mainstream anti-cannibal istic tradition can be devised or pieced together from the literature than those so far alluded to. for example, on the assumption of sanctity Such defences - based, of all human life, on the theme that cannibalism is a brutalising experience, which puts humans in the same category as the brutes - characteristic ally rely on a sharp distinction between humans and other creatures. But, §1. The Base Cases: Eating the Dead. In setting out the first of these cases it is taken for granted that the practice in some American states and Canadian provinces of allowing accident victims (e.g. those of automobile casualties) to consent to the use of parts of their bodies for organ transplants and also for other medical purposes is admissible, and that the use itself in such cases is Restricted forms of cannibalism in the interests of 6 survival are now quite widely accepted as admissible. admissible 8. Then, is there any good reason why persons should So there is really nothing extravagant at all in contending that sometimes not similarly consent to the use of their bodies for food upon cannibalism is perfectly alright: their death? fact that the admissible cases lead, naturally and coherently, once For food transfusions, instead of blood or transfuslons · or transplants. plasma And if they do, or so bequeath their bodies, why should their bodies not be eaten? What differences human chauvinism is properly cases. any extravagance is due to the left behind, to much more controversial There are several examples of human cannibalism undertaken there are in the types of cases can be minimized, and those that for survival, which have won establishment approval, from remain seem not to make much - or any relevant - moral difference. or church hierarchies. For example, in order for human parts to be intially taken and used, of members of a Uruguayan rugby party who survived an airplane crash the bodies have to be more or less butchered; in the high Andes (dramatised by Read). but then they may be in much less pretty shape after a serious accident. Again, in each typ e of case, the parts may - or may not - be supplied to people who are in genuine need; etc. Nor does internal ingestion appear to differ, in any way that matters morally, from internal connection, from organ transplantation. It could be objected that with an organ transplant a specific organ is required, whereas with a starving or undernourished person alternative sources of food are - or ought legal A striking recent example is the cannibalism Their eating of dead companions, evidently necessary for survival, was condoned by the Catholic Church of Uruguay and by other prominent Catholic thinkers. Interestingly, Rubio, Auxiliary Bishop of Montevideo, justified such cannibalism, necessary for survival, through a medical transplant comparison 10 .•• Eating someone who has died in order to survive is incorporating their substance, and it is quite possible to compare this with a graft. Flesh survives when assimilated by someone in extreme need, to be - available. But where the parts are used for nonspecific just as it does when an eye or heart of a dead man is grafted onto a living man ••. (as quoted in Read, p. 308). medical testing, e.g. cell culture, or just disposed of (e.g. by But the Bishop tactfully rejected, except 'as a source of inspiration', incineration) without any other use, the specific need consideration the equivalence, appealed to by some members of the team, between does not work. Anyway what would it show? eating the flesh of their friends and participating in communion, as The claim staked is accordingly this:_ where the human initiated by Christ at the Last Supper, where he (figuratively) shared eaten is dead, and certain other conditions are satisfied, cannibalism his flesh and blood with his apostles (Read, p.309; is admissr e. also p. 299). The other conditions~ comprise such things as Exactly why this correlation, which undoubtedly helped the survivors, the following: that the whole thing is done decently (in ways, gets discounted, remains tantalisingly obscure. that is . LO be spelled out specifically); that the person eaten consented (or, differently, would consent) to being eaten, perhaps by the parties concerned, or more strongly that the person directed tha t he or .;he be eaten (or otherwise used); or differently again, tha t the ~onsumption was necessary for survival or well-being. etc. seems worth pursuing further. The correlation For though survival was not a problem 9 Suc h d es pi cable motives as those of the ge t-even s yndrome ("we'll 8 fix the ba s t a rd, we'll eat him") are pointl ess (as well as stup id l y for the apostles at the Last Supper (so destroying a strict correlation), survival is not the only basis justifying the eating of human flesh. As with blood, the gift relation is another v i ndi c tiv e ) wh e re the part y is already dead. It can be argued that eating certain pieces of human flesh out of respect is an exceptional case (like eating a fellow creature to avoid starvation), and that a general principle of respect for important basis. A consent or bequeathal clause 11 is important in under- the dead overrides any consent that may be given. The short cutting various objections to the consumption of dead humans, for answe r to this is, firstly, that grantin g of exceptional cases alr eady in s tance, that it is an affront to human dignity, that it is a mark allows that some cases of cannibalism are admissible, and secondly , of total d isr espec t, that the 'sanctity of the human being' is that no general principle applies in a decisive way to exclude the compl e tely disregarded (Hp. 186), that it is impious (Dp. 467). exampl es alr ea dy considered. Fo r if the person consents it can hardly be an affront to that general principles can always be thwarted, it is instructive to consider per s on's dignity, or violate that person's sanctity (as seen from one po int of view). Nor is it an affront to the dignity of creatures of an irreligious cast, for whom a dead body whether of a human or an animal is a d ead body - though perhaps a dead body of a fellow creature o r of a friend. So it is an affront only to those of particular ( religious) groups, perhaps the same groups for whom dead human bodies are sacred and their disfigurement by humans (whether for medical or 5 other purposes) impious . Just as it is legitimate for one to discount the often illfounded views of such groups - insofar as the views are int ended to have universal applicability - as regards medical use of (forme rly ) consenting humans, as regards sexual relations, abortion, e uthanasia, and so forth, so it is legitimate to discount them in the case at hand. Dev ine ' s argument against cannibalism, namely as a paradigmatic applica tion of his overflow principle. On the contrary, the eating of certain parts of the bodies of dead humans was, amon g certain tribes who used to practice cannibalism, for it was thought that in that way the eaters could acquire or participate in some of the (former) virtues o f the dead , e. g . wisdom, strength, hunting skills, etc. still be, that eating is not disrespectful: So it can what is sometimes dis- respectful is raising for food nnd killing, e.g. in order to ent. The overflow principle~ formed -chiefly to cope with the treatment of animals, is this: Act towaPds that which, while not itself a pePson, is clos ely associated with pePsonhood in a way cohePent with an attitude of Pespect fop pePsons (Vp . 503) . Instead of arguing directly for the principle, Devine suggests firstl y that it may be argued for in rule-cons equ e ntial fashion, secondly tha t it may be made plausible as part of a way of life having respect for persons at its centre, and thirdly that th e prin ciple is well ensconced in the moral consciousness of the plain man. Each of these suggestions can be faulted both in general and as regards the relevant application. For instance, plain men mostly do not object to the bulldozing of old cemeteries to make way for a development. Nor need the eating of a dead human be a mark of disrespect. an act of consider a ble res pect; To illustrate how application of suc h On the other hand, the principle can be rendered analytic by taking up the slack in "associated with" and "coherent with" appropriately - only then it won't yield the relevant substantive application. In application of the principle Devine makes two alternative moves. First, 11 It is by no means obvious, however, that a cons~n 10 is required. similarly if it is going to be incinerated and the ashes s pread, it might better be carefully composted. The point ma de does not exclude organ transplants, eating, and so ecological alternatives to burial or cremation. The most the overflow principle The suggestion that the already dead can, at least in s e ems to show, under this move, is - what does not exclude consumption, certain circumstances, be eaten without moral qualm, innocuous though and what one may well concur with - that the dead (and not merely the human dead) ought to be eaten respectfully; it is, is liable to spark off a series of protests. and even this much some ugly scenes could result i f "long pig" caught on; is not shown if the tense change, the transformation from alive to dead, destroys the requisite closeness of association. outback Australia) competing to pick up "accident" victims. ambulances or tow trucks, are readily enough avoided (by suitable body, which forms the visible aspect of the bulk of persons with whom we are acquainted, and which persists when the person ceases to exist in death. (Vp. 593) organization), and more respectful practices adopted. would, if the objection is to have force - lead to what is normally a~sumcs, overflow to the subsequently dead body (which is no longer inadmissible, for example, to a perverse lust for human flesh, and And again respectful eating be marketable commodities, if there was commerce not just in human flesh. but in bags, shoes, and belts made from human hides, decorations from human bones and teeth, glue and fertilizer from other parts and so on 12 in the way that there is commerce in animal parts? Perhaps, disre sp ec t wo uld be an outcome, but perhaps for the wrong re aso ns. What s ee ms clear is that giving human flesh to the ne edful, s ~y , i s one thing, a llowing commerce in human parts is another. More serious is the objection that such "admissible cannibalism" could - or rather ov e rflow to thl' llvlng body docs not however guarantee, what Devine Wouldn't disrespect be inevitable if human parts become But these types of scenes, which can already occur with competing ... respect for persons overflows to the human to dead bodies. e.g. the the way that refrigerated trucks follow the kangaroo shooters in some heavy assumptions as to features of persons, reveals: could, it appears, be coherent with the alleged overflow of respect It is true that spectacle of the refrigerated vans patrolling the highways (in much Devine assumes it does not, as his second move which begins to buy into the "visible aspect" of a person). so in nci cher case is value diminished, it seems, by (respectful) cannibalism or ordinary garbage (in the literal sense) is not eaten (except in desperation, etc.). A dead body does nee have the value of the person whose body it is in life; Garbage is commonly thrown away, things in these end uses are mostly not; For i f a body is going to be buried and "eat,~" by bacteria, or various carnivores, it might as well be eaten; although a dead body is not a person, still the fact that it (so to speak) was a person means that it ought not to be treated like ordinary garbage (Vp. 503). forth. clause perhaps, thereby to the deliberate killing of humans for food. Hogg makes much of the first of these points, the (unintended) impression he gives being that human flesh is so delicious that it is highly addictive. Whether this is so or not (it would seem unlikely with a preponderance of older stringier humans, though the number of "battery humans" is increasing).it appears not to matter, unless it does lead to what would be more disconcerting, e.g. the establishment of a black market or the like in human flesh, with inputs from killer or Mafia syndicates. But the problem is not substantially different 13 12 of our unwillingness to kill people for food or other purposes, from problems that already arise with the treatment of animals (e.g. traffic in rare species), and over the distribution of dangerous drugs to humans, and can be met in similar ways, i.e. through a similar range of political or organizationa l options. The usual utilitarian defence of vegetarianism based on suffering, pain, and the like caused in raising and killing creatures for food, co llapses. 13 For no direct suff~ring, pain or the like occurs, with the creatures eaten already dead; and any sorts of suffering that might be marshalled among some of the still living who are pained by the consumption can be more than compensated for by th e alleviation of suffering of the meat consumers, for a suitable and secondly not a (direct) consequence of our unwillingness to cause distress to people - not that it always would (contrary to Diamond's assumption) - but rather 'what conditions our attitude to not dining on ourselves is the view that a person is not something The argument turns however on a slide on the mi.ddl.e term 'something to eat' which is ambiguous between (i) something that may be eaten and (ii) something that is eaten; In the second sense the justification given of the fact dead people are not eaten, namely people are not eaten, while in a sense "logically adequate" is trivial, and proves no requisite grounding, and the "justification " does not imply that dead people may not be eaten. In the first sense, a nontrivial justification is offered, that it is impermissible choice of consumers. to eat people,but in this case we cend to repeat the initial question; Some vegetarians however (rightly) reject utilitarian defenses; Diamond, in particular, tries to argue that they involve 'fundamental confusions about the moral relations between people and people and between people and animals ' (Dp. 465), and introduces instead convent ionalist arguments - unfortunately of wide philosophical appea l - against eating people. Some of the reasons for not eating people, she subsequently argues, extend to grounds for not eating animals either. Diamond's argument begins from certain quite central facts ... We do not eat our dead, even when they have died in auto- mobile accidents or been struck by lightning • .. (Dp. 467) An immediate objection is that this is little more than a local fact, Why is it? Diamond has a surprising answer: in effect that it is analytic on, or at least a consequence of, our notion of what a person or human being is. ••• it is not respect for our interests which is involved in our not eating each other . These are all things which go to determine what sort of concept 'human being' is it is one of those things which go to build our notion of human beings (Opp. 469-70). But such a thing as not eating other people is certainly not part of the concept 'human being', indeed it is not merely ~ot analytic or normic (near-analytic ) of human beings,it is not even true of them - good for certain ' we ' but by no means generally, as the history of given that, on well-authentic ated evidence, cannibalism was formerly canniba lism shows. widespread, and that it still persists in isolated place s today. It is equally a fact in the context of quite extensive groups, that .EE~L2o not eat l'i~.· So either the central fact has to be morally grounded or has to have moral consequences. The second option would involve a prescriptive fallacy (deduction of an ought from an is); followin g fashion:- in any case, Diamond tries the first, in the The fact is, firstly, not a (direct) consequence The answer is, in short, radically unsatisfactory . That this is 15 Tt may s eem ... I should find myself havin g t o jus tify slav e ry. For do we not learn - if 14 we liv e in a slav e soci e ty - what slaves ar e the answer Diamond is offering is however at once confirmed by how she goes on (writing in speciesist assumptions 15 in the same revolting fashion): and what masters are through the structure of a life in which we are here and do this, and they are there and do that? Do we not learn the difference between a master and a slave that way? (Dp. 470) Diamond does not manage to escape these difficulties, though sh e And so too - very much so - [built into the notion] the idea of the difference between human beings and animals. We learn what a human being is in - among other things sitting at a table where WE eat THEM. We 16 are around the table and they are on it (Dp. 470) . While we may learn something about what some human beings - not makes various attempts (p. 470 and especially pp. 476-7): the notion of a slave or an enemy or an outlaw assumes a background of response to persons, and recognition that what happens in these cases is that we have something which ;;;;-;;,::-e not treating as what it - in a way - is ( Dp. 476). vegetarians - are like in this way, in the way we can learn what But this is to assume a background of norms, of how things morally some other human beings are like from cannibal feasts where 11 we" are, that a person is not something to enslave, etc. (and to attempt are on the table as well as around it, we learn little of the once more to build a presupposed morality into conv entional facts). notion of human being in this way. Nor does what correct information Furthermore, as this reveals, the same ploy could be worked in the we acquire in this way provide a firm basis for moral judgements case of animals, namely that in hunting them, killing them, serving about the possibility of eating humans, though Diamond appears to them up for dinner, we are ~ treating them as what - in a way think that it does; for she later says that the source of moral they are (or, more accurately, as they mora lly deserve treating). life derives from ways in which we mark what human life is (Dp. 418), Such comparisons make it evident then what Diamond is about, and that another move which involves a prescriptive fallacy, as well as he r conventionalistic approach fails. obvious anthropoce ntri cit y . However, to remove objections to eating the already dead, Indeed many of the sorts of conventional patterns of response under specified conditions, is simply to avoid, rather than face up a nd conventional facts that Diamond alludes to are a fairly direct to, the real opposition to even qualified cannibalism. For an o utcome of human chauvinism, e.g. that drivers mostly stop for important part of the real opposition to qualified canniba lism relies injured humans, not for injured animals, that humans are commonly upon illicit assimilation of cases of eating already dead people given funerals, animals mostly not. Diamond needs to say, and with killing humans for food, and, differently again, rearing some proceeds to say, that these sorts of differences are appropriate, but that is to slide to a value judgement which concedes to he rself part of what is at issue. Diamond's approach encounters serious difficulties when applied to such matters as slavery, the treatment of outlaws and enemies of them, e.g. certain infants, for food . and in an obvious sense ! .!1.~~~., Thus Devine's ambiguous, 17 what is entire l y different, permitting the killin g of humans for 16 food, or to, what is different again, the deliberate raisin g of human s for food. claim that 'a meat diet requires that animals be killed' (Vp. 483). And thus Diamond again, the cases are entirely different. involved both rearing and slaughtering Swift's "proposal" of children for food. Nor is the base position so far reached a new one, but an ancient proposition. it i s one thin g morally to eat an already dead deer, another to let a deer die and then eat it, another again to shoo t What we should be going against in adopting Swift 's "Modest proposal" is something one should be going against in salvaging the dead, more generally useful organs for transplantation, and the rest for supper or the compost heap. (Dp. 469) 17 Not a t all: animals: The differences are already clea r as rega rds For instance, Chrysippus, the Stoic, in his or otherwise kill it and then (perhaps) eat it, and yet another to eat a deer raised (in one or another of very different ways) for food. Within each of these different categories, it is important to distinguish cases. For while eating a dead human, even after it has been allowed to die (by omission), may be admissible, killing humans for food is often not, and raising a human for food (and other goods) is, it is now generally assumed by humans, certainly not. treatise On Justice, 'permitt ed eating of the corpses of the dead• 18 There are several separate issues here, in particular the So also apparently did Diogenes in his Republic, Zeno in his Republic, ~~ban~ or raising for food issue, on which much literature on and Cleanthes, all of whom may have authorised cannibalism on a the moral basis of vegetarianism has in fact focussed, and the broader scale. general l?I~'!_ati~ issue, which includes matters of killing and letting die. Limited extensions of cannibalism beyond the base cases, where humans are allowed to die or are killed . eat ing of (certain of) their parts . Eating dead humans involves But if eating such parts is (often) The issues are separate because creatures may be killed for food, e.g . in hunting, though they are not raised for food, and conversely creatures may be raised for food (or treated as slaves) without, for one reason or another, being killed. Cases of humans admiss ibl e , then so also presumably is consumption of such parts when raising humans for food have apparently never occurred, though humans they are (irrevocably or freely) severed from a living human, e.g. have sometimes been fed up for the pot (e.g. in the Aztec empire and in Fiji). ea ting the amputated limb of a friend or enemy or drinking the blood Humans are the only creatures we in fact know who might (having l ost consider- donated by another, able touch with the natural world) just adopt such a practice: These rather special cases, involving (what is no other ca lled, for s h o r t ) ~ human parts, provide a first set of extensions animals ever raise creatures for food, not did cannibalistic cu ltures of the base cases. ever apparently raise humans for food. These extensions include some bizarre cases, in particular where the part concerned is one's own. However, allowing the eating of dead humans and nonlive hum~ n parts under certai n conditions offers no slippery slide to, It is a serious and difficult question (to which moral philosophers have not sufficiently addressed themselves) why it is that if humans are not under !!.!!i'. conditions entitled to raise other humans for food, they are entitled under many 19 18 th e gene ral i ss ue as to wh e n, or wh e n prec i se l y , killin g f o r food i s jus tifiable can be largely skirt ed. For it is justifiable , it is conditions - indeed, it is often assumed, under a sweeping ra~ th e n claimed, whe n and only when killing itself i s justified, whe ne ve r of factory conditions - to raise other animals for food? that is. They can only be justified in so doing if there are significant and While one half of the italicised equivalence is uncontrover s ial - relevant differences between humans and other creatures raised, if killing for food (or for purpose P) is permissible, so is what it or that might be raised, for human or animal food. involves, killing - the converse is not. Yet there are, For consider some circum- it has already been pointed out, no such appropriate species-wide stances (assuming you can find them) where killing of person x is differences. justifie d, e.g. in war, in retribution, in self-defence, in r e ducin g g reat A fresh start can be made on the issue from a cannibalistic perspective. evil. Since it is not eating human f l e s h ~ that is Th e n killing x for these reasons is not killing for food, even if x is in fact subsequently eaten. There is an important intensional wrong, what is it that is wrong, if anything, with raising humans difference, so that being justified in killing x for some crime say , or other creatures for food? does not justify killing him for food, much as thinking of killing him or is it both? both. Is it the raising, or is it the killing, The answer is, of course, that trouble lies with for the one reason is very different from thinking of killing him for Raising of creatures frequently has one or both of two dama ging features accompanying it: first, the other purpose. deprivation of the What can be argued given the permissibility of- eating dead rai s ed creatures, and secondly, treatment of the raised animal humans, is that where killing of z is permissible, cannibalism of z merely as a means (not as an end). is also IN FACT permissible. The second, attitudinal, difference may have little or no impact beyond the first. For example, if infanticide i s alri ght under certain conditions (as Tooley contends, and others have hinted), And the first may be avoided, e.g. whe re the creatures stay by choice but then in fact cannibalism of infants is alright also under the given could depart if they wished. conditions (but the issues as regards the raising of infants for fo od Kept geese, for instance, may be in that position; they are seemingly not deprived, but may live in rather are, of course, not thereby resolved). natural conditions (except that migration and much that goes with it is permissible can, to this limited extent, be bypassed. II has been lost). Thus the issue of when killing It is worth elaborating these points, since important Killing involves something different again: extensions - not the only extensions - of cannibalism beyond the base all that goes with removing of a life, the termination of projects, purposes, cases depend upon them, and since - very differently - they furnish associations of value, etc. (and also the definitive end of con- clear cases of inadmissible cannibalism. sciousness, etc.). of situations to distinguish:- With the predation issue also, a central issue ls as to when killing an animal for food is permissible. It may be thought indeed that the killing for food issue just is, or is t a ntamount to, the general issue of killing, and that accordingly • There are several clas se s 21 survive themselves, the survivors of an aircrash in a remote area, 20 people on a life raft, etc. Such examples, where defensible, as they sometimes are, provide a further class of examples of admissible la. Killing , causing to die, is impermissible. cannibalism - what might be called exceptional cannibalism, since the lb. Letting die (passive killing, as it is sometimes misleadingly , but conveniently , called) is circumstances are, at present anyway, among higher mammals, rather impermissible . exceptional . Then, in either case , killing or letting die for eating or followed by An important and often times questionable practice, which eating is also impermissible, by preceding principles (essentially can in principle at any rate, deliver exceptional examples 20 , is ~Pp ➔ ~P (p & q)), hunting (in the intransitive form, which involves capture or killing So in particular it is where the creature is of the same species. That is, cannibalism is in these cases inadmissible . But some of these cases are clear; for instance, where creature (or if the object sought is duly located). Men continue to hunt in the French fields, and sometimes still their own species 21 , not at present human) x is leading a worthwhile nonaggressive independent and pro- in the shape of enemy soldiers , but those cast as outlaws (manhunts) . ductive life in a peaceful countryside. (Intransitive) Hunting divides into several types, according to its 2a. Killing is permissible. 2b. Letting die is permissible. end purpose, for sport , for food, for extermination, for capture. Hunting humans for sport (hunting for "sport " , so called, typically In common reckoning there are many examples of both second classes, involves killing) is a practice that has persisted well into this "passive" infanticide, suicide and gambling with life, euthanasia, century, in Australia for example . killing or allowing to die to maximise community values where there though it can be given philosophical support by chauvinistic theories are large numbers of people or choices between them, execution and such as a limited and racially prejudiced group-utilitarianism or by assassination, self-defence , killing in war (the list follows roughly appeal to the "ideal" of pure subspecies (the stud ideal). t he later chapter headings in Glover, where these well-known types such hunting is impermissible, so, for the same sorts of reasons, is of examp les are set out in some detail). the hunting of many animals for sport . In all these types of cases, It has nothing to recommend it, But if Hunting otherwise, except for death can be followed by eating, provided the base class conditions capture, is a restricted form of killing, and to what extent it is are satisfied . permissible turns on when that sort of killing is permissible . In such cases, henceforth called de facto extensions, cannibalism is also in fact admissible . The position arrived at thus far is pulled together in rhe Almost always the killing or letting die in 2a and 2b is not spec ifically for eating. conjoined: Eating the resulting dead is simply th e source of food is adventitious. Sometimes, however, in unusual circumstances some members of a party of the one species kill certain members of the party or allow them to die in order to fo ll owing diagram, which subsequent sections (and parts) endeavol1r to fil l out and render more precise:- 23 §3. 