1
20
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Text
THE 'FIGHT FOR THE FORESTS' AFFAIR
Authors:
Richard & Val Routley.
R. Routley has been since 1971
Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Research School of
Social Sciences, A.N.U.;
the position is tenured with a 5 year
bar, at that time passed more or less automatically. V. Routley
is author of a number of published papers both on philosophy and
on environmental subjects.
Title & Contents:
'The Fight for the Forests' (1st edition 1973,
290 pages) looked at the situation of Australian forests, especially
proposed and progressing industrial development of the forests such
as in pine and woodchip schemes;
it discussed economic, ecological
and social aspects of these schemes and of the planning which
underlay and justified them, as well as associated issues in the
foundations of economics and environmental decision-making.
Qualifications to write the book: These were of a reasonable
generalist kind. As philosophers we were well acquainted with the
theory of scientific methodology~ probability and decision theory,
as environmentalists and keen amateur naturalists we had a reasonable
general knowledge of the biological and ecological aspects involved.
The foundations of economics is also an area of academic research
and interest.
The local forestry literature is .neither very copious
nor very specialised, so that it is fairly easy · to become more or
less completely acquainted with it. Most of it is fairly easily
understood by people with~ut professional forestry training.
'The
Fight for the Forests' laid major emphasis on reasoning and on
methodological considerations in planning and prediction, and on \,
bringing outunderlying or hidden assumptions - especially value
assumptions - in these areas.
This is an area in which we were
well qualified to w.~ite. Given the very large range of areas involved
in discussing forestry as a social phenomenon, rangi n g from scientific
methodology and decision theory through sociology, social science,
economics and many areas of biology and ecology, our own special
areas of academic interest and in-depth knowledge were at least as
generally relevant to the issues concerned as most of those involved
in a conventional forestry training.
Care was taken to provide
full references to background work in cases where specialist areas
of knowledge were involved, so that no one had to rely simply on
our authority for claims made.
The book attempted then to present
an integrated picture of the forestry situation in Australia on
the basis of detailed knowledge of some areas relevant to the field,
as the work of foresters themselves often does,* and much of i.t
consisted of what is now known as 'applied philosophy'.
* These points should help dispel the professionalist myth, propagated
commonly by foresters, that only people with professional forestry
training are qualified to write about the forests.
Often such
foresters also advocate a closed decision-making system in which
they; as the 'relevant professionals' have sole rights of decision .
However, forestry issues raise many questions of social values which
are of general concern and shou d be widely discussed.
As well, as
noted, a very wide range of discipline areas are involved, and some
of the most important for the fate of the forests lie right outside
(continued on next page)
�2.
Character of Book: . 'The Fight for the Forests' was not a very
radical book politically but apparently offended mainly because it
attac~ed cherished programs and because of its strong emphasis on
the control of forests by the large forest industries, the close
connections of these industries with state forest services who were
allegedly employed in the public interest, and the role of professional
foresters in promoting ecologically destructive forestry developments
which were in the interests of industry. At that time the forestry
profession was a sacred cow, virtually beyond criticism, and the
book, rather predictably, was the object of intense hostility from
professional foresters (including academic foresters).
Its main
specific contentions, concerning the excessive nature of the pine
program and overestimation in planning for this program, the destructive environmental effects and uneconomic nature for the public of
pine and woodchip schemes in public forests, were at the time
controversial but have been subsequently vindicated by events and
by a number of later studies by others. The book tended to receive
unfavourable reviews from foresters, but received many favourable,
often highly favourable, reviews from non-foresters.
What happened:
Funds for printing the book were obtained, more or
less by chance, from RSSS, which at that time had a substantial
end-of-triennium surplus, without going through any refereeing system.
After final typing for photo-offset printing WfiS completed and just
a few weeks before the book was due to go to the printer, professional
foresters and sympathisers within the university appear to have got
wind of its likely contents.
(An article on pines published the
previous year, in Australian Quarterly 1972, had a substantial impact*·* l
and provided a good idea of the book's general stance). The then
Vice Chancellor, Professor R.M. Williams, suggested that printlng
should not proceed unless the book was given to the head of the
Forestry School at A.N.U., to be revised in ~ccordance with his
comments.
(Given the attitudes, beliefs, and connections of
professionals in general and this head of Department in particular,
this would almost certainly have crippled or destroyed the book.)
Footnote p.l
continued
conventional forestry training. For example, the major and most
influential papers underlying the original planning for the pine
program in the late sixties (papers which were heavily criticised
in our work) were the product of a botanist, Dr. M.R. Jacobs,
although they were primarily concerned ~ith qti~stions of planning
and decision.
But forconsidering these questions (e.g. the popular
planning methodology of overestimating future demand
and population
to 'play safe'), it is more helpful to understand, say, methodology
and decision theory than it is to understand, say, the patterns
of seeding of various eucalypts.
No one complained about Dr. Jacobs
going outside his 'area of competence', nor was his work suppressed
or subjected to censorship on this ground, because he was covered
by the professional umbrella.
There are many similar cases, which
reveal the arbitrariness with which field restrictions are commonly
applied to restrict inquiry.
** 1
After the article appeared there was for the first time parliamentary
questioning of the pine p ogram, with some strong speeches against
it,
and an increasingly critical attitude was
taken in the press.
�3.
Fortunately, the acting-Director of RSSS at the time was Professor
G. Sawer, who resisted this suggestion, and also kindly read
through the manuscript to check on liability to legal action;
(in the fuss preceding publication it had been suggested also that
publication should not proceed because of possible liability to
such legal action). He suggested a few minor changes of a few lines
at one or two points to safeguard against this.
Publication proceeded. The first edition of the book in 1973
sold out within a few months, and two further editions, revised and
updated, (1974, 1975) also sold out shortly after printing, making
it one of the best selling books ever distributed by A.N.U. Press.
Harassment from irate professionals and their sympathisers
within the university was not over however. We were left in no doubt
that the book had been 'an embarrassment to the university'.
In 1974
the author with library rights was prevented on order from the acting
head of the Forestry School, Professor Carron, from using the
Forestry School library.
As this contains.most forestry publications
and material, this constituted a direct attempt to block further work.
This ban was later overturned as a result of intervention from the
Biological Sciences Library Committee.
Later, RSSS, apparently in response to criticism of certain
school publications, set up a committee to review publications
procedure.
Shortly afterwards we were informed that there would be
no funding available for a further edition o f the book or f o r a
a reprint o f the book. No reasons were given. We were not informed
that the book was the subj e ct of a revi e w (as t he re were at that
time no proposals by us for a further edition) . We were given no
opportunity to nominate referees, to supply relevant information,
or to influence the outcome of the review in any way. Subs e quently
the school adopted a different procedural system in which the
departments and authors concerned nominate suitable referees. There
is little doubt that, had we been given the opportunity to follow
the regular system, suitable referees could have been found to provide
favourable reports.
Meanwhile, orders ~or the now out-of-print book
continue to arrive, and it continues to be favourably reviewed and
mentioned, both in Australia and overseas.
There is little doubt
that a further edition or reprint could have been sold. Attempts to
prevent publication were, therefore, ult.Lmately successful.
As a sequel, the production
publications by School presses one - was a major ground used by
take over the School presses and
For the time being, this attempt
of certain unspecified 'controversial'
of which our book was, reportedl½
ANU Press in its recent attempt to
gain central control over publication.
has failed.
General comments:
The situation in the forestry profession showed,
at the time we were working in the area at least, a very high degree
of suppression and professional cohesiveness, and an exceptional
degree of conformity and absence of critical .voices. This probably
is so pronounced because of the great control and influence exerted
by a highly restricted body of employers, namely, a few large forest
industries and the state forest services. For the same reasons perhaps,
there was a high degree of secrecy and control of information.
�4.
We encountered many severe cases of suppression in the forest~y
profession (applyi·n g in a·cademic, research, bureaucratic and state
forest service areas) and in related biological areas. This
included action by state forest services to terminate the research
projects (in state forests) of those who made public statements
unfavourable to them, or who supplied information or were associa.t~d
with those who did, and many other .- adverse effects on the careers
or prospects of potentially critical professionals. The influence
of state forest services reached within the university (ANU).
Suppression was so regular and pronounced that we believe it is
probably true that no one inside the profession or discipline
could have, at that time, written a book similar to 'The Fight
for the Forests'.
Such criticism could only appear where it slipped
past :· the usual professional c9ntrol and suppression mechanisms,
as our book did.
The general suppression mechanism illustrated by this case
then appears to be:
a combination of indoctrination and intimidation,
plus well-developed professional loyalty, ensures that significant
criticism does not originate from inside the profession or
discipline itself, or does so only in a rare, muted and easily
ov~rlooked form;
at the same time the professionalism mystique
and the discipline system is invoked, as it was in our case, to
ensure that no one outside the profession _can make such criticism
in a way which needs to be treated seriously (e.g. through publication
in a university series), and even to ensure that such criticism ~Y
potentially dangerous outsiders is silenced altogether. The
fragmentation of knowledge, like the fragmentation of work, is
thus used as a method of control.
It's a neat system, which nicely
protects a particular set of doctrines and interests.
R. & V. Routley
Research School of so c ial Sciences
Australian National University
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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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
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THE 'FIGHT FOR THE FORESTS' AFFAIR
Authors:
Richard & Val Routley.
R. Routley has been since 1971
Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Research School of
Social Sciences, A.N.U.;
the position is tenured with a 5 year
bar, at that time passed more or less automatically. V. Routley
is author of a number of published papers both on philosophy and
on environmental subjects.
Title & Contents:
'The Fight for the Forests' (1st edition 1973,
290 pages) looked at the situation of Australian forests, especially
proposed and progressing industrial development of the forests such
as in pine and woodchip schemes;
it discussed economic, ecological
and social aspects of these schemes and of the planning which
underlay and justified them, as well as associated issues in the
foundations of economics and environmental decision-making.
Qualifications to write the book: These were of a reasonable
generalist kind. As philosophers we were well acquainted with the
theory of scientific methodology~ probability and decision theory,
as environmentalists and keen amateur naturalists we had a reasonable
general knowledge of the biological and ecological aspects involved.
The foundations of economics is also an area of academic research
and interest.
The local forestry literature is .neither very copious
nor very specialised, so that it is fairly easy · to become more or
less completely acquainted with it. Most of it is fairly easily
understood by people with~ut professional forestry training.
'The
Fight for the Forests' laid major emphasis on reasoning and on
methodological considerations in planning and prediction, and on \,
bringing outunderlying or hidden assumptions - especially value
assumptions - in these areas.
This is an area in which we were
well qualified to w.~ite. Given the very large range of areas involved
in discussing forestry as a social phenomenon, rangi n g from scientific
methodology and decision theory through sociology, social science,
economics and many areas of biology and ecology, our own special
areas of academic interest and in-depth knowledge were at least as
generally relevant to the issues concerned as most of those involved
in a conventional forestry training.
Care was taken to provide
full references to background work in cases where specialist areas
of knowledge were involved, so that no one had to rely simply on
our authority for claims made.
The book attempted then to present
an integrated picture of the forestry situation in Australia on
the basis of detailed knowledge of some areas relevant to the field,
as the work of foresters themselves often does,* and much of i.t
consisted of what is now known as 'applied philosophy'.
* These points should help dispel the professionalist myth, propagated
commonly by foresters, that only people with professional forestry
training are qualified to write about the forests.
Often such
foresters also advocate a closed decision-making system in which
they; as the 'relevant professionals' have sole rights of decision .
However, forestry issues raise many questions of social values which
are of general concern and shou d be widely discussed.
As well, as
noted, a very wide range of discipline areas are involved, and some
of the most important for the fate of the forests lie right outside
(continued on next page)
2.
Character of Book: . 'The Fight for the Forests' was not a very
radical book politically but apparently offended mainly because it
attac~ed cherished programs and because of its strong emphasis on
the control of forests by the large forest industries, the close
connections of these industries with state forest services who were
allegedly employed in the public interest, and the role of professional
foresters in promoting ecologically destructive forestry developments
which were in the interests of industry. At that time the forestry
profession was a sacred cow, virtually beyond criticism, and the
book, rather predictably, was the object of intense hostility from
professional foresters (including academic foresters).
Its main
specific contentions, concerning the excessive nature of the pine
program and overestimation in planning for this program, the destructive environmental effects and uneconomic nature for the public of
pine and woodchip schemes in public forests, were at the time
controversial but have been subsequently vindicated by events and
by a number of later studies by others. The book tended to receive
unfavourable reviews from foresters, but received many favourable,
often highly favourable, reviews from non-foresters.
What happened:
Funds for printing the book were obtained, more or
less by chance, from RSSS, which at that time had a substantial
end-of-triennium surplus, without going through any refereeing system.
After final typing for photo-offset printing WfiS completed and just
a few weeks before the book was due to go to the printer, professional
foresters and sympathisers within the university appear to have got
wind of its likely contents.
(An article on pines published the
previous year, in Australian Quarterly 1972, had a substantial impact*·* l
and provided a good idea of the book's general stance). The then
Vice Chancellor, Professor R.M. Williams, suggested that printlng
should not proceed unless the book was given to the head of the
Forestry School at A.N.U., to be revised in ~ccordance with his
comments.
(Given the attitudes, beliefs, and connections of
professionals in general and this head of Department in particular,
this would almost certainly have crippled or destroyed the book.)
Footnote p.l
continued
conventional forestry training. For example, the major and most
influential papers underlying the original planning for the pine
program in the late sixties (papers which were heavily criticised
in our work) were the product of a botanist, Dr. M.R. Jacobs,
although they were primarily concerned ~ith qti~stions of planning
and decision.
But forconsidering these questions (e.g. the popular
planning methodology of overestimating future demand
and population
to 'play safe'), it is more helpful to understand, say, methodology
and decision theory than it is to understand, say, the patterns
of seeding of various eucalypts.
No one complained about Dr. Jacobs
going outside his 'area of competence', nor was his work suppressed
or subjected to censorship on this ground, because he was covered
by the professional umbrella.
There are many similar cases, which
reveal the arbitrariness with which field restrictions are commonly
applied to restrict inquiry.
** 1
After the article appeared there was for the first time parliamentary
questioning of the pine p ogram, with some strong speeches against
it,
and an increasingly critical attitude was
taken in the press.
3.
Fortunately, the acting-Director of RSSS at the time was Professor
G. Sawer, who resisted this suggestion, and also kindly read
through the manuscript to check on liability to legal action;
(in the fuss preceding publication it had been suggested also that
publication should not proceed because of possible liability to
such legal action). He suggested a few minor changes of a few lines
at one or two points to safeguard against this.
Publication proceeded. The first edition of the book in 1973
sold out within a few months, and two further editions, revised and
updated, (1974, 1975) also sold out shortly after printing, making
it one of the best selling books ever distributed by A.N.U. Press.
Harassment from irate professionals and their sympathisers
within the university was not over however. We were left in no doubt
that the book had been 'an embarrassment to the university'.
In 1974
the author with library rights was prevented on order from the acting
head of the Forestry School, Professor Carron, from using the
Forestry School library.
As this contains.most forestry publications
and material, this constituted a direct attempt to block further work.
This ban was later overturned as a result of intervention from the
Biological Sciences Library Committee.
Later, RSSS, apparently in response to criticism of certain
school publications, set up a committee to review publications
procedure.
Shortly afterwards we were informed that there would be
no funding available for a further edition o f the book or f o r a
a reprint o f the book. No reasons were given. We were not informed
that the book was the subj e ct of a revi e w (as t he re were at that
time no proposals by us for a further edition) . We were given no
opportunity to nominate referees, to supply relevant information,
or to influence the outcome of the review in any way. Subs e quently
the school adopted a different procedural system in which the
departments and authors concerned nominate suitable referees. There
is little doubt that, had we been given the opportunity to follow
the regular system, suitable referees could have been found to provide
favourable reports.
Meanwhile, orders ~or the now out-of-print book
continue to arrive, and it continues to be favourably reviewed and
mentioned, both in Australia and overseas.
There is little doubt
that a further edition or reprint could have been sold. Attempts to
prevent publication were, therefore, ult.Lmately successful.
As a sequel, the production
publications by School presses one - was a major ground used by
take over the School presses and
For the time being, this attempt
of certain unspecified 'controversial'
of which our book was, reportedl½
ANU Press in its recent attempt to
gain central control over publication.
has failed.
General comments:
The situation in the forestry profession showed,
at the time we were working in the area at least, a very high degree
of suppression and professional cohesiveness, and an exceptional
degree of conformity and absence of critical .voices. This probably
is so pronounced because of the great control and influence exerted
by a highly restricted body of employers, namely, a few large forest
industries and the state forest services. For the same reasons perhaps,
there was a high degree of secrecy and control of information.
4.
We encountered many severe cases of suppression in the forest~y
profession (applyi·n g in a·cademic, research, bureaucratic and state
forest service areas) and in related biological areas. This
included action by state forest services to terminate the research
projects (in state forests) of those who made public statements
unfavourable to them, or who supplied information or were associa.t~d
with those who did, and many other .- adverse effects on the careers
or prospects of potentially critical professionals. The influence
of state forest services reached within the university (ANU).
Suppression was so regular and pronounced that we believe it is
probably true that no one inside the profession or discipline
could have, at that time, written a book similar to 'The Fight
for the Forests'.
Such criticism could only appear where it slipped
past :· the usual professional c9ntrol and suppression mechanisms,
as our book did.
The general suppression mechanism illustrated by this case
then appears to be:
a combination of indoctrination and intimidation,
plus well-developed professional loyalty, ensures that significant
criticism does not originate from inside the profession or
discipline itself, or does so only in a rare, muted and easily
ov~rlooked form;
at the same time the professionalism mystique
and the discipline system is invoked, as it was in our case, to
ensure that no one outside the profession _can make such criticism
in a way which needs to be treated seriously (e.g. through publication
in a university series), and even to ensure that such criticism ~Y
potentially dangerous outsiders is silenced altogether. The
fragmentation of knowledge, like the fragmentation of work, is
thus used as a method of control.
It's a neat system, which nicely
protects a particular set of doctrines and interests.
R. & V. Routley
Research School of so c ial Sciences
Australian National University
Dublin Core
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Box 70, Item 1: Draft of The 'fight for the forests' affair
Subject
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Printout of draft, undated. Paper published, Routley R and Plumwood V (1986), 'The "Fight for the Forests" affair', in Martin B, Baker CMA, Manwell C and Pugh C (eds) Intellectual suppression: Australian case histories, analysis and responses, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.
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Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff.
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<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a>
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<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&pageSize=20&sortBy=score&sortDirection=Desc&searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 70 Item 1
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<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a>
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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>.
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Box 59: Nuclear
-
https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/a2d897c3f43419ae04104b4b7a0919b7.pdf
0ec140abbbef068d6ca7a2d80321fb03
PDF Text
Text
NUCLE AR POWER -
I.
ETHIC AL,
SOC I AL AND POLltt AAL DI MiN S I ONS
COMPETING PARADIGMS AN D THE NU CLEAR DEBAT E.
1870
One ha rdly needs initia t i on i nt o the dark my s te ri e s of
nucl ear ph ys i cs to contribu te use f ully t o t he debat e no w
wid e l y r anging ov e r nuc lear powe r . While ma ny i mpo r tan t
empi rica l que stions ar e s t i ll unr e s olved, t hese do not r e a lly
l i e a t th e ce nt r e of t he con t r ove rsy. In st e ad, it is a
de ba t e about val ue s . ..
ma ny of the que s tions ~hi ch a ri s e are s oc i al an d et hica l one s . 1
Socio logical inves tigation s have conf i rme d that th e n ucl ea r deba t e is primaril
y
one ove r what is wor th having or pursuing and over what we a re ent i t l ed to do
to o th e rs .
They ha ve also confirme d tha t t he debate i s polaris ed a lon g t he
li nes o f compe ting paradigm s. 2 Accordin g to the entre nc he d parad i gm dis ce rn e
d,
that conste llation of value s , attitude s and be liefs o fte n ca ll e d t he Domi nan t
So ci a l Pa radigm (hereaft er the Old Paradigm ),
economic criteria be come the be nchmark by whi ch a wi de ran ge of
individu al and social action is judged and e va luat e d . And be li e f
in the market and marke t mechan isms is quit e ce ntral . Clust e rin g
around this core belief is the convicti on th a t e nt e r p r i s e flou r is hes
bes t i n a system of r isks and rewards, that di ffe r e nti als a r e
neces sary ..• , and in the nece ssity for some fo r m o f di vis i on of
labour, and a hi e rarchy of skills and exper t is e . In pa rt i cul a r,
t here i s a be li e f in th e comp e t e nce o f e xperts i n gener a l and of
sci entis t s in pa r ticular .
the re is an empha s i s on q uantif i ca t ion . 3
The ri v a l world view , sometime s c all e d t he Alte rnative Environm e ntal Par ad igm
(the New Paradi gm) dif f ers on almos t e ve ry pcint , and, acco rdin g t o so ciologi
sts ,
in ways summari sed i n th e fo llowing t a bl e 4 Domi nant Socia l Para digm
CORE VALUES
Ma te r i a l (e conomic growth , progress an d dev elopmen t )
Na tu ra l env ironment va lu e d as resourc e
Dom i nat i on over na t ur e
Al t e rn a tive Env ir onme nt al
Pa rad igm
Non-ma terial (se l f -r eali sa t io n)
Na t ural e nvir onm e nt i ntrin s i cally
valu ed
Ha r mo ny with na tu r e
ECONOMY*
Ma rket forces
Ri s k a nd rewa r d
Rewa r ds for ach i evemen t
Diff e rent i a l s
Individ ua l se lf-help
Public i nte r es t
Sa fety
Incomes r elat ed t o nee d
Egali t a r ian
Co ll ective/soc i al provi s i on
PO LITY
Authori t at iv e s t ru c t ures (e xp e r t s in flue ntia l)
Hi e r a r ch1.c a l
Law and order
Ac t io n through o ffi c ia l i nst it ut io ns
Pa rtic ip a tive s t ruc t ur e s ( ci ti zen/
wo r ke r invo lveme n t )
No n- hi era r chical
Liberation
Di r ec t a c ti o n
SOCIETY
Ce ntr a lised
La r ge-s ca le
As socia tional
Or der ed
Dece ntr a l ised
Small - s ca l e
Communa l
Flexib l e
NATURE
Ampl e rese r ves
Nature host il e/ ne u t r a l
Envi r onmen t cont roll a ble
Earth ' s r esou r c e s lim i ted
Nature be nign
Na t ure de l i ca t el y ba l a nc ed
KNOWLEDGE
Co nf idence in sc i ence and t ec hnology
Ra t i onal i t y of mea ns (only)
Li mit s t o sc i e nce
Rati ona lit y of en ds
*Stat e
socia l ism , as pr a ctised i n mo s t of t he " Eastern b l oc" , di ffers
as to eco nomi c o r ganisation , t he ma r ket i n pa r ticula r be i ng rep l ac ed
sys tem hy ~ comma nd sy st e m) . Bu t sin c e t he r e i s v irt ual l y no debate
r·o ni i nes 'l l s r a t <! ., ociali sm , 5 that mJnnr va riant on th e Old Para digm
from t he Ol d Pa rad i gm r eall y on ly
by cen t ral planning (a ma r ke t
over o nu c lea r futu r e within t he
ne ed no t be de lineat ed he r e .
�2
No doubt the competing paradigm picture is a trifle simple (and
subs equently it is important to disentangle a Modified Old Paradigm, which
softens the old econ omic assumptions with social welfa r e requirements :
really
and
instead of a New Paradigm there are rather count erpa radigms, a
cluster of not very well worked out positions that diverge from the cluster
marked out as the Old Paradigm) .
Nonetheless it is empi rically investigable,
and, most important, it enables the nuclear debate to be focuss ed .
Large -
scale nuclear development, of the sort now occurring in much of the world ,
runs counter to leading tenets (such as societal features) of the New Pa radigm.
Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the assessment of nucl ear
power, instead of or in addition to merely economic factors such as cost and
efficiency, is already to move somewhat beyond the recei ved paradigm.
For
under the Old Paradigm, strictly construed, th e nuclear debate is confined to
the tenns of the narrow utilitarianism up on which contemporary economic
practice is p r emisse d, the issues to questions of economic means (to assumed
economistic ends) along with technological, social engineering and other
instrumental details :
whatever falls outside these terms is ( dismissed as)
.
.
1.6
irrationa
Furthermore, nuclear development rece ive s its support from adherents
of the Old Paradigm.
Virtually all the arguments in favour of it are set
within the assumption frame.work of the Old Paradigm, and without these
assumptions the case for the nuclear future the world is presently committed
to fails .
But in fact the argument for a nuclear future from the Old Paradigm
is itself broken-backed and ultimat ely fails, unless the free enterprise
economic assumptions are replaced by th e ethically unacceptable assumptions of
advanced (corporate) capitalism .
The two paradigm picture also enables our case against a nuclear future
(a case written from outside the Old Paradigm) to be structured.
.
7
main parts : -
There are two
It is argue d, firstl y , from without the Old Paradigm, that
nuclear development is ethically unjustifiable; but that, secondly, even from
within the framework of the ethically dubious Old Paradigm, such development
is unacceptable, since significant features of nuclear development conflict
with indispensible features of the Paradigm (e . g . co sts of project development
and state subsidization with market independence and crite ria for project
selection) .
It has appeared acceptable from within the dominant paradigm only
because ideals do not square with practice, only because the assumptions of th e
Old Paradigm are but very rarely applied in contemporary political practice,
�3
th e place of pure (or mixed) capitalism having been usurped by corporate
capitalism.
It is because the nuclear debate can be carried on within th e
framework of the Old Paradigm that the debate - although it is a debate about
values, because of the conflicting values of the competing paradigms - is not
just a debate about values; it is also a debate within a paradigm as to means
to already assumed (economistic) ends, and of rational choice as to energy
options within a predetermined framework of values. (In this corner belong,
as explained in section VIII, most decision theory argume nts, arguments often
considered as encompassing all the nuclear debate is ethically about, best
utilitarian me ans to predetermined ends . )
For another leading characteristic
of the nuclear deb a te is the attempt, under the dominant paradigm to remove it
from the ethical and social sphere, and to divert it into specialist issues whe th e r over minutiae and contingenci es of present techno l ogy o r ove r medical
or legal or mathematical details. 8
The double approach can be applied as regards each of t he main problems
nuclear development poses.
There are many i nte rr ela t ed problems, and the
argument is further structured in terms of these.
For in the advancement and
promotion of nucle ar power we encounter a remarkable combination of factors, never
befo re assembled :
establishment, on a massive scale , of an industry which
involves at each stage of its processing serious risks and at some stages of
p roduction possible catastrophe , which delivers as a by-product rad ioactive
wastes which require up to a million years' storage but for which no sound and
e conomic storage methods are known, which grew up as part of the war industry
and which is easily subverted to deliver nuclear weapons, which r equires for
i t s operation considerable secrecy, limitations on the flow of informa tion and
r es trictions on civil liberties, which depends for its economics, and in orde r
to generate expected profits, on substantial state subsidization, supper½ and
intervention.
with problems.
It is, in short, a very high techological develo pmen t, beset
A first important problem, which serves also to exemplify
e thical issues and principles involved in other nuclear power que st i on s , is
th e unreso l ved matter of disposal of nuclear wastes.
II . THE NUCLEAR WASTE DISPOSAL PROBLEM, AND THE TRAIN PARABLE .
A long distance country train has just pulled out.
crowded carries both pass e ngers and fr e i gh t.
The train which is
At an early stop in the journey
someon e con signs as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which
contains a high ly toxic and exp losive gas.
This is packaged in a very thin
container which, as the consigner is aware, may not contain th e gas for the
�4
full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if th e train
should strike any real trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the
interior of the train becomes very hot, if the train should be derailed or
involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interefere inadvertently
o r deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it.
these sorts of contingencies have occurred on some previous journeys.
All of
If the
container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some
of the people on the train in adjacent carriages, while othe r s could be maimed
or incur serious diseases.
Most of us would roundly condemn such an action.
consigner of the parcel say to try to justify it?
What might the
He might say that it is not
certain that the gas will escape and that it is mere speculation to suppose it
will , that the world needs his pr~uct and it is his duty to supply it , and
that in a ny case he is not responsible for th e train or the people on it. These
sorts of excuses however wo uld norrrally be seen as ludicrous when set in this
context . What is worth remarking is that similar excuses are not always so seen
I
when the consigner, again a "responsible" b usin essman , puts his workers ' health
or other peoples ' welf are at risk.
Suppose he ways that it is hi s own and otherd press ing needs which
justify his action.
The company he controls,which produces the material as a
by-product , is in bad financia l straits, and could not afford to produce a
better container even if it knew how to make one.
If the company fails , he and
his family will suffer, his employees will lose their jobs and have to look
for others, and th e whole company town, through loss of spending and the
cancellation of the Multiplier Effe ct, will be worse off.
The poor and unemployed
of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer
espe cially. Few people would accept such a story, even if correct, as justification .
Even where there are serious risks and costs to ones e lf or some group for whom
one is concerned one is usually considered not t o be entitled to simply transfer
the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto
other uninvolved parties,
especially where they a ri se from one's own, or one's group 's, chosen life-style.
The matter of nuclear waste disposal has many moral features which resemble
the train case . How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as th e argument
progresses . There is no known proven safe way to package th e highly toxic
wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around th e world as
large- scale nuclear development goes ahead. 9 The waste problem will be much
more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with
�5.
each one of the 2000 or so reactors envisaged by the end of the century producing,
on average , annual wastes containing 1000 times the radioactivity of the
Hiroshima bomb .
Much of this waste is extremely t oxic .
For example, a
millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer .
Wastes
will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after
the ir expected life times of perhaps 40 years , and which, some have estimated,
may require l½ million years to reach saf e levels of radioactivity.
Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environ ment fo r
th e ir entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period
a ve rages a thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include
plutonium, there is a half to a million yea r storage problem . Serious problems
have aris en with both short-term and proposed long-t erm methods of storage,
e ven with th e comparatively small quantities of waste produced ove r th e last
10
twenty years.
Short-term methods of storage require continued human in t e rven tion, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human i nterference and risk of leakage through non-human factors .
No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic
history of the earth over the last million years, a period whose flu ctua tion s
in climate we are only just beginning to guage and which has seen four Ice
Ages , could be confident that a rigorous guarantee of safe storage could be
provided for the vast period of time involved. Nor does the history of human
affa irs over the last 3000 years give ground for confidence in safe storage by
methods requiring human intervention over perhaps a million years . Proposed
long-term storage methods such as storage in granite formations or in salt mines,
are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already pro ved to
involve difficulties with attempts made to put them into practice. Even as
regards expensive recent proposals for first embedding concentrated wastes in
glass and encapsulating the r e sult in multilayered metal containe rs before rock
deposit , simulation mo dels reveal that radioactive material may not rema in
suitably is ola ted from human environment . 11 In short, the best pres ent storage
proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and
.
h .
.
lla
d amaging t eir environment.
Given the heavy costs which could be involve d fo r the future, and given
the known limits of technology, it is methodological ly unsound to bet, as
nuclear nations have, on the discovery of safe procedures for storage of wastes.
Any new procedures (required before 2000) will probably be but variations on
present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies.
For instance , none of
the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly test e d, and they may
�6.
well prove to involve unforeseen difficultie s and risks when an attemp t is made
to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could
provide a rigorous guaran t ee 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 geological
or future µuman factors . But even if an economicall y viable, rigorously safe
long t e rm storage method could be devised , there is the problem of gua rantee ing
that it would be universally and invariably used.
The assumption that it
would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive
economicall y and politically ) seems to p r esuppose a level of efficiency,
pe rfection and concern for the f u ture which has not previously been e ncountere d
in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nucl ea r industry. 12
Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long t e rm storage
sites through pe rhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weaponsgrade radioactive material will be accessible , over much of the million year
storage peri od, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it.
Th e assumption that a way will nonetheless be found , before 2000,
which gets around the wastestorag e problem (no longer a nere disposal problem)
is accordingly not rationally based, but is rather like many assumpti ons of way s ,
an article of faith . It is an assunption supplied by the Old Par adigm, a no
limitations ass ump tion , that there are really no (developmen t) problems that
cannot be solved technologic ally (if not in a fash i on that is always
immediately economi cally feasible).
The assumption has played
an important
part in development plans and pra ctic e.
It has not only encouraged an unwarrant e d
technolog ical optimism (not to say hubris 13 ), that there are no limits to what
humans can accomplish , es pe cially through science ; it has led t o the embarcation
on projects before crucial problems have been satisfactor ily solved or a solution
is even in sight , and it has led to th e idea that technology can always be suitably
controlled .
It has also led, not surprisingl y, to disasters .
There are severe
limits on what technology can achieve (some of which a r e becoming known in the
form of limitation theorems 14 ); and in addition there are human limitations
which modern technologic al development s often fail to take due account of (risk
a nalysis of the likelihood of reactor accidents is a relevant example, discuss e d
below) . The original nuclear technology dream was that nuclear fissi on would
provide unlimi t ed energy (a 'clean unlimited supply of power '). That dr e am soon
shattered. The nu clear industry apparently remains a net consume r of power,
and nuclear fission will be but a quite shor t-t erm supplier of power. 15
�)
7.
The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclea r development
are , then, significant.
Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for
a million years, but even with the (suspect) breeder r eactor it could be an
energy source for only perhaps 150 years.
It will do nothing for the energy
problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be se riously
affected by the wastes.
Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of futur e people could
be fo rced to bear significant risks resulting from the provision of the
(extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people o f 10 generations.
Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive
materials th e only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the fu ture .
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 transition t o 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 .
For they may well have to face the change to renewable res ources 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' dreams of global
industrialisation are realised , more and more of the global population will have
become dependent on high energy consumption and associat ed 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 larg ely depleted of non-renewable
resources, and in which su ch r enewable r eso urces as forests and soils as remain,
resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life ,
15a
are in a run-down condition. Such points
tell against th e idea th a t future
people mGst be , if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy , at least
indirect beneficiaries .
It is for such reasons th at the train pa rabl e cannot
be turned around to work in favour of nuclear power, with for exampl e , the
nuclear train bringing relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (onl y)
by nuclear power.
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 .
Like the consigner in the train
parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to ge t itself out of a
mess arising from its chosen life style - the creation of e conomies dependent on
an abundance of non-renewable energy, which is limited in supply - to pass on
costs and risks of serious harm to others who will obtain no corresponding
benefits .
The " solution" may enable the avoidance of some uncomfortable changes
�8.
in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as
the consigner's action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and his immediate
surroundings, but at the expense of passing heavy burdens to other uninvolved
parties, whose opportunity to lead decent lives may be seriously jeopardised.
Industrial society has - under each paradigm, so it
will be argued -
cl e ar alternatives to · this action, which is taken essentially to avoid changing
corporately-controlled patterns of consumption and protect the interest of
those comparatively few who benefit from them .
If we apply to the nuclear situation, so perceived , the standards of
behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle if perhaps
of t en not in fact ) in the contemporary wo rld, it is not easy to avoid the
conclusion that nuclear development involves gross injustice with respect to
15a
th e future .
There appear to be 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 the nuclear pa rcel
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 imply that there are no circumstances in
which such an action might be justifiable, or at least whe re the matter is less
clearcut.
It is the same with the nuclear case .
Just as in the cas e of the
consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying
circumstances might be, and whether they apply in th e present case.
We consider
these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn,
beginning with the ques tion of our obligations to the future.
Resolution of
this question casts light on other ethical questions concerning nuclear development.
It is only when these have been considered that the matter of whether
there are overriding circumstances is taken up again (in section VII).
III
OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE.
The especially problematic area
is that of the distant (i.e . non-immediat e) fut ure, the futur e with which
people alive today will have no direct contact: by comparison, the immediate
future gives fewer problems for most ethical theories.
In fact the question of
obliga tions to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories
fail to pass , and also has serious repercussions in political philosophy as
regards the adequacy of accepted (democra ti c and other) institutions which do
not take due account of the interests of future creatures.
�9.
Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on the issue.
A good
many of the philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down
in favour of the same considerations 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
a lesser 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 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 th ere are no
moral obligations to the future beyond perhaps those to the next gene ration .
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 a ct ing or failing to act deriving from the
ef fect of our actions on future people . Of those philosophers who say , or
whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate)
future, who have opted for the unconstrained position, many have based this view
on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose
some temporal or spatial contiguity .
Th us moral obligation is seen as grounded
on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people
widely separated in time ( o r sometimes in space) . Fo r example, obligation is
seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also
non-transitive . Among su ch suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or
r eq uirements on moral obligation , which would rule out obligations to the nonimmediate future are these :- Firstly there are those accounts which require that
someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his r ights or
en titlement . People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and
entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing effective to
e nforce any claims they might have for their rights against us.
Secondly , there
a re 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 invariant 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 couid be no guarantee that any
contemporary institutions would do it for them .
�10.
Both the view that moral obligation requires the cont ex t of a moral
community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rul e out th e
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 r ela tions
of short duration such as sympathy and love.
As well there are difficulties
about love and sympathy for (non-existent ) people in the far distant futu r e 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 l ittle or no sympa th y .
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
peop l e ; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary people had
no obligations concerning future people and could damage them as it suited them.
What all these views have in common is a picture of obligation as
some thing acquired, either individually or institutionally , something which
is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. pa rticipatin g
in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can
fail to have (e . g . love, sympathy, empathy). 16 Because obligation therefore
becomes conditional, features usually (and correctly) thought to characterise
obligation such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding
features) are lost, especially where there is a choice wh e ther or not to do the
thing required to acquire the obligation, and so as to whether to acquire it.
The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the
distant future.
The view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future
people, that one is free to act however one likes with respect to them, is not
however sustainable. Consider, for example , a scientific group which, for no
particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places
in orbit a cobalt bomb 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
...
�11.
the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictab le
result of the action. The unconstra ined position clearly implies that this is
an acceptabl e moral enterpris e, that whatever else we might legitimat ely
criticize in the scientis ts' experimen t, perhaps its being ove r-e xpensive or
badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do
to futu re people . The unconstra ined position also endorses as morally acceptabl e
the following sort
of policy: -
A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit
from mining , processin g and manufactu ring a new type of material which, although
it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendan ts, will
over a pe ri od of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an
enormous ep idemi c of cancer among the inhabitan ts of the earth at that time .
According to the unconstra ined view the firm is free to act in its own interests ,
without any considera tion for the harm it does r emote future people.
Such counterex amples to the unconstra ined view, which are easily vari e d
and multiplie d , might seem childii>hl y obvious. Yet the unconstra ined position
concernin g the future f rom which they follow is far from being a straw man ; not
only have several philosoph ers endorsed this position, but it is a cl e ar
implicati on of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligatio n, as
well as of prevailin g e conomic theory. It seems that those who opt for the
unconstra ined position have not considere d such examples , despite their being
clearly implied by their position.
We suspect that - we would certainly hope
that - when it is brought out that the unconstra ined position admits such
counterex amples , that being free to act implies among other thin gs being free to
inflict pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for the unconstra ined
position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many
of those who have put forward the unconstra ined position seem to have had in
mind in denying moral obligatio n is rather that · future people can look after
themselve s, that we are not responsib le for their lives. The popular view that
the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causal l y
independe nt of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in the counterexample cases or in the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone
to take care of itself .
Present people are influenci ng it , and in doing so
thereby acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsi bilities as they do in
causally affecting the present and immediate future, namely the obli gation to
tak e accoun t i n what they do of people affected and their interests , to be
care ful in their actions, to take account of the genuine probabili ty of their
actions causing harm, and to see that th ey do not act so as to rob future
people of the chance of a good life.
�12.
Furth e rmore, to say that we are not respon s ible f o r th e lives o f future
people does not amount to th e same thing as sayin g t hat we are fr ee to do as we
like with r es pe ct to them , that there are no moral constraints on our act io n
involving th e m. In just th e same way , th e fact that on e does no t hav e o r ha s not
acquired an obliga tion to some stran ge r with whom one has ne ver been i nvolved , that
on e has no responsibil ity for his life, does not imply that on e is fr ee t o do
what on e like s with respect to him, for e xample to r ob him or to pursue some
course of action of advantage to on e self which could s e riously ha rm him.
These difficultie s for the uncons trained position arise in part from the
(sometime s deliberate) failure to make an important distinction betwe e n acquired
or assume d obligation toward somebody , for which some act of acquisition or
a s sumption is required as a qualifying condition , and moral constraints , which
require, for example, that one should not act so as t o damage or harm someone ,
a n d for which no act of acquisition is required.
There i s a conside rable
di ffer ence in the level and kind of responsibil ity involved. In the first cas e
on e must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e . g.
have loves, sy!ll)athy, be contracted.
In the second case responsibil it y arises
as a r e sult of being a causal agent who is aware of the cons eque nces o r probable
consequence s of his action, and thus does not have to be es pecially acquired or
assumed.
Thus there is no problem about how the latt e r class , moral c onstra ints,
can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult o r i mpossible
for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfi e d . They appl y a s a result
o f th e abil i t y to produce causal effects on the distant future of a r eas onably
pr e dict a ble nature .
Thus also moral constraints can apply to what do e s not
(ye t) e xist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist . Wh ile
it may pe rhaps be the case that there would need to be an acquired or a ssume d
ob liga tion in order for it to be claimed that contemporar y people mus t make
special sacrifices f or future people of an heroic kind, or even to he lp them
e s pe cially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrain e d
from harming them . Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigne r cannot
argue in justificatio n of his action that he has never assumed or acquired
re s ponsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no
l ove or sympathy for th em and that t hey are not part of his moral community , in
short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one ne eds to
argue concerning the train, and the nuclear case , is that there are mo ral
constrain ts against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations
to take responsibil ity for the live s of people involved .
There has been an attempt 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 distinction s between constraints and
acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogat ion this is just
�13 .
to misrep resent the positio n of these obliga tions. For exampl e, one
is no more
engagin g in heroic self-sa crifice by not forcing future people into
an unviab le
life positio n or by refrain ing from causing then direct harm than
the consign er
is resorti ng to heroic self-sa crifice in re frainin g from placing his
dangero us
package on the train.
The conflat ion of moral restrai nts with acquire d obliga tion, and the
attemp t there~ ith to view all constra ints as acquire d and to write
off nonacq uired
constr aints, is facilit ated through the use of the term ' moral obligat
ion ' both
to signify any type of deontic constra ints and also to indicat e r athe
r someth ing
which has to be assumed or require d . The conflat ion is encoura ged
by reduct ionist
positio ns which, in attemp ting to accoun t for obligat ion in genera
l, mistake nly
endeavo ur to collaps e all obligat ions . Hence the equa ti on , and some
main roots
of the uncons trained positio n, of the erron eous belief that there
are no moral
constr aint s concern ing the distant future.
The uncons trained view tends to give way , under the weight of counte
rexampl es , to more qualifi ed, and sometim es ambiva lent, positio ns ,
for example
the positio n that
our obliga tions are to immedi ate poster ity, we ought to try to
improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to
our immedi ate succes sors in a better conditi on, and that is all; 17
there are in practic e no obliga tions to the distan t futur e . A main
argume nt
in favour of the latter theme is that such obliga tions would in practic
e be
otiose . Everyth ing that needs to be accoun ted for can be en compass
ed through
the chain picture of obliga tion as linking succes sive genera tions,
under which
each genera tion has obliga tions, based on loves or sympath y , only
to the
succeed ing genera tion . The re are at least three objecti ons to this
chain
accoun t. First, it is inadeq uate to treat constr aints concern ing
the future
as if they applied only between genera tions, as if there were no questio
n of
constr aints on individ uals as opposed to whole genera tions, since
individ uals
can create causal effects , e . e. harm, on the future in a way which
may create
individ ual respon sibility , and which often cannot be sheeted home
to an e ntire
genera tion .
Nuclea r power and its wastes , for exampl e, are strictl y the
respon sibility of small groups of power- hol ders, not a genera tional
respon
sibility .
Second ly, such chains, since non-tr ansitiv e, cannot yield direct obligat
ions to
the distan t future . But for this very r eason the chain pict ure cannot
be
adeq uate, as exampl es again show. For the pic ture is unable to explain
severa l
of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the exampl es already
discuss ed
which show that we can have a direct effect on the distan t future
withou t
affecti ng the next genera tion, who may not even be able to influen
ce matters .
�14.
Thirdly, improvement s fo r immediate successors may be achieved at th e expense of
disadvantag es to people of the more distant future . Improving the world for
immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstanc es
be most easily achieved by , ruining it for less immediate successors . Such
cases can hardly be written off as "ne ver- never land" examples since many cases
of environment al exploitatio n might be seen as of just this type. e . g . not just
the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewab le resources and the
long- term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through
overus e .
If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from th e
fa vouring 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 ove r time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in
the way the chain picture suggests .
IV . ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE: ECONOMISTIC UNCERTAINTY
AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS. While there are grave difficultie s for the
unconstrain ed position, qualificatio n leads to a more defensible position.
According to the main qualified position we a r e not entirely unconstrain ed
with respe ct 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 pres ent and immediate
future . The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, coun t for
very much l ess than the interests of present people. Hence such thin gs as nuclear
development and various exploitativ e activities which benefi t present people should
proceed, even if people of the distant future are (somewha t) disadvantag ed by them .
The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in
prevailing 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 a discount rate , so dis counting costs and risks to future people.
a t tempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming
increasingl y common , can lead then to the qualified position. What is
objectionab le in such an approach is that
The
economics should operate within the
bounds of moral (deontic) constraints , just as in practice it operates within
legal constraints , not detennine what those constraints are. There are moreover
alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one
which discounts the future is to beg many questions at issue.
�15.
Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting
the future, the most threadbare is based on the assumption that future
generations will be better off than present ones, and so better placed to handle
th e waste problem. 18 Since there is mounting evidence that future ge ne rations
may well not be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter,
no argume nt for discounting the interest s of future gcncrntionfl on thi s
can carry much weight. Nor is that all that is wrong with the argument.
biH:1i. B
For
it depends at base on the assumption that poorer contemporar ies would be making
sacrifices to richer successors in foregoing such (allegedly beneficial)
development s as nuclear power .
That is, it depends on the already scotched
sacrifice argument .
In any case, for the waste disposal problem to be
legitimatel y bequeathed to the future gene rations, it would have to be shown,
what recent economic progress hardly justifies, that future generations will
be , not just better off , but so much better off and more capable that they
can duly absorb the nuclear waste burden.
A more plausible argument for discounting is directly in terms of
opportunity costs. It is argued , from the fact that a dollar gained now is worth
much more than a dollar received in the non-immedia te future (because the first
dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is
required to obtain equivalent monetary values, and so for efficient allocation
of resources . Similarly it is argued, by virtue again of equalizatio n of monetary
value, that compensatio n - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to
economica lly - costs much less now th an later . Thus a few pennies set aside
(e.g . in a trust fund) now or in the future, if need be, will suffice to
compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage.
There are, presently at least , insurmounta ble practical difficultie s about
applying such discounting , e . g . how to de t ermine appropriate future discount rates .
A more serious objection is that applied generally, the argument presupposes ,
what is false, that compensatio n, like value, can always be converted into
monetary e quivalents , that peo ple (including those outside market frameworks)
can be monetarily compensated for a variety of damages, i n cluding cancer and loss
of life . There is no compensatin g a dead man, or for a lost species. In fact
the argument presupposes a do uble reduction neither part of which can succeed :
it is not just that value cannot in general be represented at all adequately
monetarily , 19 but (as against utilitariani sm, for example) that constraints and
obligations can not be somehow reduced to mat t ers of value . It is also
presupposed that all decision me thods, suitable for requisite nuclear choices,
�16.
are bound to apply discounti ng . This is far from so : indeed Goodin argues that,
on the contrary, more appropria te decision rules do not allow discounti ng, and
discounti ng only works in practice with expected utility rules (such as underlie
cost-bene fit and benefit-r isk analyses) , which are, he contends strictly
inapplica ble for nuclear choices (since no t all outcomes can be duly determine d
and assigned probabil ities, in the way that applicatio n of the rules requires. ). 20
As the preceding arguments reveal, the discounti ng move often has the same
result as the unconstra ined position . If, for instance, we consider the cancer
example and reduce costs to payable compensa tion, it is evident that over a
sufficien tly long period of time discounti ng at curren t prices would lead to the
conclusio n that there are no recoverab le damages and so , in economic terms, no
constrain ts . In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off.
One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the applicatio n of
discoun t rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no
more than about 15 years, 21 and applicati on of such rates would simply beg
the question against the i.nterests and rights of future pe ople . Where there is
certain future damage of a morally forbidden type, for example , the whole method
of discounti ng is simply inapplica ble, and its use would violate moral
constrain ts .
Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids th e objection s
from cases of certain damage, comes from probabili ty considera tions. The distant
future, it is argued , is much more uncertain than t he present and itillue diate
fut ure, so that probabili ties are consequen tly lower, perhaps even approachi ng
or coincidin g with zero for any hypothesi s concernin g the distant future. But
then if we take ac count of probabil iti es in the obvious way , by simply multiplyi ng
th e m 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 neighbour ing people
where (much ) high~r probabil ities are attached. So in the case of confl ict
between the present and the future where it i s a question of weighing certain
benefits to the people of the present and the immediat e future against a much
lower probabili ty of indetenni nate costs to an indetermi nate number of distant
future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present,
assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved . But of course
it cannot be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits
are involved in the nucle ar case, especial ly if it is a question of risking
poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years , with consequen t
risk of serious harm to thousands of ge nerations of future people, in order to
obtain doubtful benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportuni ty
to maintain corporati on profitabi lity or to continue unnecess arily high energy
use.
And even if the costs an d benefits were comparabl e or
evenly weighted,
�"
17.
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
s ufficiently large.
Such a cost-benefi t or risk-benefi t approach to moral and decision
problems , with o r without the probability frills , is quite inadequate where
different parties are concerned or to deal with cases of conflict of interest
or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly
yields counterintu itive 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 ga in from
it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferabl e in any simple or
general way from one party to another .
Transfers of this kind, of costs
and benefits involving different parties, commonly rais e moral issues - e.g.
is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs on y - which are not
susceptible to a simple cost-benefi t approach of the sort adopted in promotion
of nuclear energy, where costs to future people are sometimes dismissed with
the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits.
The limitations of tran sfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison,
heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptabili ty of the nuclea r
risk, between nuclear risks and those from such activities as airplane travel
or cigarette smoking . In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the
activity are also, to an overwhelmin g extent, those who bear the serious health
costs and risks involved . In contrast the users and supposed beneficiari es
of nuclear energy will be r isking not only, or even primarily, their own lives
and health, but also that of others who may be non-benefic iaries and who may be
spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any dire ct way
related to a person ' s extent of use .
The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian ' s
(happiness) sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties,
and the introductio n of p r obability consideratio ns - as in utilita r ian de cision
methods such as expected utility rules - does not change the principles involved
but merely complicates the analysis . One might further object to the probability
argument that probabiliti es 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 morai prob l ems do not depend on a high level of
probability anyway .
In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the train parable
reveals , that a significant risk is created ; such cases do not depend critically
on high probability assignments .
�18 .
Uncerta inty argumen ts in various forms are the most common and importan t
ones used by philo s ophers, economi sts and others to argue f or the position that
we
cannot be expe cted to
distant future .
take serious ac count of the effects of our actions on th e
There are two strands to the uncertai nty argumen t, capable of
s eparatio n , but frequen tly tangled up. Both argumen ts are mistaken , the first
on a priori grounds, the second on a posterio ri grounds. The first argumen t
is a gene ralised uncerta inty argumen t which runs as fol lows :- In contras t to
the exa ct informa tion we can obtain about the present, the informa tion we can
obtain about the effects of our a-ctions on the di s tant future is unreliab le,
fuzzy and highly specula tive. But we cannot base assessm ents of how we shoul
d
act on informa tion of this kind, especia lly when accurate informa tion is obtainable about the present which would indicate differen t act ion. Therefo re we must
r eg retfully ignore the uncertai n effects of our actions on the distant fut ure.
More formally and crudely: One only has obligati ons to the futur e if t hese
obliga tions are based on reliable in forma tion at present as regards th e
distant future. Therefo re one has no obligati ons to the distant future. This
first argumen t is essentia lly a variant on a sceptica l argwnen t in epistemo logy
concerni ng our knowledg e of the future (formall y, replace 'obligat ions ' by
'knowled ge' in the crude stateme nt of the argumen t above). The main ploy is
to
conside rably overesti mate and oversta te the degree of certaint y availabl e with
r es pect to the present and immedia t e future, and the degree of certaint y which
is required as the basis fo r moral conside ration with r espect to the present
and with respect to the f uture.
Associa ted with thi s is the attempt to sugges t
a sharp division as regards certaint y between the present and immedia te 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 divi sion between the distant
future and the adjacen t future and the present, at l east with re spect to those
things in th e pres e nt which are normally subject to moral constra ints. We can
and constan tly do act on the basis of such "unrelia ble " informa tion, as the
sceptic as regards the future conveni ently labels "unce rta i nty"; for scepticproof certaint y is rarely, or never, availab le with respect to much of the
present and immedia te future . In moral situatio ns in the pres e nt, action
often takes acco unt of risk and probabi lity , even quite low probab iliti es .
Conside r again the train example. We do not need to know for certain that the
containe r will break and the lethal gas escape . In fact it does not even have
to be probable , in the relevan t sense of more probable than not, in order for
us to condemn the consign er's action. It is enough that there is a signific ant
risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decrease d wellb eing of the consigne r is certain and that the prospec ts of the passeng ers
quite uncertai n, the resoluti on of the problem is neverth eless clearly in fa
vour
of the so-calle d "specul ative" and "unrelia ble". But if we do not require
certaint y of action to apply moral constra ints in cont emporary affairs, why
�19.
should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future?
Why should
we require for the future, ep istemic standards which the more familiar sphere of
moral act ion concerning the present and adjacent futur e does not need to meet?
The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consi deration
ca n be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an eipstemic double standard.
But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining th e difference
between the present and the future a nd 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
e ach class, which difference is in turn in need of justification.
The second uncertainty argument is a practical unc e rtainty argument,
that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice
take the interests of future people into account becaus e uncertainty about
the distant future is so gross th a t we canmot determine what the lik ely
cons equences of actions on it will be and therefore, however good our intentions
to the people of the distant future are, 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 rati onal ground for
ch oosing between them.
this way : -
The seco!ld uncertainty argume nt can be put alternatively
If moral principles are. like other principles, implicational in form,
that is of such forms as "if x has character h then x is wrong, for eve r y
(action) x", then what the argument claims is that we cannot ever obtain the
info rmation about future actions which would enable us to detach the
an tecedent of the implication .
So even if moral principles theoretically
apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain cl ear
conclusions or dire ctions concerning contemporary action action of th e "It is
wrong to do x" type.
Many of the assumptions of the second argument can be conceded.
If
th e 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 th e 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 th e
future, will in practice not be applicable to obtain an y clea r conclusions about
how to act.
on action .
Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints
However the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the
future always is 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
�"
20 .
argument has to assume .
There are some areas where un certainty is not so grea t as
to ex clude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point ,
which was noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certain ty
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
uncerta inty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally r e levant,
but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance
t o moral is sues .
For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be
in a hundred years in names or footwear, or what flavour s of ice cream people
will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, espe cially
if we consider 3000 years of history, that what peop le there are in a hundred
years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unli ke 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 ge netic defec ts, by the destruction of resources, or the
elimination from the ear th of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at
present makes it such a rich and interesting place .
For this sort of r eason ,
the second uncertainty argument should be rejected.
The case of nuclear waste
storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, is one area
where uncertainty in morally relevant respects is not so great as to preclude
moral constraints on action, where we can ascertain if not absolute certainties
at least probabilities of the same sort of orde r as are considered sufficient for
the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially
where spatially remote people are involved.
In particular there is not 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 is
evident from the train 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 defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to
write off probable or possible harm to future people as outside the scope of
prope r consideration.
Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncer taint y
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 r eally
take account of future people because we cannot be sure that th ey will exis t or
that their tast es 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
�21.
things that would affect us.
But this is to insist upon compl e t e ce r taint y of a
sort be yond what is required for the pre sent and imme diate future, whe r e there
i s also commonly no guarantee that some disast e r will not overtake t hose we are
mo rally cowmi tted to. Again we may be told that th e r e i s no guarant ee that
future peopl e will be worthy of any e fforts on our part, because th ey may be
mo rons or for ever plugged into enjoyme nt or other machin es . Even if on e is
prepare d t o accept the elitist approach presupposed -
according to which
only those who meet certain properly civilized or int e ll e ctual standards a r e
e ligible for moral consideration - what we are being han de d in such ar guments
as a serious defeating consideration is a gain a mere outside possibility li ke the sceptic who says that solid-looking desk in front of us is pe rhaps only a
facade, not because he has any particular r e ason for doing so, but bec ause he
hasn't looked around the back , drilled holes in it, etc. etc .
Ne ith e r the
cont emporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing
that a lapse into universal moronity or universal-pleas ure-machine escapism is
a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility.
We can contrast with
th e se me re logical possibilities the very real historically supportab l e risks
of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilisation through destruction
of its resource base.
The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty argume n t s of
sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may
consider a real possibility, but still does not succee d in showing th a t it is
a c ce ptab l e to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future
,
people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste cas e .
This is the argument that
future p eople may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage me thod for
nuclear was tes 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 : that this appears to
be a live possibility, and not merely a logi cal possibility, does not make the
action of the firm earlier discussed, 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
s orts were admissible only j_f what was required for inadmissibility was certainty
of harm or a very high probability of it . In such cases before such actions could
�22.
be conside r e d admissible what would be required is far more than a possibility,
22
real or not
- 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 th emselves .
The strategy of these and other uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then,
and may be brought out by looking yet again at the train example wh ere the consigner
says that he cannot be expected to take account of th e effec t of his actions on
the passengers b ec ause they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or
some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g . the train may break down and they
may all change to a different transport leaving the parcel behind, or the train
may crash killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak.
These are all possibilities of course, but there is no positi ve r eason to believe
that they are any more than that, that is they are not live possibilities.
The
strategy is to stress such remote possibilities in order to create the false
impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real
possibility that the container will 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 consigner's taking account of the passengers' welf are and th e
real possibility of harm from his parcel and thereby to 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
of harm, 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 re al possibility
of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly r eq uired high degree of
certainty or probability cannot be attained.
That is, the strate gy draws
attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat th e
application of moral constraints .
But, as we have seen, this is often not so.
Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the
indeterminacy of the future .
In particular it is argued that the indeterminacy,
for example , with respect to the number and exact character of people at future
times, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into
account where there is a conflict with the present .
Since th e ir numbers are
ind eterminate and their interests unknown how, it is asked, 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 rais ed
particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present
and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latte r 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
�23,
ignoring such factors.
Nor are distributio nal problems as large and
representat ive of a class of moral prob lems concerning the future as the tendency
to focus on them would suggest. It can be conceded that there will be cases
where the indetermina cy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very
difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - a realistic ethical theory will
not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be othe r conflict
cases where the level of indetermina cy does not hinder resolution of the issue,
e . g . the train example which is a conflict case of a t ype . In particular,
th e re will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numb ers , n umbers of
interests, or whatever , cases for which one needs to know only the most general
probable characteris tics of future people .
The crucial question which emerges is then :
are there any features of
futu re people which would disqualify them from full moral consideratio n o r
r e duce thei r claims to such below those of present people? The answe r is:
in
principle None .
Prima facie, moral principles are universalis able , and lawlike,
in that they ap ply independent ly of position in space or in time, for examp le.
But universalis ability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories
whi ch are capable of dealing satisfactor ily with the pres ent : in other words, a
theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects
as regards th e present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people,
e .g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup, such as (whit e skinned) humans , etc .