22 Unavoidable detours: when is killing a creature wrong, and when is letting a creature die wrong? It is not necessary, nor is it easy or desirable, to avoid entirely the issues of when killing Diagram 2: TYPES OF ADMISSIBLE AND INADMISSIBLE CANNIBALISM is wrong and when killing for food is wrong, and when such kinds of l( ,- killing are not wrong . Type 1 cases (exemplified e.g. in hunting for sport) - - -- ___ _] Base case I ,< conditions fail I X other than rather weak or circular principles. had seemed to be clear turn out on further reflection to be much l ess ,< obvious. \ ESSENTIAL / ,-...__ _ _ _ _ _'-! \ PREDATION..,, For example, it had seemed evident that the onus of jus tification (where this makes sense) characteristically lay with the WATERSHED J(. XCEPTIONAL EXTENSIONS Worse, things chat INADMISSIBLE ADMISSIBLE BASE CASES But it is not so easy to elicit or to defend action-taking party; \t 'I,( that it is the killing or removal of life that muse be justified, not the letting live. Some things, however, are clearer . 'J{ NONLIVE EXTENSIONS First and foremost, a satisfacto ry (nonchauvinistic) a c count K -J KILLING BOUNDARY of when and why killing a creature is wrong won't make exceptions for REARING FOR SLAUGHTER BOUNDARY humans and, more generally, won't contain the term 'human' or logical So far, in considering examples of killing, issue has not equivalents. This important requirement disposes of much of the been taken with enlightened conventional wisdom, with the result chat philosophical literature. a serious , and perhaps unwarranted, discrepancy between the treatment (9p. 135-9), which refer to the (contractual) conditions for human dished out to animals and that accorded humans is beginning to emerge. social life (the mixed account given should be faulted on several other So the judgements made tend to follow conventional practice: grounds as well). killing It wipes out, for example, Ewin's attempts Similarly it removes the main condition eventually humans for food is admitted but happens only in exceptional circumstances, achieved in Glover (a whole text devoted to moral issues concerning killing killing, which fails to present, or seriously address, the matter of animals for food is a pervasive practice. More generally, killing animals for food is considered permissible in a wide range of circumstances where killing humans is not , yet on what solid grounds? . As regards killing, even enlightened conventional moral wisdom returns us to the heartlands of human chauvinism. necessary and sufficient conditions for when killing is wrong) . The first main condition Glover arrives at is that ' taking human life is normally directly wrong: that most acts of killing people would be J/ To avoid it, the matter of wrong in the absence of harmful side-effects' (Gp . 42), i.e . so long killing and letting die will have (like most moral issues) to be as 'the best total outcome' does not involve killing (cf. p . 286), to reconsidered, nonchauvinistically. set down the underlying utilitarian recipe . Other conditions Glover outlines - similarly unacceptable even to their author when 'animal' replaces 'human' - are likewise faulted as damagingly cha,·vinistic, 25 24 for instance that it is wrong to kill a human whose life is worth l iv i ng (Gp . 53) , whenever that is. e . g. burning a collection of seeds (er seedlings) is one thing, burning Secondly , unremarkably, most of the recipes suggested in the a forest is another, slicing up or eating a raw egg is one thing, slicing literature are defective, first among them utili t arian proposals , which, as is well-known can sanction unjust killing. 22 up or eating an eagle is another, etc. Other (non- utilitarian) potential ys me rit the same consideration as ys, as if th ey we r e ys. recipes are also problematic, as a proposal by Young, wh i ch will he l p Call the r.esult of making the required deletio n, th e us on our way, serves to indicate: modified proposal . . . . what makes killing another person [more genera lly a considered . realisation either of the victim's life purposes or of such life- purposes as the victim may reasonably have been narrower utilitarian frameworks and induces a decided circularity, The proposa l requires some brief explanation. The term ' unjust ' , which takes the proposal outside is qualified in the final proposal (p.519) by 'maximally' , the point expected to resume or to come to have (Yp.518; repeated p.519 with 'maximally ' included). of which (though it is not fully explained) is to permit killing or The qualifying term sacrificing of one person in order to save others . 'irrevocable' is inserted to separate killing from life imprisonment I It is the modified proposal that will be chiefly creature] wrong on occasions is its characte r as an irrevocable, [maximally] unjust preventing of their I It is a popular fallacy that which may, as a matter of fact , defeat the prisoner ' s purposes . The long some members of a group (on a lifeboat or from a remote airplane crash) final disjunction is designed to delegitimize killing of sometime comatose are sacrificed for, or by, others of the group . persons (it also would include people undergoing reform programs) - -,hat is ac counled [maximally] unjust. an additional clause is required - and killing of potential future in way, and almost (but not) captial punishment. debatable judgements , such as that in the common case (on Young ' s ified' (p . 528) , ified. 23 from which it follows that abortion is commonly unjust- The disjunct should, it certainly seems, be deleted - especially since what justifies the main part of Young ' s proposal, considerations of what has value, does not justify the final disjunct, because merely potential persons do not appear to have requisite value, though they might (or might not) come to have such. Generally, potential ys do not have the same range of features (including acquired value, etc.) ll Similarly what one is entitled t o do , or feels like doing with r espect to them may differ; If , however, there are no just wars then most killing in war is wrong; and if punishment by death is sometimes just , capital punishment is sometimes not wr.ong. If, for instance, a person's life purposes are sufficiently evil~ e.g. they include genocide, then their fulfilment is certainly pro1, ~ rJ y , justly, thwarted. 0 1· Thus some proviso as to the chara c t e r or qua lit y of life purposes , such as the term 'unjustly ' obliquely supplies , is essential (but often omitted in ethical discussions) . It is not evident however that killing such a person (as distinct, e.g. from imprisonment , re-education, etc.) is permissible, exc ept perhaps in worst cases. ~ • what they become if their potential is realised . For example, Young claims (Ypp.520-1) that the proposal lets through various types of killing persons such as infants and foetl1ses - thereby writing in some very has only 'morally trivial or no moral support abortion will be unjust- But generally what the proposal permits and what it excludes depends critically upon cases already apparently covered, so that it is not obvious that such construal of 'moral') where the expressed wish of the pregnant woman The qualification makes way for certain cases of cannibalism, for instance those where I 26 Ther e is no good r eason to restrict the proposal to persons , and Young does not intend to. 27 Many killings of animals constitute , he t ells us (Yp.526), maximally unjust prevention of their realisation of life purposes, and accordingl y are wrong. ' Killing such animals for food is only justifiable when no adequate of other crea tures). acts are avoided. food supply is available and food i s needful' (Yp . 526), in which event, presumably, justice prevails. A characteris tic remnant of Further it is simply assumed - though it could no doubt be argued (rather as below) - that requisite unjust Young's proposal as applied has bite; human chauvinism also intrudes , with Young a ppealing to the ' greater eschewing killing of creatures for food. 25 range of life-purpose s normally human beings have' (Yp.527, italics that the modified proposal has bite: amended) ; 24 and thereby smuggling in a greater value assumptio n as regards humans. Here, as elsewl1ere also , the account of when killin g is wrong is progressive ly l oaded , almost manipulated , to yield the sought r esults : in particular , what is unjust - including which killings are unjust and which class of life-purpos es are more valuable relevant to det e rmining maximal injustice - are bot h open to rigging. These points help to bring out too how back of Young's accoun t and application s of his proposal lie more basic consideratio ns of justice and value (and it is to such considera tions that we should no doubt eventually turn). Consider, for instance, the route to the permissibil ity of systematic cullings of a herd. Wants , now substituting for li fe -purpose s , are simply supposed to be summed up utilitarian- fashion, except th at (somewhat as with Mill ' s utilitariani sm) a weighting is imposed to reflect the respective values of different wants (those of humans, e . g ., as opposed to those It is an illusion however the bite all turns on Young's cunning application , since the modified proposal itself reduces to near tautologous ness. purposes occur? taken. For when does irrevocable prevention of a life's When, and only when (since it is irrevocable) that life is So the modified proposal reduces effectively to AP. Killing x is wrong iff taking x's life is maximally unjust. But killing x is, according to OED, causing the death of x, which is tantamount, in terms of sense, to taking the life of x. And what is wrong is, according to OED again, what is unjust, and would be, if the OED were sharpened 1,1p a little, what is maximally unjust. Whence the adjusted proposal, AP. The proposal does not rule out killings which have the effect overall of fostering th e wants of the largest subset of some group like a wild herd where otherwise the wants of an even larger subset will be thwarted. Systematic cullings in the absence of feasible alternative s, therefore, may be morally pe rmissible. (Yp.527) for example, it would oblige most of us to adopt a largely vegetarian life-style We have come round a circle, but much was glimpsed on the way, so the circuitous route was not without its rewards. By working through other l ess chauvinistic accounts of the wrongness of killing (e.g. the nonchauvin istic base of Ewin's account) we can come a similar circular way and arrive at the same fairly stable result. Moveover, in the adjusted proposal we do have an account, not yet a hi ghly usable account, since circular, but an account nonetheless . In terms of this account clear cases where cannibalism is morally inadmissable can be distinguishe d, for example as follows: Cannibalism of x is wrong wherever it involves maximally unjust taking of x's life. Conversely, there are many cases where 28 the killing of one creature by another creature is, because not maximally unjust, quite permissible; 29 e.g. certain instances of killing in self-defenc e, exceptional cannibalism , abortion, etc . But if the creature is killed, then it is dead, so by the earli er Now let x and y be of the same species, say Homo Sapiens: argument it is permissible to eat it (under certain conditions) . CAP provides exact conditions for when cannibalism is wrong, in So there are many cases where killing a creature and then eating it, cases where cannibalism involves killing. or its then being eaten, are permissible . conditions are satisfied; If some of the many cases of permissible killing are, as they seem to be, cases of killing a then Sometimes these often they are not. Sorting out when they are, and when they are not, will occupy many a controversi al creature of the same species, then active cannibalism involving killing is, in such cases, permissible . The argument needs of course filling out in crucial respects, especially by some enumeration of types of cases where killing is permissible , and a sub-listing of cases where these are intra-specie s killings. Would this suffice? However, it of the) distinction between killing and letting die, by blurring or rejecting the distinction on which it is based~ that betweem omission and One question is whether the account determines (even in its circular way) the precise conditions under which killing for food can permissibly occur. Letting die is not the same as (active) killing . has recently become fashionable to try to remove the (moral significance The question reduces commission (or else it is pretended that it is frightfully difficl1lt to make this distinction s out, etc.). Rejection of the omission/ commission distinction appears to rest on a mix of fallacious moves:- to the logical issue of whether AP as a strong logical equivalence FMl. A some to all argument, warrants intersubsti tutivity in more highly intensional frames such FM2. A confusion of the thesis that the distinction is morally as those declaring purposes. Though I've tended to vacillate on this issue, my feeling increasingly is that substitutiv ity is warranted, important with the quite different thesis that only commi.ssions can be morally blameworthy and that omissions are morally guiltless (the the reason being that the equivalence of AP is of virtually synonymity position reportedly held by some religious groups in the past). strength, which legitimates replacement in all but quotational (type) FM3. An extensional approach to nonextensio nal differences . sentence contexts. But purpose sentence contexts, such as' ... for eating' are not quotational . FAP. Hence it follows using AP that Killing x for food purposes is wrong iff taking x's life for food is maximally unjust, heavily upon the fact that there are some cases where it is morally difficult to distinguish between certain commissions and certain and that CAP. These points are considered briefly in turn:- ad FMl. Those attempting to discredit the distinction usually rely y's killing x for (and followed by) eating is wrong iff y's taking x's life for eating is maximally unjust. omissions, e.g. that in appropriate circumstanc es exposing the baby may be little different morally from directly smothering it. (The Greeks believed it wasn't but that was because exposure gave the gods a chance to intervene and save from death those who were fated to perform especially important tasks). r JO But the fact that there a r c ~ cases where the JI distinctio n is not of great moral significan ce does not show that it is dispensabl e. In order to show that lt is dispensabl e it is extension ality assumption which removes scope. The principle necessa ry to show that there are no cases where it is needed, that appears to be that failing to provide a condition which would have for all cases failing to provide a condition which would prevent been causally responsibl e for preventing x is morally equivalent to ~x is (morally) equivalent to providing a condition for x. providing a condition which is causally responsibl e for x . But Moral it is easy to produce some cases where the distinctio n seems to be equivalenc e requires interchang eability witin deonitic contexts, essential if we are to account for what we wish intuitivel y to say. indeed it could be characteri sed in terms of such substituti bility . For example, to take a case those who wish to abolish the distinctio n The equivalenc e yielded is of the form -F-x are fnnd nf appealing to, we may wish to say that the people who did commonly falls, especially where Fis not extensiona l. not attempt to help in the Kitty Genovese case were morally culpable, moveover that the causal responsib ility functor is not extension al, perhaps to a high degree, but few of us would wish to say that their and that such a principle fails for it. moral culpabilit y was exactly the same or of exactly the same kind as that of the murderer, and that they should equally be brought to trial on murder ch~rges. Or, to take another case, placing poison in your husband ' s tea is not the moral equivalent of failing to give him the antidote when he has placed it in himself. In order to say +-> Fx. But such a principle It is clear Though letting die differs significan tly, then, from killing, conditions upon when it is wrong may be reached in similar ways. How the condition for letting die correspond ing to AP should go becomes rather more obvious if the righthand side of AP is expanded to: taking (the) action which terminates x's life is maximally unjust. what is evident in such cases, some equivalent of the omission/c ommission The parallel passive condition can th en presumably be formulated distinctio n is needed . thus:- ad FM2. But the thesis that the distinctio n is needed and is morally DP. significan t in many, or at l e a s t ~ , cases must be clearly dis- which continues x ' s life is maximally unjust. 26 tinguished from the very much stronger thesis that all omissions are blameless, and that any commission s are morally open ~o blame - or praisewort hy. This thesis is, rather plainly, indefensib le, yet has been responsibl e for much of the bad light in which appeal to distinctio n appears . ad FMJ. Then in turn, substituti on principles again yield clauses EDP and CDP, correspond ing to EAP and CAP, special cases of which yield conditions under which cannibalism is wrong where it involves letting die. Principle CDP which supplies this condition, where x and y are of the same species, runs as follows:- The principle of moral symmetry between omissions and commission s is in fact refutable. Letting x die is wrong iff refraining from taking (the) action It appears to be based on an CDP. y ' s letting x die for eating purposes is wrong iff y's refraining from taking (the) action which continues x's life, for purposes of eating x, is maximally unjust. Since letting die is, for the most 32 part, less heinous than killing, cannibalism involving letting die 33 i s more widely permissible than cannibalism involving killing . 27 §4 . The matter of predation, and important cases of l egit imat e killing and letting die for food. One tempting model that underlies the conflict picture of Paradigmatic examples of legitimate predation, of predation as basically undesirable but an unavoidable killing are provided by predation, where bis prey of a and a depen ds fact, a model that leads to human vegetarianism, is the following (essentially) for its livelihood, indeed for its survival, on eating kind of atomistic axiological theory (or utilitarianism):- bs.28 Such predat ion i s a n essential part of any su ffici e ntl y rich ecosystem . Essential pr eda tio n i s pre dation which is essent i a l to according to the initial positive value thesis, every living creature (every sentient creature , every higher animal , etc .) has an initial positive the nor,~11 livelihood of tl1e predat or , and where the prcd alor takes non-instrumental value which it retains unless it does something to for itself no more than it requires for it s livelihood. forf eit that value. carn.ivores , such as the big cats , but some humans, such traditional Eskimos, are essential predators. Not only ilS some (On the even simpler position of biospheric egalitarianism, discussed below, all living things have equal worth, The fact that humans ar e part of the natural predatory food chains should not be lost s i g ht o[ . Observe that the argument to permissibility of essential pre- in some nontrivial sense.) These positive values just sum ; and maximisation of value (or suitably averaged value) is, of course , the (or an) ethical objective . Then killing is generally undesirable , dation does ~ take the invalid form: such predation is a fact (a fact because it results in a reduction in net value, and survival is generally of life), therefore it is permissible. That arguments of this type , desirable. 29 The exceptions occur when a creature has forfeited its selectively relied upon by Diamond and (earlier) Hegel, are inval id is value, e . g . it per sists in value-reducing behaviour, so that killing well-enough known (they commit a prescriptive fallacy), and is evident it would prevent a further decline in net value or lead to increase in from such fallacious arguments as the diplomacists' argument, e.g. it is total value . a fact of life that Indonesia has occupied (absorbed) East Timar; when it leads to an overall reduction in value . the re- The underlying theme is that killing is unjustifiable The onus of proof, fore it is pe rfectly alright that Indonesia occupied (absorbed) East Timar. when it can be assigned, lies with those who make the exceptions, who Naturally it would be decidedly awkward if the fact of essential predation do or license the killing . turned out to be impermissible: since, with one item of value consuming another item of value, it trouble. the whole natural order would be in moral This brings us to another defect of the argument from· "facts", Predation now appears as an awkward fact , leads to an overall reduction in value. Since inessential preda tion that it suggests that essential predation is really, at base, something is inessential, it is ruled out as inadmissible. pretty undesirable, but nonetheless something we have to live with - in (nonindigenous) humans for whom predation is, it is plausibl~ argu ed , Thus in particular, contrast with predation, in its associated meaning, as plunder, which we iness en tial, are not entitled to kill for f ood : do n't, or rather oughtn 't to, have to live with morally, and which is usual rai si ng of animals for food, etc . are all excluded in one st r oke , commonly reprehensible. and a l eading feature of vegetarianism imposed . therewith hunting, 34 35 Essential predation is not so satisfactorily dispos ed o f, but introduces conflict. For either one creature, the prey, is sacrificed or another creature, the predator, is: value de c lines . Similar objections apply against biological egalitarianism, either way tot 8 1 In the interim, while vegetarian scientists work even when it is qualified as in Drengson and Naess by an in principle 30 on new diets and new lifestyles for predators, there is an obvious clause. recipe to be applied, which while not eliminating conflict, minimises that predation is rather suboptimal: its effe c t: is strictly ruled out as a general practice. just as steam gives way to sail, so the less valuable gives way to t h e ~ valuable. Thus if humans are reckoned to be It is not (or not only) that it is taken for granted the trouble is that predation Since each lion and each antelope is assigned one unit of whatever is assigned equally, mo re valuable than polar bears - the usual human evaluation - then there is no way of justifying the lifestyle of a lion that consumes polar bea rs are not going to be entitled to prey on humans, in the sens e several antelopes. at least that their predation is not justified. Any equalitarian approach that is E££ atomistic is liable Application of the recip e 31 presupposes a value ranking on creatures under which some are more valuabl e to further incoherence, as Drengson's holism reveals. than others: some living system of living things, e.g . the Earth as on the Gaia otherwise if all are equal, predation is never admissible, and Lets be essential predators just die out - at least that is the simple ethical pic t - hypothesis (p. 233). ure. least of the living things that comprise it, has the same value as This points up one of the many problems for biological egaltarianism. But the picture presented so far is too simple, and tl1e recipes suggested dubious. Then s, which should(?) have the value at each of them (in effect 1 = n, for n>l). Some of t~e ecological consequences of implementing the For if the matter is properly considered not at a given time, but over a time interval, dynamically and not suggested recipes, and reform of essential predators, can now be just statically, it is not so simple, and a rather different result gauged. emerges . the chains of predation are long and complex; One predator takes, over a typical lifetime, rather a lot of prey . Unless the predator ranks very much more highly than Massive environmental interference would be required, since distortions especially in lower-level prey would occur, with resulting the prey, the value of the sum of the prey will exceed that of the ecological instability and often catastrophe. predator. that is, are ecologically highly undesirable. These considerations, in combination with a positive and gross population The consequences, What this and the value thesis, suggest a very different result, that predators should summation problems begin to reveal is that the initial atomistic be allowed to, or encouraged to, die out - unless they are somehow, value distribution picture is inadequate because it leaves out systems what seems improbable for predators that remain wild, converted to and systemic connections such as a more ecological approach would vegetarianism, include, The dynamic picture resorted to is still too simple in one important respect, that over a time interval, prey, which would often exceed natural (and sometimes reasonable) population levels without predation, are replaced. Where population of a preyed-upon species of creature is at an ecological limit, and minor culling of the sort 36 natural predation induces does not, owing to replacement, reduce 37 population levels significantly below that limit, predation has no significant effect on total value, So results yet another, different, recipe, one which is a little nearer the ecologica l mark. 32 farm animals (all of them) can be appropriately filled out, to Some utilitarians, Singer in particular, have recognised exclude replacement of animals with unusual or special properties, the role of replacement a·,1d made some allowance for it (at a serious cost to Singer ' s vegetarianism , it should be added), e.g. those carrying valuable genes, and to allow slaughter, without Singer now allows for killing and replacement of nonselfconscious life, but advances a nonreplaceabllity thesis for self-conscious life. Furthermore, even if a replacement thesis for free-range shorter-term replacement, of those carrying damaging diseases or genes - as it no doubt can, in a modified replacement thesis - still For the basic division Singer appeals to 'Tooley 's distinction' between a nonreplacement thesis fails to allow even for essential predation of selfconscious creatures, and accordingly should be scrapped, beings that are merely conscious and ••• those that Since this pronouncement is likely to be disputed, at least are also self -conscious, in the sense of being able to conceive of themselves as distinct entities, existing by some vegetarians, it is worth trying to indicate why essential over time with a past and a future (Sp.151), At the same time it can be In fact most of the sorts of free-range farmyard animals that Singer predation is perfectly admissible, seems to be envisaging as nonselfconscious, and accordingly replaceable, explained what is still wrong with the tempting dynamic picture and creatures, for instance geese and hens, appear to satisfy Tooley's the initial positive value thesis. tests for selfconsciousness. what is put in as what is left out, Geese are certainly aware of themselves they value members of their own community ; trees, and inanimate such as rocks and buildings,~ have initial and they remember value, but that complexes and wholes, in particular ecosystems, may elements of their past and, in things like nest building (practice), anticipate the future. More important, what has selfconsciousness (reflex- ive consciousness), or consciousness to do with the moral dimension? Until well have initial value, The reduction assumptions underlying value decomposition thereof, itself, because by no means all consciousness of conscious life is _ 32 a to atoms fail , Singer's theses lack foundation and look, while perhaps convenient for that it cannot be duly explained; There are grounds for anticipating for instance, being too valuable to be Such wholes may have value furthermore which is not dissolvable into values of component parts, or atoms this is duly explained - it is not satisfactorily explained as valuable in some traditional farmers, rather ad hoe, What is left out is not just that objects other than living creatures, both animate such as plants and as distinct entities, and of geese as distinct from (and superior to) hens; What is wrong is not So much In terms of the value of wholes such as ecosystems, one of the arguments for essential predation is disarmingly elementary . It takes the form: (sufficiently) rich (natural) ecosystems are Predation is an essential part of these systems . simply replaced, in the sense of having irreplaceable experiences, worth- very valuable, while projects, etc., does not have the requisite linkage with self- What is an essential part of what is very valuable is admissible. consc iousness. Therefore, predation is admissible. Such predation, which may be argued for in other ways , admits of extension by the following principle : 38 EP. If something is entitled to kill for food under certain 39 conditions, e.g. respectfully and when in need, then so are others under the same conditions. §5. The argument for EP is of the same type as that for other Postscript . The paper is very incomplete . It fails to address several issues intimately connected with cannibalism, such as hunting similar indifference, or interchangeability, principles in ethics. of humans and other animals, in particular for food, and as raising It follows from EP and essential predation that, since a tiger may humans and other animals, especially defective infants, for food. when in need kill a cow to eat, then so may humans in need. If Worse, it is evasive on some fundamental issues, and it fails to penetrate very taking the cow's life is not maximally unjust in the one case, nor deeply into some of the issues it does begin to consider, such as is it in the other, since the circumstances are similar. predation, or as the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for admiss- The results reached may be alternatively argued for using principle CP. 33 Perhaps Singer is also on the right track, though he has latched onto the wrong distinction. Perhaps there is a (descriptive) condition q (or a condition qs for each sorts of agent), appropriately ible killing. position. It is little consolation that others are in the same Hopefully some of these deficiencies will be compensated for in subsequent parts. At the same time several themes will be developed that may tied with causing to die, such that while killing creatures without q not have been evident so far, e.g. that in under suitable conditions is permissible, killing creatures with q is far too much killing taken much too lightly, but far too little is not, except under special conditions . 