The only candidates for characteris tics that would fairly
rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, such
as uncertainty and indetermina cy; but, as we have argued, it would be far too
sweeping to see thes e 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 determinatio n of best probable of practical course of action given only
present information ) . In particular, they do not affect cases of th e so~t
be ing considered, nuclear development , where highly determinate or certain
infonnation about the numbers and characteris tics of the class likely to be
harmed is not required, nor is certainty of damage.
To establish obligations to the future a full universaliz ability
principle is not required: it is enough that the temporal position of a person
cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral
consideratio n; 24
inversely, that it is without basis to discriminat e morally
against a person in virtue of his temporal position . As a result of this
�.
23a.
universalizabi lity, there are the same general obligations to future peo ple as
to the present; and thus there i s the same obligation to take account of them
and thei r 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 them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life . Uncertainty
and inde t e rminacy do not relieve 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
�24.
harm in the future case under conside ration, then futurity alone will not
provide adequate grounds for proceed ing with the action, thus discri mina ting
against future people.
Accordin gly we cannot escape, through appeal to
futurity , the conclusi on already tentativ ely reached, that proposa ls for nuclear
developm ent in the present and likely future state of technolo gy and practice
s
for future waste disposa l are immoral.
Before we conside r (in section VII) the remainin g escape route from this
conclusi on, through appeal to overridi ng circumst ances , it is importan t to
pick up th e further case (which heavily r einforce s the tentativ e conclusi on)
against nuclear developm ent, since much of it relies on ethical princip les
similar to those that underlie obligati ons to the future, and since it too
is commonly met by similar appeal to extenua ting ci rc umstanc es.
V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION: REACTOR EMISSIONS, AND CORE MELTDOWN . The
eth ical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to futur e creature
s.
Just as remoten ess in time does not erode obligati ons or enti tl emen ts t o just
treatmen t, neither does location in spac e , or a particu lar geograp hical position
.
First of all, the problem of nuclear waste disposa l rais es serious question s
of
distribu tive justice not only across time, across generat i ons, but also across
space. Is one state or region entitled to dump its radioac tive polluti on in
another state's or region's yard or water s? When that region receives no due
compens ation (whateve r that would amount to, in such a case), and the people
do not agree (though the leaders imposed upon them might)? The answer, and
the
argumen ts underpin ning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing
to the tentativ e conclusi on concerni ng the injustic e of imposing radioac tive
wastes upon future people. But the cases are not exactly the same: USA and
Japan
cannot endeavo ur to discoun t peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose
to drop some of their radioac tive pollutio n in quite the same way the y can
discoun t people of two centurie s hence . (But what this conside ration really
reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that entitl ement to just treatmen t can
be discoun ted over time.)
Ethical issues of distribu tive justice, as to equity , concen1 not only
the spatio-t emporal location of nuclear waste, but also arise elsewher e in the
assessm ent of nuclear developm ent; in particu lar, a s regards the treatmen t of
those in the neighbou rhood of reactors , and, dif fe rently, as regards the
•
distribu tion of (alleged ) benefits and costs from nuclear power across nations. 25
People living or working in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to
special costs and risks : firstly, radioac tive pollutio n, due to the fact that
reactors discharg e radioac tive materia ls into the air and water near the plant,
�25 .
and secondly catast rop hic accidents, such as (steam) explosion of a reactor .
immediate question is whether such costs an d risks can be imposed, with any
An
eth ical legitimacy, on these people, who frequently have little or no say in
their imposition, and who have mostly not been informed of any choices regarding
the "risk/benefit tradeoffs" of nuclear technology.
That they are so imposed,
without local participation, indeed often without local input or awareness as
with local opposition, reveals one part of the antidemocratic face of nuclear
development, a part that nuclear development shares however with otl1er largescale polluting industry, where local participation and que stions, fundamental
to a genuine democracy of regional det ermination and popular sovereignty , are
commonly ignored or avoided.
The "normal" emission, during plant operation, of low level radiation
car ri es carcinogenic and mutagenic costs .
While the re are undoubtedly costs,
there remains, however, substantial disagreement over the likely numbe r of cancers
and precise ex tent of genetic damage induced by exp os ure to such rad iation , over
the local health costs involved. Under t he Old Paradigm, whi ch (ill egi timately)
permits free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the e thical
issue directly raised is said to be: what extent of cancer and genetic damage,
if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nucl ear power, and under
what conditions? Under the Old Paradigm the issue is th en translat e d into
decision-theor etic questions, such as to 'how to employ risk/benefit analysis
as a prelude to government regulation' and ' how to determine what is an
acceptab le level of risk/safe ty for the public. 26
The Old Paradigm attitude, reflected in the public policy of some countries
that have such policies, is that the economic benefits conferred by allowing
radiation emissions outweigh the costs of an increase in cancer and genetic
damage . An example will reveal that such evaluations, which rely for what
appeal th ey have on a dubious utilitarianism, will not pass muster. It is a
pity about Aunt Ethyl getting cancer, but it's nice to have this air con ditioner
working in summer . Such frequently trivial and rather inessential benefits,
which may be obtained alternatively, e.g. by modification of houses, in no way
comp ensate for the agony of cancer . 27 The point is that the costs to one party
a r e not justified, especially when such benefits to other parties can be
alte rnatively obtained without such awful costs , and morally indef ensible , being
imposed .
People, minorities, whose position is particularly compromised are those
who live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant . (Children , for example, are in a
�26.
particularl y vulnerable position, since they are severa l times more likely to
contract cancer through exposure than normal adults). In USA, such people bear
a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the
population at large.
A non-negligi ble percentage (in excess of 3% of those
exposed for 30 years) of people in the area will die, all egedly for the sake
of the majority who are benefitted by nuclear powe r production (allegedly,
for th e real reasons for nucl e ar development do not concern this silent
majority) . Whatever
charm the argument from overriding benefits had, e ve n
unde r the Old Paradigm, vanishes once it is seen that t he re are alternative ,
and in several respects less expensive, ways of deliveri ng the r eal benefi ts
involved.
There are several other tricks used in showing that the imposition of
r adia tion on minorities, most of whom have little or no genuine voice in the
location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serio us
losses, is quite (morally) acceptable. One ch eape r trick, deployed by the US
Atomic Energy Commission, 28 is to suppose that it is permissible to double,
through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a pop ulation
has
received with apparently negligible consequence s, th e argument being that
the additional amount (being equivalent to the "natural" level) is also likely
to have negligible consequence s.
The increased amounts of radiation - with
their large man-made component - are then accounted no rmal, and, of course,
so it is th en claimed, what is normal is morally acceptable. None of the steps
in this argument is sound.
Drinking one bottle of wine a day may have no illeffects, whereas drinking two a day certainly may affe ct a person's well-being;
and while the smaller intake may have become normal for the person, the larger
one will, unde r such conditions, not be. Finally, what is or has become normal,
e . g. two murde rs or twenty cancers a day in a given city, may be far from acceptabl e .
In fact, even the USA, which has strict standards by comparison with most
other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits ra diation emissions very
sub s tantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is
worse than me re consideratio n of the standards would disclose. Furthermore , the
monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to th e nuclear op erators
themselves, scarcely disintereste d parties . Public policy is determin ed no t so
as to guarantee public he alth, but rather to serve as a ' public pacifier' wh ile
private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered . 29
�2 7.
While radioacti ve emissions are nn ordinary feature of react o r op e ration,
breakdown is, hopefully , not: an accident of magnitude is accounted , by official
definitio n, an 'extraord inary nuclear occurrenc e'. But such accidents can happen,
and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island). 30
If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water)
30a
r e actors ,
then the core melts and 'containm ent failure' is likely, with the
r e sult that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioacti vely contamina ted .
I n the event of the worst type of accident in a very small reactor, a steam
explosion in the reactor vessel, about 45,000 people would be killed instantly
and at least 100,000 would die as a result of the accident , prope rt y da mages
would exceed $1 7 billion and an area the size of Pennsylva nia would be destroyed .
Mod e rn nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which
.
.
31
t h ese conservat ive
Us governmen t f'igures are given
t he con s equences of a
s imilar accident with a modern reactor would according l y be much great e r still.
Th e consigner in risking the lives, we ll-being and property of the
passenger s on the train has acted inadmissi bly. Does a governme nt-sponsor ed
private utility act in a way that is anything other th an much less responsib le
in siting a nuclear reactor in a community , in planting such a dangerous package
on the community train.
The answer will be No, if the analogy holds good and the
consigner s ' action is , as we would ordinaril y ·suppo se , inadmissi ble and i rrespon-
sible.
The proponent s of nuclear power have in effect argued to the cont rary,
while at the same time endeavour ing to shift the dispute out of the ethical arena
and into a technolog ical dispute as to means (in accordanc e with the Old Paradigm) .
It has been contended , firstly, what con trasts with the train example, that
there is no real possibili ty of a catas trophic nuclear accident . Indeed in the
influenti al Rassmusse n report 32 - which was extensive ly used to support public
confidenc e in US nuc lear fission technolog y - an even stronger, an incredibl y
strong , improbab ility claim was stated: n amely , the likelihoo d of a catastrop hic
nucle ar accident is so remote as to be '3.lmost) impossi.bl e. The main argument for
this claim de rives from the assumptio ns and estimates of the report i.tself . These
assumptio ns like the claim are undercut by nuclear incidents that came very close
to accidents , incidents which reflect what happens in a reactor rather better than
mathemat ical models.
As with the storage of nuclear wastes, so with the operation of nuclear
reactors, it is important to look at what happens in the actual world of
technolog ical limitatiom s and human error, of waste leakage and r eactor inciden t s
and quite possibly accidents , not in an ideal world far removed from the actual ,
a technolog ical dream world whe re there is no real possibili ty of a nuclear
�28,
catastrophe.
In such an ideal nuclea r world, wh e re wa s t e disposal we r e fool-proof
and reactors we re accident-proof, thin gs would no doubt be morally different.
But we do no t live in s u ch a world .
According to the Rasmuss en r e port its calc ulat ion of extremely low accident
probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological a ssumptions
and is methodo logically sound.
This is ve ry far from being the cas e .
The under-
ly ing mathematical methods, variousl y called "fault tree analysis " and
"reliability estimating techniques", a r e unsound, because they exclude as "not
credible" po s sibilities or as "not significant" branches that are re a l
possibilities, which may well be realised in the real world.
It is the
eliminations that are othe rworldly .
In fact the me thodology and dat a of the report
· · 1 y cr1.t1.c1.ze
h as b een soun dl y an d d ec1.s1.ve
. · ·
d . JJ And 1.t
. h as b een s h own t1at
I
t he r e
is a real possibili t y, a non-negligible probability, of a serious accident .
It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negli gib l e
prob abi li ty of a reactor accident, still it is acceptable, be ing of no greater
orde r than risks of accidents t hat ar e already socially accepted.
Here we
enco unt e r agai n that insidious e ngin e ering approach to morality built into
mod e ls of an e conomic cast, e.g. benefit - cost balance s heets , risk assessment
mode ls, et c.
Risk assessment, a sophistica ti on of trans ac tion or tr ade -off
mode ls, pur.-ports to p ro vide a compari s on between th e relative ri sks at tach ed to
different options, e . g . e nergy options, which settl es th e ir ethical status .
The fo llowing lines of argume nt are encountered in a risk assessme nt as applied
to energy options:
(i)
if option a imposes costs on fewer people than option b then option a is
preferable to option b;
(ii )
option a involves a total net cost in terms of cost to people (e.g. deaths,
injuries , etc .) which is less than th at of option b, which is already accepted;
there for e op tion a is acceptable . 34
For example, the number likely to be killed by nuclear power stations is less than
the likely number killed by cigarette smoking or in road accident s , which a r e
accepted: so nuclear power stations are acceptable .
A little reflection reveals
that this sort of risk assessment argt.mlent involves the same kind of fallacy
as transaction models.
I t is far too simple -minded, and it ignores distrib ut ional
and other r e l e vant aspect s of the context.
In o rde r to ob tain an ethical
assessment we s hould need a much fuller pi cture and we sho uld nee d to know at
least t he s e thin gs :- do the costs and benef it s go to th e same parti es ; and is
the person who undertakes the risks also t he person who receives the benefits or
�29.
primar ily, as in driving or cigare tte smokin g, or are the costs impos
e d on other
parties who do not benefi t? It is only if the parties are the same
in the case of
th e options compar ed, and there are no such distrib utiona l problem
s, that a
compar ison on such a basis would be val.id. 35 This is rarely the cas
e , and it is
not so in the case of risk assessm ents of energy options . Second
ly, does the
person incur the risk as a result of an activit y which he knowin gly
underta kes
in a situati on where he has a r easona ble choice, knowing it entails
the risk,
etc ., and is the level of risk in propor tion to the le~el of the
rel evant
ac tivity, e.g. as in smoking ? Thirdly , for what reason is the risk
imposed :
is it for a s e rious or a relativ ely trivial reason? A risk that is
e thica lly
accepta ble for a serious reason may not be ethica lly accepta ble for
a trivial
reason. Both the argume nts (i) and (ii) are often employe d in trying
to justify
nuclea r power. The second argume nt (ii) involve s the fallaci es of
th e firs t (i)
and an additio nal set , namely that of forgett ing that the health risks
in the
36
nuclea r s e nse are cumula tive , and already high if not , some say ,
too high.
The maxim "If you want the benefi ts you have to accept th e costs "
is
one thing and the maxim "If I want the benefi ts then you have to accept
the
costs (or some of them at least)" is anothe r and very differe nt thin
g . It is
a widely accepte d moral princip le, already argued for by way of exampl
es and
already invoked , that one is not, in genera l, entitle d to simply
transfe r cos ts
of a signifi cant kind arising fron an activit y which benefi ts onesel
f onto other
parties who are not involve d in the activit y and are not benefi ciaries 37
.
This
transfe r princip le is especi ally clear in cases where the signifi cant
costs
include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof , and where
the benefi t to
the benefi tting par ty :is of a noncru cial or dispen sible nature , becaus
e, e . g.
it can be substit uted for or done withou t. Thus, for instanc e , one
is not
usually entitle d to harm , or risk harmin g, anot her in the process
of be nefitti ng
onesel f . Suppose , for anothe r example , we consid er a village which
produc es, as a
result of an indust rial process by which it lives, a noxious waste
materi al which
is expens ive and difficu lt to dispose of and yet creates a risk to
life and health
if undispo sed of. Instead of giving up thei r i.ndus trial process and
turning to
some other way of making a living such as farming the surroun ding
country side,
they persis t with this way of life but ship their problem on a one-way
deliver y
service , on the train, to the next village . The inhabi tants of this
village are
then forced to face the problem either of under taking the expens ive
and difficu lt
dispos al process oor of sustain ing risks to thei r own lives and health
or else
leaving the village and their livelih oods. Most of us would see
this kind of
transfe r of co s ts as morally unacce ptable .
�JO.
From this arises a necessary condition for ene rgy options: that to be
morally acceptable they should not involve the trans fer of significant costs or
risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, do not use the energy source or
do not benefit correspondingly from its us e .
Included in the scope of this
condition are not only future people and future generations (those of the next
vil lages) but neighbours of nuclear reactors , especially, as in third world
co untries, neighbours who are not nuclear powe r users.
The distribution of
costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries is a
characteristic of certain wide spread and serious forms of pollution, a nd is one
of its most obje ctionable moral features.
It is a corollary of the condition that we sho ul d not hand the world on t o
our successors in substantially worse shape than we received it - t he tramsmission
principle.
For if we did then that would be a signi ficant transfe r of costs .
(The corollary can be independerltly argued for on the basis of certain e t hic al
theories) .
VI . OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT,
ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR.
The problems already discuss ed by no means exhaus t the
envi ronme ntal, health and safety risks and costs in or arising from th e nuclea r
fuel cycle.
The full fuel cycle include s man y sta ges both before and after
r eacto r operation , apart from waste disposal, namely mining , milling, conversion,
enrichment and preparation, reprocessing spent fuel, and trans po rtati on of
materials.
Seve ral of these stages involve hazards.
Unlike the special risks
in the nuclear cycle - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionab le material,
and of the further prolife ration of nuclear armaments - thes e hazard s have
parallels, if not exact equival ents, in other very polluting method s of generating
power, e . g. "workers in the uranium mining industry sustain 'the same risk' of
38
fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry".
Furth ermo re, the
various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectors of
uranium fabrication should be differently viewed from those resultin g from location,
for instance from already living where a reactor is built or wastes are dumped.
For an occupation is, in principle at
any rate, chosen (as is occupational
relocation), and many types of hazards incurred in workin g with radio a ctive
material are now known in advance of choice of such a n occupation: with where
one al re ady lives things are very different.
The uranium mine r's choice of
occup ation can be compared with the airline pilot's choice, whe r eas t he Pacific
Islander ' s "fact" of location cannot be.
The social issue o f arrangements that
contract occupational choices and opportuni ti es and often a t l east ease peo ple
into hazardous occupations such as uranium or tin or coal mining (where the
risks, in contrast to airline piloting, are mostly not duly compensated), while
very important, i s not an i ssue newly produced by nuclear associated occupa tions .
�31.
Other social and environm ental problems - though endemic where large-sca le
industry operates in societies that are highly inegalita rian and include sectors
that are far from affluent - are more imtimatel y linked with the nucle ar power
cycle.
Though pollu tion is a common and generally undesirab le component of
large-sca le industria l operation , radioacti ve pollution , such as uranium mining
for instance produces, is especiall y a legacy of nuclear developme nt, and a
specially undesirab le one , as enormous rectifica tion estimates for de ad radioactive lands and waterways reveal .
Though sabotage is a threat t o many large
industrie s , so that modern factory complexes are often guarded like concentra tion
camps (but from us on the outside), sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire
consequen ces, of a different order of magnitude from most industria l sabotage
(consider again the effects of core meltdown) . Though theft of material from more
dubious enterpris es such as munitions works can pose threa ts to populatio ns at
large and can assist terrorism , no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterp rises
pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionab le material . No other
industry produces materials which so readily permit of fabricatio n into such
massive explosive s.
No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerabl e on so
many fronts.
In part to reduce it, vulnerab ility, in part because of its long and
continuin g associati on with military activitie s, the nuclear industry is subject
to, and encourage s, several practices which (certainly given their scale) run
counter to basic features of free and open societies , crucial features such as
personal liberty, freedom of associati on and of expressio n, and free access to
informati on . These practices include secrecy , restricti on of infonnati on,
formation of speci al police and guard forces, espionage , curtailme nt of civil
lib e rties.
Already operators of nuclear installat ions are given extraordi nary
powers, in vetting employees , to investiga t e the backgroun d and
activitie s not only of employees but also of their families and
sometimes even of their friends. The installati ons themselve s
become armed camps, which especiall y offends British sensibili ties.
The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constable s) Act of 1976 created a
special armed force to guard nuclear installat ions and made it
answerabl e ..• to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority . 39
These developme nts in the United Kingdom, and worse in West Germany, presage
along with nuclear developme nt increasin gly authorita rian and anti-demo cratic
societies . That nuclear developme nt a ppears to force such political consequen ces
tells heavily against it.
�32.
Nuclear developme nt is further indicted political ly by the dire ct
connectio n of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is fortunate ly true that
e thical questions concernin g nuclear war - for example, whether a nucle ar war
is justified , or just, under any circumsta nces , and if so what circums tances are distingui shable from those concernin g nuclear power. Undoubted ly , however,
t he spread of nuclear powe r is substanti ally increasin g the technical me ans
for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportuni ty for , and
chances of, nuclear engagemen t.
Since nuclear wars are neve r account able
positive goods , but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are
always highly ethically undesirab le .
The spread
of nuclear power according ly
expands the opportuni ty for, and chances of, highly undesirab le consequen ces.
Finally the la tt e r, so increasin g thes e chances and opportun ities, is itself
undesirab le, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear developme n t, is also
undesirab le .
The details and considera tions that fill out this argume nt,
from nuclea r war against nuclear developme n t, are many. They are fir stly
technical , that it is a relativel y straightfo rward and inexpensi ve matte r to
make nuclear explosive s given access to a nuclear powe r plant, secondly political ,
that nuclear engagemen ts once institute d
likely to escalate and that those
who control (or different ly are likely to force access to) nuclear power plant s
do not shrink from nuclear confronta tion and are certainly prepared to toy with
nuclear engagemen t (up to "strategi c nuclear strikes" at least) , and thirdly
ethical, that wars invariabl y have immoral consequen ces, such as mas sive
damage to involved parties, however high sounding their justifica tion is.
Nucl ea r wars are certain to be considera bly worse as regards damage inflicted
than any pr e vious wars (they are likely to be much worse than all previous
wars p ut together) , because of th e enormous destructi ve power of nuclear
weapons, and the extent of spread of their radioacti ve effec ts, and because
of the expected rapidity and irreversi bility of any such confronta tions .
The supportin g considera tions are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and
a r e designed to show that the chances of such undesirab l e out comes is itself
und e sirable .
The core argument is in brief this (the argument will be
elaborate d in section VIII):- Energy choice between alternativ e options is
a case of de ci sion making under uncertain ty , because in particula r of th e gross
uncertain ties involved in nuclear developme nt. In cases of this type the
ap propriate rational procedure is to compare worst cons equences of each
alternati ve, to reject those alternati ves with th e wor s t of these worst
consequen ces (this is a pretty uncontrov ersial part of th e maximin rule which
enjoins selection of the alternati ve with the best worst consequen ces) . The
nuclear alternati ve has, in particula r because of the r e al possibili ty of a nuclear
war, the worst worst consequen ce~ and is according ly a particula rly undesirab le
alternati ve.
�33.
VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS,AND UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF NUCLEAR
DEVELOPMENT. As with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear
development , only one justificatory route r emains open, that of app e al to
important overriding circumstances.
That appeal, to be ethically acceptable,
must go far beyond merely economic considerations.
For, as already observed ,
the consigne r's action cannot be justifi ed by purely economistic argume nts,
such as that his profits would ris e , the firm or the village would be more
prosperous , or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable
changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer principle on which this
assessment was based, that one was not usually entitl ed to cre ate a serious
risk to othe rs for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in
parti cular, applied to the nuclear case. For this r eason the economistic
arguments which are those most commonly advanced under th e Old Paradi gm to promote
nuclear development - e .g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electri city
utilities, and the need otherwise fo r 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 econornistic assumptions
about benefits to present people were correct - it will be contended that most of
them are not - the arguments would fail because economics (like the utilitarianism
from which it characteristica lly derives) has to operate within the framework of
moral constraints, and not vic e versa .
What do have to be considered are however moral confli ct arguments, that is
arguments to the effe ct that, unless the prima facie unacceptable (nuclear)
alt e rnative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only
possible outcome, and will ensue . For example, in the train parable, the
consigner may a rgue that his action is justified becaus e unless it is take n his
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 clearcu t, and one would perhaps
hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances.
Some of the arguments advanced to show moral confl i ct are based on competin f
commitments to present people, and others on competing obligatio ns to future people .
both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impos e 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 e xhaustive set of
alternatives (or a t ].east practical alternatives ) and upon showing that the only
alterna tives to admittedly mo rally 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 th e argument - for
example, if in the village case it turns out that the villagers have another option
�to starvi ng or to the sendin g off of the parce l, name l y ea
rning a liv ing in some
other way - then the argum ent is defect ive and cannot r eadily
be patche d . Just
s uch a suppre ssion of practi cable altern atives has occurr ed
in the argum ent
design ed to show that the altern atives to the nuclea r option
are even worse than
the option itself , and that there are other factua l defect
s in thes e argum ents
as well. .In short, the argum ents depend essen tially on the
presen tation of
false dichot omies .
A first argum ent, the povert y argum ent , is that there is
an ove rridin g
ob li gation to the poor , both the poor of the third world
and the poor of
indus trialis ed countr ies . Failur e to develo p nuclea r energy
, it is often claime d,
would amoun t to denyin g them the oppor tunity to reach the
standa rd of afflue nce
we curren tly enjoy and would create unemp loymen t and povert
y in th e indus triali s e d
n a tions.
The unemp loymen t and povert y argume nt does not stand up to
exami nati on
eithe r for t he poor of th e indus trial countr ies or for thos
e of th e thir d world.
The re is good eviden ce that large- scale nuclea r energy will
help to increa se
unemp loymen t and povert y in the indus trial world, throug h
the divers i on of very
much availa ble capita l into an indust ry which is not only
an excep tional ly
poo r provi der of di rect employ ment , but also helps to reduce
availa bl e jobs throug h
encour aging substi tution o f energy use for labour use. 40
The argume n t that nuclea r
ene rgy is needed for the third world is even less convin cing.
Nuclea r energy is
both politi cally and econom ically inapp ropria te for th e third
world, since it
requir es massiv e amoun ts of capita l , requir es numbe rs of
import ed sci en tists
and engine ers, but create s neglig ible local employ ment, and
depend s for its
feasib ility upon, what is largel y lackin g , establ ished electr
icity transm ission
system s and back-u p facili ties and suffic ient electr ical
applia nce s to plug into
the system . Politi cally it increa ses foreig n depend ence,
adds to ce ntrali sed
entren ched power and reduc es the chance for change in the
oppres sive politi cal
struct ures which are a large part of the proble m . 41 The
fa c t that nuclea r energy
is not in the intere sts of the people of t he third world
does not of course
mean that it is not in the intere sts of, and wanted by, their
rulers , the
wester nised and often milita ry elites in whose intere sts
the econom ies of thes e
countr ies are usuall y organi sed, and wanted often for milita
ry purpos es . It
is not patern alistic to examin e critic ally the demand s these
ruling elites may
make in the name of the poor.
�35 .
The po verty argume nt is then a fraud. Nuclear ene r gy will not be used t o
help th e poor. Both for the third world and for the industr ialised co untrie
s
there are well-kno wn energy-c onservin g alternat ives and the practi cal option
of
developi ng oth e r energy sources, alternat ives some of which offer f a r bette r
prospec ts for helping the poor .
It can no longer be pretende d that there is no alt e rnative to nuclear
de velopme nt: indeed nuclear de velopme nt is itself but a bridging , or stop-gap
,
procedu re on route to solar or perhap s fusion deve lopment . And there a r e various
alternat ives : coal and other fossil fuels, geotherm al, and a range of solar
op tions (includi ng as well as narrowly solar, wind, water, tidal and plant power),
each po ss ibly in combina tion with cons e rvation measures ~ 2 Despit e the availab
ility
of alterna tives, it may still be pre t e nde d that nuclea r deve lopment is ne cess
ary
fo r affluenc e (what will emerge is that it is advantag eous for the power and
aff luence of ce rtain select groups ) . Such an assumpt ion really und erlies part
o f t he pover ty argumen t, which thus amounts to an elabora tion of th e trickledown argumen t (much f avoured within the Old Paradigm se tting) . For the a rgument
runs : - Nuc l ea r developm ent is necessar y for (continu ing an d in c r eas in g)
affluenc e.
Affluenc e inevitab ly tr i ckl es down to th e poor. Th e r e for e nuclear
developm ent benefits the poor . First, the argumen t does not on i ts own sh ow
a nything specific about nuclear power : for it works equally well if ' ene r gy '
is substitu ted f or ' nuclear ' .
It has also to be shown , what the next major
argumen t will try to claim, that nuclear developm ent is unique among e ne rgy
alternat ives in increasi ng affluenc e . The second assumpt ion , that affluenc e
inevitab ly trickles down, has now been roundly refuted , both by r ecent historic
al
da ta, which show increasi ng affluenc e ( e .g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita)
co upled with increasi ng poverty in several countrie s, both developi ng and
de veloped , and th r ough economic models which reveal how "affluen ce" can increase
withou t r e dist ribution occur ring .
Another maj o r argumen t a dvanced to show moral conflic t app eals to a set
of suppos e dly ove rr iding and competin g obligati ons to future people . We have,
it is said , a du ty to pass on the immense ly valuable things and institut ions
which our culture has develope d .
Unless our high-tec hnology , high ene r gy
industr ial society is continue d and fo s tered, our valuab l e institut ion s and
tra ditions will fall into de cay or be swept away. The ar gument is essentia lly
th a t without nuclear powe r, withou t th e conti n ued level of materia l wealth
43
it alone is assumed to make possible , the li gh ts of our civiliza ti on wil l go
out.
Fut ure people will be th e los e rs.
�36,
The lights-goin g-out argument doe s rais e quest ions as to what is valuable
in o ur society, and of what characteris tics are necess ary for a good society .
But for the most part th ese large questions, which deserve much full e r
ex amination , can be avoided .
The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely
un critical position with re spe ct to present high-techno logy societi es , apparently
assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable . It assumes that technologi c
society is unmodifiabl e , that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy
conse rvation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without
collapse. It has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited
supplies of ene rgy - such as nuclear and only nuclear power is a ll eged t o furnish ar e essential to maintain this whole.
These assumptions are hard to accept.
The assumption that technologic al
so c ie ty's energy patterns are unmodifiabl e is especially so - after all it has
survived events such as world wars which have r equired major social and technologic a
r es tructuring and consumption modificatio n. If western society ' s demands for energy
a re totally unmodifiabl e without collapse, not only would it be committed to a
program of increasing destruction , but one might ask what use its culture co uld
be to future people who would very likely , as a consequence of this destruction ,
lack the resource base which th e argument assumes to be essential in the case of
contemporar y society.
There is also difficulty with th e assumption of uniform valuablene ss;
but if this is rejected the question be comes not: what is necessary to maintain
exis ting high-techno logical society and its political institution s, but rather:
what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and th e political
institution s which are needed to maintain those valuable things . While it may be
easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to
maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to a rgu e that it
is e ssential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably
that we have a du ty to pass .on to the fut ure.
The evidence, for instan ce from history, is that no very high level of
material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable.
The re 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 e ve n
if a radical change in these di rec tions is independent ly desirable, as we should
arg ue, 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-goin g-out a rgument a re wrong.
No enormous reduction of well-b e ing is required to consume less energy than at
�37.
present , and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of
consumption which is assumed in the usu al economic case for nucl ear energy . 44
What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to preven t the
lights going out in west e rn civilisation , but to enable th e lights to go on
burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of
th e Energy Extravaganza.