34 general experience of killing and death when it does occur, that is Given that q is 11 modern 11 societies there appropriately morally connected such a procedure would fit into the except usually among small groups mostly of inured professionals, annular picture (given earlier: q would mark out the interior of the which "shield" most humans from the phenomena involved. dotted elipse). Nor need the distinction be chauvinistic, because it cuts across species in a morally defensible way. anything, is q? located? made good? But, what, if Can a suitable morally-unloaded category-based distinction And how disconcerting would it be if some such distinction could no Wait for the next exciting episode . 35 ' 40 FOOTNOTES 41 It was singularly appropriate that this paper should have otained its first (and only) public presentation at the Alfred E. Packer Memorial Center, University of Colorado. I am indepted to several members of the audience for comments and references, and in particular for the first extension of the base case . It is noticeable how people who have never been cannibals despise the horrible thing; and how quickly it disappears when a cannibal tribe comes into contact with a wider world than that Directly merely of their own bush village. daylight falls on the habit, it Withers away . This is remarkable when we remember the sanctity The cannibal of it in primitive man's eyes . is not necessarily a hopelessly degraded brute, but-;-man who has not yet lived out of the dark obscurity of bush tribalism, and so had bli~dly_ followed a practice deep-rooted in the sacrificial These themes are defended, and the annular model explained, in The themes are also defended in HC, p. 103ff., and in AHC. other recent work, e.g. by Tooley and Singer. As the schematic diagram shows, humans do not occupy a central ring. Thus adoption of the model does not imply, what Pickering assumes (p. 374), that 'humans are more~ntral ' or, for that matter, that 'humans are owed more extensive moral consideration Nothing in the model itself depends on humans . than plants'. The model is not species based, or biologically based, but category basect";-and designed to reflect the different sorts of things there are, e . g. things capable of entering into contracts conferring obligations, and things not so capable, things that can have preferences and make choices as opposed to things that cannot (truly, or significantly), things, including systems and Nor, therefore, organisations, with a telos and things without. does the model write in a new type of chauvinism, or confer privilege or moral advantage on things in more central rings. Indeed, things in central rings will have obligations and commitments, and be subject to limitations on what they do, in ways that things further out cannot be; so there will be some As this moral disadvantages in occupying a more central place. indicates, the categories selected are intended to have moral And different sorts of behaviour are morally linkages . appropriate with respect to the different categories of objects. 2. 3. 4. The popular view that dialectics and adoption fraction of assumption themes are dangerous is partly based on a modal fallacy, For the fallacy e.g. that what can be believed is believed . in operation in more intellectually respectable quarters see WW. the Epilogue of Harris Some dialectics are accordingly recommended for anyone convinced that cannibalism must be wrong. The investigations undertaken in this paper alwshare other features with (classic) dialectics: there are many loose ends, and in several crucial areas firm conclusions are not reached. Later parts of the paper will take care of some of these things. Thus Hogg (p. 188), Cannibalism . .. can hardly be said to exist in There may be isolated the world of today. pockets of survival in the heart of New Guinea and among some of the tribes in the remotest corner of South America or African jungles; but they will be no more than the rarest of phenomena. 5. Hopkins, given the last word by Hogg, p. 192. quote from Hopkins is of passing interest: The whole ideas common to man the world over from his earliest days. 6. Some of the advantages of institutionalisation of certain cannibalistic practices are evident, e.g. a_much enh~nced Various disadvantages if not evident should supply of protein. become so in the course of the text. 7. See again in HC and similar. Although the human/nonhuman distinction is not, so it is argued, one of moral significance, not all Other distinctions of moral importance distinctions vanish. - those of the annular model - naturally remain. 8. Of coures, this practice is (still) controversial, and But a offensive to various religious and other groups. great advantage of a pluralistic society is t~at it can acconnnodate (better than alternatives) such differences Issues such as human_ . over the morality of practices . burial and restricted cannibalism, however, make the limits of present pluralism evident . 9. Or else did not incur official establishment disapproval, though the acts strictly appeared to infringe the Every s~~ond_ra~onteur has prevailing law of the land. examples of cannibals not brought to Justice . 10. . This clearly anticipates an initial argument of this My thanks to W. Berryman for drawing my attention paper. to the attitude of the Catholic Church, as presented in Read. 11. Consent in principle will carry the requisited load, and for this it is normally enough that the person would consent. This indicates one logical route to the liberalisation, and removal, of the consent clause. 12. There would (so far) be no trophies, e.g. Z's head ~n the hall, Y's skull on a stand, because trophies involve hunting and killing (for which see below). 13. As some vegetarians would freely admit; other 11 vegetar i ans II f rther and regard the killing of certain (nonself) an1•mals for food as admissible provided no suffering u, go i conscious is incurred and that the animals are replaced. . But it s true that usually 'vegeta;ians do not touch the issue of our attitudes to the dead (D., p.9) . 42 14. 15. In a like vein it is suggested that Singer and Regan do not see that 'a cow is not something to eat; (for them) it is only that one must not help the process along' (D., p. 468). The latter incidentally would not exclude the use of dead creatures for food, leather goods, etc.; things that animal liberationists like Singer definitely exclude. 43 21. Diamond recognizes this objection, p. 471, but does not meet Pace K. Bell, according to whom, Men have always hunted in the fields around Potigny and Falaise . They still do, but no longer their it. own species. 16. 17. 18. In similar ways we are said to gain the concept of an animal; s~~ p. 476. -Diamond introduces this piece of serious confusion in the course of emphasizing why the 'assumption that we all agree that it is morally wrong to raise people for meat ... is not, or not merely, ... too weak' (D.• p . 469). Diogenes Laertius, vol. 11, p. 297. Some of the complex issues concerning hunting will be considered in subsequent parts, others elsewhere. 22. See, e.g., Henson, and also Ewin and RKU . 23. A notable piece of male chauvinism also slides through, in the suggestion that, in Lhe absence of more weighty moral backing, the expressed wish of a pregnant woman is morally trivial. And Sayre reports (p. 25), Cannibalism (uv0pwno~ayCa) is alleged to have been a practice of the Cynics by Philodemus and by Theophilus Antiochenus; but, if so, it must have been confined to their early history, for they had a number of critics during the Christian era who would have mentioned it if they had known of it. Both Philodemus and Theophilus were biassed and we must remember that similar stories were told of the early Christians. However, cannibalism is said to have been authorized by the Republic and Thyestes (or Atreus) attributed to Diogenes and also by the Republic of Zeno and by Cleanthes and Chrysippus (Philodemus, On the Stoics; Theophilus Antiochenus, Ad. Autolycum 3, 5; D.L. 6, 73; Ibid. 7, 188; cf. 28th Letter of Diogenes; Dio Chrysostom 8, 14). As Diogenes Laertius goes on to explain, that 'Chrysippus did countenance the eating of dead humans was one of the points brought against him by those who 'ran him down as having written much in a tone that was gross and indecent'. As regards such attitudes to the dead, times have not changed that much. The (idea of) eating "the dead" (dead humans, of course), under ~ circumstances, is still widely regarded as scandalous, and highly newsworthy (see Read, p . 296 ff). 19. Cannibalism which involves explicit killing for food is a kind of reflexive predation, but generally (cases of) cannibalism and predation only properly overlap. 20. An example would be where some of the survivors of a crash or wreck hunt other "survivors" in order to survive; cf. W. Golding, Lord of the Flies. 24. But one's life-purposes are diminished lhow can this be on Young's picture?) if they jeopDrdise those of others. Hence Young's preparedness to let Amin be killed by the stampeding horses, Yp. 527. 25 . Indeed it leads, as Young interprets it, to a more sensible vegetarianism than Singer's initial position (in Animal Liberation, not as significantly modified in Sp.153). neither culling nor predation are simply ruled out. 26. For Action and taking action should be construed in a wide, but common enough fashion, e.g. the action taken may amount to doing nothing or getting-the-hell-out-of-it. 27. It is tempting to try to prove this on the basis of a proper inclusion assumption, that where letting die is wrong so is killing, but not conversely. The assumption may, however, need qualification; e . g. killing may sometimes be preferable to letting died in a lingering way . 28. 'Predation" is a singularly unfortunate word to be stuck with to describe this universal phenomenon. It is unfortunate both because of its etymology, and because of its other meaning . At to the first, ' predation' derives from praedari, 'to plunder', which derives in turn from praedo, 'booty', As to the second, 'predation' also means a 'practice or addiction to plunder or robbery'. Both carry strong negative connotations. There is a similar damaging duality in the expressions 'prey' and 'prey upon'. 29. These defective considerations also lead to a maximisati~n of population of creatures of the base class assigned values, up to the limit - if any (on frontier philosophers there are none) where declining returns set in . Where, further, humans are typically, but erroneously, assigned greater value than other creatures, the considerations support the rapid biassing of terrestial fauna! population in favour of humans that we are witnessing. The second point does not apply, in that form, . against biol0gical egalitarianism, and the first objection fails where total value is replaced, as under some utilitarianisms (with what justification is less clear, since surely we want to maximise value so far as constraints permit: see RKU), by average value, average value per (base class) life lived, etc. 44 The argument in the text is not affected materially by switching from value analogues of total utilitarianism to analogues of some form of average utilitarianism. On some of the serious problems with these utilitarianisms, see Jamieson. 30. Drengson, following Naess and others, espouses 'biospheric egalitarianism and the intrinsic value of all life' (p. 222). According to the theory, each (living) being has intrinsic value (pp.233-4), and hence each presumably has equal worth (and is entitled, in Singer's terms, to equal consideration , if not equal treatment). In Naess and Drengson this biospheric egalitarianism is qualified by an in principle clause. According to Naess, 'The 'in principle' clause is inserted because any realistic praxis necessitates some killing, exploitation and suppression' (p.95), and according to Drengson, 'This qualification is made with the simple recognition that we cannot live without affecting the world to some degree' (the latter claim is inadequate, because it is not just 'we' who are involved). 31. Axiological approaches that are atomistic have other problems, some reminiscent of those Wittgenstein discusses for logical atomism. In particular, how do we locate the atoms to which value is supposed to adhere fundamentally. A first bad feature of this approach is invariance failure: it matters for final summations how the atoms are chosen, for different choices will assign complexes quite different values. Secondly (Wittgenstein's question), why are some things said to be atoms not complexes, and vice versa. A third group of problems, brought out in HC, concerns the choice of a base class. 32. An environmental ethic s:1oul.:l. also be an ccologic:1 I et!dc, sense of an ecologically realistic ethic. facts are certainly relevant. 32a. A detailed case for this claim 33. j:1 t lH· In this resepct too the appears in Routley and Griffin. Thus rp can be made to yield a good deal more than Young's application of his proposal (for which he offers no proper justification): A creature is entitled to kill another creature of lesser value when its life (and so all its functions, prospects, etc.) depends on it and when it does not kill more creatures than it needs for these purposes. And the dubious business of imposing such order rankings on creatures can be bypassed. 34. The qualifications are necessary. If the latter exceptional conditions clause were not adjoined, the prospe ct of finding a condition q would be wiped out by such cases of essential predation as exceptional human cannibalism. The qualifications, although they enhance the prospects of locating such a q, do not appear to make it analytic or near analytic that such a descriptive q can be found. 45 35. Not only are there many proposals for q to sift through - most of which however seem to fail for reasons already indicated in the text - but also there are apparent options to finding such a distinction, such as resetting the problem, in a less individualistic way, in the framework of (ecological) communities. REFERENCES K. Bell, Not in Vain, University of Toronto Press, 1973, REFERENCES CONTINUED P.E, Devine, 'The moral basis of vegetarianism ', Philosophy 53 (1978) · 481-505 . (all references prefixed with 'V' are to this article) , C. Diamond, ' Eating meat and eating people', Philosophy (references hereto are prefixed by 'D'). 53 (1978) 465-77, Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (edited, with English translation, by R. D. Hicks), Heinemann , London, 1925, A.R . Drengson, ' Shifting paradigms: from the Technocratic to the PersonPlanetary', Environmental Ethics 2 (1980) 221-40, R. E. Ewin, ' What is wrong with killing people? ' Philosophical Quarterly tl..<. (197;t) 126-39. M, Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches, Fontana, London , 1977 (hereafter prefixed by 'W.W.'). M, Harris, Cannibals and Kings , Collins , London, 1978 (hereafter prefixed by ' CK '), R. Henson, ' Utilitarianism and the wrongness of killing', Philosophical Review 80 (1971) :1.u,- n7. D. Jamieson,'Utilitarianis m and the value of life', typescript, University of Colorado, 1981. J, Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives, Penguin, Middlesex, England, 1977 . L.P. Pickering, Review of ' Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century ', Environmental£.£,.~-~ 2 (1980) 373-78 . G. Hogg , Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, Robert Hale, London, 1958. (references hereto are prefixed by 'H'), R. and V. Routley, 'Against the inevitability of human chauvinism ' in Ethics and Problems of the 21st Century, eds , K, E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre, University of Notre Dame Press, 1979, (Hereafter prefixed by ' AHC') . J. Langton, Cannibal Feast, Herbert Joseph, London, 1937. L, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1953. A. Naess, 'Self-realisation in a mixed community of humans ·, bears, sheep and wolves', Inquiry 22 (1971) 231-41 , A. Naess, ' The shallow and the deep . long-range ecology movement. Inquiry A s11mmr1ry'~ 16 (1':173) 95-100. P.P, Read, Alive, Avon, New York, 1974. R. and V. Routley, 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarianism', typescript 1976 (hereafter referred to as ' RKU ' ). R. and V, Routley, ' Human chauvinism and environmental ethics' in Environmental Philos~ (ed. D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley), RSSS , Australian National University , 1980 (the article is referred to as ' HC' , the book as ' EP ' ), F. Sayre, Diogenes of Sinope , A study of Greek Cynicism, Johns Hopkins University , Baltimore, 1938. P. Singer, 'Killing humans and killing animals', Inquiry 22 (1979) 146- 56, (references hereto are prefixed by ' S '). R. Tannahill, Flesh and Blood. A History of the Cannibal Complex , Hamilton , London, 1975 . Hamish M. Tooley , Abortion and Infanticide, typescript, Australian National University, 1980, R. Young, ' What is so wrong with killing people?' Philosophy 5¥ (1979) (all references prefixed with ' Y' are to this article) , 515-528 R. Routley and N. Griffin, 'Unravelling the meanings of life', available in this series , 1982. ) /.o,..,.,,,, l. ~ / , . ~ tA-- ~ <'"'1 ---- 3/ }o/t/v/~}~4--( ~~ ·~~O·\o ~ --..., \0~'203.l\. <;c..c.tt.,. ~ ~ a.I) . ~~ ~✓:. ,;,,tf ~ .r. ..... ---,(7> o-,.J /' ,,,((; 11 / c, ~ I ( _ ///,;.,/ /c/ (',.,./// 1' ,. ~ L: 1 -=y' 1/ ,/L ~ -=~ t<..,(' •.r<-- <-r-? ,r"'t, 7 ; /4... I ~,. /J/4/,JJ ( 0 -/4, -;IL l r~ rk . rr_!j, ~lb f f.o fvr-~ ~tf?>J ;_/.. « ~ YL r1.M- ~~ J'fM~J Cif ~✓ ,/.~ ) . <=<- ,,._., wh ~ 1 ~ ~ ~ ?/;1 ~ ~~ rry~t ~ ,t(!__ 16;=,·~--f:; ~ h ~ ¥,-I- ..<-D /4 ~ :f f/-L -. J,¥i~~ f 9~ (3/-~~) (I ~~ 1- h,c>_~ x /~~ -/2-(;:L r J,?-- l ~re:- )( 07A~ c/4;t-~ ,4,,.~ 7' ~rrvf j e1~,k 'U"- 0 ~ vl'f.. /411-1 ~~ 1 ,...~,._£.~ I~ 7"Y-'? ,• or ' 7 ,/.tL~ =- #--~✓ " -,/ ~~ "'~ e.~.,__,,., ..l<A--C- , 7 l'/4~ (k/v( ~ A-Ld , c-£-{,~.,.,. t-/~r;;,;-,,.:__ , C, - ~1 < "'t: ~ 4- 7,1; ,..~~ I /Jo N T T,,f'/c,- y•1 1//;rE r,vt{l. /2 <",I!.,.. '::.. {-,A/ j,._~ __:_ /,._,_ 'd / ~~-;. ,, 11 o,r ;i'a '7 .~/2 ?,(_ C/ I /;,(if'-:J;J__(;1:,-· J',(J; JJ;<~'r;b,f'/ ... Y ,1,f; ;,;--,ftlfr -~, £' .r.::._/, /•;· /''"/.' f.// / /, (cf,,,_;..,<-f (,_) :y;-._7 ,//<--"f .j•,/7 • C ~ • ~.:!__,,_ •-v, f//dl#l£ , < ~, r/ • 1,-e.--., t. ~ #J tq- 7' : ~ , ,.':_ J/'C4(. ~ &nJltJ[e "71fLt..H "1/'~ c~ "4 C/1 .. 't ,.,. ... ~;: .. t.t..4 r~ c~ /~J I~ ~~ ,H" ._ ~t/ ~l-d_ I (' rt-lrC , I ,,I, /.,_,.. .,.,.____ /4-..- C- ,,,,_ ~ , /4,L._ '-- . ,.__,_ te(A~ / 4 ~ , , fc. ~,;,,d~ t;, ~~7Y24~ h /c r n.., ,W·r ht<I I t!l"--vv-t_. t : - ;{ c.--<- u....., ( , It ~'-? I 1 ,JKc} ~ ~-✓f ;,z.. M~ / tkl-· .:I- / 1 t.~ ,.,e1 ;,-,:. ~ ~"7 f cjrl; ~ I_;.,_ 1 L,,3:-:r;-,1 •-v->-1- • 4, pS,.,(£-.,-. . ftr~ J/4. /red-,~ , _;, ~·~/~<l ' /""= cd/7 ;/ ~<¥<- J,r 7""° 1,/,,:,A -z/1.,/h/7 /,(~ • t:i.C.1 / /d'tr 7 ;:. rJ- ~:,,1 "l j 1 ( ,"'p> '(. f (,~ 0 11/'- 1 t<~ ~ ~ 4-7/J t /2-c. ) 7 /~ ?'~J 1/)):-/. ( / ~r,,.,,__,, ~,:,,..,,...,~ . l)';•.:Z:~-e-M-;I /fa ! ") ;; ,' ~ ~~ L ' A-7~ J~j 1/ ~ ~£" v:_._i eye- ,c. y),6 7 ) \ d,; ~ 1 a,___ r/ d't .ru), Cl»,~ ' ~L The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Cutting, Scholfield B (17 August 1988) 'A human role for the pig', The Weekly Times, 14. (1 leaf) - / / / . -7 / <et ? -·- -·-- C:; /~ ~, u / f l ~ Jc,._ '? ~ (,, ?0_/~ c c:i--l 7 ,5'<.. / 17 -~ ,..-tt'!' . : . - - - ---- ·-- - · · - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- ~oc-. r-c- a., r..,_,/- t .)I~ , ) / ~ ?! / . / c..rc.v ~~ //._ J OAJ 77/c /~/?t:J/f??pvc~ c:>~ 77rr" , I /}(,ifth('i/l'J7lt>p)( ;T//VC/73 ,v - cJ,,,C ~E ./,PH/6:-J ,,f/t;I~ I The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • Typescript, with handwritten emendations and annotation. Two reference reports on Cannibalism I. (2 leaves) Cutting (photocopy) of 'Necessity as a common law doctrine? [6.40] R v Dudley and Systems', The system of criminal law: cases and materials, 544-551. (4 leaves) The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • Cutting (photocopy) of 20 pages from unidentified publication on Pioneers-Donner Party-The Mormons, 526-545. (10 leaves) Letter, Bill to Richard, 7 Oct 1981 re feedback on Richard Sylvan's paper on cannibalism. (2 leaves) Letter, Robert to Richard, 7 Oct 1981 re feedback on Richard Sylvan’s paper on cannibalism. (2 leaves) I I - I :/.,, f. - - - -- ----------------- - - - - - ----- ---- ----- ___________, --------- ----------·------------- - - ----- - - -- - - -- - - - - - - - -- ------ - - - - - - - - --- $ ~ /~ .2Z- - - - --- - _ _L __ /4 r<./ ...---a~ l 2, ck?- _.:., t';_.~ ~ o_ _s_ ,,. .,/:,_ ~ , {- ~ M7-e;:__ /4?-l, _:., /.: ~ / ; ~ / /--/ ,a-~~ ,4d - - ~ c 1 /dLC4'--=·- - C4--~ _,t:?~7 ,-4,-,/4._ / - /2.; ~<"F' §5 . Raising humans and other animals for food. Humans have lit tle compuncti on, for the most part, in rearing other animals for food . Since healthy animals that are raised for food often excell humans, especially humans that are "defective " in one way or another , little , except considera tions of species , seems to stand in the way of raising such humans for food . We are in the region of Swift ' s modest proposal again . What distinguis hes creatures humans (and other creatures capable of animal husbandry) are entitled to raise for food from creatures that they are not? It is not difficult to state some constrain ts on t he solution of this problem, which also rule out usual solutions . First , the distinctio n should be independe nt of reference to particula r species , especially of reference to the human species , and also indirect reference thereto, by way of phrases such as ' standard ... ' , ' normal ... . ' 'potential ... ' . Secondly - and this furnishes the ground of the first requireme nt the basis of the distinctio n should be morally relevant i n the way that mere zoologica l distinctio ns are not: otherwise chauvinism is not avoided . ' The replaceme nt principle Singer adopts for benign farmyard husbandry fails on this score , among others (the others being that many farmyard animals seem to satisfy the requireme nts for being selfconsci ous beings) . Not being selfconsc ious , which is supposed to justify replaceme nt, under ideal farming condition s , lacks requisite moral linkage . Singer ' s move does however emphasi ze ' 31. two important things . First , the familiar objections to animal husbandry, e.g. on grounds of cruelty or deprivation to animals, are remove.e\ by considering only (ideal) free-range individualised farmyard husbandry . Secondly, some distinction (fit to take its place in the annular picture) with requisite moral linkage is what is sought . Any distinction that is going to work will have to involve the capacities of the creatures concerned , in such a way that the capacities tie with moral features . The capacities concerned are, obviously, capacities connected with being aware of being raised for food . But this is not sufficiently general, being raised for killing or for cartage or for skin or fur or feathers would be similar, and similarly bad or whatever; lacks moral connection . and it still What all the cases have in common which is general, one which has (as already noted) moral connections , is being used as a means . The sought distinction is accordingly made in terms of creatures that are capable of being aware of their case primarily as means for other, for their food , etc. U-creatures, say, as opposed to A-creatures . 21 no means all, are A-creatures: infants are not . Many humans, but Why this distinction? 21 There are probably other requir e ments as we ll: e . g. that not in midst of present worthwhile projects; e.g. Mrs. Goose is not raising young, etc. The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • • • Photocopy of Young R (1979) 'What is so wrong with killing people?', Philosophy, 54(21):515-528, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100063531. (8 leaves) Cutting, Ewin R (1972) 'What is so wrong with killing people?', The Philosophical Quarterly, 22(87): 126-139, https://doi.org/10.2307/2217540. (14 leaves) Typescript (carbon copy) of untitled paper attached to Ewin cutting. (18 leaves) Photocopy of Singer P (1979) 'Killing humans and killing animals', Inquiry, 22:1-4, 145156, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747908601869. (6 leaves) Photocopy of one page (157) from Lockwood M (1979) 'Singer on killing and the preference for Life', Inquiry, 22:1-4, 157-170, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747908601870. (1 leaf) t . • ~ /,o.R-,4-.. ~t ~,, ,,_,;L ~ C~"'1 /C'.tt---? ,.... ,._._ ~ e.-;- __ jf1~ ~ rur 6 ""efc7'/ ~ ,,,<e,,,.,;z,r4? ~ c,,__,,,- .1 ------~ ,,-v-9"' ~ "'-<- r = c:e/4 /4--,- ~/~~-~ P.f.?4 ,..,.,,PE' r e ~ 7~~ y?f /2 ~c;k__/"7'/~ 7 ~ / 7~ / /,..,;,, ~ ,?£ / ~J" r-tr= / t:t_ ~7, /9-7 r~ o-/4-~ ,.ve- / _,/~,/ ;:7'/ /re-v -~ (~ ,,{~9 C'l<-,r /4 ~vr,, 1~ /c{. rL r ,' ~ ,~ 7-£ ~ - - ~ ~ . , , ~; / " ' - - /c~V-- ~ ~ -~ ~ L <r7J\ _0 / ~ ~~ 0 - ~ 7L 7 C-£-..,/,4c,.~~ ~~ ~ ~ ~ ~ /.? ~ ~ =,/---6-- ~ . ~(' ~ ~ cv;·n! ' To -J~ > /~&:, -6-,e> ~ ~ ~7f 7~ ~ /~~ ~,,,_7 ,;,_~ 4/ ~/ C ~~ o/· //4- ~ / ~ /~ 7~ ~ ?¼_ 11 ~ M,- '--+-€- /~1) / ~ ,~ --/?~/ 4:- ..,,.,,,, ,,./" &-"'7/<" c, /4 Ye-/ U.:.... ~ ;/ / 7'~L. . ~ ~,, i 7,2 ~ ~ .,/4 /< ; e-.,, ' ~ ;,I'£ .Y CJ/-?!' , ,_, ·/,,.r.,.-........-,. , ,,__ s « ~ ?< 0~ /~L,, ,4_._ / Cb- i,_,.__1 c-.r r~ /2 re:_ ~ h'L 7 '---71J r-"-"- 3-.. d..-. ~~:; d:....-../ ~ ~_/~ The following have been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. • • • • • • Photocopy of Diamond C (1978). 'Eating meat and eating people', Philosophy, 53(206): 465-479, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3749876. (8 leaves) Photocopy from The Encyclopedia Americana (1978) 'Cannibalism', The Encyclopedia Americana, 2: 543-544. (2 leaves) Photocopy from Britannica Encyclopedia (1969) 'Cannibalism', Britannica Encyclopedia, 4: 785. (1 leaf) Photocopy from Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1966) 'Cannibalism', Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 3: 50. (1 leaf) Photocopy of Naess A (1979) 'Self‐realization in mixed communities of humans, bears, Sheep, and Wolves', Inquiry, 22:1-4, 231-241, https://doi.org/10.1080/00201747908601874. (6 leaves). Photocopy of one page (2273) from unidentified dictionary, Pre-collection to Predecree. (1 leaf) r)I':, t; 1 ·-et I r o-f 6 ?\/ih'i I Jet ~t·.?t'cc If33 •• 11t1;,.,_4,, ;; w ; ~ ) ~,,c._! / //,,,,.---: J:~w ~ J/4 ~"~t New- f'-w1r- > ~:/~4-;-, L 1/75 /I ~-~erY /, • ,I J Lcz ~ ' d cc c e::es ,f c::::e.. ~ .. . -1~ ~~ ;/w,;.,L;:;,',,,._ ,;/ a,~}:z;:__ dL-0~ " 7 1 f,t} 0 ~ ~ A. ~~ - 7'~ - . ' -f ~i,t;i,:___ ~✓~ ~~ . - - /z;j/M?!, ,<4 n/41"? r - / ·~ ·7 - Jo - ~ C:~~ - ~..,;t,J;j,,. - ... c.-C~1/~ - 7"1(~ /'<d~ ..£.... ,;:_~ 74::,,,'~ /k,,. ~~ ~ -4- . ~/17 '_ ~ 1IIE !1i l/lL/7? . ··• .,. Men have always hunted in the fields around They still do, but no • longer their own species. (K. Bell, Not in Vain, University of ~oronto Press, 1973) .,, Petigny and Falaise .  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 59, Item 681: Notes and cuttings on predation (for Cannibalism II) Subject The topic of the resource Typescripts and handwritten notes. Includes copies of published works by other authors and letters. Description An account of the resource Published works and letters redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 681 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [119] leaves. 30.57 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Notes and cuttings Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:de64185">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:de64185</a> Box 59: Nuclear Como House Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3 https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/4bdf0fc19be362d2a697b5695b65a2df.pdf 533596ed2c0f2e3fff873e709de97e2c PDF Text Text Discussion Papers in environmental phiiosophy _. Phitosophy Departments The Australian National University PO Box 4, Canberra, Australia 2600. NUMBER 9 WAR AND PEACE. II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY RICHARD ROUTLEY ��FOR CIRCULATION AND EVENTUAL LIBRARY DEPOSIT WAR AND PEACE. II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM by R. Routley Number 9 Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy Department of Philosophy Australian National University 1983 ��ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM Pacifism, despite its limited revival through the nonviolent action 1 movement and as a respectable tradition within the Catholic church , continues to have a bad philosophical press. one way or another, It is commonly portrayed characteristically as inconsistent. as incoherent Even philosophical defences of pacifism are liable to be extremely defensive, conceding pacifism is in only that consistent, but insisting otherwise that it is as false as a moral 2 position can be, bizarre, and morally insensitive . What follows challenges the prevailing wisdom put out in the philosophical press, but using its own analytic methods. §1. Slide arguments to inconsistency; from rights. an In influential and and arguments from irresponsibility and widely disseminated set of articles 3 attacking pacifism , Narveson says that the pacifist's position is not only that [Tl] violence is evil but also that [T2] it is morally wrong to use force [violence] to resist, punish, or prevent violence. This further step makes pacifism a radical moral doctrine. What I shall try to establish below is that it is, in fact, more than merely radical - it is actually incoherent because self-contradictory ... (p.408, italics added). Subsequently (p.414) he characterises pacifism by way of T2, though it would be better characterised by the more sweeping 1. According to the US Catholic Bishops, pacifism is 'a valid Christian position', with a long tradition going back to Christ and the early Christians who were committed to a nonviolent lifestyle: see Origins 12 (1982) pp.310-311. The revival in the nonviolent action (NVA) movement is a somewhat qualified one (as will emerge), many in that movement wishing to distance themselves from traditional pacifism. 2. In particular, T. Regan 'A defence of pacifism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1972) 73-86. Page references to this article are prefixed by R. Regan ends by saying 'To regard the pacifists' belief vaguely ludicious" is, perhaps, to put it mildly'. as "bizarre and �P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. However T2 captures the cases that orthodox opposition. The separate comprehensive pacifism from main form of pacifism under investigation is called 'comprehensive' to distinguish it from standard pacifism, in the usual sense which is narrower restricted to certain theses concerning (state) order, notably opposition to (violence in) war, which does not necessarily elsewhere. the But if violence Pacifism, as a universally and not merely in war. violence is impermissible, then it should be so what is out rule position, moral should be comprehensive. On its own showing, it is contended, proper action to preventative action commitment to prevent, what would involve, it use in the case Narveson's or of pacifism. of incoherence Narveson and others find in pacifism: claims prohibits, acclaimedly sometimes, precluded from taking violence; But force. genuine actively defend on them, pain Hence the initial that it cannot underwrite its of inconsistency. However location of incoherence in pacifism depends, essentially, on several connected slides, all of which the pacifist should resist - without force. initial for a moral position must allow action to back up commitment, action of a type logically excluded own is pacifism The slide is from the theme T2 italicised above to what results by deletion of the crucial phrase 'to use force', or as it should be 'to use violence', namely J. Narveson 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Ethics 75 (1968) and 'Is pacifism consistent', Ethics 78 (1968). The first article is reprinted in War and Morality (ed. R. Wasserstrom) Wadsworth, Belmont, California, 1970, pp.63-77. The first article is also rewritten and combined with part of the second in 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Moral Problems (ed. J. Rachels), Third Edition, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, pp.408-425. Page references without further citation are to this latter article. Narveson's theme that pacifism is incoherent is headlined and further elaborated in his 'Violence and war', Matters of Life and Death (ed. T. Regan), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1980, pp.109-147. Page references prefixed by 'N' are to this article. 2 �It is morally wrong to resist, punish, or prevent violence - R2. and similarly from special and related cases of T2 to special and related of R2 (e.g. It is cases from T2S, It is forbidden to use force to resist violence, to R2S, forbidden to resist The violence). slide is illegitimate because commitment to T2 does not entail commitment to the rejected proposition R2; for one thing there are many ways of confronting, reducing and controlling violence, worked out pacifists by and others, which do not involve use of violence (or 4 perhaps force). The initial slide is however what assault on pacifism Narveson clearing (after several exploits confusions, explain the popularity of pacifism, out of the way). irresponsibility of in This his first main which he takes to argument, from the does not actually lead to contradiction, but it pacifism, does suggest that there is a serious tension between pacifism and any method of maintaining social order, so serious that pacifism is socially irresponsible: ... to hold the pacifist position as a genuine full-blooded moral principle is to hold nobody has a right to fight back when attacked ... It means that we are all mistaken in supposing that we have the right of self-protection ... It appears to mean, for instance, that we have no right to punish criminals, that all our machinery of criminal justice is, in fact, unjust. Robbers, murderers, rapists, and miscellaneous delinquents this [irresponsible] theory, to be let loose (pp.415-6). Since one can protect oneself and avoid and resist aggression back violence), (with unless a slide (tentatively) by is without fighting pacifism does not mean what Narveson claims it means, Nor does comprehensive made. theses on ought, T1 T2, and imply that pacifism, characterised we have no right to punish criminals, but simply that such punishment (or the imposition of penalties) will not apply violent methods. Nor therefore does it imply that all conventional machinery of criminal justice is unjust, but only that some, good 4. deal, of that machinery is. One hardly the or a needs to be a comprehensive Pacifism, as involving the active use of defensive methods, can be traced back as far as the Mohist philosophers of ancient China. On modern methods see especially G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. As will emerge, there is a point in distinguishing (as Narveson does not in his earlier work) force from violence; they are not equivalent. 3 �pacifist to coherently think the latter. the This provides confirmation some for key point which is that there is, so far at least, no inconsistency evident in maintaining that those who hold that violent methods are legitimate morally are mistaken. The next slide is closely connected with, and really generalises upon, initial slide. The is to imbue a range of more neutral terms with the stunt connotation of violence or at least of force which equate with violence. use of force is taken to by implied in R2. cannot here resist Hence (p.415). violence, or force and to so Hence the against attack' (pp.417-8). also Narveson's and so to a much less can be resisted, But without violence. things like arrest, without violence (e.g. even by Force can be applied, as in opening sliding out of handcuffs and running away). a jam jar or pulling a person out of danger, without violence. force, but not vice versa; and defensible position. positions can be defended, as in this paper or on the field, Things be If the stunt were got away with, it would pacifism render a unwarranted deprive pacifism of, for instance, the general methods of nonviolent action resistance, be that assumption "recharacterisation" of pacifism as the position that 'no one ought ever defended to proceeds Hence the conflation of T2 and excluded from among admissible pacifist methods. pacifist Narveson Thus such activities as resisting, punishing, preventing, and defending are taken to imply (use of) R2; the Violence implies and it is violence, not all applications of force, that comprehensive pacifists are bound to exclude. The attempt nonviolent to castrate practices, any case indefensible. development and themselves from compromise, pacifism, by depriving it of the range of is not confined to those who (want to) think pacifism in It enjoys some popularity even among those advocating expansion of nonviolent methods, who no doubt want to distance older mediation, pacifism, whose methods they see as confined to negotiation, and involving the granting of concessions. The newer (nonviolent) activists have justification; for pacifism has often by an unsympathetic opposition, as confined to passive methods jeen presented, (cf. even the Concise English Dictionary account, where it is erroneously 4 said �of pacifism 'positively, it holds that all disputes should be settled by that negotiation', and, negatively, that it is 'the hostilities added). and of total doctrine of non-resistance non-cooperation with any form of warfare': But nothing in the characterisation of pacifism, whether or standard, need so limit its admissible methods: to italics comprehensive nothing excludes resistance, uncompromising methods, and imposition of sanctions which offer no concessions.^ It is simply that comprehensive pacifism has not yet developed its fuller potential, especially in conflict resolution. Subsequent slides in the development of the argument against just variations qualifier. on those pacifism are given, writing violence-involving in as an internal Thus the measure of a person's opposition to something in terms of 'the amount of effort he is willing to put forth against it' is taken - somewhat perversely - to be violence-involving effort or opposition in the pacifist's 'opposition to If violence'. this slide were pacifist would be caught in an elementary inconsistency since in case of the permissible any being opposed to violence, by definition, he is prepared to use violence and so is not opposed to violence. it is Even Narveson 'cannot make too much' of this inconsistency, though not so far removed from the alleged inconsistencies he does want to make much of in his main inconsistency argument. 5. In the way Sharp, for example, has illicitly assumed in several works: see for instance the unduly narrow definition of pacifism given in his Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent Publishers, Boston, 1980, p.198. Again, however, there is some historical basis for dissociating nonviolent action from pacifism; and given the difficulties comprehensive pacifism can lead to, there are philosophical reasons as well. But even without much in the way of organised sanctions, worthwhile positive results can often be obtained, as the case of international law reveals: cf. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, Oxford University Press, 1961, p.212. 5 �A similar slide, together with a further slide, is made in the argument on based inconsistency pacifism theme, the to notion of rights, especially as it figures in the transformed to the claim No one has a right to indulge in violence (p.418). P2(R). For Narveson tries to incorporate the right to indulge in violence in notion The right. of very initial move is to work in assumptions of defence from breaches of a right and of Because the against action preventative infringement 'a right just i_s a status justifying preventative action ... it. of what does follow logically is that one has a right to whatever may be necessary to prevent infringements of his right' (p.419). That 'whatever may be necessary' turns out to to include force, now very generously construed - here is the further slide such incorporate things as social pressure. Moreover 'it is a logical truth, not merely a contingent one, that what might be For action must have the notion of violence built into it. the against question nonviolent (p.421)! quite indefensibly strong. him To block the argument it is enough for rights with The argument accordingly to be, to or be to, limited In any case the 'whatever may be necessary' requirement is action. entitle pacifism. associated preventative action not force logical transformations to work, however, the notion of preventative these begs is necessary to For example, D'Agostino's right to his umbrella does kill a person who is trying to steal the umbrella even if such action is necessary in the circumstances to prevent infringement his of right. to How the argument from rights leads inconsistency is summed up thus (p.421): SAI. 'If we have any rights at all then we have a right to use force to prevent the deprivation of the thing to which we are said to have a right'. SA2. We have, according to the pacifist's 'the right not to have violence done to us', as a consequence of the.o&f^e&i^fi to avoid violence. But, therefore, we have the right to use violence, so the pacifist's position is self-contradictory, both granting and not granting the right to use violence. The argument fails because SAI is readily rejected. claiming Narveson that 'our standard concept of rights' yields SAI (cf. 6 is mistaken p.423). in That a �right can be sustained by right-supporting or right-defending require that that action is violent. action does Pacifists can provide an adequate analysis of rights - essentially the usual one - without letting themselves in by simply rejecting the Narveson not slide^. What for SAI, appears in place of SAI is something like If we have any rights at all then we have a right to uphold them. SAI#. But the right to uphold them, defend them, protect them, etc., give facto, an entitlement to the use of violence. no dilemma for the pacifist. not, does ipso Without the slide there is The "pacifist's dilemma" and Narveson's slide are two aspects of the one thing. The arguments from lesser §2. violence and In evil. lesser outline the argument - which is independent of the notion of rights - is that pacifists must admit, in terms of their own principles, that there are cases where the violence would where those Inconsistency be some is morally use of immediate permissible violence by T2. and morally justified. would prevent evil, of The cases are greater violence. More explicitly, and in (Narveson's) terms which also import the notion of evil, pacifists have lesser much use to admit both that the some use of force, is admissible, in preventing greater evil, and that it is not admissible because it involves violence. An argument like this as gets summarized as follows It seems to me logically true, in any moral theory whatever, that [E2'J the lesser evil must be preferred to the greater. If the use of force by me, now is necessary to avoid the use of more physical force (by others, perhaps) later, then to say that physical force is the 6. Narveson, in responding to a suggestion of Armour (pp.423-4), sees nothing between (1) forceful defence of rights, with the slide to violence in, and (0) nothing really answering to rights at all, where words like 'rights' occur without stuffing. This shows a serious blindspot. What lies in between are a range of notions which do not guarantee the slide to violence. An account of rights which will serve is given in R. and V. Routley 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics' in Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980; see especially p.l75ff. 7 �supreme (kind of) evil is precisely to say that under circumstances I am committed to the use of physical force . these Now there are several somewhat different arguments snarled up in these sketches. It is important to them unsnagged 8, especially if a clearer view of the get ethical place of pacifism is to The result. from argument, basic lesser violence, goes as follows:— Cl. There are cases where use of violence would prevent greater violence. C2. One ought to minimize violence. Therefore C3. There are cases where one ought to use violence, the since in this way, in any arbitrary one of minimized. ""P2. indicated, cases violence is Therefore It is not (always) morally wrong to use violence, contradicting the pacifist principle, P2, according to it which is mora y wrong, always, to use violence. All the ingredients premisses, can be of this argument, together with pulled together from Narveson's work. support for the He not only espouses C2, but suggests two distinct arguments for it, the first of which connects the argument with the lesser evil argument:- El. (Use of) violence is an evil. E2. Evil should be minimized. The second argument to C2 is simply from the pacifist premiss, varying P2, E3. One ought not to undertake violence - period; that is, the level of violence ought to be zero. J. 8 9. Narveson, 'Is pacifism inconsistent', Ethics 78 (1968) p.148. Without getting into the level of complication, not to say epicycling, that Regan lands himself in: he is obliged to distinguish three mirage-like senses of 'lesser evil': quantitative, qualitative, and resultant (Rp.78). See Np.127 where it is asserted that violence as a source of evil should be minimized, and Np.119, where the point is put in terms of absolute evil. That way of putting it already starts to give the game away, since Narveson is all too evidently interested in negotiable evil which can be traded off against other evils. 8 �Neither argument is decisive; of reference that they both in fact begin easing pacifists into a resist, where moral absolutes are warped into should moral relatives, where obligations give way to obligations-other-things-being- In any event E3 only directs one not to get involved in violence at equal, etc. all, and says nothing about minimizing it when one compatible frame got into it. E3 is directives quite different from minimization where violence is with involved, e.g. has rooting it out, which may involve nonminimization strategies. Thus E3 does not entail E2, and commitment to E2 does not commit pacifists to 02 - a principle nonviolent activists usually do not accept either, being to accept prepared violence perpetrated against them, for example, as a means to social justice. Nor do El and E2 entail 02; so neither does principles like El and E2 oblige them to accept C2. by commitment evil-perpetrating Narveson's such e.g. violence but argument some increases well-known hypothetical cases as the slaying of an dictator. non-violent fails to For in particular, violence is not the only evil, and (so) evil may sometimes be reduced by in pacifists for similar reasons. Regan's reconstruction of Regan argues from premisses concerning the ranking of evil and a premiss like E2', specifically 3. The use of force is a substantive evil. 4. Therefore, a lesser quantity of force must quantity of force (Rp.79). The argument is invalid: be preferred to a great an ordering of evils does not induce a similar ordering force, even when force is an evil. of It is enough to observe that increasing force may still reduce evil, and so, on Regan-Narveson assumptions, be preferrable. Resort to the theme that Elt. Violence is an irredeemable evil (proposed by Regan in his "defence" of pacifism, Rp.80, and by Narveson, Np.118) promises a way around the difficulty. subsequently considered An irredeemable evil is figuratively so black that no combination with grays (lesser evils) or whites (goods) 10. An argument like the argument from lesser violence itself would appear to undercut the argument from El and E2 to premiss C2 for the argument for lesser violence. 9 �will lighten its hue; now it always dominates. Elt together with E2 will yield C2, but What are the grounds for that? the problem with the argument shifts to Elt. As Narveson points out (Np.119), it is not widely acceptable, most people being prepared to countenance some small amount of violence in exchange for considerable goods. (But then, not so long ago, most people were tolerant of cruelty to animals providing it was not too Moreover, so Narveson implies, appeal to Elt does not get gross.) pacifists out of the argument from lesser violence; deeper, It does break the argument however; underwriting C2. by indeed it seems to get them in for it removes Cl and, more importantly, the corresponding premiss of the more difficult argument from lesser evil, which starts from DI. There are cas^s where the use of violence would avoid greater evil. For given, by Elt, that use of violence is irredeemably evil, evil than that tainted with violence; requires. however pacifism is no of pacifism (see into a 'bizarre and vaguely ludicrous (utilitarian through as violence an irredeemable evil which Rp.80ff.), position (Rp.86), extreme pacifism, some of the (problematic) features of which Regan outlines But the approach greater and there are accordingly no cases such as DI This is the core of Regan's defence converts there is a . mistaken inspired) attempt to get at moral absolutes, which is what pacifism is, like other deontological positions, grounded upon. But such absolutes are adequately expressed in such commandments as, One ought not to commit violence, meaning thereby, as it says ought not, not just for the time being, or so long as reasons otherwise don't arise, or for acting other things being equal, or prima facie, but ought not 11. That is by no means the only element in Regan's torturous reformulation of Narveson's argument that can be faulted. Consider, for example, premiss 5. If any given action, A, is necessary to bring about a lesser rather than a greater quantity of qualitatively equivalent evil, then one's obligation is to do A. While the premiss has considerable appeal as a principle of supererogation, there is little reason to accept it as one supplying obligations. 12. Extreme pacifism can be seen as taking the rule that one ought never to use violence as having priority over all other moral rules - which is indeed an extreme position even if a consistent one. Such a priority rule is an unsatisfactory way to deal with moral dilemmas: see further below. 10 �Such old-fashioned deontological, moral absolutist positions, come what may, period. such is pacifism as collide bottom, at more fashionable, highly with head-on malleable moral positions like utilitarianism, which both Narveson and Regan (at time) were working from. The reason for collision is simply that 'utilitarianism ... for the utility 'that will be brought out is incompatible with pacifism': some one who acts by may be greater than that produced by any alternative' (Np.121) violence the according to the to utilitarian-commandment maximize doing 13 So . utility may sometimes commit violence, contravening pacifist principles. On its own inconsistency with a false little: position every doctrine inconsistency suffers such with very many false doctrines. Narveson does have another (small) argument to the effect that pacifism odds the with contractarianism. correct, other ethical positions But this argument would only position insidious, is however, for have Firstly, as we generally, have provisional. theory-saving seen, made also libertarianism were it at and otherwise however they are not, including has which happened is more it utilitarianism, seem as climate unfavourable to incompatible There are two more specific damaging features. and consequentialist approaches more no deontic principle were firm, but all are if The theory of prima facie principles This is entirely mistaken. is a device, designed to get consequentialist positions out of difficulties such as moral dilemmas. 13. weight, is that utilitarian thinking has permeated much of the rest of such as pacifism. positions What instance. ethical thought, thus helping to establish a ethical carry if the positions were suitably exhaustive; no deeper ecological presents, he shows utilitarianism as Secondly, consequentialist positions tend to suggest that To show what Narveson goes on to claim that people are sometimes justified in using force rather more is required, as Regan points out, Rp. 85, n.18. It has also to be shown that there are cases of these types (as in Cl) and that agents can know that use of force will increase utility, reduce evil, etc. A pacifist, rightly sceptical of utilitarian tracing of consequences, and fond of noting that violence begets violence, could, with a small dose of scepticism also, dig in at this point and claim that because no one can be sure that use of force will reduce evil, so no one is justified in using force. This is sceptically-based pacifism. 11 �only consequentialist reasons carry argumentative weight, and so try such positions, as pacifism, into offering to ease rival incongruous consequential sometimes support for their themes. Narveson assumptions takes such procedures upon pacifists: a stage further, and utilitarian foists thus he says that the pacifist's 'objection to violence is that it produces suffering, unwanted pain, in the (p.425). recipients' These incongruous utilitarian grounds are something of a travesty of pacifists' reasons for objecting to violence, which concern rather the type of action involved and what it does - though not only or always at all in the way of suffering - to the perpetrators as well as those on whom it is inflicted. Even more astonishing, such utilitarian—style considerations are supposed to commit the pacifist to the following three statements, one of which however he must deny (!): [N]l. To will the end (as morally good) is to will the it (at Other things being equal, the lesser evil is to be preferred to the means to least prima facie). [N]2. greater. [N]3. There are no "privileged" moral persons ... (p.425)^. 'These three principles' which feature in the summation of 'the pacifist's problem', among them imply, as far as I can see, both the commitment to force when it is necessary to prevent more violence and also the conception of a right as an entitlement to defense. And they therefore leave pacifism, as a moral doctrine, in a logically untenable position (p.425). It would take not merely logic, but a good deal of magic, to coax out of the statements given. consequences such For implications to hold the substantive terms such as 'violence' and 'right' must also figure, in one way or otherwise the implications fail just on formal grounds. another, in the implicans; The intended argument to the "commitment to force" conclusion appears however to be some sort of variant on the lesser evil argument, with N2 replacing E2' (N3 and N1 have more oblique roles, N3 to stop exceptions being made for oneself and one's group, and N1 to ensure that 14. Narveson also wants to contend that 'all of these may be defended on purely logical or "meta-ethical" grounds'. This is likely false, especially the claim as to logical status, since some of the principles are rejected in substantive ethical theories. 12 �violence adopted or even required as a means has its full import, e.g. in in Cl, ethical an end. for one thing, principle Nl, which is at least But, dubious unless 'prima facie' is unbracketed, which is reflected as the begs bound morally to shun violent means. pacifism, against question Under pacifist reformulation Nl will give way to something more like To choose an end as morally good is to choose (only) morally Nl#. acceptable means to it. For another, without much further construction work the suggested arguments need pacifists since nothing damaging emerges; worry not the three principles duly adjusted; they hardly leave pacifism as untenable. More threatening is the argument from lesser evil itself, which has countered. This and E2 N2 or inconsistency is of evil) comprehensive to pacifism Narveson's stock examples concern murder, one what is the moral situation here? to (admissibility What of are them these being of violence) dilemma, Indeed the example is very similar to the turns that on Jim shoots one of what account is given of moral dilemmas. pacifist does not do, unless he wants coherence trouble, is to utilitarian line and where situation N But ought The situation is that of a paradigmatic that of Pedro and Jim, where Pedro volunteers to call off his firing squad about to shoot several captives if everything be cases difficult N ought to prevent mass murder, but also kill B, because that is murder and involves violence. of a moral dilemma. moral 03 N (Narveson in fact) must kill the (potential) mass-murderer B (Np.119). person not to the argument from DI (cases of violence to avoid greater evil) (minimization in yet of trying them^. almost Now What a comprehensive take the inadequate to explain moral dilemmas away, as if they didn't ever occur (at least at other than an initial intuitive level), as if all obligations were prima facie, negotiable, etc., etc. No, the conflicting obligations stand. to be done is however a very consequentialist thing, to try to determine What is the best 15. A surprising feature of Narveson's argument, also Regan's "reconstruction", is that these cases are usually nowhere in sight, as if again one got to conclusions logically out of the air, without any of the hard work the cases involve. 