In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high e nergy
consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, es pecially if e nergy
is obtained by nuclear fission means , be positively inimical to it.
A society
which has become heavily dependent upon an ext remely high centralised, controlled
and garrisoned, capital-
and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one
which is highly susce ptible 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.
Such a society would, almost inevitably t e nd to become
autho ritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other
things, of its response to the threat pos ed by dissident groups in the nuclea r
.
.
situation.
45
Nuclear development may thus help in passing on to future generations
some of th e worst aspects of our society - the consumerism, alienation,
destruction of nature, and latent authoritarianism - while many valua ble
asp e cts, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for
p ersonal and collective autonomy which exist , would be lost or diminish e d:
political freedom , for example, is a high price to pay for consume ri sm and
energy extravagance.
But it is not the status quo, but what is valuable in
our society, presumably, that we have some obligation to pass on to the future,
and if possible enhance.
Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives,
alternative social, economic and political choices, which do not involve such
unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technologynuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable,
but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or,
rath e r, the development of alternative technologies and lifestyles which offer
far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is
valuable in our society than the highly centralised nuclear option.
The lights-
going-out argumen t, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it
also is based on a false dichotomy.
�38 .
Thus the further escape route, the appeal to moral conflict, is, like the
appeal to fut urity, closed.
If then we apply - as we have argued we should -
the same standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the
present, the conclusion that large-scal e nuclear developmen t i s a crime agains t
the future is inevitable .
Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes
to other ar_guments - from reactor melt-down, radiation emissions, and so on for rejecting nuclear development as morally unacceptable, for saying that it is
not only a moral crime against the distant future but also a crime against the
present and immediate future .
In sum, nuclear development is morally
unacceptable on several grounds.
A corollary is that only political arrangements
that are morally unacceptable will support the impending nuclear future.
VIII. A NUCLEAR FUTURE IS NOT A RATIONAL CHOICE, EVEN IN OLD PARADIGM TERMS.
The arg ument thus far, to anti-nuclear conclusions, has r elied upon, and
defended premisses that would be rejected under the Old Paradigm; for examp l e,
such theses as that the interests and utilities of future people are not
discounte d (in contrast to the temporally-limited utilitarianism of marketcentred economic theory ), and that serious costs and risks to health and life
cannot admissibly be simply transferred to uninvolved parties (in contrast
to the transfer and limited compensation assumptions of mainstream economic
theory).
To close the cas e, arguments will now be outlined which are designed
to show that even within the confines of the Old Paradigm, choosing the nuclear
future is not a rational choice .
Large-scale nucl ear developme nt is not just something that happens, it
requires, on a continuing basis, an immense input of capital and energy .
Such
investment calls for substantial reasons; for the investment should be, on
Old Paradigm assumptions, the best among feasible alt ernatives to given economic
ends.
Admi t tedly so much capital has already been invested in nucle ar fission
research and development, in marka:l. contrast to other newer rival sources of
power, that there is strong political incentive to proceed - as distinct from
requisite reasons for further capital and energy inputs.
The reasons can be
divided roughly into two groups, front reasons, which are the reasons given
(ou t) , and which are, in accordance with Old Paradigm percepts, pub l icly
eco nomic (in that they are app roved for public consumption), and th e r ea l
r ea s ons , which involve private economic factors and matters of power and social
control.
�39.
The main argument put up, an economic growth argument, upon which
variations are played, is the following version of the lights-going -out argument
(with economic growth duly standing in for material wealth, and even for what is
valuable!): - Nuclear power is necessary to sustain economic growth. Economic
growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e . g. to increas e the size of
the pie, to avoid or postpone redistributi on problems, and connected social
unr e st, e tc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is
part of US energy policy, 46 and the second premiss is supplied by standard
economics textbooks . But both premisses are defective, the second because
what is valuable in economic growth can be achieved by selective economic growth,
which jettisons the heavy social and environmen tal costs carried by unqualified
47
economi c growth .
More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption
of the dominant paradigm, the first premiss (or rath e r an appropriate and less
vulne rabl e restatement of it) fails even on Old Paradigm standards. For of course
nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps costlier
alt e rnatives .
The premiss usually defended is some elaboration of th e premiss
Nuc lear power is the economicall y best way to sustain economic growth, 'economicall y
best' being filled out as ' most efficient', 'cheapest ' , 'having most favourable
benefit-cos t ratio', etc.
Unfortunate ly for the argument, and for nuclear
development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively, unless
a goo d deal of economic cheating (easy to do) is done. Much data, beginning with
th e cancellatio n of nuclear plant orders, can't be assembled to show as much. Yet
the argument requires a true premiss, not an uncertain or merely possible one, if
it is to succeed and detachment is to b e permitted at all, and evidently true
premisses
if the argument is to be decisive.
The data to be summarised splits into two parts, public ( governmenta l)
analyses, and private (utility) assessments . Virtually all available data
concen1s the USA; in EuroZS, West and East, true cos ts of uniformly "publicly=
controlled" nuclear power
are generally not divulged.
Firstly, the capital costs of nuclear plants, which have been rising much
more rapidly than inflation, now exceed those of coal-fired plants .
Komanoff
has estimated that capital costs of a nuclear generator (of optimal capacity)
will exceed comparable costs of a coal-fired unit by about 26 % in 1985. 49 And
capital costs are only one part of the equation that now tell rather decisively
against private utility purchase of new nuclear plants . Another main factor
is the poor performance and low reliability of nuclear generators . Coney showed
that nuclear plants can only generate about half the elect ricit y th ey were
designed to produ ce , and that when Atomic Energy Commis sion estimates of relative
costs of nuclear and coal power, which assumed that both opera t ed at 80% of design
capacity , were adjusted accordingly , nuclear generated power proved to be far more
�40.
.
h
.
d 50
expensive
tan
estimate.
The discrepancy between actual and estimated
capacity
is especially important because a plant with an ac tual capacity factor of 55 %
produced electricity at a cost about 25% high e r than if the plant had performed
at the manufacturers' projected capacity rate of 70-75%.
The low reliability
of nuclear plants (p e r kilowatt output) as compared with the superior
r e liability of smaller coal-fired plants adds to the case, on conventional economic
grounds of ef ficienc y and product production costs , against nuclear powe r .
Thes e unfavourable assessments are from a privat e (utility) perspective,
before the very extensive public subsidization of nuclear power is duly taken
into account .
The main subsidies are through research and development , by way
of insurance (under the important but doubtfully constitutional Price-Anderson
51
Act ), in en richme n 4 and in waste management . It has been estimated that
charging such costs to the electricity consumer would increase electricity bills
for nucl ea r power by at least 25% ( and probably much more) .
Wh en official US cost/benefit analyses favouring nuclear power over
coal are examined, it is f ound that they inadmissibly omit seve ral of the public
costs i nvolve d in producing nuclear power .
For example, the analyses igno re
waste costs on the quite inadmissible ground that it is not known curren tly
wha t t he costs involved are .
But even using actual waste handling cos t s (while
wastes await s torage) is enough to show that coal power is preferable to nuc l ear . 52
When further public costs, such as insurance against accident and for radiation
damage , are dul y taken into account, the balance is swung stil l further i n
favo ur of al te rnatives to nuclear and
aga i nst nuclear power .
In short , eve n on
proper Old Par a digm accounting, the nu c l ear alte rn at iv e s hould be rejected.
Nuclear development is not economical, it certainly se ems ; it has b een
kept going n~ through its clear economic v iability, but by massive pub li c
s ubsidization , of s e vera l types .
In USA, to take a main examp le where
information is available , nuclear developme nt is publicly supported through
heavily subsidized or somet i mes free research and development , thro ugh the
Price-Anderson Act, which sharply limits both private and public liability,
i . e . wh ich in ef fe ct p rovided t he insurance subsidy making corporat e nuclear
development e conomicall y f e asibl e, and through government ag r eement to handle all
r adioactive wastes .
While the Old Paradigm str ictly construed c annot sup port un economical
developments, cont empo rary liberalisation of the Paradigm do e s allow fo r
un economi c projects, seen as operated in the public interest, in such fields as
soc ial welfare.
Duly admitting s ocial welfare and some
equity
pr i nciples
�41,
i n th e dist ribut ion of wealt h (not necessa rily of pol l ution) l e ads the modern
version of the Old Paradigm , called the Mo dified Old Paradigm .
The main
changes from the Old Paradigm are (as with state socialism) as emphasis of
economic facto rs, e . g . individual self-he lp is down- played , wealth is to a
small extent redistributed, e.g . through t:axation , market forces are re gulated
or disp la ced (not in principle eliminat e d, as with stat e s ocialism).
Now it
has been cont ended - outrageous though it should now se e m - that nuclear powe r
is i n the public interest as a means to various sought public ends, for example ,
apart from those already mentioned suc h as energy fo r growth and che ap
e l ect ricity, and such as plantiful powe r f or heating and cooking a nd app lian ce
use , avoidan ce of shortages , rat ioning ,
brown-outs and the like .
Since
alternative power sources, such as coal, could s e rve some ends given power was
supplied with suitable extravagance, the
argumen t has aga in to show that t he
cho ice of nucle ar power over other a lterna tives is best in the requ isite
respects, in s erving the public interes t.
Such a n ar gumen t is a matter for
decision theory, unde r which head cost -bene f i t analyse s which rank alternatives
a l so fall as special cases .
Decision theory purports to cover th eo r e tically the field of choice
b e tween alte rnatives; it is present ed as the theory which ' dea l s with t he
.
pro bl em o f c h oosing
one cours e o f acti. on among s e vera 1 poss1'bl. e cou r ses 1 . 53
Th us the choice of alt e rnati~ modes of energy pro duc ti on, t he ene r gy choice
problem, be comes an exercise
in decision theory; and the nucl ea r choice is
often ''.justi f ied" in Old Paradigm terms t h rough app e al to decision t heo ry.
But though decision theory is in principle comp rehens ive , as soon as it is put
to work in such practi cal cases as energy choice,
it is very considerably
contracted in scope, several major assumptions are surreptitiously imported,
and what one is confronte d with is a
depauperate
theory drastically
pruned down to confo r m with the narrow utilitarianism of mainstream e conomic
theory .
The extent of reduction can be glimpsed by comp a ring , to take one
imp ortant example , a general optimisation model for decision (wh ere
uncertainty is not gross) with comparab le decision the ory methods, such as th e
expe cted uti lity model.
The general model for best choice among alte rnatives
specifies maximisation of expected value subject to constrain ts, which may
include
et hical constraints ex clud ing cert a in alt e rnati ves under gi ven
cond itions .
Expected utility
models dEmote value to utility, assuming thereby
measurability and transference prop e rt ies t hat may not obtain, and elimina te
constraints altoget her (absorbing what is fo rbidden, fo r examp le , as having a
hi gh dis u tili ty, but one that can be compensate d for none th eless ).
Thus , in
�42.
particula r,
e thical constrain ts against nuclear developme nt are replaced, in
Old Paradigm fashion, by allowance in principle for compensat ion for damage
sustained . Still it is with decision making in Old Paradigm terms that we
are now embroiled , so no longer at issue are the defective (nee-clas sical)
economic assumptio ns made in the theory, for example as to the assessmen t of
everythin g t o be taken into account through utility (which comes down to
monetary terms : everythin g worth accountin g has a price), and as to the legitimac y
of transferr ing with limited compensat ion risks and costs to involved parties.
The energy choice problem is, so it has commonly been argued in the
assumed Old Paradigm framework , a case of decision under uncertain ty . It is not a
case of decision under risk (and so expected utility models are not applicabl e),
be cause some possible outcomes are so unce rtain that, in contrast to the case of
risk, no (suitably objective ) quantifia ble probabil ities can be assigned to them.
It ems that are so uncertain are taken to include nuclear war and core me ltdown
of a reactor, possible outcomes of nuclear de velopment : 54
widesprea d radioactive pollution is, by contrast, not uncertain .
The correct rule for decision under uncertain ty is, in the case of energy
ch oice , maximin, to maximize the minimum payoff, so it is sometimes contended .
In fact, on ce again, it is unnecessa ry for present purposes to decide which
energy option is selected, but only whether the nuclear option is rejected .
Since competing selection rules tend to deliver the same rejection s for
options early rejected as the nuclear options, a convergen ce in the rejection of
the nuclear option can be effected . All rational roads lead, not to Rome,
but to rejection of the nuclear option .
A further convergen ce can be effected
also , because the best possible (economic ) outcomes of such leading options as
coal and a hydroelec tric mix are very roughly of the same order as the nuclear
option (so Elster contends, and his argument can be elabo rated). Unde r these
condition s complex decision rules
(such as the Arrow-Hor wicz rule) which take
account of both best possible and most possible outcomes under each option
reduce to the maximin
rule .
Whichever energy option is selected under the
maximum rule, the nuclear option is certainly rejected since there are options
where worst outcomes are
substanti ally better
than that of the nuclear
option (just consider the scenario if the nuclear nightmare , not th e nuclear
dream, is realised) . Further applicati on of the rejection rule will reject
the fossil fuel (predomin antly coal) option, on the basis of estimated effe cts
on the earth 's climate from burning massive quantitie s of such fuels .
�43.
Although the rejection rule coupled with maximin
position several rivals to maximin
proposed,
each
enjoys a privileged
for decision under uncertainty have been
of which has associated rejection rules.
Some of these
rules , such as the risk- added reasonin g criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8),
which 'assesses
the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of
risk it adds to those pre-existin g in the status quo, rather than in te rms of
th e absolute value of the risk associated with the policy' are decidedly
dubious,
and rather than offering a
rational
decision procedure appears t o
afford protection of the (nuclear) status quo.
~~at will be argued, or rather
what Goodin has in effect argued for us, is that wherever one of these rival
rules is applicable, and not dubious, it leads to rejection of the nuclear
option .
For example , the keep -options-op en or allow-for-r eversibility
(not an entirely unquestiona ble rule
rule
'of strictly limited applicabili ty')
e xcludes the nuclear option because 'nuclear plants and their by-products have
an air of irreversibi lity ... " One cannot simply abandon
a nuclear reactor
the way one can abandon
a coal-fired plant"' (p.506). The compare-the alt e rnatives rule, in ordinary application , leads back to th e cost -b e nefit
assessments , which, as already observed, tell decisively against a nuclear
option when costing is done properly.
The maximise-s ustainable-b enefits rule,
which ' directs us to opt for th e policy producing the highest level of net
b enefits which can be sustained indefinitel y', 'decisively favours r e newable
sources ', ruling out the nuclear option.
Other lesser rules Goodin discusses,
which have not really been applied in the nuclear debate, and which lead yet
further from the Old Paradigm framework,
harm-avoida nce and protecting- thevulnerable als o yields th e same nuclear-exc luding results. Harm-avoida nce,
in particular, points
1
decisively in favour of "alt ernative" and "renewable "
energy sources ... combined with strenuous efforts at energy cons ervation'
(p.442) .
The upshot is evident: whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted
the result is the same, a nuclear choice is rejected, even by Old Paradigm
standards . Nor would reversion to an expected utility analysis alter this
conclusion; for such analyses are but glorified cost-benefi t analyses,wi th
probabiliti es duly multiplied in, and the
conclusion
is as before from
cost-b enefit co nsideration s, against a nuclear choice.
The Old Paradigm does not, it thus appears, sustain the nuclear
juggernaut : nor does its Modificatio n. The real reasons for the continuing
development program and the heavy commitment to the program have to be sought
elsewhere, outside the Old Paradigm, at least as preached. It is, in any case,
sufficientl y evident that contemporar y e conomic behaviour does not accord with
Old Paradigm percepts, practice does not accord with nee-classic al economic
....
�44.
th eory nor, to consider the main modification , with social democratic
th eory .
There are , firstly, reasons of previous commitment, when nuclear
power, cleverly promoted at least, looked a rather cheaper and safer deal,
and certainly profitable one :
corporations so committed are understandably
ke en to realise returns on capital already invested .
There are also typical
self-interest reasons fo r commitment to the program, that advantages accrue to
some, like those whose field happens to be nuclear engineering, that profits
accrue to some, like giant corporations, that are influential in politica l
affairs, and as a spin-off profits accrue to others , and so on .
The r e are
just as important, ideological reasons, such as a belief in the control of
both political and physical power by t e chnocratic-entrepre nial elite, a belief
in socl al control from above , control which nuclear powe r o f f ers f a r mo r e tlwn
alternatives, some of which (vaguely) threaten to alter th e power bas e , a f a ith
in th e unlimitedness of t e chnological enterprise, and nuclear in particular ,
so that any real probl ems that arise will be solved as development proceeds.
Such b e li e f s are especially conspicuous in the British scene, among the
gove rning and technocratic classes.
Within contemporary corporate capitalism,
thes e sorts of reasons for nuclear development are intimately linked, because
thos e whos e types of enterprise benefit substantially from nuclear developme nt
are commonly those who hold the requisite beliefs .
It is then, contemporary corporate capitalsim, along with its state
e n t erprise image, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut.
To be sure , corporate
capitalism , which is the political economy largely thrust upon us in we stern
nations, is not necessary for a nuclear future; a totalitarian state of the
t ype such capitalism often supports in the third world will suffice .
But,
unlike a hypothetical state that does conform to precepts of the Old Paradigm,
it is sufficient for a nuclear future - evidently, since we are well embarked
on such a future.
The historical route by which the world reached its present advanced
threshold to a nuclear future confirms this diagnosis.
split into two main cases, the notional
US
This diagnosis can be
development of nuclear power in the
and the international spread of nuclear technology for which the US has been
largely responsible .
By comparison with the West, nuc lear power production i n
th e
small
Eastern bloc is
and is largely confined to the Soviet Union
which had in 19 77 only about
nuclear plants .
one -sixth the wattage output of
US
Nuclear development in USSR has been, of course, a state
controlled and subsidized venture, in which there has been virtually
no public
participation or discussion; but Russian technology has not been exported elsewhere to any great extent .
American technology has .
�45,
The 60s were, because of the growth in electrici ty demand, a period of
great expansion of the elec trical utilities in the US . These companies we re
e ncouraged to build nuclear plants, rather than coal or oil burning plants,
for several state controlle d or influence d reasons:- Firs tly, owing to
governme ntal regulatio n procedure s the utilities could (it then seemed) earn
a higher rate of profit on a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel one. Secondly ,
the US governmen t arranged to meet crucial costs and risks of nuclear operation ,
and in this way, and more directly through its federal agencies , actively
encourage d a nuclear choice and nuclea r deve lopment. In particula r, state
limitatio n of liability and shoulderi n g of part o f insurance for nu clear
accidents and state arrangeme nts to handle nuclear wastes were what made
profit able private utility operation appear feasibl e and r esulting in nuclea r
investmen t.
In the 70s, though the state subsidiza tion continued , the private
pict ur e changed : 'high costs of construct ion combine d with low capacity
factors and poor r eli ability have wiped out the last advantage that nuclear power '
had enjoyed in the US.
Much as the domestic nuclear market in th e US is con trolled by a few
co rpor ations , so the world mark et is dominated by a few countries , predomina ntly
and first of all the US, which through its two leadi ng nuclear companies ,
We stinghous e and Gen e ral Electric, has been the major exporter of nuclear
technolog y. 55 These companies were enabled to gain entry into European and
subsequen tly world markets by US foreign policies, ba sically th e " Ato ms for
Peace" program supplemen ted by bilateral agreement s providing for US technolog y ,
r e search, enri ched uranium and financial capital. ' The US offered a [ s tat e
s ub si dize d ] nuclear package that Europe could not refus e and with whi ch the
British could not compete'.
In the 70s the picture of US dominatio n of Common
Market nuclear technolog y had given way to subtler influence : American companies
held (actually dealing with relevant governmen ts) substanti al interests in Europ ean
and Japanese nuclear companies and held licences on the technolog y which remained
largely American.
Meanwhile in the 60s and 70s the US entered into bilateral
ag re ements for civilian use of atomic energy with many other countries , for
example, Argentina , Brasil, Columbia, India, Indonesia , Iran, Ire l and, Israel ,
Pakistan, Philippin es, South Korea, Portugal, South Africa, Spa in,
Taiwan, Turk ey , Venezuela , South Vi etnam.
The US proceeded ,
in this way, to ship
nuclear technolog y and nuclear materials in gre at quantitie s round th e world.
It also proceeded to spread nuclear t echnology t hrough th e Internati onal Atomic
Ene rgy Agency , originall y de si gne d to control and saf eg uard nuclear ope rati ons,
but most of whos e ~udget and activitie s • .. have gone to promote nu c l ear
activitie s' .
�46.
A main reason for th e promotion and sales pressure on Third World
countries has been the failure of US domestic market and industrial world
markets for reactors. Less developed countries
offer a new frontier where reactors can be built with
easy public financing, where health and safe t y regulations
are loose and enforcement rar e , where public opposition
is not pennitted and where weak and corrupt regimes offer
easy sales.
[Forj
..• the US has considerabl e leverage
with many of these countries. We know from painful
expe rience that many of the worst dictatorshi ps in the planet
would not be able to stand without overt and covert US support .
Many of those same regimes
are now
pursuing
the
nuclear path, for all the worst reasons. 56
It is e v ident from this sketch of the ways and means of r eactor
proliferatio n that not only have practices departed far from the framework
of the Old Paradigm and the social Modificatio n, but that the practices (of
corp orate capitalism and associated third world imperialism ) involve much
that is eth ically unacceptabl e, whether
by olde r, modif ied, or alternative
57
percepts;
for principles such as those
and self-d e termination are grossly vio late d.
IX. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOWER AND DEEPER ALTERNATIVES . The futur e energy
option that is most often contrasted with nuclear power, namely coal power,
while no doubt preferable to nuclear power, is hardly acceptable . For it
carries with it the likelihood of serious (air) pollution and associ ated
phe nomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to ment ion the
despoliatio n caused by extensive strip mining , all of which result from its us e
in meeting very high projected consumption figures. Such an option would also
fail, it seems, to meet the necessary transfer condition, because it would
impose widespread costs on nonbenefic iaries for some concentrate d benefits to
some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production
58
and replacement .
To these conventiona l main options a third is often added which emphasizes
softer and more benign technologie s, such as those of solar energy and, in
Northern Europe, hydroele ctricity . The deeper choice, which even softer paths
tend to neglect, is not technologic al but social , and involves both
conservatio n measures and the restruct urin g of production away from energy
intensive uses: at a more basic level there is a choice between consumerist ic
and nonconsume ristic futures.
These more fundamental choices between social
alternative s , conventiona l t echnologica lly-oriented discussion of energy options
tends to be obscure.
It is not just a matter of de ciding in which way to meet
�4 7.
give n and unexamine d goals (as the Old Paradigm would imply), but als o a matter
of examining the goals. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of
comparing different technolog ies or substitut e ways of meeting some fi xed or give n
demand or level of consumpti on, and of trying to see whether we can meet this
with s oft rather than hard technolog ies; we are also fac e d, and pr i ma rily, with th e
matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society t hat creates
them . It is not just a question of devising less damaging ways to mee t these
alleged needs conceived of as inevitabl e and unchangea ble . (Hence there are
solar ways of producing unnecessa ry trivia no one really wants, as opposed to
nuclear ways.) Na turally this is not to deny that th e se softer options are
sup e rior because of the ethically unaccepta ble features of the harder options.
But it is doubtful that any technolog y, howe ver benign in principle , will
be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expect e d to meet
unbounded and uncontrol led energy consumpti on and demands. Even the more benign
technolog ies such as solar technolog y could be used in a way which creates costs
for future people and are likely to result in a deteriora ted world being hand e d
on to them . Consider, for example, the effect on the world's forest s , which are
commonly counted as a solar resource, of use for productio n of methanol or o f
e lectricit y by woodchipp ing (as already planned by forest authoriti es and
contempla ted by many other energy organisat ions) . While few would object to t he
use of genui ne waste material for energy productio n, the unrestric ted exploi t ation
of forests - whether it goes under the name of " solar energy" or not. - to meet
e ver increasin g energy demands could well be the final indignity for the world's
already hard-pres sed natural forests.
The effects of such additiona l demands on the maintenan ce of the
forests are often dismissed , even by soft technolo gicalists, by the simpl e
expedient of waving around the label 'renewabl e resources '. Many forests are
in principle renewable , it is a true, given a certain (low) rate and kind of
exploitat ion , but in fact there are now very few forestry operation s anywhere
in the world where the forests are treated as completel y renewable in the sense
of the renewal of all their values. 59 In many regions too the rate of
e xploitatio n which would enable renewal has already been exceeded, so that a total
decline is widely thought to be imminent if not already well advanced . It certainly
has begun in many regions, and for many forest types (such as rainfores t types)
which are now, and very rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of a
major further and not readily limitable demand pressure, that for energy,
on top of present pressures is one which anyone with a realistic appreciat ion
of the conduct of contempor ary forestry operation s, who i s also concerned with
long-t erm conservat ion of the forests and remaining natural communiti e s, must
regard with alarm. The result of massive deforesta tion for energy purposes,
�48,
r esemb li n g the deforesta tion of England at the beginning of th e Industrial
Revolution, again for ene rgy purposes, would be extensive and devastating
erosion in s t eeper lands and trop i cal are as , dese rtification in more a rid
r egions, possib le climatic change, and massive impoverishm en t of na tural
ecosystems .
Some of us do not wa nt to pass on - we are not entitled to pass
on - a de fores ted world to the future, any more than we want t o pass on on e
poisone d by nuclear products or polluted by coal p roduct s . In sh or t, a mere
swi t ch t o a more benign t e chnology - important though this i s - wi th out any
more bas ic structural and social change is inadequate .
Nor is such a simple technolo gi cal swi. tch likely to be achieved. It is
not as if political pressure could oblige the US government to stop its nuc lear
program (and that of the countrie s it influences, much of the world), in the
way pressure appeared
to succeed in halting the Vietnam war.
While without
doubt it would be good if this could be accomplishe d, it is ve ry un likely
give n th e inte gration of political powe rholders with those sponsoring nuclear
de velopment . 60
The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social
structure which promotes consumerism , consumption far beyo nd genuine needs, a nd
a n e conomic s tructure which en coura ge s increasing use of highly energy-inte nsive
mode s of prod uc tion. This means, for instance, trying to change a social
stru c ture in which those who are lucky enough to make it into the work f o rce
are cogs i n a production machine over which they have ve ry little r eal cont r ol
an d in which most people do unpleasant or boring work fro m which they derive
very 1i t tle real satisfactio n in orde r to obta i n the r eward of consume r goo ds
and services . A society in which social rewards are obtained primarily from
prod ucts rather than proc es s e s, fro m consumption , rath e r than from satisfac tion
in work an d in social r e lations and oth er activities , is virtually bound to be
one which generates a vast amount of unn e cessary consumption . (A production
system that produces goods not to meet genuine needs but fo r created and nongenuine needs is virtually bound to overproduce . ) Consumption frequently
be comes a substitute for satisfaction in other areas.
The adjustments focussed upon are only parts of the large r set of
adjustments involved in s ocially implementin g the New Paradigm , the move away
f rom consumerism is for examp le part of th e more ge ner al shift from ma t eri al ism
and ma terialist values .
The social change option tends to be obscured in mos t dis cussions o f
energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it do e s
que stion unde rlying values of current social arrangemen ts . The conventiona l
discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or
61
n ee ds
) as unchall e ngeable, and th e iss ue to be on e of which t ech nology can
�49.
be most profi tably employed to meet th em.
This e ffectiv e ly pre s en ts a f a l se
choice, and is the result of taking needs and demand a s lacking a s ocial
contex t so that the social structure which produces the needs is similarly
take n as unchallengeable and unchangeable .
The point is readily illustrated.
It is commonly argue d by representat i ves
of such industries as trans!X)rtation and petroleum, as for exampl e by McGrowth
of the XS Consumption Co., that people want deep freezers, air conditioners,
powe r boats, ... It would be authoritarian to prevent th em from satisfying
th e se wants.
Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in
which such nee ds and wants arise or are produced.
To point to th e de t e rmination
of many such wants at the framework level is not however to accept a Marxist
approach a ccording to which they are entirely de t ermined at the framewo rk level
( e .g. by indu s trial organisation) and th e r e is no such thing as indivi dual
ch oic e or de termination at all.
It is to s ee the soci a l framework as a major
f a c t o r i n de t e rmining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel ,
a n d t o see ap pare ntly individual choices made in such matte rs as being channelle d
a nd dire cte d by a social framework de t e rmined l argely i n th e inte r es t s o f
corporat e an d private pro f it and advantage .
The so cial change option is a hard option - at l e ast it wil l b e difficult
to obtain pol itically - but it is the only way , so it has been argued , of a voidin g
passing on serious costs to the future.
And there are other sorts of r easons t han
suc h ethical ones for taking it: it is the main, indeed the only sort of option
open to those who take a deeper ecological perspective 62 , a perspective integ ral
with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant
paradigm.
The ethical transmission requirement defended accordingl y requires,
hardly surprisingly, social and pol i tical adjustment.
The social and political changes that the deeper alternative require s will
be strongly resisted because they
and power structure.
mean changes in current social organisation
To the extent that the option repre sents some kind of
threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements it is not surp r ising
that official energy option discussion proceeds by misre pres enting and often
ob scuring i t .
But difficult though a change will be , es pec ially one with s uch
f a r - r eaching e ffects on th e prevailing power struc tur e , is to obt ai n, it is
imp e rative t o try: we are al l on the n uclear train.
�FOOTNOTES
1.
All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Goodin, p. 417;
the last line is from the Fox Report, p. 6.
While it is unnecessary to know much about the nuclear fuel cycle
in order to consider ethical and social dimensions of nuclear power, it
helps to know a little.
& Abbotts , Gyorgy.
The basics are presented in many texts, e . g. Nader
Of course in order to assess fully reports as to such
important background and stage-settin g matters as the likelihood of a
core meltdown of a (lightwater ) reactor, much more information is required.
For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies
and decision theory is at least a s important as knowledge of nuclear technology.
2.
to the first, see references cited in Goodin , p . 417, footnote 1.
As regards the second see Cot grove and Duff, and some of the references
As
given therein.