16. The example was first discussed in B. Williams, 'Conflict of values', reprinted in his Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 71-82. 13 �thing (or a sufficiently good thing) to in the In circumstances. trying N2M, that it is preferrable to minimize evil, will presumably be satisfied. the best course in the circumstances is a violent one, e.g. that B. No inconsistency in pacifism follows. minimize that Even granted it does not follow that N ought to resort to violence. N had better shoot is preferable to On the contrary the situation N ought not to shoot B, but in the appalling circumstances, he had fix. a it Suppose and that in this sense (not a deontic one) evil should be minimized, evil, remains to is the appropriate course of action principles like N2 and its mate, what determine do There is the real-life complication better do so^. of a dilemma, moral but no inconsistency through arguments like that from lesser evil. the Narveson's jackpot question, entangled in his discussion of rights, can now be met. argument The question presents a dilemma: If force is the only way to prevent violence in a given case, justified in that case? (p.420) its is use Narveson is thinking of cases where one is about to be murdered, Regan where to be No, it is not deonticly justified^. is a qualified No: and amount to making out a case. But justification on proposes is solution, back-up ambiguous, in p.423). against may just situation. dilemma a another argument, taking his proposals as evident. pacifist can simply dispute it - the jackpot question does not argument and the contrary, that enough violence for the given occasion is morally justified - it can go at least as far as killing no It is certainly not morally The response is qualified then because some force might be consequentially justified, as a second-best presents is it is not justified, in the sense of 'justified' which reflects its deontic origin in 'making right'. Narveson, one Given that such force again presupposes violence, the pacifist answer raped. obligatory, from pacifism person - but he As it is not — the lead to a decisive (though Narveson gives the impression that it does, e.g. What it can lead to is the argument from lesser evil over again. 17. This corresponds to the account of moral dilemma, given in much more technical detail in R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions' in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest and others) 1983, to appear; also available in this Discussion Paper series. 18. An extreme pacifist would answer with an unqualified No. 14 �The accusation of fanaticism, and the charge of moral its adherence to principles unexceptionable Insofar fanaticism, so Hare contends. such manages Hare as as insensitivity. P2, to Through pacifism is a form of get his remarkable accusation off the ground, he does by conflating pacifism with extreme pacifism: the pacifist ... solves the conflict of principles, not by critical thought, but by elevating one principle quite irrationally, over all the others (p.174). Comprehensive pacifism in not always resolving the conflict of principles, in letting moral stand, does neither of these things, and so does not fit into Hare's dilemmas deceptively neat two-level critical. thought, into intuitive himself to, without any Hare of the requisite supporting argument, according to which pacifist principles are inappropriate in many places at the present time, violence is apparently fine for countries like Israel (cf. Hare s redefinition, a Harey—fanatic, e.g. p.175). Hare's accusation turns on an extravagant redefinition of fanaticism. on and pacifism is not, as standard pacifism is not, extreme Nor it is the particular "critical thinking", anti-pacifist solution pacifism. helps comprehensive But moral of classification A fanatic is a person who adheres to ideals which diverge from what utilitarianism (in approved form) recommends (cf. Since p.170)! comprehensive pacifism is committed to principles and ideals of nonviolence which, as already observed, diverge from where utilitarianism (as massaged by Hare or Narveson) tends, namely the towards pacifists are Harey—fanatics. usual sense: whether position their bigoted . they whether The idea appropriateness violence This does not of course make are 'wild in many situations, such them or extravagant opinions' of some pacifist principles of . the or (OED) is pacifism consists of such opinions can be removed by an appeal to history:- A great many of the sages, especially Eastern thinkers, founders in fanatics, depends on the very different matter of fanatics comprises that of and the the world's main religions, have been pacifists, committed to But the relevant opinions hardly be, all of the condemned type. of such thinkers Whence the conclusion follows. are not, can By this simple syllogism, the accusation of fanaticism is rebutted. 19. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981, p.173. references to Hare's work without further citation are to this text. 15 All page �Nor do comprehensive pacifists come out at fanatics under Hare's satisfactory, though seriously incomplete, account of fanaticism: is treating something that is not morally relevant, such as being Jewish, as relevance is completed, it there^ fanaticism wearing beads Naturally, given that using of characterising can or moral hardly exclude the violence is a morally relevant matter, so are other procedures with similar damaging results to violence: blue For however the sensitive task matter of using morally relevant. violence as morally irrelevant. more earlier, those applying of this does lead to a residual problem for comprehensive pacifism (taken up at the end of §4). Does it really matter then that fanatics? it Although argument that it does. homework appears pacifists, that though Harey-fanatics are bigots, inasmuch as had guess what, they their done the Thus, e.g. go over to Hare's As one might anticipate, Hare's argument, upon which he sets great store, 'from universal perscriptivism to utilitarianism ... 20. Harey- properly, had they performed their critical thinking adequately, they would utilitarianism). of are it does not matter in the least, Hare has an abandon the principle they are fixated upon (and, logic fanatics, not concepts A. based [entirely] on involved' (p.176), is unsound, and in fact fails at several Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict, Universitetsforlaget, p.15: ...among the generally acknowledged moral leaders from the time of ancient China and India down to present day, the principle of nonviolence has been the rule, and the condoning of violence, even in defence, the exception. 21. the R.M. Hare, Applications of Moral Philosophy, Macmillan, London, 1972, p.78. Note that the elegant prototype argument Hare develops in this article on peace - from universalisation, directed against fanaticism and nationalism, there presented as the main causes of war - does not lead to utilitarianism (though the seeds of the later, more obscure, route are present, e.g. on p.79) and does not tell against pacifism. What has gone wrong in Hare's later argument to the much more sweeping conclusions just alluded to, can be seen by comparing the later argument with the clearer prototype argument developed against nationalism. 16 Oslo, �crucial points. objectionable getting Before feature some to these of The theory. highly a Hare's procedure that deserves comment, namely the way in of which the whole highly informal argument is set within the framework two-level is there details, procedure adopted methodologically is Hare's of own radically unsound because it takes for granted the adequacy of Hare's theory, a matter that is open, at the very least, to serious doubt, since it supposes a quite particular, and eminently rejectable (utilitarian) way of handling and resolving moral dilemmas, a way rejected above.With that rejection goes a rejection of the standard deontic logic Hare presupposes, which he assumes any serious opponent must adopt. which logic, already But that since Hare assumes uniquely determined, rules out any approach what, go over As one might anticipate, Hare's the question against some to Hare's utilitarianism). important opponents of utilitarianism. In his arguments Hare divides fanatics into pure and comprise moral intuitionists and pure impure. deontologists, fanatics Impure who stick to their deontic principles, who 'cling to their intuitions' (p.176), and do not advance to what calls 'critical thinking'. Hare's dismissal of "impure fanatics", such as extreme pacifists, 'because of [their] refusal clearly' Hare or inability to face facts or to think involves a quite illicit shift in the notion of critical thinking, (p.170) originally introduced to account for a particular (primarily utilitarian) fashion accommodating ff.). But cases this comprehensive bit intuitive principles conflict, of moral dilemmas (p.28 dirty-trick philosophy can where of pacifists are presumably "pure willing to think critically, but somehow survived opinions different from be here fanatics"; the ordeal those of the utilitarian' (p.171). set inconsistent with utilitarianism, as we have seen. any fanatics of this type, if his argument is for they are 'able and still holding moral They are in fact "pure to be According to Hare there cannot be correct argument is not correct. See further, again, Routley and Plumwood, ibid. 17 since aside, fanatics of the first type", since they go on holding opinions which turn out 22. of (p.171). Therefore, his �One sufficient reason for incorrectness we have already glimpsed, namely failure to consider the possibility that a Harey-fanatic operates with different logical assumptions and concepts from those of utilitarians reasons. other substitution, preferences For which can be one, argument (e.g. Hare's requires a base class intersubstituted. representation to ff.). are There p.177 ff.) depends on preference the of course whom among preference-havers, in Hare, chauvinistically contracts this base class whole of p.176 (cf. his discussion humans.Differently, certain the of moral matters by way of preferences of this type is open to familiar objection, even by utilitarians of a different cast. As to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, this an less is argument a than damaging charge: A person committed to an extreme pacifism, though he need make no logical mistake, yet lacks a fully developed moral sensitivity to the vagaries and complexities of human existence (Rp.86). The smear is not without basis. applied to avert greater Regan is envisaging violence where situations and he points to what he takes to be the evident evil; moral permissibility of a woman's using 'what physical power she has to free from an aspiring rapist' is Interestingly, (Rp.86). has Regan situation in a way which is incompatible with a pacifist stand: herself not described the there is nothing in to prevent a woman wriggling free (even in a way that involves some force) and fleeing. What is at issue is the permissibility of using violence, which implies the (perhaps wilful) that infliction death, by forceful means^ (cf. mere use of of damage, non-negligible Np.110); that is, which physical force or power (or energy). including pain, injury or involves much more than And it is by no means so evident that the woman is entitled to inflict violence from force, a pacifist can hardly be accused, in a way is duly separated violence upon the aspiring rapist. Once that can be made to stick, of crass moral insensitivity. 23. On the defectiveness of such contractions of the base Routley, op. cit., especially the concluding section. 18 class, see R. and V. �But a straightforward action violence disentangling abounds as It with is subcase matter as may at first seem. defective of not depend force is by means no violence. of on tight a Fortunately characterisation what indicate some done, in the way of inflicting damage. constraints Firstly, presupposed. force: is legalised force, violence, so violence, a on satisfactory violence is not applied on behalf adequately of of account some violence, where no force is applied. violence.) 24. supposed that and are which distinguished as illegitimate "legitimate" authority, long as it is physically similar to acts not so legitimated. so often mistakenly of However it is important to is not removed by the imprimatur of the law.2$ Secondly, violence is not of the enough, for main purposes, that violent actions are a subclass of actions by forceful means, a subclass picked out both through the forcible means through so Indeed the literature on nonviolent characterisations arguments developed in this paper do violence. a the is Violence threat (This only needs emphasizing because it is threats, intimidation and the like, involve Thirdly, violence can be perpetrated without intention to inflict damage. Directed against other creatures and more generally against ecological systems such as ecosystems which can be hurt. There is a difference here between live (goal-directed) systems and property, and comprehensive pacifism does not necessarily exclude wilful damage to property. Thus eco-pacifists may destroy, or at least disable, bulldozers but not harm those who use bulldozers to destroy habitat. However sensitive eco-pacifists will not condone sabotage or "violent" destruction of property either: disabling of equipment may be different. It follows from the account of violence sketched that intimidation, threats of violence, and "psychological violence" are not violence, because they do not involve forcible means: violence is physical violence. Naturally, intimidation and psychological violence are open to moral criticism and censure on grounds related to those that tell against violence proper. For similar reasons, "economic violence" and "structural violence" are also not violence: such procedures are generally open to criticism on other grounds and hardly need to be covered under the blanket charge of violence. Nor is poverty, e.g., violence or violence-involving, except figuratively, in the way that war is an obscenity. Even given the warranted restriction of violence to physical force, many difficult cases remain; e.g. questions as to when usually approved surgical practices involve violence. 19 �There can be unintentional violence, e.g. the women may have applied violent without intending to, in escaping the rapist. Fourthly, such matters as the distance at which force is applied and the indirectness of military operations, are irrelevant. modern means, the for as means, instance in The submarine operator who, by causally pressing a button, fires a missile at a distant Russian city instigates a violent By contrast, an adjacent blockade of a city, which results in hardship but not act. in direct damage, may be affected by nonviolent confined to action done against persons, means. but can violence Finally, be directed not is against other life-forms, as will soon emerge. Pacifism, like most positions, has its weaknesses, and from the fact that one of derives them^ violence (like pain) is a partly quantitative matter, and that there is no sharp cut-off point at the bottom end of the scale with small amounts violence greater than zero. of Yet minute (non-foot-in-the-door) amounts do not seem to matter all that much morally, at least compared with the gross evils that confront us on most sides when we look. Morally sensitive pacifists will not focus or fixate on small quantities of violence to the undue exclusion of larger moral will certainly problems. They give it to be understood that by 'violence' in principles such as P2 they mean 'nontrivial violence'. Arguments to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, on the basis of pacifists' not taking obvious steps passivity and pacifity. to prevent evil occurrences, depend also upon a confusion of Both Regan and Narveson (e.g. p.425) assume that pacifism 25. The point is explained in more detail in G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, op.cit., p.288n. Note however that Sharp's account of 'political violence' is defective in various other respects. It is curious, but understandable, that in his major, and massive, texts on nonviolent action, Sharp never really gets to grips with the problem of characterising violence, and indeed appears tempted by such defective equations as that of violence with force and threat with use. 26. Another comes from the necessary circumscription of permissible nonviolent action, to ensure that it does not include actions worse than nontrivial violent action. 20 �is a passive do-nothing position. This is far from true, as the variety of methods or adopted by nonviolent action groups has made plain. considered Narveson correctly comprehend the real scope or possibilities of Narveson Otherwise, would negative later Narveson's nonviolent action. hardly b<- able to assert, in the automatic (but carping) way he does, that the pacifist is standing by 'not (p.425). Neither Regan nor doing assessment nonviolence' does not change the situation: for this of anything about' violence what calls 'positive he positive is approach simply nonviolence practised in an exemplary ;.&y, as by Christ, in the hope that others will follow suit, and fails to recognise the potential or effectiveness of nonviolent practices. extent when reduce assembledmuch the of training and the Fuller details of these practices, of impact nonviolent the argument from social irresponsibility, which is part of what lies behind the charge of insensitivity. §4. The argument from corollaries. The radical practice political by definition. But from other awkward of pacifism would certainly tend to eliminate war. For Standard pacifism takes out war involves violence, typically on an extensive scale. war and corollaries the position Although normally war would be excluded, of comprehensive pacifism is not so clear. what of dilemma situations? War would always be counted morally impermissible, but in exceptional extenuating circumstances it might be the (second-) best thing 27. to do. A strange pacifism! Comprehensive The methods also include anticipatory action, for instance, the policemen going off to enact violence find their vehicles won't start, e.g. because components have been removed. As to variety, Sharp has distinguished 197 methods falling into 3 broad types: protest, noncooperation and intervention; op. cit. pp.32-3. Of course pacifisms and nonviolent action postions need not coincide: the interrelations are those of overlap (see. e.g. Sharp, Politics, p.68). 28. See e.g. B. Martin 'How the peace movement should be preparing for nuclear war' Bulletin of Peace Proposals 13 (1982) 149-159, and references cited therein pp.152-3, especially G. Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, op.cit., (referred to as Politics) and V. Coover and others, Resource Manual for a Living Revolution, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1981. 21 �pacifism thus does not include standard pacifism, in contrast extreme to pacifism. Comprehensive pacifism can of course be brought progressively closer, in practice, to extreme pacifism through principles emphasizing the evil of violence. is given a large suitably If that evil weighting then second-best choices will yield the same results as extreme pacifism does (deontically), and entirely exclude war. Now it can hardly be cogently argued as telling against pacifism that eliminate since wars, are war of an as or mounted from rely the institutions. exchanges that should certainly be avoided at all upon only arrangements social and nation-states particular, obviously police and military forces but of violence-underpinned many of their institutions, most state legal arrangements, States are however desirable social institutions, typically depend on violent means. and war is a by-product of nation-state arrangements (in the case of just comprehensive pacifism implies the of inadmissibility institutions, such as police forces and states typically are; be ruled out either individuals, directly delegates, as violence-dispensing effect who forces, by nonviolent nonviolent means. state; but it substitutes, recently or such organisations may because else their behalf. evolved will which is nonviolent methods Pacifism institutions concerned with does not public that order have Pacifism does not organisations maintain they by fully as police alternative nonviolent will be applied, where necessary, to The force of the objection should thus not entail order, sweeping charges of social irresponsibility. 22 the and are coercive actively Law and authority can still operate then in the back-up authority and "enforce" laws. overestimated. on violence however exclude the replacement of such wars, A more telling objection, then, is no doubt further evils to prevent greater evils). that which institutions these directly less or and a more general argument may be inevitability, or not without much further ado. least extensively: violence desirability, In at institution, However wars are by no means the dispense would nor therefore can an argument be mounted against pacifism from the reasonable costs; desirability wars it elimination accordingly of does Nor is it true that prominent not be social succumb to �pacifism ... would also entail anarchism, that is, the illegitimacy of government. For a purely voluntary "government" is not a government in the sense that defines a state at all (Np.127). or (differently) A government or administration can certainly operate by nonviolent, political noncoercive, arrangements. arrangements not of this sort are morally impermissible. imply the absence or illegitimacy of government, political community organised under a government. state with authority and not necessarily pacifism does not entail anarchism. main Accordingly, that implies not does it or therefore of a state, of a Nor does even it that imply a certain coercive institutions may not be a second-best solution to moral dilemmas of political organisation. and only pacifism Comprehensive objective, not attained, was Since it admits of states with frameworks of law based on the free agreements of individuals, Gandhi's practice affords a counterexample: a nonviolent Indian state; replacement of British India by a stateless or anarchist society. his it was not the Granted there are genuine interconnections between pacifism and nonviolent anarchism 2", they are not so simple as derivability. Nor is comprehensive pacifism as a moral so ideal easily brought down by its political corollaries. Comprehensive pacifism upsets other widely accepted social practices than concerning like: external and internal state relations, such as war, civil order and the it also tells against the received treatment of example. While other species, animals for it does not entail vegetarianism, while it does not prohibit eating of meat, it does morally forbid violence to animals. 29. those At least it does this so long Both hold that the coercive state which relies upon violent methods is without moral basis or legitimacy. Both involve pretty tall orders, the replacement of violence-dispensing political organisations by alternative arrangements (on replacement in the case of anarchism, see R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'The irrefutability of anarchism', Social Alternatives, 2(3) (1982) 23-8). But they differ as to what justifies these arrangements and what means can be applied (see further Sharp, op. cit., under index headings to anarchism, especially Politics, p.67). Roughly, while pacifism pushes removal of violence to a limit, anarchism pushes removal of authority (especially state authority) and restrictions on liberty, to a limit. Naturally the interconnections did not escape Gandhi: 'The ideally nonviolent state will be an ordered anarchy' (unreferenced citation at the end of the Ecophilosophy Newsletter, #5, p.24). 23 �as what normally counts as violence, to animals, continues to rank as is There is little good basis humans (or persons). restriction.^ controversial euthanasia, any in And, moral areas concerning the corollaries killing a such for however similar case, spread humans, of At violence? the suicide, But must creatures does not have to take overtly violent forms. the new "abattoirs" or hospitals a creature simply killing of No force need be applied: in a eats and dies painlessly and without a struggle. The or pill is given life is extinguished, are not pacifist ones, which focus on violence? technical purely arrangements pacifist will to objections solve, in eating meat worthwhile On the face of obtained. so New any rate, the disruption of at principle an Then the proper objections to such practices, for example that consent may not have been obtained, that it, there are no they risk of opening a hornet's nest, consider what examples like euthanasia may suggest, the possibility of nonviolent killing. injection several into e.g. So long as these involve violence, pacifism excludes such practices. involve chauvinistic indeed wherever violence plays a significant role. punishment, capital and the category by restriction of the application of violence to from removed not violence, practices threatened by vegetarian corollaries. But suppose now that the new technology is extended scientists, working in their accustomed military role: as the anti—neutron bomb, which selectively destroys devices which much but clever 'weapons , such newly devised property by further not people, or "dissolve" people, enable "wars" to be fought without violence. just Even a pacifist who goes as far as countenancing nonviolent killing can however avoid these reaches of technological fantasy. For "dissolving" people requires energy, which (since reflecting force) can stand in for force in violence: Was (upgraded) account of that is, the new wars will still involve violence. there old-fashioned however violent anything methods so such wrong as with hunting eating meat obtained by more or raising and killing one's own? Pacifism, like vegetarianism, runs counter to "natural" M. an behaviour of creatures to See R. and V. Routley, 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', op. cit. Such a restriction to persons is however imposed by Sharp, op. cit. (e.g. Politics, p.608), and it does remove the problems of vegetarianism and predation. 24 �which the principles are supposed to apply. Aggression is a fairly common feature of and human behaviour, and it sometimes (though by no means so often is as made animal The force of the out) erupts in violence. various for ways, example along these argument lines. can however Aggression assumed to be an is evolutionary adaption developed to enable creatures to be better fitted for themselves (of their offspring) in their natural environment. and ir mitigated be survival But most humans for now live in rather artificial environments substantially removed from situations which evolution gradually adapted their features (there is no way they are going to adapt in time to absorb massive doses of radiation, for instance). as Much humans have adjusted their living environment in nonevolutionary ways, so along with it they should substantially adjust their social practices - including aggressive and violent practices, ill-adapted now to their and mostly counterproductive. situation So argues the pacifist. There is a residual problem, practices like that vegetarianism. the Are creatures living in (relatively) natural conditions, such as predators of and tribal people, to be condemned as morally Sometimes, confronting yes, be attained: when wrong these violence? involve when the violence grossly exceeds what is required given the end to Though a way but always? can problem 3 1, it is a rather unsatisfactory way. be beaten the around of edge this What this suggests is that nonviolence is not an absolute, but at best a qualified ideal. The arguments for nonviolence - which are mostly practical arguments which do not exclude occasional uses of violence and do not strictly apply to creatures in natural surroundings - sort of But conclusion. exclude. nonviolent what is called charge for state, is is much more investigation aimed, among other things, at This is^ to concede an of moral insensitivity against comprehensive pacifism so long as P2 remains unqualified. 31. would The further suggestion that emerges upon granting that moral sharper, more sensitive, and less blanket principles than P2. attentuated similar approaches thinking and associated principles in this area are in a pretty primitive that a the suggestion is a dangerous one, practically at least, since it opens the door a chink to other options which categorically suggest The sheer moral power of such pacifism As Singer has in the analogous case of Liberation, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. 25 vegetarianism: is one see reason e.g., for Animal �There is no reason however why giving its adoption some pause. a genuine pacifism (making for real peace) should not be built on a modified version of P2 which permits such natural phenomena as predation. Nothing logically rules out such a genuine and more sensitive pacifism. There are other requirements the position to be worked out should meet as In particular, a rationality requirement implies that pacifists go on to oppose acts similar to those using violence: This is a of requirement otherwise they could have a case made against them. in a different sense from the pure logical consistency sense, namely that of keeping to the same story. for well. pacifism, Again there need be no deep problem so long, this time, as it is not erroneously supposed that there must be a single principle just (e.g. P2) - as distinct from bundle a of moral principles, others of which serve to oppose acts accounted similar to those involving violence.32 io meet the rationality requirement the position should, be integrated into a in larger framework of nondestructive practices, which are of a piece with nonviolent practices.33 For, except metaphorically, practices to the environment, for instance, do not involve violence, e.g. mining in a fertile valley, damaging a wild river, dumping toxic and oceans. In an does not destructive such things as strip wastes in streams extended sense, which gets beyond the confines of the property picture, all these practices are environmental vandalism. vandalism particular, cover violence But even metaphorically, against persons (and certainly not nonphysical violence such as "psychological violence"). What is sought then is an appropriate of these notions covering destructive practices; and also an accompanying synthetic term, better than the umbrella term 'vandolence'. Then P2 is superseded by synthesis an appropriately qualified P2#. It is morally wrong to use vandolence. It remains to characterise the cluster of destructive practices that count as vandolence and to try to justify the principle - no easy tasks. 32. It is important that pacifism, like other deontological positions, reject assessments of similarity simply in terms of similar damaging consequences. Features of the means deployed, for example, also matter. 13. The position has been called 'pacifism. 26 �APPENDICES §5. The from arguments impracticality impracticality and pacifism in the real world. of the reality: social alleged Even if it is conceded that pacifism is a viable moral ideal, that it does not fall down as incoherent or ludicrous, still the feasibility of pacifism as a sensible practice to live by will be contested - And it has despite, or perhaps because of, major examples such as Christ and Gandhi. to be admitted the that real world, with all its horror and squalor, does put But in this regard pacifism is not an exception. pacifism to severe tests. Nowhere is the practice of nonviolence usually thought less than in replacing war^. prepared or for succeed Yet nonviolent social defence methods, to replace the usual violent methods, have been described in some detail^, though they properly to likely given a dress rehearsal. have been never The prospects for success of nonviolent defence of,a region can vary significantly, depending upon whether the war is convention observed or not. If the convention is observed then pacifism stands reasonable prospects of success. The difficult cases are where the war convention perhaps unleashed, in broken, is massive ways, on noncombatants. and violence is According to Walzer, in his superficially sympathetic sketch and assessment of nonviolent defence and resistance, 'success is possible only if the invaders are committed to the war convention - ... and they won't always be' (Wp.331^^). attained - there is conventions are flouted. reasons, some got homesick. ruthless of This is presumably be never any guarantee of it, without or with war - even if some The invaders may give them irrelevant, e.g. up and depart for all sorts or they needed a quick decisive victory, they What Walzer no doubt means is something like this: invaders may Success false. that sufficiently in sufficient numbers with sufficient time and sufficient support 34. The more sweeping replacement of the state (of the main source of considered in Routley and Plumwood, in Social Alternatives, op.cit. 35. Again for example, in Sharp, Politics, op. cit. references given there. 36. All page references prefixed by 'W' are to Allen Lane, London, 1977. 27 See also M. Walzer, Martin, Just and war) op.cit., Unjust is and Wars, �lines, etc., can eventually succeed. defending The difference lies in the pattern of events; to violence. resorts side But that sort of thing is also true even if the is if the defence "forces" are well-armed it to invaders start and with difficult more civil well -prepared with than afterwards easier the for costly and resistance. Walzer is inappropriate examples. in command, model the of way the Jews, The way.The Nazis, to jump who that conclusion the He is thinking of an extreme totalitarian the enslaved misleading many like cannot succeed when the war convention is abandoned, in terms of defence nonviolent however, thinking, who in state, total Nazis were in Germany, the Jews of Germany providing the the population, by The "resistance" picture is highly and large, did not resist extermination in an organised never invaded Germany, were in control all or the infrastructure and had the cooperation (at least) of the bulk of the population. Walzer's comparison to work, there would have to be an enormous occupying army took over and managed all key Australia it is not even so clear largely united and actively resisting this is which With island territories such as infrastructure. that For logistically population. Walzer's feasible against impression resistance fragmenting and the populace moving into dulled acquiscence (e.g. a of the Wp.332) might have got things the wrong way around, with disbelieving and frustrated soldiers ready to leave. Non violent resistance is however unlikely to be put to the test in any adequate present state-determined circumstances. No state would be prepared to risk way in 37. It has been argued, moreover, that when church leaders, Christian or Jewish, opposed the deportations, most of the Jews were saved (when country by country comparisons are made). See, for one of many treatments of this sensitive issue, R.L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: the Holocaust and the American Future, Harper, New York, 1978, chapter 5. 38. The argument suggested in Walzer (e.g. p.333) that nonviolent methods would increase evil, or at least its distribution, is weak. It is countered by Sharp's observation that the suffering likely to be induced is less than in comparable wars. 28 �training its populace different). It full in techniques (civil is defence all too easy for them to "rout" the police: be then would action nonviolent civil obedience, for example, could no longer be ensured by the customary violent means. thus The argument initial sketchings. far §6. On the positive case for pacifism: has been largely defensive, meeting a range of objections to comprehensive pacifism. That in itself is revealing. deviations from are it Pacifism is the require what rest position (inertial and state) The reason for this is simple explanation. violence is, on most ethical systems, at least a prima facie evil, so use of enough: it is what has to be justified. Positive arguments for pacifism can take advantage of and merely justified. case try dispose of "exceptional cases" where violence is supposed to be in that the defender (person or nation) is morally-excluded situation, since the attacker has overstepped moral the position privileged The favourite exception is self-defence against a violent opponent: curious is to its already the in bounds. a Still defender is not morally committed to violence whatever he does - as in a dilemma And since it is at least prima facie wrong, and he does not have situation. to use it, he should not resort to it. An elementary syllogistic argument, given by Narveson (Np.117), can be adapted to give a similar result:- Violence is (intrinsically) wrong Violence in any excepted cases (e.g. self-defence) is still violence Violence in any excepted cases is still (intrinsically) wrong. Naturally those opposed to pacifism will challenge the first premiss, and a dialectic already glimpsed will begin. None of the arguments for pacifism is conclusive, since even where arguments are deductively tight assumptions can be challenged arguments for pacifism particularly good ones. for pacifism, (as above). Nor One of the poorer positive are all the arguments for example, makes similar assumptions to those of the classic theory 29 �of war, namely that once war is embarked upon it cannot be limited, nuclear that or chemical hope weapons will be used selectively and restrictively is an illusion, escalation is inevitable. are bound to be overstepped. case is overstated. the e.g. The (moral) limits in war - whatever they are - Although the chances of escalation are real enough, the Limited exchanges and confrontation are possible. Wars are much more social arrangements and much more conventional than the classical theory allows. Wars can, for example, be started and stopped things intervene (e.g. support (as midstream more should the for first inevitably, premiss for those mixture a above) suffering and anguish violent of methods, the They nonviolence. injustice characteristically works, the futility and counterproductiveness of means-ends of the consideration, a range of consequentialist and practical reasons, e.g. pain, important a pollution crisis affecting other neighbouring states). The main reasons for pacifism are, include in cost that in violence violence within the setting of modern industrial societies, the broader popular support base obtained by avoidance of violence, the desirable social consequences of nonviolence such as more less furtive, society. open, the why of pacifism) considerable. These are None of these well-known types of reason (giving separately decisive, but their cumulative affords a model for one way of proceeding^; Mill's defence Mill's procedure works (at least As was pointed out by F. D'Agostino in discussion. 30 of liberty nonviolence, it works as well as it works for liberty). 39. is it is enough (a nonelementary exercise) to adapt Mill's consequentialist arguments for liberty to arguments for otherwise effect reasons can be put together, in various ways, to make a strong positive case for pacifism, as principled nonviolence. as a �A more decisive consequentialist data , argument, takes a but making semantical preference rankings on worlds, and these worlds modelling nonviolence Again principles. use of route. are similar practical and The data is used to arrive at then pacifism in applied is derived semantically as principled nonviolence.^0 R. 40. Routley* * The details of such an esoteric defence of moral principles are outlined in R. and V. Routley, op.cit.: a fuller account may be found in their 'Semantical foundations for value theory', Nous (1983), to appear. * With thanks to R. Beehler, F. D'Agostino, B. Martin, L. Mirlin, R. Goodin, and participants in the Philosophy Seminar, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. The main outlines of the paper were drafted associate at Simon Fraser University. 31 while the author was a research �OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT, RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY School publications: R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, First edition 1973, Second edition 1974, Third edition 1975. Departmental publications: M.K. Rennie, Some Uses of Type Theory in the Analysis of Language, 1974. D. Mannison, M.A. McRobbie, and R. Routley, editors, Environmental Philosophy, 1980. R. Routley, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, 1980. Yellow series (Research Papers of the Logic Group): 1. R.K. Meyer, Why I am not a relevantist, 1978. 2. R.K. Meyer, Sentential constants in R, 1979. 3. R.K. Meyer and M.A. McRobbie, Firesets and relevant implication, 1979. 4. R.K. Meyer, A Boolean-valued semantics for R, 1979. 5. R.K. Meyer, Almost Skolem forms for relevant (and other) logics, 1979. 6. R.K. Meyer, A note on R-^ matrices, 1979. 7. R.K. Meyer and J.K. Slaney, Abelian logic (from A to Z), 1980. 8^ C. Mortensen, Relevant algebras and relevant model structures, 1980. 9. R.K. Meyer, Relevantly interpolating in RM , 1980. 10. C. Mortensen, Paraconsistency and C^, 1981. 11. R.K. Meyer, De Morgan monoids, 1983. 12. R. Routley, Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment and the Disjunctive Syllogism Argument can be correctly used, and N. da Costa, Essay on the foundations of logic, 1983. 13. R. Routley and G. Priest, On Paraconsistency, 198314. R. Routley, Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, 1983 15. R.K. Meyer, Where y fails, 1983. Green series (Discussion papers in environmental philosophy): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. R. Routley, Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action, 1982. R. Routley, In defence of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism, 1982. moo R. Routley and N. Griffin, Unravelling the meaning of life?, 1982. R. Routley, Nihilisms, and nihilist logics. R. Routley, War and Peace. I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and war-deterrence and the political fall out. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, Moral dilemmas and the logic of deonti R°"ouU.y and V. Plumwood, A. expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism. 7. 10. R. Routley, Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: rational behaviour under rival paradigms. the difference 1 ����� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Self-published Papers Description An account of the resource <span>Sylvan favoured the </span><span lang="EN-GB">highly-unorthodox practice of self-publishing a vast amount of his work<span>—</span><span></span>quite literally, using his own printing press!</span> Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Text Any textual data included in the document Discussion Papers in environmental phiiosophy _. Phitosophy Departments The Australian National University PO Box 4, Canberra, Australia 2600. NUMBER 9 WAR AND PEACE. II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY RICHARD ROUTLEY FOR CIRCULATION AND EVENTUAL LIBRARY DEPOSIT WAR AND PEACE. II ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM by R. Routley Number 9 Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy Department of Philosophy Australian National University 1983 ON THE ALLEGED INCONSISTENCY, MORAL INSENSITIVITY AND FANATICISM OF PACIFISM Pacifism, despite its limited revival through the nonviolent action 1 movement and as a respectable tradition within the Catholic church , continues to have a bad philosophical press. one way or another, It is commonly portrayed characteristically as inconsistent. as incoherent Even philosophical defences of pacifism are liable to be extremely defensive, conceding pacifism is in only that consistent, but insisting otherwise that it is as false as a moral 2 position can be, bizarre, and morally insensitive . What follows challenges the prevailing wisdom put out in the philosophical press, but using its own analytic methods. §1. Slide arguments to inconsistency; from rights. an In influential and and arguments from irresponsibility and widely disseminated set of articles 3 attacking pacifism , Narveson says that the pacifist's position is not only that [Tl] violence is evil but also that [T2] it is morally wrong to use force [violence] to resist, punish, or prevent violence. This further step makes pacifism a radical moral doctrine. What I shall try to establish below is that it is, in fact, more than merely radical - it is actually incoherent because self-contradictory ... (p.408, italics added). Subsequently (p.414) he characterises pacifism by way of T2, though it would be better characterised by the more sweeping 1. According to the US Catholic Bishops, pacifism is 'a valid Christian position', with a long tradition going back to Christ and the early Christians who were committed to a nonviolent lifestyle: see Origins 12 (1982) pp.310-311. The revival in the nonviolent action (NVA) movement is a somewhat qualified one (as will emerge), many in that movement wishing to distance themselves from traditional pacifism. 2. In particular, T. Regan 'A defence of pacifism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1972) 73-86. Page references to this article are prefixed by R. Regan ends by saying 'To regard the pacifists' belief vaguely ludicious" is, perhaps, to put it mildly'. as "bizarre and P2. It is morally wrong to use violence. However T2 captures the cases that orthodox opposition. The separate comprehensive pacifism from main form of pacifism under investigation is called 'comprehensive' to distinguish it from standard pacifism, in the usual sense which is narrower restricted to certain theses concerning (state) order, notably opposition to (violence in) war, which does not necessarily elsewhere. the But if violence Pacifism, as a universally and not merely in war. violence is impermissible, then it should be so what is out rule position, moral should be comprehensive. On its own showing, it is contended, proper action to preventative action commitment to prevent, what would involve, it use in the case Narveson's or of pacifism. of incoherence Narveson and others find in pacifism: claims prohibits, acclaimedly sometimes, precluded from taking violence; But force. genuine actively defend on them, pain Hence the initial that it cannot underwrite its of inconsistency. However location of incoherence in pacifism depends, essentially, on several connected slides, all of which the pacifist should resist - without force. initial for a moral position must allow action to back up commitment, action of a type logically excluded own is pacifism The slide is from the theme T2 italicised above to what results by deletion of the crucial phrase 'to use force', or as it should be 'to use violence', namely J. Narveson 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Ethics 75 (1968) and 'Is pacifism consistent', Ethics 78 (1968). The first article is reprinted in War and Morality (ed. R. Wasserstrom) Wadsworth, Belmont, California, 1970, pp.63-77. The first article is also rewritten and combined with part of the second in 'Pacifism: a philosophical analysis', Moral Problems (ed. J. Rachels), Third Edition, Harper & Row, New York, 1979, pp.408-425. Page references without further citation are to this latter article. Narveson's theme that pacifism is incoherent is headlined and further elaborated in his 'Violence and war', Matters of Life and Death (ed. T. Regan), Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1980, pp.109-147. Page references prefixed by 'N' are to this article. 2 It is morally wrong to resist, punish, or prevent violence - R2. and similarly from special and related cases of T2 to special and related of R2 (e.g. It is cases from T2S, It is forbidden to use force to resist violence, to R2S, forbidden to resist The violence). slide is illegitimate because commitment to T2 does not entail commitment to the rejected proposition R2; for one thing there are many ways of confronting, reducing and controlling violence, worked out pacifists by and others, which do not involve use of violence (or 4 perhaps force). The initial slide is however what assault on pacifism Narveson clearing (after several exploits confusions, explain the popularity of pacifism, out of the way). irresponsibility of in This his first main which he takes to argument, from the does not actually lead to contradiction, but it pacifism, does suggest that there is a serious tension between pacifism and any method of maintaining social order, so serious that pacifism is socially irresponsible: ... to hold the pacifist position as a genuine full-blooded moral principle is to hold nobody has a right to fight back when attacked ... It means that we are all mistaken in supposing that we have the right of self-protection ... It appears to mean, for instance, that we have no right to punish criminals, that all our machinery of criminal justice is, in fact, unjust. Robbers, murderers, rapists, and miscellaneous delinquents this [irresponsible] theory, to be let loose (pp.415-6). Since one can protect oneself and avoid and resist aggression back violence), (with unless a slide (tentatively) by is without fighting pacifism does not mean what Narveson claims it means, Nor does comprehensive made. theses on ought, T1 T2, and imply that pacifism, characterised we have no right to punish criminals, but simply that such punishment (or the imposition of penalties) will not apply violent methods. Nor therefore does it imply that all conventional machinery of criminal justice is unjust, but only that some, good 4. deal, of that machinery is. One hardly the or a needs to be a comprehensive Pacifism, as involving the active use of defensive methods, can be traced back as far as the Mohist philosophers of ancient China. On modern methods see especially G. Sharp, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, Boston, 1971. As will emerge, there is a point in distinguishing (as Narveson does not in his earlier work) force from violence; they are not equivalent. 3 pacifist to coherently think the latter. the This provides confirmation some for key point which is that there is, so far at least, no inconsistency evident in maintaining that those who hold that violent methods are legitimate morally are mistaken. The next slide is closely connected with, and really generalises upon, initial slide. The is to imbue a range of more neutral terms with the stunt connotation of violence or at least of force which equate with violence. use of force is taken to by implied in R2. cannot here resist Hence (p.415). violence, or force and to so Hence the against attack' (pp.417-8). also Narveson's and so to a much less can be resisted, But without violence. things like arrest, without violence (e.g. even by Force can be applied, as in opening sliding out of handcuffs and running away). a jam jar or pulling a person out of danger, without violence. force, but not vice versa; and defensible position. positions can be defended, as in this paper or on the field, Things be If the stunt were got away with, it would pacifism render a unwarranted deprive pacifism of, for instance, the general methods of nonviolent action resistance, be that assumption "recharacterisation" of pacifism as the position that 'no one ought ever defended to proceeds Hence the conflation of T2 and excluded from among admissible pacifist methods. pacifist Narveson Thus such activities as resisting, punishing, preventing, and defending are taken to imply (use of) R2; the Violence implies and it is violence, not all applications of force, that comprehensive pacifists are bound to exclude. The attempt nonviolent to castrate practices, any case indefensible. development and themselves from compromise, pacifism, by depriving it of the range of is not confined to those who (want to) think pacifism in It enjoys some popularity even among those advocating expansion of nonviolent methods, who no doubt want to distance older mediation, pacifism, whose methods they see as confined to negotiation, and involving the granting of concessions. The newer (nonviolent) activists have justification; for pacifism has often by an unsympathetic opposition, as confined to passive methods jeen presented, (cf. even the Concise English Dictionary account, where it is erroneously 4 said of pacifism 'positively, it holds that all disputes should be settled by that negotiation', and, negatively, that it is 'the hostilities added). and of total doctrine of non-resistance non-cooperation with any form of warfare': But nothing in the characterisation of pacifism, whether or standard, need so limit its admissible methods: to italics comprehensive nothing excludes resistance, uncompromising methods, and imposition of sanctions which offer no concessions.^ It is simply that comprehensive pacifism has not yet developed its fuller potential, especially in conflict resolution. Subsequent slides in the development of the argument against just variations qualifier. on those pacifism are given, writing violence-involving in as an internal Thus the measure of a person's opposition to something in terms of 'the amount of effort he is willing to put forth against it' is taken - somewhat perversely - to be violence-involving effort or opposition in the pacifist's 'opposition to If violence'. this slide were pacifist would be caught in an elementary inconsistency since in case of the permissible any being opposed to violence, by definition, he is prepared to use violence and so is not opposed to violence. it is Even Narveson 'cannot make too much' of this inconsistency, though not so far removed from the alleged inconsistencies he does want to make much of in his main inconsistency argument. 5. In the way Sharp, for example, has illicitly assumed in several works: see for instance the unduly narrow definition of pacifism given in his Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent Publishers, Boston, 1980, p.198. Again, however, there is some historical basis for dissociating nonviolent action from pacifism; and given the difficulties comprehensive pacifism can lead to, there are philosophical reasons as well. But even without much in the way of organised sanctions, worthwhile positive results can often be obtained, as the case of international law reveals: cf. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law, Oxford University Press, 1961, p.212. 5 A similar slide, together with a further slide, is made in the argument on based inconsistency pacifism theme, the to notion of rights, especially as it figures in the transformed to the claim No one has a right to indulge in violence (p.418). P2(R). For Narveson tries to incorporate the right to indulge in violence in notion The right. of very initial move is to work in assumptions of defence from breaches of a right and of Because the against action preventative infringement 'a right just i_s a status justifying preventative action ... it. of what does follow logically is that one has a right to whatever may be necessary to prevent infringements of his right' (p.419). That 'whatever may be necessary' turns out to to include force, now very generously construed - here is the further slide such incorporate things as social pressure. Moreover 'it is a logical truth, not merely a contingent one, that what might be For action must have the notion of violence built into it. the against question nonviolent (p.421)! quite indefensibly strong. him To block the argument it is enough for rights with The argument accordingly to be, to or be to, limited In any case the 'whatever may be necessary' requirement is action. entitle pacifism. associated preventative action not force logical transformations to work, however, the notion of preventative these begs is necessary to For example, D'Agostino's right to his umbrella does kill a person who is trying to steal the umbrella even if such action is necessary in the circumstances to prevent infringement his of right. to How the argument from rights leads inconsistency is summed up thus (p.421): SAI. 