3.
Cot grove and Duff, p. 339.
4.
The table is adapted from Cotgrove and Duff, p. 341;
Catton and Dunlap, especially p. 34 .
5.
compare also
See, e.g ., Gyorgy , pp . 357- 8.
6.
For one illustration , see the conclusions of Mr Justice Parker at
the Windscale inquiry (The Windscale Inquiry Vol. 1., Her Majesty 's
Stationery Office , London, 1978), discussed in both Cotgrove and
Duff , p. 347 and in Goodin, p. 501 ff.
7.
Much as with the argument of one theory or position against another .
One can argue both from one's own position against the other, and in the
other's own terms against the other.
8.
As well as screening the debate from the public such manoeuvres
favour the (pro-)nucle ar establishme nt, since they (those of th e
alliance of military, large industry, and government) control much of the
information and (subject to minor qualificatio ns) can release what, and only
what , suits them.
9.
This is a conclusion of several governmenta l inquiries and is
conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear deve lopment; for requisite
details up to 1977 see Routley (a).
The same conclus ion has been reached in
some, but not all, more recent official reports, see , e . g.,
�2
10.
For some details see Gyorgy, p. 60 ff.
11 .
Se e the papers, and simulations, discussed in Goodin, p. 428.
lla.
Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be
taken into account in arriving at moral assessments.
Nuclea r radi ation , unlike
most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life and welfare.
But since the harm nuclear development may afflict on non-human life, for
exampl e , 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 convent ional
(Old Paradigm) way.
12.
On the pollution and waste disposal record of the nuclear industry,
see Nader and Abbotts, Lovins and Price, and Gyorgy.
On the more general
problem of effective pollution controls, see also, Routley (a), footnote 7.
13.
Back of thus Humanity Unlimited assumption is the idea of Man
replacing God.
First God had unlimited power, e.g. over nature, then when
during the Enlightenment Man replaced God, Man was to have unlimited
power.
Science and technology were the tools which were to put Man into the
position of unlimitedness.
More recent l y nuclear power is seen as providing
man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology.
[ability to manage technology repr esent s the past]
14 .
On such l imitation theorems, which go back to Finsler and Godel on one
side and to Arrow on the other, see, e.g. Routley 80.
All these theorems mimic
paradoxes, semantical "paradoxes" on one side and vot ing "p aradoxes" on the
other.
Other different limitation resu1 ts are presented in Routley 81 .
It
follows that there are many problems that have no solution and much that is
n e cessarily unknowable.
Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture.
According
th e Dominant Western Worldview,
the history of humanity is one of progress; for every problem
there is a solution, and thus progress need never cease (Catton
and Dunlap, p . 34) .
15.
See Lovins and Price .
15a .
The points also suggest a variant argument against a nuclear future,
namely
A nuclear future narrows the range of opportunities
open to future generations.
'What justice requires ... is that the overall range
of opportunities open to successor generations should not be
narrowed' (Barry, p. 24 3).
Therefor e ~ a nuclear f utur e contrav enes r equirements of justice .
�3
16.
For examples , and for some details of the history of philosoph e rs'
positions on obligatio ns to the future, see Routley (a).
17 .
Passmore, p. 91.
Passmore' s position is ambivalen t and , to
all appearanc es, inconsist ent. It is considere d in detail in Routley (a),
as also is Rawls ' position.
18.
For related criticism s of the e conomists ' arguments for discounti ng,
a nd for citation of the often eminent economist s who sponsor them, see
Goodin , pp. 429-30.
19.
The reasons (not elaborate d here) are that the propertie s are different
e . g. a monetary reduction of value imposes a linear ordering on values to which
value rankings , being only partial orderings , do not conform.
20.
Goodin however puts his case against those rules in a less than
satisfact ory fashion . What he claims is tha t we cannot list all the
possible outcomes in the way that such rules as expe ct ed util ity maximiza tion
presuppos es, e.g. Goodin suggests that we cannot list all the things that can
go wrong with a nuclear power plant or with waste storage procedure s. But
outstandi ng alternativ es can always be comprehen ded logically , at worst by
saying "all the rest" (e.g. "'P covers everythin g except p). For example ,
outcomes Goodin says cannot be listed, can be comprehen ded along such lines
as "plant breakdown through human error". Furthermo re the different
more app ropriate rules Goodin subsequen tly considers also requir e listing of
"possible " outcomes .
Goodin's point can be alternati vely stated however.
There
are really two points.
The first trouble is that such ragbag alternati v es
cannot in general be assigned required quantitat ive probabil ities, and it is
at that point that applicati ons of the models breaks dovm. The breakdown is
just what separates decision making under uncertain ty from decision making
under risk. Secondly, many influenti al applicatio ns of decision theory methods,
the Rasmussen Report is a good example, do, illegitim ately, delete possible
alternati ves from their modelling s.
21 .
Discount, or bank, rates in the economis ts' sense are usually set to
follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson , Economics , 7th Edition, McGraw-H ill,
New York , 1967, p.351.
22 .
Thus the rates have little moral relevance .
A real possibili ty is one which there is evidence for believing could
eventuate . A real possibili ty requires producibl e evidence for its
considera tion . The contrast is with mere logical possibili ty.
23.
�4
24.
Such a princip le is explici t both in classica l utilitar iani s m (e.g.
Sidgwick p. 414) , and in a range of contrac t and other theories from Kant and
Rousseau to Rawl s (p.293).
How the princip le is argu ed for will depe nd
heavily , however, on the underlyi ng theory; and we do not want to make our use
depend he avily on particu lar ethical theories .
25.
The latter question is taken up in section VII; see especia lly, the
Poverty argumen t.
26 .
SF, p. 27.
Shrader -Freche tte is herself somewha t critical of the
carte blanche adoption of these methods , suggesti ng that ' whoever aff irms or
den ies the desirab ility of ... [such] standard s is, to some degree,
symboll ically assentin g to a number of American value patterns and cu l tural
norms' (p. 28 ).
27.
The examp le paralle ls the sorts of countere xamp les often advance d to
utilitar ianism, e.g. the admissi ble lynching of an innocen t person because
of pleasure given to the large lynching party.
against utilitar ianism, see ...
For the more general case
28 .
US Atomic Energy Commissi on , Compara tive Risk-Co st-B en ef it Study of
Alterna tive sources of Electric al Energy (WASH-1224), US Governm ent Printing
Office , Washing ton, D.C., Decembe r 1974 , p.4-7 and p. 1-16.
29 .
As SF points out, p.37-44 ., in some detail. As she remarks,
... since standard s need not be met, so long as the
NRC [Nuclea r Regulato ry commiss ion] judges that the
licence shows 'a reasonab le effort' at meetin g them,
current policy allows governm ent regulato rs to trade
human health and welfare for the [apparen t ] good
intentio ns of the promo tors of technolo gy. [Such]
good intentio ns have never been known to be sufficie nt
for the morality of an act (p. 39).
The failure of state regulati on, even where the standard s are as mostl y not very
demandin g, and the alliance of regulato rs with those th ey a re s upposed t o be
r eg ulating, are conspicu ous features of modern environm ental control, not just
of (nuclear ) pollutio n control.
30 .
�31 .
The figures are thos e from the origin al Bro okhaven Report: ' Theo r e
t ical
possib ilities and consequ ences of major accide nts in large nuclea
r plants ',
USAEC Report WASH-740, Governm ent Printin g Office , Washin gton , D. C.,
1957.
This r e port was r eques ted in the first place because the Commis sion
on Atomic Energy
wanted pos i tive safe t y conc l usions "to r eass ure th e
private insuran ce compan ies" so that they would pr ovid e
coverag e for th e nuclea r indust ry. Since even th e
cons e rvative statist ics of the r eport we r e alannin g it
was supp r essed and its data we r e not made public until.
almost 20 years later, after a suit was brough t as a r esult of
the Freedom of Inform ation Act (Shrad er-Frec hette, pp. 78-9).
32 .
Atomic Energy Commis sion, Re actor Safe ty Study: An Ass e ssment of
Acc ident Risks in US Comme rcial Nuclea r Power Plants , Governm ent
Printin g Offi ce ,
Washin gton, D.C., 1975 . This report, the only alleged ly comple te
study ,
conclud ed that fission reactor s presen ted only a minima l health risk
t o the
public .
Early in 1979, th e Nuclea r Regula tory Commis sion (th e r elevan t
organ isation that superse ded the trouble d Atomic Energy Commis sion)
withdre
w
i ts suppor t for the report, with the result that there is now no
compreh ensive
analys is of nuclea r power approve d by the US Governm ent.
32a .
Most presen t and planned r eactors are of this type: see Gyo r gy .
33 .
34 .
Even then relevan t environ ment factors may have been neglec t ed .
35.
There are variati ons on (i) and (ii) which multip ly costs agains t
number s such as probab ilities. In this way risks, constru ed as probab
le
cos ts, can be taken into accoun t in the assessm ent.
(Alt e rnative ly, risks may
be assesse d through such familia r method s as insuran ce.)
A princip le varying (ii), and fonnula ted as follows :
(ii ) a is ethica lly accepta ble if (for some b) a include s no more
risks than b
and b is sociall y acce pted. was the basic ethica l princip le in terms
of which
the Cluff Lak e Board of Inquiry recentl y decided that nuclea r power
de velo pme nt
1
�in Saskat chewan is ethically acceptable :
s e e Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Final
Report, Departme nt of Environment , Government of Saskatchewa n, 1978, p. 305 and
p . 288 . In this report, a is nuclear power and bis either a ctiviti e s clearl y
accepted by society as alternative power sources.
In other application s b has
been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietna m War(!)
The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles
(i) - (ii'). The principles are certainly ethically substantive , since an
ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an
inadmissibl e conventiona l character. For l ook at the origin of b: b may be
socia lly accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its
social acceptibili ty is no longer so cle arcut and it would not have been socially
accepted if as much as is now known had been known when it was introduced. 'What
is required in (ii'), for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing
is then 'ethically acceptable' rather than 'socially accepted'. But even with
th e amendments the principles are invalid , for the reasons given in the text.
It is not disconcertin g that thes e arguments do not work . It would be
sad to see yet another area lost to the exper ts, namely ethics to actuaries.
36.
A main part of the tr oubl e with the models is that they are narrowly
utilitarian , and like utilitariani sm they neglect distributio nal features ,
involve na tu ralistic fallacies, et c.
Really they try to treat as an uncon-
straine d optimisatio n what is a deontically constraine d optimisatio n :
V. Routley 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarian ism'.
s ee R. and
37.
Ap parent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistr i bution
of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be i f taxation
is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly
monopolised by a minority of the population .
Example s such as that of motoring
dangerously do not constitute counterexam ples to the principle; for one is not
morally entitled to so motor.
38.
SF, p. 15, where references are also cited.
39 .
Goodin, p. 433.
40 .
On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and
Energy , Environment a lists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7,
and also the details supplied in substantiat ing th e interesting case of Commoner
[7 ] . On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as
well [18], p. 23 . On th e employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [ 9], p. 149.
�7
A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich,
Ene rgy and Equality , Calden and Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that
the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly th e opp osite of
what the poor need.
41 .
For much more deta il on the inappropria teness see E.F . Schumacher,
Sma ll is Beauti ful, Blond and Briggs, London, 1973. As to the capital and
o ther requirement s, see [2] , p. 48 , and also [7] and [9] .
For an illuminatin g l ook at the sort of d evelopmen t high - energy
t e chnolo gy will t end to promote in the so-called unde rdeveloped countri es see
the pap e r of Waiko and other papers in The Melanesian Envfr•onment (edited
J . H. Wins l ow), Au s tr a l ian National University Press, Canb e rr a, 1977.
42 .
A useful survey is given in A. Lovins , Energy Strategy : The Road Not
Taken , Fr iends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Fo 1°eign Affair•s ,
Oc tob e r 1976); s ee also [ 17], [6 ] , [ 7], [14] , p . 233 ff, and Schumacher, op . cit .
43 .
An argument like this is suggested in Passmo re, Chapters 4 and 7,
with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument
for the ove rriding importance of passing on contemporar y culture is underpinn e d
by what appears to be a future-dire cted ethical version of the Hidden Hand
argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed he
fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only
way to do so, since do-good interventio n is almost certain to go wrong) is to
take proper care of t he present and immediate future. The argument has all
t he defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others.
44.
See Nader and Abbotts, p. 66, p . 191, and also Commoner .
45 .
Very persuasive arguments to this effect have been a dvanced by civ il
liberties groups and others in a number of countri e s: see especially M. Flood
and R. Grove-White , Nuclear Pr ospects. 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.
46.
' US energy policy, for example , since the passage of the 1954 Atomic
Energy Act , has been that nuclear powe r is necessary to provide "an e conomical
and reliable basis"
n eed ed "to sustain economic growth" (SF, p . 111, and
r efe rences there cit e d) .
�47.
There are now a great many criticism s of the second premiss in th e
literat ure . For our criticism , and a r e formulati on of the premiss in terms
of selec tive economic growth (which would exclude nu clear developm ent), see
Routley (b) , and also Berkley and Seckler.
To simple-mi ndedly contrast e conomic growth with no-growth , in the fa shion
of some discussio ns of nuclear power, c . f . Elster, is to leave out
crucial
alte rnatives ; the contracti on of course much simplifie s the otherwise faulty
case for unalleged growth.
48.
In UK and USSR nuclear developme nt is explicitl y in the public domain,
in such countries as France and West Germany the governmen t has very s ubstantia l
interests in main nuclear involved companies . Even as regards nuclear plant
operation in the US,
it is difficult to obtain comprehen sive data.
Estimates of cost very dramtical ly according to the
sample of plants chosen and the assumptio ns made
concernin g the measureme nt of plant performan ce
(Gyorgy, p. 173).
49 .
See Kalmanoff , p .
50.
See Corney.
51.
Ref. to what it has to say about Price Anderson Act.
52.
Full ref to SF on argument
from ignorance etc.
53 .
These e . g. Elster, p. 377.
On deci sion theory see also,
54 .
A recent theme in much economic literatur e is that Bayesian dec ision
theory and risk analysis can be universal ly applied . The theme is upset as
soon as one steps outside of select Old Paradigm confines. In any case , even
within these confines there is no consensus at all on, a nd few (and
widely diverging ) figures for the probabili ty of a reactor core meltdown,
an d no reliable estimates as to the likelihoo d of a nuclear confronta t i on.
Thus Goodin argue s (in 78) that 'such uncertain ties plague energy theories'
as to 'rend er expected utility calculati ons impossibl e '.
55 .
For details see Gyorgy, p. 398 ff ., from which presentat ion of the
internati onal story is adapted.
�1
56.
Gyo rgy, p . 307, and p. 308.
points, see Chomsky
For elaborati on of some of th e important
and Hermann.
57.
Whatever one thinks of the ethical principle s underlyin g the Old
Paradigm or its Modificat ion - and they do form a coherent set th at many
people can
respect - these are not the principle s unde rlying contempor ary
corporate capitalism and associate d third-wor ld i.mperialis m.
58.
Certainly practical transitio nal programs may involve tempo rary and
limited us e of unaccepta ble long t erm commoditi es such as coal, but in
presentin g su ch practical details one should not lose sigh t of the more basic
social and structura l changes, and the problem is really one of making those.
Similarly practical transitio nal strategie s should make use of such
measures as en vironment al (or replaceme nt) pricing of energy i . e . so that the
price of some energy unit includes the full cost of r e placing it by an
equivalen t unit taking account of environm ental cost of productio n. Other
(sometime s coopU.ve) s trategies towards more satisfact ory alternativ es should
a lso, of course , be adopted, in particula r the removal of institutio nal barriers
to energy conservat ion and alternati ve technolog y (e . g. local governmen t
regulatio ns blocking these), and the removal of state assistanc e to fuel and
power industrie s.
59.
Symptoma tic of the fact that it is not treated as r enewable is that
forest economics do not generally allow for full renewabi lity - if th ey did
the losses and deficits on forestry operation s would be much more s triking tha n
t hey already are often enough.
It is doubtful, furthermo re, that energy cropping of forests can be a
fully r e newable operation if net energy productio n is to be worthwhil e; see, e.g .
the argument in L. R.B . Mann 'Some difficult ies with energy farming for portable
fuels', and add in the costs of e cosystem maintenan ce.
60.
For an outline and explanati on of this phenomena see Gyorgy,
and also Woodmansee .
61 .
The requisite distinctio n is made in several places , e . g . Routley (b),
and (to take one example from the real Marxist literatur e), Baran and
Sw eezy .
62 .
The distinctio n between shallow and deep ecology was first emphasise d
by Naess. For its environm en tal i mpo rtance see Routl ey (c) (wher e
further reference s are cited) .
�•
REFERENCES .
In o rde r to contai n refe r e n ces to a modes t length, r efrre ncc to
primary sources has often been replaced by referen ce through secondary sources .
Generally the reader can easily trace the primary sour ces . For those parts of
the text that ove rlap Routley (a), fuller references wil l be found by
consulting the latter article.
S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, 'Environmen talism, middle-clas s radicalism an d
politics', Sociologica l Review 28 (2) (1980), 333-51.
R.E . Goodin, 'No moral nukes ', Ethics 90 (1980), 417-49.
A. Gyorgy and Friends , No Nukes: everyone's guide to nuclear power, South End
Press, Boston, Mass., 1979.
R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Ato mic Energy, Outb ack Press , Melbourn e ,
1977.
R. a nd V. Routley, 'Nuclear energy and obligations to the future', Inquiry
21 ( 1978), 133-79 (cited as Routley (a)).
Fox Repo rt: Ranger Uranium Environmen tal I nquiry First Report , Australian
Go vernmen t Publishing Service, Canberra , 1977.
K.S. Schrader-Fr echet te, Nu clea r Power and Publi c Policy, Reidel, Do rdrecht,
1980 (refe rred to as SF).
W. R. Cat ton, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap, 'A new ecol ogical paradigm for post - ex uber an t
sociology', Ame rican Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980) 15-47 .
Unite d States Interagency Review group on Nuclea r Waste Managemen t, Repo rt
to the President, Wash i ngton. (Dept. of Energy) 1979. (Ref. No . El. 28 . TID29442) (cited as US(a)) .
A.B . Lovins and J.H. Price, Non-Nuc lear Futures : The Case for an Eth ical
Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth Internation al, San Fran cisco , 1975.
R. Routley , 'On the impossibili ty of an ortho dox social theory and of an
orthodox solution to environmen tal problems', Logique et Analyse,
23 (1980), 145-66.
R. Routl ey , 'Necessa r y limits for knowledge: unknowable tru ths', in Es says in
honour of Paul Wei nga rtner,
(ed. E. Norscher ), Salzberg, 1980.
J. Passmore , Man's Responsibi lity for Nature, Du ckworth , London, 1974 .
�,,,.
.-2.
R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, Third Editi on, RSSS, Austra lian
National University, 1975 (cited as Routley (b)).
J . Rawls , A Theory of Justice, Harvard Unive rsit y Press, Cambridge , Mass.,
19 71.
P . hl . Berkl ey a nd D.W . Seckler, Economic Gr owth and Environment a l Dec ay,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch , New York, 1972 .
J . Elster, 'Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power' , Soci al Science Information
18 (3) (1979) 371-400.
J. Robinson , Economic Heresi e s, Basic Books, New York, 1971.
B. Barry, 'Circumstan ces of Justice and future generat i ons ' in Obligations to
Future Generations (ed. R.I. Sikora and B. Barry), Templ e Universit y Press,
Philadelphi a, 1978.
H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics , Macmillan, London , 1962 (r e issue ).
B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power , Knopf, New York, 1975.
N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Right s , 2 vols., Black
Rose Books, Montreal, 1979 .
J. Woodmans ee , The World of a Giant Corporation , North Coun tr y Pr es s , Seattle ,
Washing ton, 1975.
P . A. B~r a n and P . Sweezy, Monopoly Capita l, Penguin, 1967.
A. Naess, ' The shallow and the deep, long range eco l ogy movement.
A summary ', Inquiry 16 (1973) 95-100.
�
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NUCLE AR POWER -
I.
ETHIC AL,
SOC I AL AND POLltt AAL DI MiN S I ONS
COMPETING PARADIGMS AN D THE NU CLEAR DEBAT E.
1870
One ha rdly needs initia t i on i nt o the dark my s te ri e s of
nucl ear ph ys i cs to contribu te use f ully t o t he debat e no w
wid e l y r anging ov e r nuc lear powe r . While ma ny i mpo r tan t
empi rica l que stions ar e s t i ll unr e s olved, t hese do not r e a lly
l i e a t th e ce nt r e of t he con t r ove rsy. In st e ad, it is a
de ba t e about val ue s . ..
ma ny of the que s tions ~hi ch a ri s e are s oc i al an d et hica l one s . 1
Socio logical inves tigation s have conf i rme d that th e n ucl ea r deba t e is primaril
y
one ove r what is wor th having or pursuing and over what we a re ent i t l ed to do
to o th e rs .
They ha ve also confirme d tha t t he debate i s polaris ed a lon g t he
li nes o f compe ting paradigm s. 2 Accordin g to the entre nc he d parad i gm dis ce rn e
d,
that conste llation of value s , attitude s and be liefs o fte n ca ll e d t he Domi nan t
So ci a l Pa radigm (hereaft er the Old Paradigm ),
economic criteria be come the be nchmark by whi ch a wi de ran ge of
individu al and social action is judged and e va luat e d . And be li e f
in the market and marke t mechan isms is quit e ce ntral . Clust e rin g
around this core belief is the convicti on th a t e nt e r p r i s e flou r is hes
bes t i n a system of r isks and rewards, that di ffe r e nti als a r e
neces sary ..• , and in the nece ssity for some fo r m o f di vis i on of
labour, and a hi e rarchy of skills and exper t is e . In pa rt i cul a r,
t here i s a be li e f in th e comp e t e nce o f e xperts i n gener a l and of
sci entis t s in pa r ticular .
the re is an empha s i s on q uantif i ca t ion . 3
The ri v a l world view , sometime s c all e d t he Alte rnative Environm e ntal Par ad igm
(the New Paradi gm) dif f ers on almos t e ve ry pcint , and, acco rdin g t o so ciologi
sts ,
in ways summari sed i n th e fo llowing t a bl e 4 Domi nant Socia l Para digm
CORE VALUES
Ma te r i a l (e conomic growth , progress an d dev elopmen t )
Na tu ra l env ironment va lu e d as resourc e
Dom i nat i on over na t ur e
Al t e rn a tive Env ir onme nt al
Pa rad igm
Non-ma terial (se l f -r eali sa t io n)
Na t ural e nvir onm e nt i ntrin s i cally
valu ed
Ha r mo ny with na tu r e
ECONOMY*
Ma rket forces
Ri s k a nd rewa r d
Rewa r ds for ach i evemen t
Diff e rent i a l s
Individ ua l se lf-help
Public i nte r es t
Sa fety
Incomes r elat ed t o nee d
Egali t a r ian
Co ll ective/soc i al provi s i on
PO LITY
Authori t at iv e s t ru c t ures (e xp e r t s in flue ntia l)
Hi e r a r ch1.c a l
Law and order
Ac t io n through o ffi c ia l i nst it ut io ns
Pa rtic ip a tive s t ruc t ur e s ( ci ti zen/
wo r ke r invo lveme n t )
No n- hi era r chical
Liberation
Di r ec t a c ti o n
SOCIETY
Ce ntr a lised
La r ge-s ca le
As socia tional
Or der ed
Dece ntr a l ised
Small - s ca l e
Communa l
Flexib l e
NATURE
Ampl e rese r ves
Nature host il e/ ne u t r a l
Envi r onmen t cont roll a ble
Earth ' s r esou r c e s lim i ted
Nature be nign
Na t ure de l i ca t el y ba l a nc ed
KNOWLEDGE
Co nf idence in sc i ence and t ec hnology
Ra t i onal i t y of mea ns (only)
Li mit s t o sc i e nce
Rati ona lit y of en ds
*Stat e
socia l ism , as pr a ctised i n mo s t of t he " Eastern b l oc" , di ffers
as to eco nomi c o r ganisation , t he ma r ket i n pa r ticula r be i ng rep l ac ed
sys tem hy ~ comma nd sy st e m) . Bu t sin c e t he r e i s v irt ual l y no debate
r·o ni i nes 'l l s r a t <! ., ociali sm , 5 that mJnnr va riant on th e Old Para digm
from t he Ol d Pa rad i gm r eall y on ly
by cen t ral planning (a ma r ke t
over o nu c lea r futu r e within t he
ne ed no t be de lineat ed he r e .
2
No doubt the competing paradigm picture is a trifle simple (and
subs equently it is important to disentangle a Modified Old Paradigm, which
softens the old econ omic assumptions with social welfa r e requirements :
really
and
instead of a New Paradigm there are rather count erpa radigms, a
cluster of not very well worked out positions that diverge from the cluster
marked out as the Old Paradigm) .
Nonetheless it is empi rically investigable,
and, most important, it enables the nuclear debate to be focuss ed .
Large -
scale nuclear development, of the sort now occurring in much of the world ,
runs counter to leading tenets (such as societal features) of the New Pa radigm.
Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the assessment of nucl ear
power, instead of or in addition to merely economic factors such as cost and
efficiency, is already to move somewhat beyond the recei ved paradigm.
For
under the Old Paradigm, strictly construed, th e nuclear debate is confined to
the tenns of the narrow utilitarianism up on which contemporary economic
practice is p r emisse d, the issues to questions of economic means (to assumed
economistic ends) along with technological, social engineering and other
instrumental details :
whatever falls outside these terms is ( dismissed as)
.
.
1.6
irrationa
Furthermore, nuclear development rece ive s its support from adherents
of the Old Paradigm.
Virtually all the arguments in favour of it are set
within the assumption frame.work of the Old Paradigm, and without these
assumptions the case for the nuclear future the world is presently committed
to fails .
But in fact the argument for a nuclear future from the Old Paradigm
is itself broken-backed and ultimat ely fails, unless the free enterprise
economic assumptions are replaced by th e ethically unacceptable assumptions of
advanced (corporate) capitalism .
The two paradigm picture also enables our case against a nuclear future
(a case written from outside the Old Paradigm) to be structured.
.
7
main parts : -
There are two
It is argue d, firstl y , from without the Old Paradigm, that
nuclear development is ethically unjustifiable; but that, secondly, even from
within the framework of the ethically dubious Old Paradigm, such development
is unacceptable, since significant features of nuclear development conflict
with indispensible features of the Paradigm (e . g . co sts of project development
and state subsidization with market independence and crite ria for project
selection) .
It has appeared acceptable from within the dominant paradigm only
because ideals do not square with practice, only because the assumptions of th e
Old Paradigm are but very rarely applied in contemporary political practice,
3
th e place of pure (or mixed) capitalism having been usurped by corporate
capitalism.
It is because the nuclear debate can be carried on within th e
framework of the Old Paradigm that the debate - although it is a debate about
values, because of the conflicting values of the competing paradigms - is not
just a debate about values; it is also a debate within a paradigm as to means
to already assumed (economistic) ends, and of rational choice as to energy
options within a predetermined framework of values. (In this corner belong,
as explained in section VIII, most decision theory argume nts, arguments often
considered as encompassing all the nuclear debate is ethically about, best
utilitarian me ans to predetermined ends . )
For another leading characteristic
of the nuclear deb a te is the attempt, under the dominant paradigm to remove it
from the ethical and social sphere, and to divert it into specialist issues whe th e r over minutiae and contingenci es of present techno l ogy o r ove r medical
or legal or mathematical details. 8
The double approach can be applied as regards each of t he main problems
nuclear development poses.
There are many i nte rr ela t ed problems, and the
argument is further structured in terms of these.
For in the advancement and
promotion of nucle ar power we encounter a remarkable combination of factors, never
befo re assembled :
establishment, on a massive scale , of an industry which
involves at each stage of its processing serious risks and at some stages of
p roduction possible catastrophe , which delivers as a by-product rad ioactive
wastes which require up to a million years' storage but for which no sound and
e conomic storage methods are known, which grew up as part of the war industry
and which is easily subverted to deliver nuclear weapons, which r equires for
i t s operation considerable secrecy, limitations on the flow of informa tion and
r es trictions on civil liberties, which depends for its economics, and in orde r
to generate expected profits, on substantial state subsidization, supper½ and
intervention.
with problems.
It is, in short, a very high techological develo pmen t, beset
A first important problem, which serves also to exemplify
e thical issues and principles involved in other nuclear power que st i on s , is
th e unreso l ved matter of disposal of nuclear wastes.
II . THE NUCLEAR WASTE DISPOSAL PROBLEM, AND THE TRAIN PARABLE .
A long distance country train has just pulled out.
crowded carries both pass e ngers and fr e i gh t.
The train which is
At an early stop in the journey
someon e con signs as freight, to a far distant destination, a package which
contains a high ly toxic and exp losive gas.
This is packaged in a very thin
container which, as the consigner is aware, may not contain th e gas for the
4
full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if th e train
should strike any real trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the
interior of the train becomes very hot, if the train should be derailed or
involved in a collision, or if some passenger should interefere inadvertently
o r deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it.
these sorts of contingencies have occurred on some previous journeys.
All of
If the
container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some
of the people on the train in adjacent carriages, while othe r s could be maimed
or incur serious diseases.
Most of us would roundly condemn such an action.
consigner of the parcel say to try to justify it?
What might the
He might say that it is not
certain that the gas will escape and that it is mere speculation to suppose it
will , that the world needs his pr~uct and it is his duty to supply it , and
that in a ny case he is not responsible for th e train or the people on it. These
sorts of excuses however wo uld norrrally be seen as ludicrous when set in this
context . What is worth remarking is that similar excuses are not always so seen
I
when the consigner, again a "responsible" b usin essman , puts his workers ' health
or other peoples ' welf are at risk.
Suppose he ways that it is hi s own and otherd press ing needs which
justify his action.
The company he controls,which produces the material as a
by-product , is in bad financia l straits, and could not afford to produce a
better container even if it knew how to make one.
If the company fails , he and
his family will suffer, his employees will lose their jobs and have to look
for others, and th e whole company town, through loss of spending and the
cancellation of the Multiplier Effe ct, will be worse off.
The poor and unemployed
of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will suffer
espe cially. Few people would accept such a story, even if correct, as justification .
Even where there are serious risks and costs to ones e lf or some group for whom
one is concerned one is usually considered not t o be entitled to simply transfer
the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto
other uninvolved parties,
especially where they a ri se from one's own, or one's group 's, chosen life-style.
The matter of nuclear waste disposal has many moral features which resemble
the train case . How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as th e argument
progresses . There is no known proven safe way to package th e highly toxic
wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around th e world as
large- scale nuclear development goes ahead. 9 The waste problem will be much
more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, with
5.
each one of the 2000 or so reactors envisaged by the end of the century producing,
on average , annual wastes containing 1000 times the radioactivity of the
Hiroshima bomb .
Much of this waste is extremely t oxic .
For example, a
millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer .
Wastes
will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after
the ir expected life times of perhaps 40 years , and which, some have estimated,
may require l½ million years to reach saf e levels of radioactivity.
Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environ ment fo r
th e ir entire active lifetime. For fission products the required storage period
a ve rages a thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include
plutonium, there is a half to a million yea r storage problem . Serious problems
have aris en with both short-term and proposed long-t erm methods of storage,
e ven with th e comparatively small quantities of waste produced ove r th e last
10
twenty years.
Short-term methods of storage require continued human in t e rven tion, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human i nterference and risk of leakage through non-human factors .
No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic
history of the earth over the last million years, a period whose flu ctua tion s
in climate we are only just beginning to guage and which has seen four Ice
Ages , could be confident that a rigorous guarantee of safe storage could be
provided for the vast period of time involved. Nor does the history of human
affa irs over the last 3000 years give ground for confidence in safe storage by
methods requiring human intervention over perhaps a million years . Proposed
long-term storage methods such as storage in granite formations or in salt mines,
are largely speculative and relatively untested, and have already pro ved to
involve difficulties with attempts made to put them into practice. Even as
regards expensive recent proposals for first embedding concentrated wastes in
glass and encapsulating the r e sult in multilayered metal containe rs before rock
deposit , simulation mo dels reveal that radioactive material may not rema in
suitably is ola ted from human environment . 11 In short, the best pres ent storage
proposals carry very real possibilities of irradiating future people and
.
h .
.
lla
d amaging t eir environment.
Given the heavy costs which could be involve d fo r the future, and given
the known limits of technology, it is methodological ly unsound to bet, as
nuclear nations have, on the discovery of safe procedures for storage of wastes.
Any new procedures (required before 2000) will probably be but variations on
present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies.
For instance , none of
the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly test e d, and they may
6.
well prove to involve unforeseen difficultie s and risks when an attemp t is made
to put them into practice on a commercial scale. Only a method that could
provide a rigorous guaran t ee 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 geological
or future µuman factors . But even if an economicall y viable, rigorously safe
long t e rm storage method could be devised , there is the problem of gua rantee ing
that it would be universally and invariably used.
The assumption that it
would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method proved expensive
economicall y and politically ) seems to p r esuppose a level of efficiency,
pe rfection and concern for the f u ture which has not previously been e ncountere d
in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nucl ea r industry. 12
Again, unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long t e rm storage
sites through pe rhaps a million years of possible future human activity, weaponsgrade radioactive material will be accessible , over much of the million year
storage peri od, to any party who is in a position to retrieve it.
Th e assumption that a way will nonetheless be found , before 2000,
which gets around the wastestorag e problem (no longer a nere disposal problem)
is accordingly not rationally based, but is rather like many assumpti ons of way s ,
an article of faith . It is an assunption supplied by the Old Par adigm, a no
limitations ass ump tion , that there are really no (developmen t) problems that
cannot be solved technologic ally (if not in a fash i on that is always
immediately economi cally feasible).
The assumption has played
an important
part in development plans and pra ctic e.
It has not only encouraged an unwarrant e d
technolog ical optimism (not to say hubris 13 ), that there are no limits to what
humans can accomplish , es pe cially through science ; it has led t o the embarcation
on projects before crucial problems have been satisfactor ily solved or a solution
is even in sight , and it has led to th e idea that technology can always be suitably
controlled .
It has also led, not surprisingl y, to disasters .
There are severe
limits on what technology can achieve (some of which a r e becoming known in the
form of limitation theorems 14 ); and in addition there are human limitations
which modern technologic al development s often fail to take due account of (risk
a nalysis of the likelihood of reactor accidents is a relevant example, discuss e d
below) . The original nuclear technology dream was that nuclear fissi on would
provide unlimi t ed energy (a 'clean unlimited supply of power '). That dr e am soon
shattered. The nu clear industry apparently remains a net consume r of power,
and nuclear fission will be but a quite shor t-t erm supplier of power. 15
)
7.
The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclea r development
are , then, significant.
Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for
a million years, but even with the (suspect) breeder r eactor it could be an
energy source for only perhaps 150 years.
It will do nothing for the energy
problems of the people of the distant future whose lives could be se riously
affected by the wastes.
Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of futur e people could
be fo rced to bear significant risks resulting from the provision of the
(extravagant) energy use of only a small proportion of the people o f 10 generations.
Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive
materials th e only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the fu ture .
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 transition t o 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 .
For they may well have to face the change to renewable res ources 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' dreams of global
industrialisation are realised , more and more of the global population will have
become dependent on high energy consumption and associat ed 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 larg ely depleted of non-renewable
resources, and in which su ch r enewable r eso urces as forests and soils as remain,
resources which will have to form a very important part of the basis of life ,
15a
are in a run-down condition. Such points
tell against th e idea th a t future
people mGst be , if not direct beneficiaries of nuclear fission energy , at least
indirect beneficiaries .
It is for such reasons th at the train pa rabl e cannot
be turned around to work in favour of nuclear power, with for exampl e , the
nuclear train bringing relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (onl y)
by nuclear power.
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 .
Like the consigner in the train
parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to ge t itself out of a
mess arising from its chosen life style - the creation of e conomies dependent on
an abundance of non-renewable energy, which is limited in supply - to pass on
costs and risks of serious harm to others who will obtain no corresponding
benefits .
The " solution" may enable the avoidance of some uncomfortable changes
8.
in the lifetime of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as
the consigner's action avoids uncomfortable changes for him and his immediate
surroundings, but at the expense of passing heavy burdens to other uninvolved
parties, whose opportunity to lead decent lives may be seriously jeopardised.
Industrial society has - under each paradigm, so it
will be argued -
cl e ar alternatives to · this action, which is taken essentially to avoid changing
corporately-controlled patterns of consumption and protect the interest of
those comparatively few who benefit from them .
If we apply to the nuclear situation, so perceived , the standards of
behaviour and moral principles generally acknowledged (in principle if perhaps
of t en not in fact ) in the contemporary wo rld, it is not easy to avoid the
conclusion that nuclear development involves gross injustice with respect to
15a
th e future .
There appear to be 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 the nuclear pa rcel
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 imply that there are no circumstances in
which such an action might be justifiable, or at least whe re the matter is less
clearcut.
It is the same with the nuclear case .
Just as in the cas e of the
consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these justifying
circumstances might be, and whether they apply in th e present case.
We consider
these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear development in turn,
beginning with the ques tion of our obligations to the future.
Resolution of
this question casts light on other ethical questions concerning nuclear development.
It is only when these have been considered that the matter of whether
there are overriding circumstances is taken up again (in section VII).
III
OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE.
The especially problematic area
is that of the distant (i.e . non-immediat e) fut ure, the futur e with which
people alive today will have no direct contact: by comparison, the immediate
future gives fewer problems for most ethical theories.
In fact the question of
obliga tions to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories
fail to pass , and also has serious repercussions in political philosophy as
regards the adequacy of accepted (democra ti c and other) institutions which do
not take due account of the interests of future creatures.
9.
Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on the issue.
A good
many of the philosophers who have explicitly considered the question have come down
in favour of the same considerations 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
a lesser 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 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 th ere are no
moral obligations to the future beyond perhaps those to the next gene ration .
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 a ct ing or failing to act deriving from the
ef fect of our actions on future people . Of those philosophers who say , or
whose views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate)
future, who have opted for the unconstrained position, many have based this view
on accounts of moral obligation which are built on relations which presuppose
some temporal or spatial contiguity .
Th us moral obligation is seen as grounded
on or as presupposing various relations which could not hold between people
widely separated in time ( o r sometimes in space) . Fo r example, obligation is
seen as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also
non-transitive . Among su ch suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation, or
r eq uirements on moral obligation , which would rule out obligations to the nonimmediate future are these :- Firstly there are those accounts which require that
someone to whom a moral obligation is held be able to claim his r ights or
en titlement . People in the distant future will not be able to claim rights and
entitlements as against us, and of course they can do nothing effective to
e nforce any claims they might have for their rights against us.
Secondly , there
a re 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 invariant 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 couid be no guarantee that any
contemporary institutions would do it for them .
10.
Both the view that moral obligation requires the cont ex t of a moral
community and the view that it is contractually based appear to rul e out th e
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 r ela tions
of short duration such as sympathy and love.
As well there are difficulties
about love and sympathy for (non-existent ) people in the far distant futu r e 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 l ittle or no sympa th y .
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
peop l e ; and it would appear to follow from this that contemporary people had
no obligations concerning future people and could damage them as it suited them.
What all these views have in common is a picture of obligation as
some thing acquired, either individually or institutionally , something which
is conditional on doing something or failing to do something (e.g. pa rticipatin g
in the moral community, contracting), or having some characteristic one can
fail to have (e . g . love, sympathy, empathy). 16 Because obligation therefore
becomes conditional, features usually (and correctly) thought to characterise
obligation such as universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding
features) are lost, especially where there is a choice wh e ther or not to do the
thing required to acquire the obligation, and so as to whether to acquire it.
The criteria for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the
distant future.
The view that there are no moral constraints with respect to future
people, that one is free to act however one likes with respect to them, is not
however sustainable. Consider, for example , a scientific group which, for no
particular reason other than to test a particular piece of technology, places
in orbit a cobalt bomb 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
...
11.
the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a direct and predictab le
result of the action. The unconstra ined position clearly implies that this is
an acceptabl e moral enterpris e, that whatever else we might legitimat ely
criticize in the scientis ts' experimen t, perhaps its being ove r-e xpensive or
badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it will do
to futu re people . The unconstra ined position also endorses as morally acceptabl e
the following sort
of policy: -
A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit
from mining , processin g and manufactu ring a new type of material which, although
it causes no problem for present people or their immediate descendan ts, will
over a pe ri od of hundreds of years decay into a substance which will cause an
enormous ep idemi c of cancer among the inhabitan ts of the earth at that time .
According to the unconstra ined view the firm is free to act in its own interests ,
without any considera tion for the harm it does r emote future people.
Such counterex amples to the unconstra ined view, which are easily vari e d
and multiplie d , might seem childii>hl y obvious. Yet the unconstra ined position
concernin g the future f rom which they follow is far from being a straw man ; not
only have several philosoph ers endorsed this position, but it is a cl e ar
implicati on of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligatio n, as
well as of prevailin g e conomic theory. It seems that those who opt for the
unconstra ined position have not considere d such examples , despite their being
clearly implied by their position.
We suspect that - we would certainly hope
that - when it is brought out that the unconstra ined position admits such
counterex amples , that being free to act implies among other thin gs being free to
inflict pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for the unconstra ined
position would want to assert that it was not what they intended. What many
of those who have put forward the unconstra ined position seem to have had in
mind in denying moral obligatio n is rather that · future people can look after
themselve s, that we are not responsib le for their lives. The popular view that
the future can take care of itself also seems to assume a future causal l y
independe nt of the present. But it is not. It is not as if, in the counterexample cases or in the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone
to take care of itself .
Present people are influenci ng it , and in doing so
thereby acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsi bilities as they do in
causally affecting the present and immediate future, namely the obli gation to
tak e accoun t i n what they do of people affected and their interests , to be
care ful in their actions, to take account of the genuine probabili ty of their
actions causing harm, and to see that th ey do not act so as to rob future
people of the chance of a good life.
12.
Furth e rmore, to say that we are not respon s ible f o r th e lives o f future
people does not amount to th e same thing as sayin g t hat we are fr ee to do as we
like with r es pe ct to them , that there are no moral constraints on our act io n
involving th e m. In just th e same way , th e fact that on e does no t hav e o r ha s not
acquired an obliga tion to some stran ge r with whom one has ne ver been i nvolved , that
on e has no responsibil ity for his life, does not imply that on e is fr ee t o do
what on e like s with respect to him, for e xample to r ob him or to pursue some
course of action of advantage to on e self which could s e riously ha rm him.
These difficultie s for the uncons trained position arise in part from the
(sometime s deliberate) failure to make an important distinction betwe e n acquired
or assume d obligation toward somebody , for which some act of acquisition or
a s sumption is required as a qualifying condition , and moral constraints , which
require, for example, that one should not act so as t o damage or harm someone ,
a n d for which no act of acquisition is required.
There i s a conside rable
di ffer ence in the level and kind of responsibil ity involved. In the first cas e
on e must do something or be something which one can fail to do or be, e . g.
have loves, sy!ll)athy, be contracted.
In the second case responsibil it y arises
as a r e sult of being a causal agent who is aware of the cons eque nces o r probable
consequence s of his action, and thus does not have to be es pecially acquired or
assumed.
Thus there is no problem about how the latt e r class , moral c onstra ints,
can apply to the distant future in cases where it may be difficult o r i mpossible
for acquisition or assumption conditions to be satisfi e d . They appl y a s a result
o f th e abil i t y to produce causal effects on the distant future of a r eas onably
pr e dict a ble nature .
Thus also moral constraints can apply to what do e s not
(ye t) e xist, just as actions can cause results that do not (yet) exist . Wh ile
it may pe rhaps be the case that there would need to be an acquired or a ssume d
ob liga tion in order for it to be claimed that contemporar y people mus t make
special sacrifices f or future people of an heroic kind, or even to he lp them
e s pe cially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrain e d
from harming them . Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigne r cannot
argue in justificatio n of his action that he has never assumed or acquired
re s ponsibility for the passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no
l ove or sympathy for th em and that t hey are not part of his moral community , in
short that he has no special obligations to help them. All that one ne eds to
argue concerning the train, and the nuclear case , is that there are mo ral
constrain ts against harming, not that there are specially acquired obligations
to take responsibil ity for the live s of people involved .
There has been an attempt 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 distinction s between constraints and
acquired obligation and between obligation and supererogat ion this is just
13 .
to misrep resent the positio n of these obliga tions. For exampl e, one
is no more
engagin g in heroic self-sa crifice by not forcing future people into
an unviab le
life positio n or by refrain ing from causing then direct harm than
the consign er
is resorti ng to heroic self-sa crifice in re frainin g from placing his
dangero us
package on the train.
The conflat ion of moral restrai nts with acquire d obliga tion, and the
attemp t there~ ith to view all constra ints as acquire d and to write
off nonacq uired
constr aints, is facilit ated through the use of the term ' moral obligat
ion ' both
to signify any type of deontic constra ints and also to indicat e r athe
r someth ing
which has to be assumed or require d . The conflat ion is encoura ged
by reduct ionist
positio ns which, in attemp ting to accoun t for obligat ion in genera
l, mistake nly
endeavo ur to collaps e all obligat ions . Hence the equa ti on , and some
main roots
of the uncons trained positio n, of the erron eous belief that there
are no moral
constr aint s concern ing the distant future.
The uncons trained view tends to give way , under the weight of counte
rexampl es , to more qualifi ed, and sometim es ambiva lent, positio ns ,
for example
the positio n that
our obliga tions are to immedi ate poster ity, we ought to try to
improve the world so that we shall be able to hand it over to
our immedi ate succes sors in a better conditi on, and that is all; 17
there are in practic e no obliga tions to the distan t futur e . A main
argume nt
in favour of the latter theme is that such obliga tions would in practic
e be
otiose . Everyth ing that needs to be accoun ted for can be en compass
ed through
the chain picture of obliga tion as linking succes sive genera tions,
under which
each genera tion has obliga tions, based on loves or sympath y , only
to the
succeed ing genera tion . The re are at least three objecti ons to this
chain
accoun t. First, it is inadeq uate to treat constr aints concern ing
the future
as if they applied only between genera tions, as if there were no questio
n of
constr aints on individ uals as opposed to whole genera tions, since
individ uals
can create causal effects , e . e. harm, on the future in a way which
may create
individ ual respon sibility , and which often cannot be sheeted home
to an e ntire
genera tion .
Nuclea r power and its wastes , for exampl e, are strictl y the
respon sibility of small groups of power- hol ders, not a genera tional
respon
sibility .
Second ly, such chains, since non-tr ansitiv e, cannot yield direct obligat
ions to
the distan t future . But for this very r eason the chain pict ure cannot
be
adeq uate, as exampl es again show. For the pic ture is unable to explain
severa l
of the cases that have to be dealt with, e.g. the exampl es already
discuss ed
which show that we can have a direct effect on the distan t future
withou t
affecti ng the next genera tion, who may not even be able to influen
ce matters .
14.
Thirdly, improvement s fo r immediate successors may be achieved at th e expense of
disadvantag es to people of the more distant future . Improving the world for
immediate successors is quite compatible with, and may even in some circumstanc es
be most easily achieved by , ruining it for less immediate successors . Such
cases can hardly be written off as "ne ver- never land" examples since many cases
of environment al exploitatio n might be seen as of just this type. e . g . not just
the nuclear case but also the exhaustion of non-renewab le resources and the
long- term depletion of renewable resources such as soils and forests through
overus e .
If then such obvious injustices to future people arising from th e
fa vouring 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 ove r time, and not merely as accruing to particular generations in
the way the chain picture suggests .
IV . ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE: ECONOMISTIC UNCERTAINTY
AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS. While there are grave difficultie s for the
unconstrain ed position, qualificatio n leads to a more defensible position.
According to the main qualified position we a r e not entirely unconstrain ed
with respe ct 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 pres ent and immediate
future . The interests of future people then, except in unusual cases, coun t for
very much l ess than the interests of present people. Hence such thin gs as nuclear
development and various exploitativ e activities which benefi t present people should
proceed, even if people of the distant future are (somewha t) disadvantag ed by them .
The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in
prevailing 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 a discount rate , so dis counting costs and risks to future people.
a t tempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something that is becoming
increasingl y common , can lead then to the qualified position. What is
objectionab le in such an approach is that
The
economics should operate within the
bounds of moral (deontic) constraints , just as in practice it operates within
legal constraints , not detennine what those constraints are. There are moreover
alternative economic theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one
which discounts the future is to beg many questions at issue.
15.
Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting
the future, the most threadbare is based on the assumption that future
generations will be better off than present ones, and so better placed to handle
th e waste problem. 18 Since there is mounting evidence that future ge ne rations
may well not be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter,
no argume nt for discounting the interest s of future gcncrntionfl on thi s
can carry much weight. Nor is that all that is wrong with the argument.
biH:1i. B
For
it depends at base on the assumption that poorer contemporar ies would be making
sacrifices to richer successors in foregoing such (allegedly beneficial)
development s as nuclear power .
That is, it depends on the already scotched
sacrifice argument .
In any case, for the waste disposal problem to be
legitimatel y bequeathed to the future gene rations, it would have to be shown,
what recent economic progress hardly justifies, that future generations will
be , not just better off , but so much better off and more capable that they
can duly absorb the nuclear waste burden.
A more plausible argument for discounting is directly in terms of
opportunity costs. It is argued , from the fact that a dollar gained now is worth
much more than a dollar received in the non-immedia te future (because the first
dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is
required to obtain equivalent monetary values, and so for efficient allocation
of resources . Similarly it is argued, by virtue again of equalizatio n of monetary
value, that compensatio n - which is what the waste problem is taken to come to
economica lly - costs much less now th an later . Thus a few pennies set aside
(e.g . in a trust fund) now or in the future, if need be, will suffice to
compensate eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage.
There are, presently at least , insurmounta ble practical difficultie s about
applying such discounting , e . g . how to de t ermine appropriate future discount rates .
A more serious objection is that applied generally, the argument presupposes ,
what is false, that compensatio n, like value, can always be converted into
monetary e quivalents , that peo ple (including those outside market frameworks)
can be monetarily compensated for a variety of damages, i n cluding cancer and loss
of life . There is no compensatin g a dead man, or for a lost species. In fact
the argument presupposes a do uble reduction neither part of which can succeed :
it is not just that value cannot in general be represented at all adequately
monetarily , 19 but (as against utilitariani sm, for example) that constraints and
obligations can not be somehow reduced to mat t ers of value . It is also
presupposed that all decision me thods, suitable for requisite nuclear choices,
16.
are bound to apply discounti ng . This is far from so : indeed Goodin argues that,
on the contrary, more appropria te decision rules do not allow discounti ng, and
discounti ng only works in practice with expected utility rules (such as underlie
cost-bene fit and benefit-r isk analyses) , which are, he contends strictly
inapplica ble for nuclear choices (since no t all outcomes can be duly determine d
and assigned probabil ities, in the way that applicatio n of the rules requires. ). 20
As the preceding arguments reveal, the discounti ng move often has the same
result as the unconstra ined position . If, for instance, we consider the cancer
example and reduce costs to payable compensa tion, it is evident that over a
sufficien tly long period of time discounti ng at curren t prices would lead to the
conclusio n that there are no recoverab le damages and so , in economic terms, no
constrain ts . In short, even certain damage to future people could be written off.
One way to achieve the bias against future people is by the applicatio n of
discoun t rates which are set in accord with the current economic horizons of no
more than about 15 years, 21 and applicati on of such rates would simply beg
the question against the i.nterests and rights of future pe ople . Where there is
certain future damage of a morally forbidden type, for example , the whole method
of discounti ng is simply inapplica ble, and its use would violate moral
constrain ts .
Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids th e objection s
from cases of certain damage, comes from probabili ty considera tions. The distant
future, it is argued , is much more uncertain than t he present and itillue diate
fut ure, so that probabili ties are consequen tly lower, perhaps even approachi ng
or coincidin g with zero for any hypothesi s concernin g the distant future. But
then if we take ac count of probabil iti es in the obvious way , by simply multiplyi ng
th e m 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 neighbour ing people
where (much ) high~r probabil ities are attached. So in the case of confl ict
between the present and the future where it i s a question of weighing certain
benefits to the people of the present and the immediat e future against a much
lower probabili ty of indetenni nate costs to an indetermi nate number of distant
future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present,
assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved . But of course
it cannot be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and benefits
are involved in the nucle ar case, especial ly if it is a question of risking
poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years , with consequen t
risk of serious harm to thousands of ge nerations of future people, in order to
obtain doubtful benefits for some present people, in the shape of the opportuni ty
to maintain corporati on profitabi lity or to continue unnecess arily high energy
use.
And even if the costs an d benefits were comparabl e or
evenly weighted,
"
17.
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
s ufficiently large.
Such a cost-benefi t or risk-benefi t approach to moral and decision
problems , with o r without the probability frills , is quite inadequate where
different parties are concerned or to deal with cases of conflict of interest
or moral problems where deontic constraints are involved, and commonly
yields counterintu itive 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 ga in from
it. But the costs and benefits involved are not transferabl e in any simple or
general way from one party to another .
Transfers of this kind, of costs
and benefits involving different parties, commonly rais e moral issues - e.g.
is x entitled to benefit himself by imposing costs on y - which are not
susceptible to a simple cost-benefi t approach of the sort adopted in promotion
of nuclear energy, where costs to future people are sometimes dismissed with
the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as benefits.
The limitations of tran sfer point is enough to invalidate the comparison,
heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptabili ty of the nuclea r
risk, between nuclear risks and those from such activities as airplane travel
or cigarette smoking . In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the
activity are also, to an overwhelmin g extent, those who bear the serious health
costs and risks involved . In contrast the users and supposed beneficiari es
of nuclear energy will be r isking not only, or even primarily, their own lives
and health, but also that of others who may be non-benefic iaries and who may be
spatially or temporally removed, and these risks will not be in any dire ct way
related to a person ' s extent of use .
The transfer objection is essentially the same as that to the utilitarian ' s
(happiness) sums as a way of solving moral conflict between different parties,
and the introductio n of p r obability consideratio ns - as in utilita r ian de cision
methods such as expected utility rules - does not change the principles involved
but merely complicates the analysis . One might further object to the probability
argument that probabiliti es 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 morai prob l ems do not depend on a high level of
probability anyway .
In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the train parable
reveals , that a significant risk is created ; such cases do not depend critically
on high probability assignments .
18 .
Uncerta inty argumen ts in various forms are the most common and importan t
ones used by philo s ophers, economi sts and others to argue f or the position that
we
cannot be expe cted to
distant future .
take serious ac count of the effects of our actions on th e
There are two strands to the uncertai nty argumen t, capable of
s eparatio n , but frequen tly tangled up. Both argumen ts are mistaken , the first
on a priori grounds, the second on a posterio ri grounds. The first argumen t
is a gene ralised uncerta inty argumen t which runs as fol lows :- In contras t to
the exa ct informa tion we can obtain about the present, the informa tion we can
obtain about the effects of our a-ctions on the di s tant future is unreliab le,
fuzzy and highly specula tive. But we cannot base assessm ents of how we shoul
d
act on informa tion of this kind, especia lly when accurate informa tion is obtainable about the present which would indicate differen t act ion. Therefo re we must
r eg retfully ignore the uncertai n effects of our actions on the distant fut ure.
More formally and crudely: One only has obligati ons to the futur e if t hese
obliga tions are based on reliable in forma tion at present as regards th e
distant future. Therefo re one has no obligati ons to the distant future. This
first argumen t is essentia lly a variant on a sceptica l argwnen t in epistemo logy
concerni ng our knowledg e of the future (formall y, replace 'obligat ions ' by
'knowled ge' in the crude stateme nt of the argumen t above). The main ploy is
to
conside rably overesti mate and oversta te the degree of certaint y availabl e with
r es pect to the present and immedia t e future, and the degree of certaint y which
is required as the basis fo r moral conside ration with r espect to the present
and with respect to the f uture.
Associa ted with thi s is the attempt to sugges t
a sharp division as regards certaint y between the present and immedia te 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 divi sion between the distant
future and the adjacen t future and the present, at l east with re spect to those
things in th e pres e nt which are normally subject to moral constra ints. We can
and constan tly do act on the basis of such "unrelia ble " informa tion, as the
sceptic as regards the future conveni ently labels "unce rta i nty"; for scepticproof certaint y is rarely, or never, availab le with respect to much of the
present and immedia te future . In moral situatio ns in the pres e nt, action
often takes acco unt of risk and probabi lity , even quite low probab iliti es .
Conside r again the train example. We do not need to know for certain that the
containe r will break and the lethal gas escape . In fact it does not even have
to be probable , in the relevan t sense of more probable than not, in order for
us to condemn the consign er's action. It is enough that there is a signific ant
risk of harm in this sort of case. It does not matter if the decrease d wellb eing of the consigne r is certain and that the prospec ts of the passeng ers
quite uncertai n, the resoluti on of the problem is neverth eless clearly in fa
vour
of the so-calle d "specul ative" and "unrelia ble". But if we do not require
certaint y of action to apply moral constra ints in cont emporary affairs, why
19.
should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future?
Why should
we require for the future, ep istemic standards which the more familiar sphere of
moral act ion concerning the present and adjacent futur e does not need to meet?
The insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral consi deration
ca n be given to the distant future, then, amounts to an eipstemic double standard.
But such an epistemic double standard, proposed in explaining th e difference
between the present and the future a nd 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
e ach class, which difference is in turn in need of justification.
The second uncertainty argument is a practical unc e rtainty argument,
that whatever our theoretical obligations to the future, we cannot in practice
take the interests of future people into account becaus e uncertainty about
the distant future is so gross th a t we canmot determine what the lik ely
cons equences of actions on it will be and therefore, however good our intentions
to the people of the distant future are, 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 rati onal ground for
ch oosing between them.
this way : -
The seco!ld uncertainty argume nt can be put alternatively
If moral principles are. like other principles, implicational in form,
that is of such forms as "if x has character h then x is wrong, for eve r y
(action) x", then what the argument claims is that we cannot ever obtain the
info rmation about future actions which would enable us to detach the
an tecedent of the implication .
So even if moral principles theoretically
apply to future people, in practice they cannot be applied to obtain cl ear
conclusions or dire ctions concerning contemporary action action of th e "It is
wrong to do x" type.
Many of the assumptions of the second argument can be conceded.
If
th e 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 th e 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 th e
future, will in practice not be applicable to obtain an y clea r conclusions about
how to act.
on action .
Hence the distant future will impose no practical moral constraints
However the argument is factually incorrect in assuming that the
future always is 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
"
20 .
argument has to assume .
There are some areas where un certainty is not so grea t as
to ex clude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point ,
which was noticed in connection with the first argument, that complete certain ty
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
uncerta inty about many factors which are not highly, or at all, morally r e levant,
but this does not extend to many factors which are of much greater importance
t o moral is sues .
For example, we may not have any idea what the fashions will be
in a hundred years in names or footwear, or what flavour s of ice cream people
will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe, espe cially
if we consider 3000 years of history, that what peop le there are in a hundred
years are likely to have material and psychic needs not entirely unli ke 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 ge netic defec ts, by the destruction of resources, or the
elimination from the ear th of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at
present makes it such a rich and interesting place .
For this sort of r eason ,
the second uncertainty argument should be rejected.
The case of nuclear waste
storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, is one area
where uncertainty in morally relevant respects is not so great as to preclude
moral constraints on action, where we can ascertain if not absolute certainties
at least probabilities of the same sort of orde r as are considered sufficient for
the application of moral principles in parallel contemporary cases, especially
where spatially remote people are involved.
In particular there is not 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 is
evident from the train 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 defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to
write off probable or possible harm to future people as outside the scope of
prope r consideration.
Most of these popular moves employ both of the uncer taint y
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 r eally
take account of future people because we cannot be sure that th ey will exis t or
that their tast es 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
21.
things that would affect us.