'If we have any rights at all then we have a right to use force to prevent the deprivation of the thing to which we are said to have a right'. SA2. We have, according to the pacifist's 'the right not to have violence done to us', as a consequence of the.o&f^e&i^fi to avoid violence. But, therefore, we have the right to use violence, so the pacifist's position is self-contradictory, both granting and not granting the right to use violence. The argument fails because SAI is readily rejected. claiming Narveson that 'our standard concept of rights' yields SAI (cf. 6 is mistaken p.423). in That a right can be sustained by right-supporting or right-defending require that that action is violent. action does Pacifists can provide an adequate analysis of rights - essentially the usual one - without letting themselves in by simply rejecting the Narveson not slide^. What for SAI, appears in place of SAI is something like If we have any rights at all then we have a right to uphold them. SAI#. But the right to uphold them, defend them, protect them, etc., give facto, an entitlement to the use of violence. no dilemma for the pacifist. not, does ipso Without the slide there is The "pacifist's dilemma" and Narveson's slide are two aspects of the one thing. The arguments from lesser §2. violence and In evil. lesser outline the argument - which is independent of the notion of rights - is that pacifists must admit, in terms of their own principles, that there are cases where the violence would where those Inconsistency be some is morally use of immediate permissible violence by T2. and morally justified. would prevent evil, of The cases are greater violence. More explicitly, and in (Narveson's) terms which also import the notion of evil, pacifists have lesser much use to admit both that the some use of force, is admissible, in preventing greater evil, and that it is not admissible because it involves violence. An argument like this as gets summarized as follows It seems to me logically true, in any moral theory whatever, that [E2'J the lesser evil must be preferred to the greater. If the use of force by me, now is necessary to avoid the use of more physical force (by others, perhaps) later, then to say that physical force is the 6. Narveson, in responding to a suggestion of Armour (pp.423-4), sees nothing between (1) forceful defence of rights, with the slide to violence in, and (0) nothing really answering to rights at all, where words like 'rights' occur without stuffing. This shows a serious blindspot. What lies in between are a range of notions which do not guarantee the slide to violence. An account of rights which will serve is given in R. and V. Routley 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics' in Environmental Philosophy (ed. D. Mannison and others), Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 1980; see especially p.l75ff. 7 supreme (kind of) evil is precisely to say that under circumstances I am committed to the use of physical force . these Now there are several somewhat different arguments snarled up in these sketches. It is important to them unsnagged 8, especially if a clearer view of the get ethical place of pacifism is to The result. from argument, basic lesser violence, goes as follows:— Cl. There are cases where use of violence would prevent greater violence. C2. One ought to minimize violence. Therefore C3. There are cases where one ought to use violence, the since in this way, in any arbitrary one of minimized. ""P2. indicated, cases violence is Therefore It is not (always) morally wrong to use violence, contradicting the pacifist principle, P2, according to it which is mora y wrong, always, to use violence. All the ingredients premisses, can be of this argument, together with pulled together from Narveson's work. support for the He not only espouses C2, but suggests two distinct arguments for it, the first of which connects the argument with the lesser evil argument:- El. (Use of) violence is an evil. E2. Evil should be minimized. The second argument to C2 is simply from the pacifist premiss, varying P2, E3. One ought not to undertake violence - period; that is, the level of violence ought to be zero. J. 8 9. Narveson, 'Is pacifism inconsistent', Ethics 78 (1968) p.148. Without getting into the level of complication, not to say epicycling, that Regan lands himself in: he is obliged to distinguish three mirage-like senses of 'lesser evil': quantitative, qualitative, and resultant (Rp.78). See Np.127 where it is asserted that violence as a source of evil should be minimized, and Np.119, where the point is put in terms of absolute evil. That way of putting it already starts to give the game away, since Narveson is all too evidently interested in negotiable evil which can be traded off against other evils. 8 Neither argument is decisive; of reference that they both in fact begin easing pacifists into a resist, where moral absolutes are warped into should moral relatives, where obligations give way to obligations-other-things-being- In any event E3 only directs one not to get involved in violence at equal, etc. all, and says nothing about minimizing it when one compatible frame got into it. E3 is directives quite different from minimization where violence is with involved, e.g. has rooting it out, which may involve nonminimization strategies. Thus E3 does not entail E2, and commitment to E2 does not commit pacifists to 02 - a principle nonviolent activists usually do not accept either, being to accept prepared violence perpetrated against them, for example, as a means to social justice. Nor do El and E2 entail 02; so neither does principles like El and E2 oblige them to accept C2. by commitment evil-perpetrating Narveson's such e.g. violence but argument some increases well-known hypothetical cases as the slaying of an dictator. non-violent fails to For in particular, violence is not the only evil, and (so) evil may sometimes be reduced by in pacifists for similar reasons. Regan's reconstruction of Regan argues from premisses concerning the ranking of evil and a premiss like E2', specifically 3. The use of force is a substantive evil. 4. Therefore, a lesser quantity of force must quantity of force (Rp.79). The argument is invalid: be preferred to a great an ordering of evils does not induce a similar ordering force, even when force is an evil. of It is enough to observe that increasing force may still reduce evil, and so, on Regan-Narveson assumptions, be preferrable. Resort to the theme that Elt. Violence is an irredeemable evil (proposed by Regan in his "defence" of pacifism, Rp.80, and by Narveson, Np.118) promises a way around the difficulty. subsequently considered An irredeemable evil is figuratively so black that no combination with grays (lesser evils) or whites (goods) 10. An argument like the argument from lesser violence itself would appear to undercut the argument from El and E2 to premiss C2 for the argument for lesser violence. 9 will lighten its hue; now it always dominates. Elt together with E2 will yield C2, but What are the grounds for that? the problem with the argument shifts to Elt. As Narveson points out (Np.119), it is not widely acceptable, most people being prepared to countenance some small amount of violence in exchange for considerable goods. (But then, not so long ago, most people were tolerant of cruelty to animals providing it was not too Moreover, so Narveson implies, appeal to Elt does not get gross.) pacifists out of the argument from lesser violence; deeper, It does break the argument however; underwriting C2. by indeed it seems to get them in for it removes Cl and, more importantly, the corresponding premiss of the more difficult argument from lesser evil, which starts from DI. There are cas^s where the use of violence would avoid greater evil. For given, by Elt, that use of violence is irredeemably evil, evil than that tainted with violence; requires. however pacifism is no of pacifism (see into a 'bizarre and vaguely ludicrous (utilitarian through as violence an irredeemable evil which Rp.80ff.), position (Rp.86), extreme pacifism, some of the (problematic) features of which Regan outlines But the approach greater and there are accordingly no cases such as DI This is the core of Regan's defence converts there is a . mistaken inspired) attempt to get at moral absolutes, which is what pacifism is, like other deontological positions, grounded upon. But such absolutes are adequately expressed in such commandments as, One ought not to commit violence, meaning thereby, as it says ought not, not just for the time being, or so long as reasons otherwise don't arise, or for acting other things being equal, or prima facie, but ought not 11. That is by no means the only element in Regan's torturous reformulation of Narveson's argument that can be faulted. Consider, for example, premiss 5. If any given action, A, is necessary to bring about a lesser rather than a greater quantity of qualitatively equivalent evil, then one's obligation is to do A. While the premiss has considerable appeal as a principle of supererogation, there is little reason to accept it as one supplying obligations. 12. Extreme pacifism can be seen as taking the rule that one ought never to use violence as having priority over all other moral rules - which is indeed an extreme position even if a consistent one. Such a priority rule is an unsatisfactory way to deal with moral dilemmas: see further below. 10 Such old-fashioned deontological, moral absolutist positions, come what may, period. such is pacifism as collide bottom, at more fashionable, highly with head-on malleable moral positions like utilitarianism, which both Narveson and Regan (at time) were working from. The reason for collision is simply that 'utilitarianism ... for the utility 'that will be brought out is incompatible with pacifism': some one who acts by may be greater than that produced by any alternative' (Np.121) violence the according to the to utilitarian-commandment maximize doing 13 So . utility may sometimes commit violence, contravening pacifist principles. On its own inconsistency with a false little: position every doctrine inconsistency suffers such with very many false doctrines. Narveson does have another (small) argument to the effect that pacifism odds the with contractarianism. correct, other ethical positions But this argument would only position insidious, is however, for have Firstly, as we generally, have provisional. theory-saving seen, made also libertarianism were it at and otherwise however they are not, including has which happened is more it utilitarianism, seem as climate unfavourable to incompatible There are two more specific damaging features. and consequentialist approaches more no deontic principle were firm, but all are if The theory of prima facie principles This is entirely mistaken. is a device, designed to get consequentialist positions out of difficulties such as moral dilemmas. 13. weight, is that utilitarian thinking has permeated much of the rest of such as pacifism. positions What instance. ethical thought, thus helping to establish a ethical carry if the positions were suitably exhaustive; no deeper ecological presents, he shows utilitarianism as Secondly, consequentialist positions tend to suggest that To show what Narveson goes on to claim that people are sometimes justified in using force rather more is required, as Regan points out, Rp. 85, n.18. It has also to be shown that there are cases of these types (as in Cl) and that agents can know that use of force will increase utility, reduce evil, etc. A pacifist, rightly sceptical of utilitarian tracing of consequences, and fond of noting that violence begets violence, could, with a small dose of scepticism also, dig in at this point and claim that because no one can be sure that use of force will reduce evil, so no one is justified in using force. This is sceptically-based pacifism. 11 only consequentialist reasons carry argumentative weight, and so try such positions, as pacifism, into offering to ease rival incongruous consequential sometimes support for their themes. Narveson assumptions takes such procedures upon pacifists: a stage further, and utilitarian foists thus he says that the pacifist's 'objection to violence is that it produces suffering, unwanted pain, in the (p.425). recipients' These incongruous utilitarian grounds are something of a travesty of pacifists' reasons for objecting to violence, which concern rather the type of action involved and what it does - though not only or always at all in the way of suffering - to the perpetrators as well as those on whom it is inflicted. Even more astonishing, such utilitarian—style considerations are supposed to commit the pacifist to the following three statements, one of which however he must deny (!): [N]l. To will the end (as morally good) is to will the it (at Other things being equal, the lesser evil is to be preferred to the means to least prima facie). [N]2. greater. [N]3. There are no "privileged" moral persons ... (p.425)^. 'These three principles' which feature in the summation of 'the pacifist's problem', among them imply, as far as I can see, both the commitment to force when it is necessary to prevent more violence and also the conception of a right as an entitlement to defense. And they therefore leave pacifism, as a moral doctrine, in a logically untenable position (p.425). It would take not merely logic, but a good deal of magic, to coax out of the statements given. consequences such For implications to hold the substantive terms such as 'violence' and 'right' must also figure, in one way or otherwise the implications fail just on formal grounds. another, in the implicans; The intended argument to the "commitment to force" conclusion appears however to be some sort of variant on the lesser evil argument, with N2 replacing E2' (N3 and N1 have more oblique roles, N3 to stop exceptions being made for oneself and one's group, and N1 to ensure that 14. Narveson also wants to contend that 'all of these may be defended on purely logical or "meta-ethical" grounds'. This is likely false, especially the claim as to logical status, since some of the principles are rejected in substantive ethical theories. 12 violence adopted or even required as a means has its full import, e.g. in in Cl, ethical an end. for one thing, principle Nl, which is at least But, dubious unless 'prima facie' is unbracketed, which is reflected as the begs bound morally to shun violent means. pacifism, against question Under pacifist reformulation Nl will give way to something more like To choose an end as morally good is to choose (only) morally Nl#. acceptable means to it. For another, without much further construction work the suggested arguments need pacifists since nothing damaging emerges; worry not the three principles duly adjusted; they hardly leave pacifism as untenable. More threatening is the argument from lesser evil itself, which has countered. This and E2 N2 or inconsistency is of evil) comprehensive to pacifism Narveson's stock examples concern murder, one what is the moral situation here? to (admissibility What of are them these being of violence) dilemma, Indeed the example is very similar to the turns that on Jim shoots one of what account is given of moral dilemmas. pacifist does not do, unless he wants coherence trouble, is to utilitarian line and where situation N But ought The situation is that of a paradigmatic that of Pedro and Jim, where Pedro volunteers to call off his firing squad about to shoot several captives if everything be cases difficult N ought to prevent mass murder, but also kill B, because that is murder and involves violence. of a moral dilemma. moral 03 N (Narveson in fact) must kill the (potential) mass-murderer B (Np.119). person not to the argument from DI (cases of violence to avoid greater evil) (minimization in yet of trying them^. almost Now What a comprehensive take the inadequate to explain moral dilemmas away, as if they didn't ever occur (at least at other than an initial intuitive level), as if all obligations were prima facie, negotiable, etc., etc. No, the conflicting obligations stand. to be done is however a very consequentialist thing, to try to determine What is the best 15. A surprising feature of Narveson's argument, also Regan's "reconstruction", is that these cases are usually nowhere in sight, as if again one got to conclusions logically out of the air, without any of the hard work the cases involve. 16. The example was first discussed in B. Williams, 'Conflict of values', reprinted in his Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981, 71-82. 13 thing (or a sufficiently good thing) to in the In circumstances. trying N2M, that it is preferrable to minimize evil, will presumably be satisfied. the best course in the circumstances is a violent one, e.g. that B. No inconsistency in pacifism follows. minimize that Even granted it does not follow that N ought to resort to violence. N had better shoot is preferable to On the contrary the situation N ought not to shoot B, but in the appalling circumstances, he had fix. a it Suppose and that in this sense (not a deontic one) evil should be minimized, evil, remains to is the appropriate course of action principles like N2 and its mate, what determine do There is the real-life complication better do so^. of a dilemma, moral but no inconsistency through arguments like that from lesser evil. the Narveson's jackpot question, entangled in his discussion of rights, can now be met. argument The question presents a dilemma: If force is the only way to prevent violence in a given case, justified in that case? (p.420) its is use Narveson is thinking of cases where one is about to be murdered, Regan where to be No, it is not deonticly justified^. is a qualified No: and amount to making out a case. But justification on proposes is solution, back-up ambiguous, in p.423). against may just situation. dilemma a another argument, taking his proposals as evident. pacifist can simply dispute it - the jackpot question does not argument and the contrary, that enough violence for the given occasion is morally justified - it can go at least as far as killing no It is certainly not morally The response is qualified then because some force might be consequentially justified, as a second-best presents is it is not justified, in the sense of 'justified' which reflects its deontic origin in 'making right'. Narveson, one Given that such force again presupposes violence, the pacifist answer raped. obligatory, from pacifism person - but he As it is not — the lead to a decisive (though Narveson gives the impression that it does, e.g. What it can lead to is the argument from lesser evil over again. 17. This corresponds to the account of moral dilemma, given in much more technical detail in R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions' in Paraconsistent Logic (ed. G. Priest and others) 1983, to appear; also available in this Discussion Paper series. 18. An extreme pacifist would answer with an unqualified No. 14 The accusation of fanaticism, and the charge of moral its adherence to principles unexceptionable Insofar fanaticism, so Hare contends. such manages Hare as as insensitivity. P2, to Through pacifism is a form of get his remarkable accusation off the ground, he does by conflating pacifism with extreme pacifism: the pacifist ... solves the conflict of principles, not by critical thought, but by elevating one principle quite irrationally, over all the others (p.174). Comprehensive pacifism in not always resolving the conflict of principles, in letting moral stand, does neither of these things, and so does not fit into Hare's dilemmas deceptively neat two-level critical. thought, into intuitive himself to, without any Hare of the requisite supporting argument, according to which pacifist principles are inappropriate in many places at the present time, violence is apparently fine for countries like Israel (cf. Hare s redefinition, a Harey—fanatic, e.g. p.175). Hare's accusation turns on an extravagant redefinition of fanaticism. on and pacifism is not, as standard pacifism is not, extreme Nor it is the particular "critical thinking", anti-pacifist solution pacifism. helps comprehensive But moral of classification A fanatic is a person who adheres to ideals which diverge from what utilitarianism (in approved form) recommends (cf. Since p.170)! comprehensive pacifism is committed to principles and ideals of nonviolence which, as already observed, diverge from where utilitarianism (as massaged by Hare or Narveson) tends, namely the towards pacifists are Harey—fanatics. usual sense: whether position their bigoted . they whether The idea appropriateness violence This does not of course make are 'wild in many situations, such them or extravagant opinions' of some pacifist principles of . the or (OED) is pacifism consists of such opinions can be removed by an appeal to history:- A great many of the sages, especially Eastern thinkers, founders in fanatics, depends on the very different matter of fanatics comprises that of and the the world's main religions, have been pacifists, committed to But the relevant opinions hardly be, all of the condemned type. of such thinkers Whence the conclusion follows. are not, can By this simple syllogism, the accusation of fanaticism is rebutted. 19. R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981, p.173. references to Hare's work without further citation are to this text. 15 All page Nor do comprehensive pacifists come out at fanatics under Hare's satisfactory, though seriously incomplete, account of fanaticism: is treating something that is not morally relevant, such as being Jewish, as relevance is completed, it there^ fanaticism wearing beads Naturally, given that using of characterising can or moral hardly exclude the violence is a morally relevant matter, so are other procedures with similar damaging results to violence: blue For however the sensitive task matter of using morally relevant. violence as morally irrelevant. more earlier, those applying of this does lead to a residual problem for comprehensive pacifism (taken up at the end of §4). Does it really matter then that fanatics? it Although argument that it does. homework appears pacifists, that though Harey-fanatics are bigots, inasmuch as had guess what, they their done the Thus, e.g. go over to Hare's As one might anticipate, Hare's argument, upon which he sets great store, 'from universal perscriptivism to utilitarianism ... 20. Harey- properly, had they performed their critical thinking adequately, they would utilitarianism). of are it does not matter in the least, Hare has an abandon the principle they are fixated upon (and, logic fanatics, not concepts A. based [entirely] on involved' (p.176), is unsound, and in fact fails at several Naess, Gandhi and Group Conflict, Universitetsforlaget, p.15: ...among the generally acknowledged moral leaders from the time of ancient China and India down to present day, the principle of nonviolence has been the rule, and the condoning of violence, even in defence, the exception. 21. the R.M. Hare, Applications of Moral Philosophy, Macmillan, London, 1972, p.78. Note that the elegant prototype argument Hare develops in this article on peace - from universalisation, directed against fanaticism and nationalism, there presented as the main causes of war - does not lead to utilitarianism (though the seeds of the later, more obscure, route are present, e.g. on p.79) and does not tell against pacifism. What has gone wrong in Hare's later argument to the much more sweeping conclusions just alluded to, can be seen by comparing the later argument with the clearer prototype argument developed against nationalism. 16 Oslo, crucial points. objectionable getting Before feature some to these of The theory. highly a Hare's procedure that deserves comment, namely the way in of which the whole highly informal argument is set within the framework two-level is there details, procedure adopted methodologically is Hare's of own radically unsound because it takes for granted the adequacy of Hare's theory, a matter that is open, at the very least, to serious doubt, since it supposes a quite particular, and eminently rejectable (utilitarian) way of handling and resolving moral dilemmas, a way rejected above.With that rejection goes a rejection of the standard deontic logic Hare presupposes, which he assumes any serious opponent must adopt. which logic, already But that since Hare assumes uniquely determined, rules out any approach what, go over As one might anticipate, Hare's the question against some to Hare's utilitarianism). important opponents of utilitarianism. In his arguments Hare divides fanatics into pure and comprise moral intuitionists and pure impure. deontologists, fanatics Impure who stick to their deontic principles, who 'cling to their intuitions' (p.176), and do not advance to what calls 'critical thinking'. Hare's dismissal of "impure fanatics", such as extreme pacifists, 'because of [their] refusal clearly' Hare or inability to face facts or to think involves a quite illicit shift in the notion of critical thinking, (p.170) originally introduced to account for a particular (primarily utilitarian) fashion accommodating ff.). But cases this comprehensive bit intuitive principles conflict, of moral dilemmas (p.28 dirty-trick philosophy can where of pacifists are presumably "pure willing to think critically, but somehow survived opinions different from be here fanatics"; the ordeal those of the utilitarian' (p.171). set inconsistent with utilitarianism, as we have seen. any fanatics of this type, if his argument is for they are 'able and still holding moral They are in fact "pure to be According to Hare there cannot be correct argument is not correct. See further, again, Routley and Plumwood, ibid. 17 since aside, fanatics of the first type", since they go on holding opinions which turn out 22. of (p.171). Therefore, his One sufficient reason for incorrectness we have already glimpsed, namely failure to consider the possibility that a Harey-fanatic operates with different logical assumptions and concepts from those of utilitarians reasons. other substitution, preferences For which can be one, argument (e.g. Hare's requires a base class intersubstituted. representation to ff.). are There p.177 ff.) depends on preference the of course whom among preference-havers, in Hare, chauvinistically contracts this base class whole of p.176 (cf. his discussion humans.Differently, certain the of moral matters by way of preferences of this type is open to familiar objection, even by utilitarians of a different cast. As to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, this an less is argument a than damaging charge: A person committed to an extreme pacifism, though he need make no logical mistake, yet lacks a fully developed moral sensitivity to the vagaries and complexities of human existence (Rp.86). The smear is not without basis. applied to avert greater Regan is envisaging violence where situations and he points to what he takes to be the evident evil; moral permissibility of a woman's using 'what physical power she has to free from an aspiring rapist' is Interestingly, (Rp.86). has Regan situation in a way which is incompatible with a pacifist stand: herself not described the there is nothing in to prevent a woman wriggling free (even in a way that involves some force) and fleeing. What is at issue is the permissibility of using violence, which implies the (perhaps wilful) that infliction death, by forceful means^ (cf. mere use of of damage, non-negligible Np.110); that is, which physical force or power (or energy). including pain, injury or involves much more than And it is by no means so evident that the woman is entitled to inflict violence from force, a pacifist can hardly be accused, in a way is duly separated violence upon the aspiring rapist. Once that can be made to stick, of crass moral insensitivity. 23. On the defectiveness of such contractions of the base Routley, op. cit., especially the concluding section. 18 class, see R. and V. But a straightforward action violence disentangling abounds as It with is subcase matter as may at first seem. defective of not depend force is by means no violence. of on tight a Fortunately characterisation what indicate some done, in the way of inflicting damage. constraints Firstly, presupposed. force: is legalised force, violence, so violence, a on satisfactory violence is not applied on behalf adequately of of account some violence, where no force is applied. violence.) 24. supposed that and are which distinguished as illegitimate "legitimate" authority, long as it is physically similar to acts not so legitimated. so often mistakenly of However it is important to is not removed by the imprimatur of the law.2$ Secondly, violence is not of the enough, for main purposes, that violent actions are a subclass of actions by forceful means, a subclass picked out both through the forcible means through so Indeed the literature on nonviolent characterisations arguments developed in this paper do violence. a the is Violence threat (This only needs emphasizing because it is threats, intimidation and the like, involve Thirdly, violence can be perpetrated without intention to inflict damage. Directed against other creatures and more generally against ecological systems such as ecosystems which can be hurt. There is a difference here between live (goal-directed) systems and property, and comprehensive pacifism does not necessarily exclude wilful damage to property. Thus eco-pacifists may destroy, or at least disable, bulldozers but not harm those who use bulldozers to destroy habitat. However sensitive eco-pacifists will not condone sabotage or "violent" destruction of property either: disabling of equipment may be different. It follows from the account of violence sketched that intimidation, threats of violence, and "psychological violence" are not violence, because they do not involve forcible means: violence is physical violence. Naturally, intimidation and psychological violence are open to moral criticism and censure on grounds related to those that tell against violence proper. For similar reasons, "economic violence" and "structural violence" are also not violence: such procedures are generally open to criticism on other grounds and hardly need to be covered under the blanket charge of violence. Nor is poverty, e.g., violence or violence-involving, except figuratively, in the way that war is an obscenity. Even given the warranted restriction of violence to physical force, many difficult cases remain; e.g. questions as to when usually approved surgical practices involve violence. 