But this is to insist upon compl e t e ce r taint y of a
sort be yond what is required for the pre sent and imme diate future, whe r e there
i s also commonly no guarantee that some disast e r will not overtake t hose we are
mo rally cowmi tted to. Again we may be told that th e r e i s no guarant ee that
future peopl e will be worthy of any e fforts on our part, because th ey may be
mo rons or for ever plugged into enjoyme nt or other machin es . Even if on e is
prepare d t o accept the elitist approach presupposed -
according to which
only those who meet certain properly civilized or int e ll e ctual standards a r e
e ligible for moral consideration - what we are being han de d in such ar guments
as a serious defeating consideration is a gain a mere outside possibility li ke the sceptic who says that solid-looking desk in front of us is pe rhaps only a
facade, not because he has any particular r e ason for doing so, but bec ause he
hasn't looked around the back , drilled holes in it, etc. etc .
Ne ith e r the
cont emporary nor the historical situation gives any positive reason for supposing
that a lapse into universal moronity or universal-pleas ure-machine escapism is
a serious possibility, as opposed to a logical possibility.
We can contrast with
th e se me re logical possibilities the very real historically supportab l e risks
of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilisation through destruction
of its resource base.
The possibilities just considered in these uncertainty argume n t s of
sceptical character are not real possibilities. Another argument which may
consider a real possibility, but still does not succee d in showing th a t it is
a c ce ptab l e to proceed with an action which would appear to be harmful to future
,
people, is often introduced in the nuclear waste cas e .
This is the argument that
future p eople may discover a rigorously safe and permanent storage me thod for
nuclear was tes 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 : that this appears to
be a live possibility, and not merely a logi cal possibility, does not make the
action of the firm earlier discussed, 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
s orts were admissible only j_f what was required for inadmissibility was certainty
of harm or a very high probability of it . In such cases before such actions could
22.
be conside r e d admissible what would be required is far more than a possibility,
22
real or not
- 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 th emselves .
The strategy of these and other uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then,
and may be brought out by looking yet again at the train example wh ere the consigner
says that he cannot be expected to take account of th e effec t of his actions on
the passengers b ec ause they may find an effective way to deal with his parcel or
some lucky or unlucky accident may occur, e.g . the train may break down and they
may all change to a different transport leaving the parcel behind, or the train
may crash killing all the passengers before the container gets a chance to leak.
These are all possibilities of course, but there is no positi ve r eason to believe
that they are any more than that, that is they are not live possibilities.
The
strategy is to stress such remote possibilities in order to create the false
impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real
possibility that the container will 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 consigner's taking account of the passengers' welf are and th e
real possibility of harm from his parcel and thereby to 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
of harm, 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 re al possibility
of avoidance of damage is to show that this allegedly r eq uired high degree of
certainty or probability cannot be attained.
That is, the strate gy draws
attention to some real uncertainty implying that this is sufficient to defeat th e
application of moral constraints .
But, as we have seen, this is often not so.
Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the
indeterminacy of the future .
In particular it is argued that the indeterminacy,
for example , with respect to the number and exact character of people at future
times, would at least prevent the interest of future people being taken into
account where there is a conflict with the present .
Since th e ir numbers are
ind eterminate and their interests unknown how, it is asked, 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 rais ed
particularly by problems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present
and future people, for example oil, when the numbers of the latte r 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
23,
ignoring such factors.
Nor are distributio nal problems as large and
representat ive of a class of moral prob lems concerning the future as the tendency
to focus on them would suggest. It can be conceded that there will be cases
where the indetermina cy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very
difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble - a realistic ethical theory will
not deliver a decision procedure - but there will equally be othe r conflict
cases where the level of indetermina cy does not hinder resolution of the issue,
e . g . the train example which is a conflict case of a t ype . In particular,
th e re will be many cases which are not solved by weighing numb ers , n umbers of
interests, or whatever , cases for which one needs to know only the most general
probable characteris tics of future people .
The crucial question which emerges is then :
are there any features of
futu re people which would disqualify them from full moral consideratio n o r
r e duce thei r claims to such below those of present people? The answe r is:
in
principle None .
Prima facie, moral principles are universalis able , and lawlike,
in that they ap ply independent ly of position in space or in time, for examp le.
But universalis ability of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories
whi ch are capable of dealing satisfactor ily with the pres ent : in other words, a
theory that did not allow properly for the future would be found to have defects
as regards th e present, to deal unjustly or unfairly with some present people,
e .g. those remotely located, those outside some select subgroup, such as (whit e skinned) humans , etc .
The only candidates for characteris tics that would fairly
rule out future people are the logical features we have been looking at, such
as uncertainty and indetermina cy; but, as we have argued, it would be far too
sweeping to see thes e 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 determinatio n of best probable of practical course of action given only
present information ) . In particular, they do not affect cases of th e so~t
be ing considered, nuclear development , where highly determinate or certain
infonnation about the numbers and characteris tics of the class likely to be
harmed is not required, nor is certainty of damage.
To establish obligations to the future a full universaliz ability
principle is not required: it is enough that the temporal position of a person
cannot affect his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral
consideratio n; 24
inversely, that it is without basis to discriminat e morally
against a person in virtue of his temporal position . As a result of this
.
23a.
universalizabi lity, there are the same general obligations to future peo ple as
to the present; and thus there i s the same obligation to take account of them
and thei r 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 them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life . Uncertainty
and inde t e rminacy do not relieve 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
24.
harm in the future case under conside ration, then futurity alone will not
provide adequate grounds for proceed ing with the action, thus discri mina ting
against future people.
Accordin gly we cannot escape, through appeal to
futurity , the conclusi on already tentativ ely reached, that proposa ls for nuclear
developm ent in the present and likely future state of technolo gy and practice
s
for future waste disposa l are immoral.
Before we conside r (in section VII) the remainin g escape route from this
conclusi on, through appeal to overridi ng circumst ances , it is importan t to
pick up th e further case (which heavily r einforce s the tentativ e conclusi on)
against nuclear developm ent, since much of it relies on ethical princip les
similar to those that underlie obligati ons to the future, and since it too
is commonly met by similar appeal to extenua ting ci rc umstanc es.
V. PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION: REACTOR EMISSIONS, AND CORE MELTDOWN . The
eth ical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to futur e creature
s.
Just as remoten ess in time does not erode obligati ons or enti tl emen ts t o just
treatmen t, neither does location in spac e , or a particu lar geograp hical position
.
First of all, the problem of nuclear waste disposa l rais es serious question s
of
distribu tive justice not only across time, across generat i ons, but also across
space. Is one state or region entitled to dump its radioac tive polluti on in
another state's or region's yard or water s? When that region receives no due
compens ation (whateve r that would amount to, in such a case), and the people
do not agree (though the leaders imposed upon them might)? The answer, and
the
argumen ts underpin ning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing
to the tentativ e conclusi on concerni ng the injustic e of imposing radioac tive
wastes upon future people. But the cases are not exactly the same: USA and
Japan
cannot endeavo ur to discoun t peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose
to drop some of their radioac tive pollutio n in quite the same way the y can
discoun t people of two centurie s hence . (But what this conside ration really
reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that entitl ement to just treatmen t can
be discoun ted over time.)
Ethical issues of distribu tive justice, as to equity , concen1 not only
the spatio-t emporal location of nuclear waste, but also arise elsewher e in the
assessm ent of nuclear developm ent; in particu lar, a s regards the treatmen t of
those in the neighbou rhood of reactors , and, dif fe rently, as regards the
•
distribu tion of (alleged ) benefits and costs from nuclear power across nations. 25
People living or working in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to
special costs and risks : firstly, radioac tive pollutio n, due to the fact that
reactors discharg e radioac tive materia ls into the air and water near the plant,
25 .
and secondly catast rop hic accidents, such as (steam) explosion of a reactor .
immediate question is whether such costs an d risks can be imposed, with any
An
eth ical legitimacy, on these people, who frequently have little or no say in
their imposition, and who have mostly not been informed of any choices regarding
the "risk/benefit tradeoffs" of nuclear technology.
That they are so imposed,
without local participation, indeed often without local input or awareness as
with local opposition, reveals one part of the antidemocratic face of nuclear
development, a part that nuclear development shares however with otl1er largescale polluting industry, where local participation and que stions, fundamental
to a genuine democracy of regional det ermination and popular sovereignty , are
commonly ignored or avoided.
The "normal" emission, during plant operation, of low level radiation
car ri es carcinogenic and mutagenic costs .
While the re are undoubtedly costs,
there remains, however, substantial disagreement over the likely numbe r of cancers
and precise ex tent of genetic damage induced by exp os ure to such rad iation , over
the local health costs involved. Under t he Old Paradigm, whi ch (ill egi timately)
permits free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the e thical
issue directly raised is said to be: what extent of cancer and genetic damage,
if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of nucl ear power, and under
what conditions? Under the Old Paradigm the issue is th en translat e d into
decision-theor etic questions, such as to 'how to employ risk/benefit analysis
as a prelude to government regulation' and ' how to determine what is an
acceptab le level of risk/safe ty for the public. 26
The Old Paradigm attitude, reflected in the public policy of some countries
that have such policies, is that the economic benefits conferred by allowing
radiation emissions outweigh the costs of an increase in cancer and genetic
damage . An example will reveal that such evaluations, which rely for what
appeal th ey have on a dubious utilitarianism, will not pass muster. It is a
pity about Aunt Ethyl getting cancer, but it's nice to have this air con ditioner
working in summer . Such frequently trivial and rather inessential benefits,
which may be obtained alternatively, e.g. by modification of houses, in no way
comp ensate for the agony of cancer . 27 The point is that the costs to one party
a r e not justified, especially when such benefits to other parties can be
alte rnatively obtained without such awful costs , and morally indef ensible , being
imposed .
People, minorities, whose position is particularly compromised are those
who live within 50 miles of a nuclear plant . (Children , for example, are in a
26.
particularl y vulnerable position, since they are severa l times more likely to
contract cancer through exposure than normal adults). In USA, such people bear
a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the
population at large.
A non-negligi ble percentage (in excess of 3% of those
exposed for 30 years) of people in the area will die, all egedly for the sake
of the majority who are benefitted by nuclear powe r production (allegedly,
for th e real reasons for nucl e ar development do not concern this silent
majority) . Whatever
charm the argument from overriding benefits had, e ve n
unde r the Old Paradigm, vanishes once it is seen that t he re are alternative ,
and in several respects less expensive, ways of deliveri ng the r eal benefi ts
involved.
There are several other tricks used in showing that the imposition of
r adia tion on minorities, most of whom have little or no genuine voice in the
location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without serio us
losses, is quite (morally) acceptable. One ch eape r trick, deployed by the US
Atomic Energy Commission, 28 is to suppose that it is permissible to double,
through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a pop ulation
has
received with apparently negligible consequence s, th e argument being that
the additional amount (being equivalent to the "natural" level) is also likely
to have negligible consequence s.
The increased amounts of radiation - with
their large man-made component - are then accounted no rmal, and, of course,
so it is th en claimed, what is normal is morally acceptable. None of the steps
in this argument is sound.
Drinking one bottle of wine a day may have no illeffects, whereas drinking two a day certainly may affe ct a person's well-being;
and while the smaller intake may have become normal for the person, the larger
one will, unde r such conditions, not be. Finally, what is or has become normal,
e . g. two murde rs or twenty cancers a day in a given city, may be far from acceptabl e .
In fact, even the USA, which has strict standards by comparison with most
other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits ra diation emissions very
sub s tantially in excess of the standards laid down; so the emission situation is
worse than me re consideratio n of the standards would disclose. Furthermore , the
monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to th e nuclear op erators
themselves, scarcely disintereste d parties . Public policy is determin ed no t so
as to guarantee public he alth, but rather to serve as a ' public pacifier' wh ile
private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered . 29
2 7.
While radioacti ve emissions are nn ordinary feature of react o r op e ration,
breakdown is, hopefully , not: an accident of magnitude is accounted , by official
definitio n, an 'extraord inary nuclear occurrenc e'. But such accidents can happen,
and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island). 30
If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water)
30a
r e actors ,
then the core melts and 'containm ent failure' is likely, with the
r e sult that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioacti vely contamina ted .
I n the event of the worst type of accident in a very small reactor, a steam
explosion in the reactor vessel, about 45,000 people would be killed instantly
and at least 100,000 would die as a result of the accident , prope rt y da mages
would exceed $1 7 billion and an area the size of Pennsylva nia would be destroyed .
Mod e rn nuclear reactors are about five times the size of the reactor for which
.
.
31
t h ese conservat ive
Us governmen t f'igures are given
t he con s equences of a
s imilar accident with a modern reactor would according l y be much great e r still.
Th e consigner in risking the lives, we ll-being and property of the
passenger s on the train has acted inadmissi bly. Does a governme nt-sponsor ed
private utility act in a way that is anything other th an much less responsib le
in siting a nuclear reactor in a community , in planting such a dangerous package
on the community train.
The answer will be No, if the analogy holds good and the
consigner s ' action is , as we would ordinaril y ·suppo se , inadmissi ble and i rrespon-
sible.
The proponent s of nuclear power have in effect argued to the cont rary,
while at the same time endeavour ing to shift the dispute out of the ethical arena
and into a technolog ical dispute as to means (in accordanc e with the Old Paradigm) .
It has been contended , firstly, what con trasts with the train example, that
there is no real possibili ty of a catas trophic nuclear accident . Indeed in the
influenti al Rassmusse n report 32 - which was extensive ly used to support public
confidenc e in US nuc lear fission technolog y - an even stronger, an incredibl y
strong , improbab ility claim was stated: n amely , the likelihoo d of a catastrop hic
nucle ar accident is so remote as to be '3.lmost) impossi.bl e. The main argument for
this claim de rives from the assumptio ns and estimates of the report i.tself . These
assumptio ns like the claim are undercut by nuclear incidents that came very close
to accidents , incidents which reflect what happens in a reactor rather better than
mathemat ical models.
As with the storage of nuclear wastes, so with the operation of nuclear
reactors, it is important to look at what happens in the actual world of
technolog ical limitatiom s and human error, of waste leakage and r eactor inciden t s
and quite possibly accidents , not in an ideal world far removed from the actual ,
a technolog ical dream world whe re there is no real possibili ty of a nuclear
28,
catastrophe.
In such an ideal nuclea r world, wh e re wa s t e disposal we r e fool-proof
and reactors we re accident-proof, thin gs would no doubt be morally different.
But we do no t live in s u ch a world .
According to the Rasmuss en r e port its calc ulat ion of extremely low accident
probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological a ssumptions
and is methodo logically sound.
This is ve ry far from being the cas e .
The under-
ly ing mathematical methods, variousl y called "fault tree analysis " and
"reliability estimating techniques", a r e unsound, because they exclude as "not
credible" po s sibilities or as "not significant" branches that are re a l
possibilities, which may well be realised in the real world.
It is the
eliminations that are othe rworldly .
In fact the me thodology and dat a of the report
· · 1 y cr1.t1.c1.ze
h as b een soun dl y an d d ec1.s1.ve
. · ·
d . JJ And 1.t
. h as b een s h own t1at
I
t he r e
is a real possibili t y, a non-negligible probability, of a serious accident .
It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negli gib l e
prob abi li ty of a reactor accident, still it is acceptable, be ing of no greater
orde r than risks of accidents t hat ar e already socially accepted.
Here we
enco unt e r agai n that insidious e ngin e ering approach to morality built into
mod e ls of an e conomic cast, e.g. benefit - cost balance s heets , risk assessment
mode ls, et c.
Risk assessment, a sophistica ti on of trans ac tion or tr ade -off
mode ls, pur.-ports to p ro vide a compari s on between th e relative ri sks at tach ed to
different options, e . g . e nergy options, which settl es th e ir ethical status .
The fo llowing lines of argume nt are encountered in a risk assessme nt as applied
to energy options:
(i)
if option a imposes costs on fewer people than option b then option a is
preferable to option b;
(ii )
option a involves a total net cost in terms of cost to people (e.g. deaths,
injuries , etc .) which is less than th at of option b, which is already accepted;
there for e op tion a is acceptable . 34
For example, the number likely to be killed by nuclear power stations is less than
the likely number killed by cigarette smoking or in road accident s , which a r e
accepted: so nuclear power stations are acceptable .
A little reflection reveals
that this sort of risk assessment argt.mlent involves the same kind of fallacy
as transaction models.
I t is far too simple -minded, and it ignores distrib ut ional
and other r e l e vant aspect s of the context.
In o rde r to ob tain an ethical
assessment we s hould need a much fuller pi cture and we sho uld nee d to know at
least t he s e thin gs :- do the costs and benef it s go to th e same parti es ; and is
the person who undertakes the risks also t he person who receives the benefits or
29.
primar ily, as in driving or cigare tte smokin g, or are the costs impos
e d on other
parties who do not benefi t? It is only if the parties are the same
in the case of
th e options compar ed, and there are no such distrib utiona l problem
s, that a
compar ison on such a basis would be val.id. 35 This is rarely the cas
e , and it is
not so in the case of risk assessm ents of energy options . Second
ly, does the
person incur the risk as a result of an activit y which he knowin gly
underta kes
in a situati on where he has a r easona ble choice, knowing it entails
the risk,
etc ., and is the level of risk in propor tion to the le~el of the
rel evant
ac tivity, e.g. as in smoking ? Thirdly , for what reason is the risk
imposed :
is it for a s e rious or a relativ ely trivial reason? A risk that is
e thica lly
accepta ble for a serious reason may not be ethica lly accepta ble for
a trivial
reason. Both the argume nts (i) and (ii) are often employe d in trying
to justify
nuclea r power. The second argume nt (ii) involve s the fallaci es of
th e firs t (i)
and an additio nal set , namely that of forgett ing that the health risks
in the
36
nuclea r s e nse are cumula tive , and already high if not , some say ,
too high.
The maxim "If you want the benefi ts you have to accept th e costs "
is
one thing and the maxim "If I want the benefi ts then you have to accept
the
costs (or some of them at least)" is anothe r and very differe nt thin
g . It is
a widely accepte d moral princip le, already argued for by way of exampl
es and
already invoked , that one is not, in genera l, entitle d to simply
transfe r cos ts
of a signifi cant kind arising fron an activit y which benefi ts onesel
f onto other
parties who are not involve d in the activit y and are not benefi ciaries 37
.
This
transfe r princip le is especi ally clear in cases where the signifi cant
costs
include an effect on life or health or a risk thereof , and where
the benefi t to
the benefi tting par ty :is of a noncru cial or dispen sible nature , becaus
e, e . g.
it can be substit uted for or done withou t. Thus, for instanc e , one
is not
usually entitle d to harm , or risk harmin g, anot her in the process
of be nefitti ng
onesel f . Suppose , for anothe r example , we consid er a village which
produc es, as a
result of an indust rial process by which it lives, a noxious waste
materi al which
is expens ive and difficu lt to dispose of and yet creates a risk to
life and health
if undispo sed of. Instead of giving up thei r i.ndus trial process and
turning to
some other way of making a living such as farming the surroun ding
country side,
they persis t with this way of life but ship their problem on a one-way
deliver y
service , on the train, to the next village . The inhabi tants of this
village are
then forced to face the problem either of under taking the expens ive
and difficu lt
dispos al process oor of sustain ing risks to thei r own lives and health
or else
leaving the village and their livelih oods. Most of us would see
this kind of
transfe r of co s ts as morally unacce ptable .
JO.
From this arises a necessary condition for ene rgy options: that to be
morally acceptable they should not involve the trans fer of significant costs or
risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, do not use the energy source or
do not benefit correspondingly from its us e .
Included in the scope of this
condition are not only future people and future generations (those of the next
vil lages) but neighbours of nuclear reactors , especially, as in third world
co untries, neighbours who are not nuclear powe r users.
The distribution of
costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. on to non-beneficiaries is a
characteristic of certain wide spread and serious forms of pollution, a nd is one
of its most obje ctionable moral features.
It is a corollary of the condition that we sho ul d not hand the world on t o
our successors in substantially worse shape than we received it - t he tramsmission
principle.
For if we did then that would be a signi ficant transfe r of costs .
(The corollary can be independerltly argued for on the basis of certain e t hic al
theories) .
VI . OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT,
ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR.
The problems already discuss ed by no means exhaus t the
envi ronme ntal, health and safety risks and costs in or arising from th e nuclea r
fuel cycle.
The full fuel cycle include s man y sta ges both before and after
r eacto r operation , apart from waste disposal, namely mining , milling, conversion,
enrichment and preparation, reprocessing spent fuel, and trans po rtati on of
materials.
Seve ral of these stages involve hazards.
Unlike the special risks
in the nuclear cycle - of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionab le material,
and of the further prolife ration of nuclear armaments - thes e hazard s have
parallels, if not exact equival ents, in other very polluting method s of generating
power, e . g. "workers in the uranium mining industry sustain 'the same risk' of
38
fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry".
Furth ermo re, the
various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sectors of
uranium fabrication should be differently viewed from those resultin g from location,
for instance from already living where a reactor is built or wastes are dumped.
For an occupation is, in principle at
any rate, chosen (as is occupational
relocation), and many types of hazards incurred in workin g with radio a ctive
material are now known in advance of choice of such a n occupation: with where
one al re ady lives things are very different.
The uranium mine r's choice of
occup ation can be compared with the airline pilot's choice, whe r eas t he Pacific
Islander ' s "fact" of location cannot be.
The social issue o f arrangements that
contract occupational choices and opportuni ti es and often a t l east ease peo ple
into hazardous occupations such as uranium or tin or coal mining (where the
risks, in contrast to airline piloting, are mostly not duly compensated), while
very important, i s not an i ssue newly produced by nuclear associated occupa tions .
31.
Other social and environm ental problems - though endemic where large-sca le
industry operates in societies that are highly inegalita rian and include sectors
that are far from affluent - are more imtimatel y linked with the nucle ar power
cycle.
Though pollu tion is a common and generally undesirab le component of
large-sca le industria l operation , radioacti ve pollution , such as uranium mining
for instance produces, is especiall y a legacy of nuclear developme nt, and a
specially undesirab le one , as enormous rectifica tion estimates for de ad radioactive lands and waterways reveal .
Though sabotage is a threat t o many large
industrie s , so that modern factory complexes are often guarded like concentra tion
camps (but from us on the outside), sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire
consequen ces, of a different order of magnitude from most industria l sabotage
(consider again the effects of core meltdown) . Though theft of material from more
dubious enterpris es such as munitions works can pose threa ts to populatio ns at
large and can assist terrorism , no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterp rises
pose problems of the same order as theft of fissionab le material . No other
industry produces materials which so readily permit of fabricatio n into such
massive explosive s.
No other industry is, to sum it up, so vulnerabl e on so
many fronts.
In part to reduce it, vulnerab ility, in part because of its long and
continuin g associati on with military activitie s, the nuclear industry is subject
to, and encourage s, several practices which (certainly given their scale) run
counter to basic features of free and open societies , crucial features such as
personal liberty, freedom of associati on and of expressio n, and free access to
informati on . These practices include secrecy , restricti on of infonnati on,
formation of speci al police and guard forces, espionage , curtailme nt of civil
lib e rties.
Already operators of nuclear installat ions are given extraordi nary
powers, in vetting employees , to investiga t e the backgroun d and
activitie s not only of employees but also of their families and
sometimes even of their friends. The installati ons themselve s
become armed camps, which especiall y offends British sensibili ties.
The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constable s) Act of 1976 created a
special armed force to guard nuclear installat ions and made it
answerabl e ..• to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority . 39
These developme nts in the United Kingdom, and worse in West Germany, presage
along with nuclear developme nt increasin gly authorita rian and anti-demo cratic
societies . That nuclear developme nt a ppears to force such political consequen ces
tells heavily against it.
32.
Nuclear developme nt is further indicted political ly by the dire ct
connectio n of nuclear power with nuclear war. It is fortunate ly true that
e thical questions concernin g nuclear war - for example, whether a nucle ar war
is justified , or just, under any circumsta nces , and if so what circums tances are distingui shable from those concernin g nuclear power. Undoubted ly , however,
t he spread of nuclear powe r is substanti ally increasin g the technical me ans
for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the opportuni ty for , and
chances of, nuclear engagemen t.
Since nuclear wars are neve r account able
positive goods , but are at best the lesser of major evils, nuclear wars are
always highly ethically undesirab le .
The spread
of nuclear power according ly
expands the opportuni ty for, and chances of, highly undesirab le consequen ces.
Finally the la tt e r, so increasin g thes e chances and opportun ities, is itself
undesirab le, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear developme n t, is also
undesirab le .
The details and considera tions that fill out this argume nt,
from nuclea r war against nuclear developme n t, are many. They are fir stly
technical , that it is a relativel y straightfo rward and inexpensi ve matte r to
make nuclear explosive s given access to a nuclear powe r plant, secondly political ,
that nuclear engagemen ts once institute d
likely to escalate and that those
who control (or different ly are likely to force access to) nuclear power plant s
do not shrink from nuclear confronta tion and are certainly prepared to toy with
nuclear engagemen t (up to "strategi c nuclear strikes" at least) , and thirdly
ethical, that wars invariabl y have immoral consequen ces, such as mas sive
damage to involved parties, however high sounding their justifica tion is.
Nucl ea r wars are certain to be considera bly worse as regards damage inflicted
than any pr e vious wars (they are likely to be much worse than all previous
wars p ut together) , because of th e enormous destructi ve power of nuclear
weapons, and the extent of spread of their radioacti ve effec ts, and because
of the expected rapidity and irreversi bility of any such confronta tions .
The supportin g considera tions are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and
a r e designed to show that the chances of such undesirab l e out comes is itself
und e sirable .
The core argument is in brief this (the argument will be
elaborate d in section VIII):- Energy choice between alternativ e options is
a case of de ci sion making under uncertain ty , because in particula r of th e gross
uncertain ties involved in nuclear developme nt. In cases of this type the
ap propriate rational procedure is to compare worst cons equences of each
alternati ve, to reject those alternati ves with th e wor s t of these worst
consequen ces (this is a pretty uncontrov ersial part of th e maximin rule which
enjoins selection of the alternati ve with the best worst consequen ces) . The
nuclear alternati ve has, in particula r because of the r e al possibili ty of a nuclear
war, the worst worst consequen ce~ and is according ly a particula rly undesirab le
alternati ve.
33.
VII. CONFLICT ARGUMENTS,AND UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF NUCLEAR
DEVELOPMENT. As with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case against nuclear
development , only one justificatory route r emains open, that of app e al to
important overriding circumstances.
That appeal, to be ethically acceptable,
must go far beyond merely economic considerations.
For, as already observed ,
the consigne r's action cannot be justifi ed by purely economistic argume nts,
such as that his profits would ris e , the firm or the village would be more
prosperous , or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable
changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer principle on which this
assessment was based, that one was not usually entitl ed to cre ate a serious
risk to othe rs for these sorts of reasons, applied more generally and, in
parti cular, applied to the nuclear case. For this r eason the economistic
arguments which are those most commonly advanced under th e Old Paradi gm to promote
nuclear development - e .g. cheapness, efficiency, profitability for electri city
utilities, and the need otherwise fo r 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 econornistic assumptions
about benefits to present people were correct - it will be contended that most of
them are not - the arguments would fail because economics (like the utilitarianism
from which it characteristica lly derives) has to operate within the framework of
moral constraints, and not vic e versa .
What do have to be considered are however moral confli ct arguments, that is
arguments to the effe ct that, unless the prima facie unacceptable (nuclear)
alt e rnative is taken, some even more unacceptable alternative is the only
possible outcome, and will ensue . For example, in the train parable, the
consigner may a rgue that his action is justified becaus e unless it is take n his
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 clearcu t, and one would perhaps
hesitate to condemn any action taken in such circumstances.
Some of the arguments advanced to show moral confl i ct are based on competin f
commitments to present people, and others on competing obligatio ns to future people .
both of which are taken to override the obligations not to impos e 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 e xhaustive set of
alternatives (or a t ].east practical alternatives ) and upon showing that the only
alterna tives to admittedly mo rally 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 th e argument - for
example, if in the village case it turns out that the villagers have another option
to starvi ng or to the sendin g off of the parce l, name l y ea
rning a liv ing in some
other way - then the argum ent is defect ive and cannot r eadily
be patche d . Just
s uch a suppre ssion of practi cable altern atives has occurr ed
in the argum ent
design ed to show that the altern atives to the nuclea r option
are even worse than
the option itself , and that there are other factua l defect
s in thes e argum ents
as well. .In short, the argum ents depend essen tially on the
presen tation of
false dichot omies .
A first argum ent, the povert y argum ent , is that there is
an ove rridin g
ob li gation to the poor , both the poor of the third world
and the poor of
indus trialis ed countr ies . Failur e to develo p nuclea r energy
, it is often claime d,
would amoun t to denyin g them the oppor tunity to reach the
standa rd of afflue nce
we curren tly enjoy and would create unemp loymen t and povert
y in th e indus triali s e d
n a tions.
The unemp loymen t and povert y argume nt does not stand up to
exami nati on
eithe r for t he poor of th e indus trial countr ies or for thos
e of th e thir d world.
The re is good eviden ce that large- scale nuclea r energy will
help to increa se
unemp loymen t and povert y in the indus trial world, throug h
the divers i on of very
much availa ble capita l into an indust ry which is not only
an excep tional ly
poo r provi der of di rect employ ment , but also helps to reduce
availa bl e jobs throug h
encour aging substi tution o f energy use for labour use. 40
The argume n t that nuclea r
ene rgy is needed for the third world is even less convin cing.
Nuclea r energy is
both politi cally and econom ically inapp ropria te for th e third
world, since it
requir es massiv e amoun ts of capita l , requir es numbe rs of
import ed sci en tists
and engine ers, but create s neglig ible local employ ment, and
depend s for its
feasib ility upon, what is largel y lackin g , establ ished electr
icity transm ission
system s and back-u p facili ties and suffic ient electr ical
applia nce s to plug into
the system . Politi cally it increa ses foreig n depend ence,
adds to ce ntrali sed
entren ched power and reduc es the chance for change in the
oppres sive politi cal
struct ures which are a large part of the proble m . 41 The
fa c t that nuclea r energy
is not in the intere sts of the people of t he third world
does not of course
mean that it is not in the intere sts of, and wanted by, their
rulers , the
wester nised and often milita ry elites in whose intere sts
the econom ies of thes e
countr ies are usuall y organi sed, and wanted often for milita
ry purpos es . It
is not patern alistic to examin e critic ally the demand s these
ruling elites may
make in the name of the poor.