19 There can be unintentional violence, e.g. the women may have applied violent without intending to, in escaping the rapist. Fourthly, such matters as the distance at which force is applied and the indirectness of military operations, are irrelevant. modern means, the for as means, instance in The submarine operator who, by causally pressing a button, fires a missile at a distant Russian city instigates a violent By contrast, an adjacent blockade of a city, which results in hardship but not act. in direct damage, may be affected by nonviolent confined to action done against persons, means. but can violence Finally, be directed not is against other life-forms, as will soon emerge. Pacifism, like most positions, has its weaknesses, and from the fact that one of derives them^ violence (like pain) is a partly quantitative matter, and that there is no sharp cut-off point at the bottom end of the scale with small amounts violence greater than zero. of Yet minute (non-foot-in-the-door) amounts do not seem to matter all that much morally, at least compared with the gross evils that confront us on most sides when we look. Morally sensitive pacifists will not focus or fixate on small quantities of violence to the undue exclusion of larger moral will certainly problems. They give it to be understood that by 'violence' in principles such as P2 they mean 'nontrivial violence'. Arguments to the moral insensitivity of pacifism, on the basis of pacifists' not taking obvious steps passivity and pacifity. to prevent evil occurrences, depend also upon a confusion of Both Regan and Narveson (e.g. p.425) assume that pacifism 25. The point is explained in more detail in G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, op.cit., p.288n. Note however that Sharp's account of 'political violence' is defective in various other respects. It is curious, but understandable, that in his major, and massive, texts on nonviolent action, Sharp never really gets to grips with the problem of characterising violence, and indeed appears tempted by such defective equations as that of violence with force and threat with use. 26. Another comes from the necessary circumscription of permissible nonviolent action, to ensure that it does not include actions worse than nontrivial violent action. 20 is a passive do-nothing position. This is far from true, as the variety of methods or adopted by nonviolent action groups has made plain. considered Narveson correctly comprehend the real scope or possibilities of Narveson Otherwise, would negative later Narveson's nonviolent action. hardly b<- able to assert, in the automatic (but carping) way he does, that the pacifist is standing by 'not (p.425). Neither Regan nor doing assessment nonviolence' does not change the situation: for this of anything about' violence what calls 'positive he positive is approach simply nonviolence practised in an exemplary ;.&y, as by Christ, in the hope that others will follow suit, and fails to recognise the potential or effectiveness of nonviolent practices. extent when reduce assembledmuch the of training and the Fuller details of these practices, of impact nonviolent the argument from social irresponsibility, which is part of what lies behind the charge of insensitivity. §4. The argument from corollaries. The radical practice political by definition. But from other awkward of pacifism would certainly tend to eliminate war. For Standard pacifism takes out war involves violence, typically on an extensive scale. war and corollaries the position Although normally war would be excluded, of comprehensive pacifism is not so clear. what of dilemma situations? War would always be counted morally impermissible, but in exceptional extenuating circumstances it might be the (second-) best thing 27. to do. A strange pacifism! Comprehensive The methods also include anticipatory action, for instance, the policemen going off to enact violence find their vehicles won't start, e.g. because components have been removed. As to variety, Sharp has distinguished 197 methods falling into 3 broad types: protest, noncooperation and intervention; op. cit. pp.32-3. Of course pacifisms and nonviolent action postions need not coincide: the interrelations are those of overlap (see. e.g. Sharp, Politics, p.68). 28. See e.g. B. Martin 'How the peace movement should be preparing for nuclear war' Bulletin of Peace Proposals 13 (1982) 149-159, and references cited therein pp.152-3, especially G. Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, op.cit., (referred to as Politics) and V. Coover and others, Resource Manual for a Living Revolution, New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1981. 21 pacifism thus does not include standard pacifism, in contrast extreme to pacifism. Comprehensive pacifism can of course be brought progressively closer, in practice, to extreme pacifism through principles emphasizing the evil of violence. is given a large suitably If that evil weighting then second-best choices will yield the same results as extreme pacifism does (deontically), and entirely exclude war. Now it can hardly be cogently argued as telling against pacifism that eliminate since wars, are war of an as or mounted from rely the institutions. exchanges that should certainly be avoided at all upon only arrangements social and nation-states particular, obviously police and military forces but of violence-underpinned many of their institutions, most state legal arrangements, States are however desirable social institutions, typically depend on violent means. and war is a by-product of nation-state arrangements (in the case of just comprehensive pacifism implies the of inadmissibility institutions, such as police forces and states typically are; be ruled out either individuals, directly delegates, as violence-dispensing effect who forces, by nonviolent nonviolent means. state; but it substitutes, recently or such organisations may because else their behalf. evolved will which is nonviolent methods Pacifism institutions concerned with does not public that order have Pacifism does not organisations maintain they by fully as police alternative nonviolent will be applied, where necessary, to The force of the objection should thus not entail order, sweeping charges of social irresponsibility. 22 the and are coercive actively Law and authority can still operate then in the back-up authority and "enforce" laws. overestimated. on violence however exclude the replacement of such wars, A more telling objection, then, is no doubt further evils to prevent greater evils). that which institutions these directly less or and a more general argument may be inevitability, or not without much further ado. least extensively: violence desirability, In at institution, However wars are by no means the dispense would nor therefore can an argument be mounted against pacifism from the reasonable costs; desirability wars it elimination accordingly of does Nor is it true that prominent not be social succumb to pacifism ... would also entail anarchism, that is, the illegitimacy of government. For a purely voluntary "government" is not a government in the sense that defines a state at all (Np.127). or (differently) A government or administration can certainly operate by nonviolent, political noncoercive, arrangements. arrangements not of this sort are morally impermissible. imply the absence or illegitimacy of government, political community organised under a government. state with authority and not necessarily pacifism does not entail anarchism. main Accordingly, that implies not does it or therefore of a state, of a Nor does even it that imply a certain coercive institutions may not be a second-best solution to moral dilemmas of political organisation. and only pacifism Comprehensive objective, not attained, was Since it admits of states with frameworks of law based on the free agreements of individuals, Gandhi's practice affords a counterexample: a nonviolent Indian state; replacement of British India by a stateless or anarchist society. his it was not the Granted there are genuine interconnections between pacifism and nonviolent anarchism 2", they are not so simple as derivability. Nor is comprehensive pacifism as a moral so ideal easily brought down by its political corollaries. Comprehensive pacifism upsets other widely accepted social practices than concerning like: external and internal state relations, such as war, civil order and the it also tells against the received treatment of example. While other species, animals for it does not entail vegetarianism, while it does not prohibit eating of meat, it does morally forbid violence to animals. 29. those At least it does this so long Both hold that the coercive state which relies upon violent methods is without moral basis or legitimacy. Both involve pretty tall orders, the replacement of violence-dispensing political organisations by alternative arrangements (on replacement in the case of anarchism, see R. Routley and V. Plumwood 'The irrefutability of anarchism', Social Alternatives, 2(3) (1982) 23-8). But they differ as to what justifies these arrangements and what means can be applied (see further Sharp, op. cit., under index headings to anarchism, especially Politics, p.67). Roughly, while pacifism pushes removal of violence to a limit, anarchism pushes removal of authority (especially state authority) and restrictions on liberty, to a limit. Naturally the interconnections did not escape Gandhi: 'The ideally nonviolent state will be an ordered anarchy' (unreferenced citation at the end of the Ecophilosophy Newsletter, #5, p.24). 23 as what normally counts as violence, to animals, continues to rank as is There is little good basis humans (or persons). restriction.^ controversial euthanasia, any in And, moral areas concerning the corollaries killing a such for however similar case, spread humans, of At violence? the suicide, But must creatures does not have to take overtly violent forms. the new "abattoirs" or hospitals a creature simply killing of No force need be applied: in a eats and dies painlessly and without a struggle. The or pill is given life is extinguished, are not pacifist ones, which focus on violence? technical purely arrangements pacifist will to objections solve, in eating meat worthwhile On the face of obtained. so New any rate, the disruption of at principle an Then the proper objections to such practices, for example that consent may not have been obtained, that it, there are no they risk of opening a hornet's nest, consider what examples like euthanasia may suggest, the possibility of nonviolent killing. injection several into e.g. So long as these involve violence, pacifism excludes such practices. involve chauvinistic indeed wherever violence plays a significant role. punishment, capital and the category by restriction of the application of violence to from removed not violence, practices threatened by vegetarian corollaries. But suppose now that the new technology is extended scientists, working in their accustomed military role: as the anti—neutron bomb, which selectively destroys devices which much but clever 'weapons , such newly devised property by further not people, or "dissolve" people, enable "wars" to be fought without violence. just Even a pacifist who goes as far as countenancing nonviolent killing can however avoid these reaches of technological fantasy. For "dissolving" people requires energy, which (since reflecting force) can stand in for force in violence: Was (upgraded) account of that is, the new wars will still involve violence. there old-fashioned however violent anything methods so such wrong as with hunting eating meat obtained by more or raising and killing one's own? Pacifism, like vegetarianism, runs counter to "natural" M. an behaviour of creatures to See R. and V. Routley, 'Human chauvinism and environmental ethics', op. cit. Such a restriction to persons is however imposed by Sharp, op. cit. (e.g. Politics, p.608), and it does remove the problems of vegetarianism and predation. 24 which the principles are supposed to apply. Aggression is a fairly common feature of and human behaviour, and it sometimes (though by no means so often is as made animal The force of the out) erupts in violence. various for ways, example along these argument lines. can however Aggression assumed to be an is evolutionary adaption developed to enable creatures to be better fitted for themselves (of their offspring) in their natural environment. and ir mitigated be survival But most humans for now live in rather artificial environments substantially removed from situations which evolution gradually adapted their features (there is no way they are going to adapt in time to absorb massive doses of radiation, for instance). as Much humans have adjusted their living environment in nonevolutionary ways, so along with it they should substantially adjust their social practices - including aggressive and violent practices, ill-adapted now to their and mostly counterproductive. situation So argues the pacifist. There is a residual problem, practices like that vegetarianism. the Are creatures living in (relatively) natural conditions, such as predators of and tribal people, to be condemned as morally Sometimes, confronting yes, be attained: when wrong these violence? involve when the violence grossly exceeds what is required given the end to Though a way but always? can problem 3 1, it is a rather unsatisfactory way. be beaten the around of edge this What this suggests is that nonviolence is not an absolute, but at best a qualified ideal. The arguments for nonviolence - which are mostly practical arguments which do not exclude occasional uses of violence and do not strictly apply to creatures in natural surroundings - sort of But conclusion. exclude. nonviolent what is called charge for state, is is much more investigation aimed, among other things, at This is^ to concede an of moral insensitivity against comprehensive pacifism so long as P2 remains unqualified. 31. would The further suggestion that emerges upon granting that moral sharper, more sensitive, and less blanket principles than P2. attentuated similar approaches thinking and associated principles in this area are in a pretty primitive that a the suggestion is a dangerous one, practically at least, since it opens the door a chink to other options which categorically suggest The sheer moral power of such pacifism As Singer has in the analogous case of Liberation, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975. 25 vegetarianism: is one see reason e.g., for Animal There is no reason however why giving its adoption some pause. a genuine pacifism (making for real peace) should not be built on a modified version of P2 which permits such natural phenomena as predation. Nothing logically rules out such a genuine and more sensitive pacifism. There are other requirements the position to be worked out should meet as In particular, a rationality requirement implies that pacifists go on to oppose acts similar to those using violence: This is a of requirement otherwise they could have a case made against them. in a different sense from the pure logical consistency sense, namely that of keeping to the same story. for well. pacifism, Again there need be no deep problem so long, this time, as it is not erroneously supposed that there must be a single principle just (e.g. P2) - as distinct from bundle a of moral principles, others of which serve to oppose acts accounted similar to those involving violence.32 io meet the rationality requirement the position should, be integrated into a in larger framework of nondestructive practices, which are of a piece with nonviolent practices.33 For, except metaphorically, practices to the environment, for instance, do not involve violence, e.g. mining in a fertile valley, damaging a wild river, dumping toxic and oceans. In an does not destructive such things as strip wastes in streams extended sense, which gets beyond the confines of the property picture, all these practices are environmental vandalism. vandalism particular, cover violence But even metaphorically, against persons (and certainly not nonphysical violence such as "psychological violence"). What is sought then is an appropriate of these notions covering destructive practices; and also an accompanying synthetic term, better than the umbrella term 'vandolence'. Then P2 is superseded by synthesis an appropriately qualified P2#. It is morally wrong to use vandolence. It remains to characterise the cluster of destructive practices that count as vandolence and to try to justify the principle - no easy tasks. 32. It is important that pacifism, like other deontological positions, reject assessments of similarity simply in terms of similar damaging consequences. Features of the means deployed, for example, also matter. 13. The position has been called 'pacifism. 26 APPENDICES §5. The from arguments impracticality impracticality and pacifism in the real world. of the reality: social alleged Even if it is conceded that pacifism is a viable moral ideal, that it does not fall down as incoherent or ludicrous, still the feasibility of pacifism as a sensible practice to live by will be contested - And it has despite, or perhaps because of, major examples such as Christ and Gandhi. to be admitted the that real world, with all its horror and squalor, does put But in this regard pacifism is not an exception. pacifism to severe tests. Nowhere is the practice of nonviolence usually thought less than in replacing war^. prepared or for succeed Yet nonviolent social defence methods, to replace the usual violent methods, have been described in some detail^, though they properly to likely given a dress rehearsal. have been never The prospects for success of nonviolent defence of,a region can vary significantly, depending upon whether the war is convention observed or not. If the convention is observed then pacifism stands reasonable prospects of success. The difficult cases are where the war convention perhaps unleashed, in broken, is massive ways, on noncombatants. and violence is According to Walzer, in his superficially sympathetic sketch and assessment of nonviolent defence and resistance, 'success is possible only if the invaders are committed to the war convention - ... and they won't always be' (Wp.331^^). attained - there is conventions are flouted. reasons, some got homesick. ruthless of This is presumably be never any guarantee of it, without or with war - even if some The invaders may give them irrelevant, e.g. up and depart for all sorts or they needed a quick decisive victory, they What Walzer no doubt means is something like this: invaders may Success false. that sufficiently in sufficient numbers with sufficient time and sufficient support 34. The more sweeping replacement of the state (of the main source of considered in Routley and Plumwood, in Social Alternatives, op.cit. 35. Again for example, in Sharp, Politics, op. cit. references given there. 36. All page references prefixed by 'W' are to Allen Lane, London, 1977. 27 See also M. Walzer, Martin, Just and war) op.cit., Unjust is and Wars, lines, etc., can eventually succeed. defending The difference lies in the pattern of events; to violence. resorts side But that sort of thing is also true even if the is if the defence "forces" are well-armed it to invaders start and with difficult more civil well -prepared with than afterwards easier the for costly and resistance. Walzer is inappropriate examples. in command, model the of way the Jews, The way.The Nazis, to jump who that conclusion the He is thinking of an extreme totalitarian the enslaved misleading many like cannot succeed when the war convention is abandoned, in terms of defence nonviolent however, thinking, who in state, total Nazis were in Germany, the Jews of Germany providing the the population, by The "resistance" picture is highly and large, did not resist extermination in an organised never invaded Germany, were in control all or the infrastructure and had the cooperation (at least) of the bulk of the population. Walzer's comparison to work, there would have to be an enormous occupying army took over and managed all key Australia it is not even so clear largely united and actively resisting this is which With island territories such as infrastructure. that For logistically population. Walzer's feasible against impression resistance fragmenting and the populace moving into dulled acquiscence (e.g. a of the Wp.332) might have got things the wrong way around, with disbelieving and frustrated soldiers ready to leave. Non violent resistance is however unlikely to be put to the test in any adequate present state-determined circumstances. No state would be prepared to risk way in 37. It has been argued, moreover, that when church leaders, Christian or Jewish, opposed the deportations, most of the Jews were saved (when country by country comparisons are made). See, for one of many treatments of this sensitive issue, R.L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: the Holocaust and the American Future, Harper, New York, 1978, chapter 5. 38. The argument suggested in Walzer (e.g. p.333) that nonviolent methods would increase evil, or at least its distribution, is weak. It is countered by Sharp's observation that the suffering likely to be induced is less than in comparable wars. 28 training its populace different). It full in techniques (civil is defence all too easy for them to "rout" the police: be then would action nonviolent civil obedience, for example, could no longer be ensured by the customary violent means. thus The argument initial sketchings. far §6. On the positive case for pacifism: has been largely defensive, meeting a range of objections to comprehensive pacifism. That in itself is revealing. deviations from are it Pacifism is the require what rest position (inertial and state) The reason for this is simple explanation. violence is, on most ethical systems, at least a prima facie evil, so use of enough: it is what has to be justified. Positive arguments for pacifism can take advantage of and merely justified. case try dispose of "exceptional cases" where violence is supposed to be in that the defender (person or nation) is morally-excluded situation, since the attacker has overstepped moral the position privileged The favourite exception is self-defence against a violent opponent: curious is to its already the in bounds. a Still defender is not morally committed to violence whatever he does - as in a dilemma And since it is at least prima facie wrong, and he does not have situation. to use it, he should not resort to it. An elementary syllogistic argument, given by Narveson (Np.117), can be adapted to give a similar result:- Violence is (intrinsically) wrong Violence in any excepted cases (e.g. self-defence) is still violence Violence in any excepted cases is still (intrinsically) wrong. Naturally those opposed to pacifism will challenge the first premiss, and a dialectic already glimpsed will begin. None of the arguments for pacifism is conclusive, since even where arguments are deductively tight assumptions can be challenged arguments for pacifism particularly good ones. for pacifism, (as above). Nor One of the poorer positive are all the arguments for example, makes similar assumptions to those of the classic theory 29 of war, namely that once war is embarked upon it cannot be limited, nuclear that or chemical hope weapons will be used selectively and restrictively is an illusion, escalation is inevitable. are bound to be overstepped. case is overstated. the e.g. The (moral) limits in war - whatever they are - Although the chances of escalation are real enough, the Limited exchanges and confrontation are possible. Wars are much more social arrangements and much more conventional than the classical theory allows. Wars can, for example, be started and stopped things intervene (e.g. support (as midstream more should the for first inevitably, premiss for those mixture a above) suffering and anguish violent of methods, the They nonviolence. injustice characteristically works, the futility and counterproductiveness of means-ends of the consideration, a range of consequentialist and practical reasons, e.g. pain, important a pollution crisis affecting other neighbouring states). The main reasons for pacifism are, include in cost that in violence violence within the setting of modern industrial societies, the broader popular support base obtained by avoidance of violence, the desirable social consequences of nonviolence such as more less furtive, society. open, the why of pacifism) considerable. These are None of these well-known types of reason (giving separately decisive, but their cumulative affords a model for one way of proceeding^; Mill's defence Mill's procedure works (at least As was pointed out by F. D'Agostino in discussion. 30 of liberty nonviolence, it works as well as it works for liberty). 39. is it is enough (a nonelementary exercise) to adapt Mill's consequentialist arguments for liberty to arguments for otherwise effect reasons can be put together, in various ways, to make a strong positive case for pacifism, as principled nonviolence. as a A more decisive consequentialist data , argument, takes a but making semantical preference rankings on worlds, and these worlds modelling nonviolence Again principles. use of route. are similar practical and The data is used to arrive at then pacifism in applied is derived semantically as principled nonviolence.^0 R. 40. Routley* * The details of such an esoteric defence of moral principles are outlined in R. and V. Routley, op.cit.: a fuller account may be found in their 'Semantical foundations for value theory', Nous (1983), to appear. * With thanks to R. Beehler, F. D'Agostino, B. Martin, L. Mirlin, R. Goodin, and participants in the Philosophy Seminar, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. The main outlines of the paper were drafted associate at Simon Fraser University. 31 while the author was a research OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT, RESEARCH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY School publications: R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, First edition 1973, Second edition 1974, Third edition 1975. Departmental publications: M.K. Rennie, Some Uses of Type Theory in the Analysis of Language, 1974. D. Mannison, M.A. McRobbie, and R. Routley, editors, Environmental Philosophy, 1980. R. Routley, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, 1980. Yellow series (Research Papers of the Logic Group): 1. R.K. Meyer, Why I am not a relevantist, 1978. 2. R.K. Meyer, Sentential constants in R, 1979. 3. R.K. Meyer and M.A. McRobbie, Firesets and relevant implication, 1979. 4. R.K. Meyer, A Boolean-valued semantics for R, 1979. 5. R.K. Meyer, Almost Skolem forms for relevant (and other) logics, 1979. 6. R.K. Meyer, A note on R-^ matrices, 1979. 7. R.K. Meyer and J.K. Slaney, Abelian logic (from A to Z), 1980. 8^ C. Mortensen, Relevant algebras and relevant model structures, 1980. 9. R.K. Meyer, Relevantly interpolating in RM , 1980. 10. C. Mortensen, Paraconsistency and C^, 1981. 11. R.K. Meyer, De Morgan monoids, 1983. 12. R. Routley, Relevantism and the problem as to when Material Detachment and the Disjunctive Syllogism Argument can be correctly used, and N. da Costa, Essay on the foundations of logic, 1983. 13. R. Routley and G. Priest, On Paraconsistency, 198314. R. Routley, Research in logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, 1983 15. R.K. Meyer, Where y fails, 1983. Green series (Discussion papers in environmental philosophy): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. R. Routley, Roles and limits of paradigms in environmental thought and action, 1982. R. Routley, In defence of cannibalism I. Types of admissible and inadmissible cannibalism, 1982. moo R. Routley and N. Griffin, Unravelling the meaning of life?, 1982. R. Routley, Nihilisms, and nihilist logics. R. Routley, War and Peace. I. On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and war-deterrence and the political fall out. R. Routley and V. Plumwood, Moral dilemmas and the logic of deonti R°"ouU.y and V. Plumwood, A. expensive repair-kit for utilitarianism. 7. 10. R. Routley, Maximizing, satisficing, satisizing: rational behaviour under rival paradigms. the difference 1  Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Box 149, Item 3: War and peace II - on the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism of pacifism Subject The topic of the resource Series: Discussion papers in environmental philosophy ; number 9. Published by Australian National University. Department of Philosophy. Published under Richard Sylvan's previous name Richard Routley. Description An account of the resource One of two copies in collection. Annotation on cover: Part corrected. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&amp;advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&amp;range=&amp;collection=&amp;type=&amp;user=&amp;tags=&amp;public=&amp;featured=&amp;exhibit=&amp;geolocation-mapped=&amp;geolocation-address=&amp;geolocation-latitude=&amp;geolocation-longitude=&amp;geolocation-radius=10&amp;submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <span class="MuiTypography-root-125 MuiTypography-body2-126">The University of Queensland's <a data-testid="rek-series" href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/records/search?page=1&amp;pageSize=20&amp;sortBy=score&amp;sortDirection=Desc&amp;searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&amp;searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 149, Item 3 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available <a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1983 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, <a href="https://najtaylor.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. N.A.J. Taylor</a>. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource [31] leaves ; 25 cm. 58.71 MB. Type The nature or genre of the resource Manuscript Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:4d46fce">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:4d46fce</a> Box 149: Publications (to como)