35 .
The po verty argume nt is then a fraud. Nuclear ene r gy will not be used t o
help th e poor. Both for the third world and for the industr ialised co untrie
s
there are well-kno wn energy-c onservin g alternat ives and the practi cal option
of
developi ng oth e r energy sources, alternat ives some of which offer f a r bette r
prospec ts for helping the poor .
It can no longer be pretende d that there is no alt e rnative to nuclear
de velopme nt: indeed nuclear de velopme nt is itself but a bridging , or stop-gap
,
procedu re on route to solar or perhap s fusion deve lopment . And there a r e various
alternat ives : coal and other fossil fuels, geotherm al, and a range of solar
op tions (includi ng as well as narrowly solar, wind, water, tidal and plant power),
each po ss ibly in combina tion with cons e rvation measures ~ 2 Despit e the availab
ility
of alterna tives, it may still be pre t e nde d that nuclea r deve lopment is ne cess
ary
fo r affluenc e (what will emerge is that it is advantag eous for the power and
aff luence of ce rtain select groups ) . Such an assumpt ion really und erlies part
o f t he pover ty argumen t, which thus amounts to an elabora tion of th e trickledown argumen t (much f avoured within the Old Paradigm se tting) . For the a rgument
runs : - Nuc l ea r developm ent is necessar y for (continu ing an d in c r eas in g)
affluenc e.
Affluenc e inevitab ly tr i ckl es down to th e poor. Th e r e for e nuclear
developm ent benefits the poor . First, the argumen t does not on i ts own sh ow
a nything specific about nuclear power : for it works equally well if ' ene r gy '
is substitu ted f or ' nuclear ' .
It has also to be shown , what the next major
argumen t will try to claim, that nuclear developm ent is unique among e ne rgy
alternat ives in increasi ng affluenc e . The second assumpt ion , that affluenc e
inevitab ly trickles down, has now been roundly refuted , both by r ecent historic
al
da ta, which show increasi ng affluenc e ( e .g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita)
co upled with increasi ng poverty in several countrie s, both developi ng and
de veloped , and th r ough economic models which reveal how "affluen ce" can increase
withou t r e dist ribution occur ring .
Another maj o r argumen t a dvanced to show moral conflic t app eals to a set
of suppos e dly ove rr iding and competin g obligati ons to future people . We have,
it is said , a du ty to pass on the immense ly valuable things and institut ions
which our culture has develope d .
Unless our high-tec hnology , high ene r gy
industr ial society is continue d and fo s tered, our valuab l e institut ion s and
tra ditions will fall into de cay or be swept away. The ar gument is essentia lly
th a t without nuclear powe r, withou t th e conti n ued level of materia l wealth
43
it alone is assumed to make possible , the li gh ts of our civiliza ti on wil l go
out.
Fut ure people will be th e los e rs.
36,
The lights-goin g-out argument doe s rais e quest ions as to what is valuable
in o ur society, and of what characteris tics are necess ary for a good society .
But for the most part th ese large questions, which deserve much full e r
ex amination , can be avoided .
The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely
un critical position with re spe ct to present high-techno logy societi es , apparently
assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable . It assumes that technologi c
society is unmodifiabl e , that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy
conse rvation or alternative (perhaps high technology) energy sources without
collapse. It has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited
supplies of ene rgy - such as nuclear and only nuclear power is a ll eged t o furnish ar e essential to maintain this whole.
These assumptions are hard to accept.
The assumption that technologic al
so c ie ty's energy patterns are unmodifiabl e is especially so - after all it has
survived events such as world wars which have r equired major social and technologic a
r es tructuring and consumption modificatio n. If western society ' s demands for energy
a re totally unmodifiabl e without collapse, not only would it be committed to a
program of increasing destruction , but one might ask what use its culture co uld
be to future people who would very likely , as a consequence of this destruction ,
lack the resource base which th e argument assumes to be essential in the case of
contemporar y society.
There is also difficulty with th e assumption of uniform valuablene ss;
but if this is rejected the question be comes not: what is necessary to maintain
exis ting high-techno logical society and its political institution s, but rather:
what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and th e political
institution s which are needed to maintain those valuable things . While it may be
easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled is necessary to
maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to a rgu e that it
is e ssential to maintain what is valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably
that we have a du ty to pass .on to the fut ure.
The evidence, for instan ce from history, is that no very high level of
material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable.
The re 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 e ve n
if a radical change in these di rec tions is independent ly desirable, as we should
arg ue, 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-goin g-out a rgument a re wrong.
No enormous reduction of well-b e ing is required to consume less energy than at
37.
present , and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of
consumption which is assumed in the usu al economic case for nucl ear energy . 44
What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do then is not to preven t the
lights going out in west e rn civilisation , but to enable th e lights to go on
burning all the time - to maintain and even increase the wattage output of
th e Energy Extravaganza.
In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high e nergy
consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, es pecially if e nergy
is obtained by nuclear fission means , be positively inimical to it.
A society
which has become heavily dependent upon an ext remely high centralised, controlled
and garrisoned, capital-
and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one
which is highly susce ptible 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.
Such a society would, almost inevitably t e nd to become
autho ritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among other
things, of its response to the threat pos ed by dissident groups in the nuclea r
.
.
situation.
45
Nuclear development may thus help in passing on to future generations
some of th e worst aspects of our society - the consumerism, alienation,
destruction of nature, and latent authoritarianism - while many valua ble
asp e cts, such as the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for
p ersonal and collective autonomy which exist , would be lost or diminish e d:
political freedom , for example, is a high price to pay for consume ri sm and
energy extravagance.
But it is not the status quo, but what is valuable in
our society, presumably, that we have some obligation to pass on to the future,
and if possible enhance.
Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives,
alternative social, economic and political choices, which do not involve such
unacceptable consequences, are available. The alternative to the high technologynuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable,
but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for power or,
rath e r, the development of alternative technologies and lifestyles which offer
far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what is
valuable in our society than the highly centralised nuclear option.
The lights-
going-out argumen t, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it
also is based on a false dichotomy.
38 .
Thus the further escape route, the appeal to moral conflict, is, like the
appeal to fut urity, closed.
If then we apply - as we have argued we should -
the same standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the
present, the conclusion that large-scal e nuclear developmen t i s a crime agains t
the future is inevitable .
Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes
to other ar_guments - from reactor melt-down, radiation emissions, and so on for rejecting nuclear development as morally unacceptable, for saying that it is
not only a moral crime against the distant future but also a crime against the
present and immediate future .
In sum, nuclear development is morally
unacceptable on several grounds.
A corollary is that only political arrangements
that are morally unacceptable will support the impending nuclear future.
VIII. A NUCLEAR FUTURE IS NOT A RATIONAL CHOICE, EVEN IN OLD PARADIGM TERMS.
The arg ument thus far, to anti-nuclear conclusions, has r elied upon, and
defended premisses that would be rejected under the Old Paradigm; for examp l e,
such theses as that the interests and utilities of future people are not
discounte d (in contrast to the temporally-limited utilitarianism of marketcentred economic theory ), and that serious costs and risks to health and life
cannot admissibly be simply transferred to uninvolved parties (in contrast
to the transfer and limited compensation assumptions of mainstream economic
theory).
To close the cas e, arguments will now be outlined which are designed
to show that even within the confines of the Old Paradigm, choosing the nuclear
future is not a rational choice .
Large-scale nucl ear developme nt is not just something that happens, it
requires, on a continuing basis, an immense input of capital and energy .
Such
investment calls for substantial reasons; for the investment should be, on
Old Paradigm assumptions, the best among feasible alt ernatives to given economic
ends.
Admi t tedly so much capital has already been invested in nucle ar fission
research and development, in marka:l. contrast to other newer rival sources of
power, that there is strong political incentive to proceed - as distinct from
requisite reasons for further capital and energy inputs.
The reasons can be
divided roughly into two groups, front reasons, which are the reasons given
(ou t) , and which are, in accordance with Old Paradigm percepts, pub l icly
eco nomic (in that they are app roved for public consumption), and th e r ea l
r ea s ons , which involve private economic factors and matters of power and social
control.
39.
The main argument put up, an economic growth argument, upon which
variations are played, is the following version of the lights-going -out argument
(with economic growth duly standing in for material wealth, and even for what is
valuable!): - Nuclear power is necessary to sustain economic growth. Economic
growth is desirable (for all the usual reasons, e . g. to increas e the size of
the pie, to avoid or postpone redistributi on problems, and connected social
unr e st, e tc.). Therefore nuclear power is desirable. The first premiss is
part of US energy policy, 46 and the second premiss is supplied by standard
economics textbooks . But both premisses are defective, the second because
what is valuable in economic growth can be achieved by selective economic growth,
which jettisons the heavy social and environmen tal costs carried by unqualified
47
economi c growth .
More to the point, since the second premiss is an assumption
of the dominant paradigm, the first premiss (or rath e r an appropriate and less
vulne rabl e restatement of it) fails even on Old Paradigm standards. For of course
nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps costlier
alt e rnatives .
The premiss usually defended is some elaboration of th e premiss
Nuc lear power is the economicall y best way to sustain economic growth, 'economicall y
best' being filled out as ' most efficient', 'cheapest ' , 'having most favourable
benefit-cos t ratio', etc.
Unfortunate ly for the argument, and for nuclear
development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively, unless
a goo d deal of economic cheating (easy to do) is done. Much data, beginning with
th e cancellatio n of nuclear plant orders, can't be assembled to show as much. Yet
the argument requires a true premiss, not an uncertain or merely possible one, if
it is to succeed and detachment is to b e permitted at all, and evidently true
premisses
if the argument is to be decisive.
The data to be summarised splits into two parts, public ( governmenta l)
analyses, and private (utility) assessments . Virtually all available data
concen1s the USA; in EuroZS, West and East, true cos ts of uniformly "publicly=
controlled" nuclear power
are generally not divulged.
Firstly, the capital costs of nuclear plants, which have been rising much
more rapidly than inflation, now exceed those of coal-fired plants .
Komanoff
has estimated that capital costs of a nuclear generator (of optimal capacity)
will exceed comparable costs of a coal-fired unit by about 26 % in 1985. 49 And
capital costs are only one part of the equation that now tell rather decisively
against private utility purchase of new nuclear plants . Another main factor
is the poor performance and low reliability of nuclear generators . Coney showed
that nuclear plants can only generate about half the elect ricit y th ey were
designed to produ ce , and that when Atomic Energy Commis sion estimates of relative
costs of nuclear and coal power, which assumed that both opera t ed at 80% of design
capacity , were adjusted accordingly , nuclear generated power proved to be far more
40.
.
h
.
d 50
expensive
tan
estimate.
The discrepancy between actual and estimated
capacity
is especially important because a plant with an ac tual capacity factor of 55 %
produced electricity at a cost about 25% high e r than if the plant had performed
at the manufacturers' projected capacity rate of 70-75%.
The low reliability
of nuclear plants (p e r kilowatt output) as compared with the superior
r e liability of smaller coal-fired plants adds to the case, on conventional economic
grounds of ef ficienc y and product production costs , against nuclear powe r .
Thes e unfavourable assessments are from a privat e (utility) perspective,
before the very extensive public subsidization of nuclear power is duly taken
into account .
The main subsidies are through research and development , by way
of insurance (under the important but doubtfully constitutional Price-Anderson
51
Act ), in en richme n 4 and in waste management . It has been estimated that
charging such costs to the electricity consumer would increase electricity bills
for nucl ea r power by at least 25% ( and probably much more) .
Wh en official US cost/benefit analyses favouring nuclear power over
coal are examined, it is f ound that they inadmissibly omit seve ral of the public
costs i nvolve d in producing nuclear power .
For example, the analyses igno re
waste costs on the quite inadmissible ground that it is not known curren tly
wha t t he costs involved are .
But even using actual waste handling cos t s (while
wastes await s torage) is enough to show that coal power is preferable to nuc l ear . 52
When further public costs, such as insurance against accident and for radiation
damage , are dul y taken into account, the balance is swung stil l further i n
favo ur of al te rnatives to nuclear and
aga i nst nuclear power .
In short , eve n on
proper Old Par a digm accounting, the nu c l ear alte rn at iv e s hould be rejected.
Nuclear development is not economical, it certainly se ems ; it has b een
kept going n~ through its clear economic v iability, but by massive pub li c
s ubsidization , of s e vera l types .
In USA, to take a main examp le where
information is available , nuclear developme nt is publicly supported through
heavily subsidized or somet i mes free research and development , thro ugh the
Price-Anderson Act, which sharply limits both private and public liability,
i . e . wh ich in ef fe ct p rovided t he insurance subsidy making corporat e nuclear
development e conomicall y f e asibl e, and through government ag r eement to handle all
r adioactive wastes .
While the Old Paradigm str ictly construed c annot sup port un economical
developments, cont empo rary liberalisation of the Paradigm do e s allow fo r
un economi c projects, seen as operated in the public interest, in such fields as
soc ial welfare.
Duly admitting s ocial welfare and some
equity
pr i nciples
41,
i n th e dist ribut ion of wealt h (not necessa rily of pol l ution) l e ads the modern
version of the Old Paradigm , called the Mo dified Old Paradigm .
The main
changes from the Old Paradigm are (as with state socialism) as emphasis of
economic facto rs, e . g . individual self-he lp is down- played , wealth is to a
small extent redistributed, e.g . through t:axation , market forces are re gulated
or disp la ced (not in principle eliminat e d, as with stat e s ocialism).
Now it
has been cont ended - outrageous though it should now se e m - that nuclear powe r
is i n the public interest as a means to various sought public ends, for example ,
apart from those already mentioned suc h as energy fo r growth and che ap
e l ect ricity, and such as plantiful powe r f or heating and cooking a nd app lian ce
use , avoidan ce of shortages , rat ioning ,
brown-outs and the like .
Since
alternative power sources, such as coal, could s e rve some ends given power was
supplied with suitable extravagance, the
argumen t has aga in to show that t he
cho ice of nucle ar power over other a lterna tives is best in the requ isite
respects, in s erving the public interes t.
Such a n ar gumen t is a matter for
decision theory, unde r which head cost -bene f i t analyse s which rank alternatives
a l so fall as special cases .
Decision theory purports to cover th eo r e tically the field of choice
b e tween alte rnatives; it is present ed as the theory which ' dea l s with t he
.
pro bl em o f c h oosing
one cours e o f acti. on among s e vera 1 poss1'bl. e cou r ses 1 . 53
Th us the choice of alt e rnati~ modes of energy pro duc ti on, t he ene r gy choice
problem, be comes an exercise
in decision theory; and the nucl ea r choice is
often ''.justi f ied" in Old Paradigm terms t h rough app e al to decision t heo ry.
But though decision theory is in principle comp rehens ive , as soon as it is put
to work in such practi cal cases as energy choice,
it is very considerably
contracted in scope, several major assumptions are surreptitiously imported,
and what one is confronte d with is a
depauperate
theory drastically
pruned down to confo r m with the narrow utilitarianism of mainstream e conomic
theory .
The extent of reduction can be glimpsed by comp a ring , to take one
imp ortant example , a general optimisation model for decision (wh ere
uncertainty is not gross) with comparab le decision the ory methods, such as th e
expe cted uti lity model.
The general model for best choice among alte rnatives
specifies maximisation of expected value subject to constrain ts, which may
include
et hical constraints ex clud ing cert a in alt e rnati ves under gi ven
cond itions .
Expected utility
models dEmote value to utility, assuming thereby
measurability and transference prop e rt ies t hat may not obtain, and elimina te
constraints altoget her (absorbing what is fo rbidden, fo r examp le , as having a
hi gh dis u tili ty, but one that can be compensate d for none th eless ).
Thus , in
42.
particula r,
e thical constrain ts against nuclear developme nt are replaced, in
Old Paradigm fashion, by allowance in principle for compensat ion for damage
sustained . Still it is with decision making in Old Paradigm terms that we
are now embroiled , so no longer at issue are the defective (nee-clas sical)
economic assumptio ns made in the theory, for example as to the assessmen t of
everythin g t o be taken into account through utility (which comes down to
monetary terms : everythin g worth accountin g has a price), and as to the legitimac y
of transferr ing with limited compensat ion risks and costs to involved parties.
The energy choice problem is, so it has commonly been argued in the
assumed Old Paradigm framework , a case of decision under uncertain ty . It is not a
case of decision under risk (and so expected utility models are not applicabl e),
be cause some possible outcomes are so unce rtain that, in contrast to the case of
risk, no (suitably objective ) quantifia ble probabil ities can be assigned to them.
It ems that are so uncertain are taken to include nuclear war and core me ltdown
of a reactor, possible outcomes of nuclear de velopment : 54
widesprea d radioactive pollution is, by contrast, not uncertain .
The correct rule for decision under uncertain ty is, in the case of energy
ch oice , maximin, to maximize the minimum payoff, so it is sometimes contended .
In fact, on ce again, it is unnecessa ry for present purposes to decide which
energy option is selected, but only whether the nuclear option is rejected .
Since competing selection rules tend to deliver the same rejection s for
options early rejected as the nuclear options, a convergen ce in the rejection of
the nuclear option can be effected . All rational roads lead, not to Rome,
but to rejection of the nuclear option .
A further convergen ce can be effected
also , because the best possible (economic ) outcomes of such leading options as
coal and a hydroelec tric mix are very roughly of the same order as the nuclear
option (so Elster contends, and his argument can be elabo rated). Unde r these
condition s complex decision rules
(such as the Arrow-Hor wicz rule) which take
account of both best possible and most possible outcomes under each option
reduce to the maximin
rule .
Whichever energy option is selected under the
maximum rule, the nuclear option is certainly rejected since there are options
where worst outcomes are
substanti ally better
than that of the nuclear
option (just consider the scenario if the nuclear nightmare , not th e nuclear
dream, is realised) . Further applicati on of the rejection rule will reject
the fossil fuel (predomin antly coal) option, on the basis of estimated effe cts
on the earth 's climate from burning massive quantitie s of such fuels .
43.
Although the rejection rule coupled with maximin
position several rivals to maximin
proposed,
each
enjoys a privileged
for decision under uncertainty have been
of which has associated rejection rules.
Some of these
rules , such as the risk- added reasonin g criticised by Goodin (pp.507-8),
which 'assesses
the riskiness of a policy in terms of the increment of
risk it adds to those pre-existin g in the status quo, rather than in te rms of
th e absolute value of the risk associated with the policy' are decidedly
dubious,
and rather than offering a
rational
decision procedure appears t o
afford protection of the (nuclear) status quo.
~~at will be argued, or rather
what Goodin has in effect argued for us, is that wherever one of these rival
rules is applicable, and not dubious, it leads to rejection of the nuclear
option .
For example , the keep -options-op en or allow-for-r eversibility
(not an entirely unquestiona ble rule
rule
'of strictly limited applicabili ty')
e xcludes the nuclear option because 'nuclear plants and their by-products have
an air of irreversibi lity ... " One cannot simply abandon
a nuclear reactor
the way one can abandon
a coal-fired plant"' (p.506). The compare-the alt e rnatives rule, in ordinary application , leads back to th e cost -b e nefit
assessments , which, as already observed, tell decisively against a nuclear
option when costing is done properly.
The maximise-s ustainable-b enefits rule,
which ' directs us to opt for th e policy producing the highest level of net
b enefits which can be sustained indefinitel y', 'decisively favours r e newable
sources ', ruling out the nuclear option.
Other lesser rules Goodin discusses,
which have not really been applied in the nuclear debate, and which lead yet
further from the Old Paradigm framework,
harm-avoida nce and protecting- thevulnerable als o yields th e same nuclear-exc luding results. Harm-avoida nce,
in particular, points
1
decisively in favour of "alt ernative" and "renewable "
energy sources ... combined with strenuous efforts at energy cons ervation'
(p.442) .
The upshot is evident: whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted
the result is the same, a nuclear choice is rejected, even by Old Paradigm
standards . Nor would reversion to an expected utility analysis alter this
conclusion; for such analyses are but glorified cost-benefi t analyses,wi th
probabiliti es duly multiplied in, and the
conclusion
is as before from
cost-b enefit co nsideration s, against a nuclear choice.
The Old Paradigm does not, it thus appears, sustain the nuclear
juggernaut : nor does its Modificatio n. The real reasons for the continuing
development program and the heavy commitment to the program have to be sought
elsewhere, outside the Old Paradigm, at least as preached. It is, in any case,
sufficientl y evident that contemporar y e conomic behaviour does not accord with
Old Paradigm percepts, practice does not accord with nee-classic al economic
....
44.
th eory nor, to consider the main modification , with social democratic
th eory .
There are , firstly, reasons of previous commitment, when nuclear
power, cleverly promoted at least, looked a rather cheaper and safer deal,
and certainly profitable one :
corporations so committed are understandably
ke en to realise returns on capital already invested .
There are also typical
self-interest reasons fo r commitment to the program, that advantages accrue to
some, like those whose field happens to be nuclear engineering, that profits
accrue to some, like giant corporations, that are influential in politica l
affairs, and as a spin-off profits accrue to others , and so on .
The r e are
just as important, ideological reasons, such as a belief in the control of
both political and physical power by t e chnocratic-entrepre nial elite, a belief
in socl al control from above , control which nuclear powe r o f f ers f a r mo r e tlwn
alternatives, some of which (vaguely) threaten to alter th e power bas e , a f a ith
in th e unlimitedness of t e chnological enterprise, and nuclear in particular ,
so that any real probl ems that arise will be solved as development proceeds.
Such b e li e f s are especially conspicuous in the British scene, among the
gove rning and technocratic classes.
Within contemporary corporate capitalism,
thes e sorts of reasons for nuclear development are intimately linked, because
thos e whos e types of enterprise benefit substantially from nuclear developme nt
are commonly those who hold the requisite beliefs .
It is then, contemporary corporate capitalsim, along with its state
e n t erprise image, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut.
To be sure , corporate
capitalism , which is the political economy largely thrust upon us in we stern
nations, is not necessary for a nuclear future; a totalitarian state of the
t ype such capitalism often supports in the third world will suffice .
But,
unlike a hypothetical state that does conform to precepts of the Old Paradigm,
it is sufficient for a nuclear future - evidently, since we are well embarked
on such a future.
The historical route by which the world reached its present advanced
threshold to a nuclear future confirms this diagnosis.
split into two main cases, the notional
US
This diagnosis can be
development of nuclear power in the
and the international spread of nuclear technology for which the US has been
largely responsible .
By comparison with the West, nuc lear power production i n
th e
small
Eastern bloc is
and is largely confined to the Soviet Union
which had in 19 77 only about
nuclear plants .
one -sixth the wattage output of
US
Nuclear development in USSR has been, of course, a state
controlled and subsidized venture, in which there has been virtually
no public
participation or discussion; but Russian technology has not been exported elsewhere to any great extent .
American technology has .
45,
The 60s were, because of the growth in electrici ty demand, a period of
great expansion of the elec trical utilities in the US . These companies we re
e ncouraged to build nuclear plants, rather than coal or oil burning plants,
for several state controlle d or influence d reasons:- Firs tly, owing to
governme ntal regulatio n procedure s the utilities could (it then seemed) earn
a higher rate of profit on a nuclear plant than a fossil fuel one. Secondly ,
the US governmen t arranged to meet crucial costs and risks of nuclear operation ,
and in this way, and more directly through its federal agencies , actively
encourage d a nuclear choice and nuclea r deve lopment. In particula r, state
limitatio n of liability and shoulderi n g of part o f insurance for nu clear
accidents and state arrangeme nts to handle nuclear wastes were what made
profit able private utility operation appear feasibl e and r esulting in nuclea r
investmen t.
In the 70s, though the state subsidiza tion continued , the private
pict ur e changed : 'high costs of construct ion combine d with low capacity
factors and poor r eli ability have wiped out the last advantage that nuclear power '
had enjoyed in the US.
Much as the domestic nuclear market in th e US is con trolled by a few
co rpor ations , so the world mark et is dominated by a few countries , predomina ntly
and first of all the US, which through its two leadi ng nuclear companies ,
We stinghous e and Gen e ral Electric, has been the major exporter of nuclear
technolog y. 55 These companies were enabled to gain entry into European and
subsequen tly world markets by US foreign policies, ba sically th e " Ato ms for
Peace" program supplemen ted by bilateral agreement s providing for US technolog y ,
r e search, enri ched uranium and financial capital. ' The US offered a [ s tat e
s ub si dize d ] nuclear package that Europe could not refus e and with whi ch the
British could not compete'.
In the 70s the picture of US dominatio n of Common
Market nuclear technolog y had given way to subtler influence : American companies
held (actually dealing with relevant governmen ts) substanti al interests in Europ ean
and Japanese nuclear companies and held licences on the technolog y which remained
largely American.
Meanwhile in the 60s and 70s the US entered into bilateral
ag re ements for civilian use of atomic energy with many other countries , for
example, Argentina , Brasil, Columbia, India, Indonesia , Iran, Ire l and, Israel ,
Pakistan, Philippin es, South Korea, Portugal, South Africa, Spa in,
Taiwan, Turk ey , Venezuela , South Vi etnam.
The US proceeded ,
in this way, to ship
nuclear technolog y and nuclear materials in gre at quantitie s round th e world.
It also proceeded to spread nuclear t echnology t hrough th e Internati onal Atomic
Ene rgy Agency , originall y de si gne d to control and saf eg uard nuclear ope rati ons,
but most of whos e ~udget and activitie s • .. have gone to promote nu c l ear
activitie s' .
46.
A main reason for th e promotion and sales pressure on Third World
countries has been the failure of US domestic market and industrial world
markets for reactors. Less developed countries
offer a new frontier where reactors can be built with
easy public financing, where health and safe t y regulations
are loose and enforcement rar e , where public opposition
is not pennitted and where weak and corrupt regimes offer
easy sales.
[Forj
..• the US has considerabl e leverage
with many of these countries. We know from painful
expe rience that many of the worst dictatorshi ps in the planet
would not be able to stand without overt and covert US support .
Many of those same regimes
are now
pursuing
the
nuclear path, for all the worst reasons. 56
It is e v ident from this sketch of the ways and means of r eactor
proliferatio n that not only have practices departed far from the framework
of the Old Paradigm and the social Modificatio n, but that the practices (of
corp orate capitalism and associated third world imperialism ) involve much
that is eth ically unacceptabl e, whether
by olde r, modif ied, or alternative
57
percepts;
for principles such as those
and self-d e termination are grossly vio late d.
IX. SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOWER AND DEEPER ALTERNATIVES . The futur e energy
option that is most often contrasted with nuclear power, namely coal power,
while no doubt preferable to nuclear power, is hardly acceptable . For it
carries with it the likelihood of serious (air) pollution and associ ated
phe nomena such as acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to ment ion the
despoliatio n caused by extensive strip mining , all of which result from its us e
in meeting very high projected consumption figures. Such an option would also
fail, it seems, to meet the necessary transfer condition, because it would
impose widespread costs on nonbenefic iaries for some concentrate d benefits to
some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the full costs of production
58
and replacement .
To these conventiona l main options a third is often added which emphasizes
softer and more benign technologie s, such as those of solar energy and, in
Northern Europe, hydroele ctricity . The deeper choice, which even softer paths
tend to neglect, is not technologic al but social , and involves both
conservatio n measures and the restruct urin g of production away from energy
intensive uses: at a more basic level there is a choice between consumerist ic
and nonconsume ristic futures.
These more fundamental choices between social
alternative s , conventiona l t echnologica lly-oriented discussion of energy options
tends to be obscure.
It is not just a matter of de ciding in which way to meet
4 7.
give n and unexamine d goals (as the Old Paradigm would imply), but als o a matter
of examining the goals. That is, we are not merely faced with the question of
comparing different technolog ies or substitut e ways of meeting some fi xed or give n
demand or level of consumpti on, and of trying to see whether we can meet this
with s oft rather than hard technolog ies; we are also fac e d, and pr i ma rily, with th e
matter of examining those alleged needs and the cost of a society t hat creates
them . It is not just a question of devising less damaging ways to mee t these
alleged needs conceived of as inevitabl e and unchangea ble . (Hence there are
solar ways of producing unnecessa ry trivia no one really wants, as opposed to
nuclear ways.) Na turally this is not to deny that th e se softer options are
sup e rior because of the ethically unaccepta ble features of the harder options.
But it is doubtful that any technolog y, howe ver benign in principle , will
be likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expect e d to meet
unbounded and uncontrol led energy consumpti on and demands. Even the more benign
technolog ies such as solar technolog y could be used in a way which creates costs
for future people and are likely to result in a deteriora ted world being hand e d
on to them . Consider, for example, the effect on the world's forest s , which are
commonly counted as a solar resource, of use for productio n of methanol or o f
e lectricit y by woodchipp ing (as already planned by forest authoriti es and
contempla ted by many other energy organisat ions) . While few would object to t he
use of genui ne waste material for energy productio n, the unrestric ted exploi t ation
of forests - whether it goes under the name of " solar energy" or not. - to meet
e ver increasin g energy demands could well be the final indignity for the world's
already hard-pres sed natural forests.
The effects of such additiona l demands on the maintenan ce of the
forests are often dismissed , even by soft technolo gicalists, by the simpl e
expedient of waving around the label 'renewabl e resources '. Many forests are
in principle renewable , it is a true, given a certain (low) rate and kind of
exploitat ion , but in fact there are now very few forestry operation s anywhere
in the world where the forests are treated as completel y renewable in the sense
of the renewal of all their values. 59 In many regions too the rate of
e xploitatio n which would enable renewal has already been exceeded, so that a total
decline is widely thought to be imminent if not already well advanced . It certainly
has begun in many regions, and for many forest types (such as rainfores t types)
which are now, and very rapidly, being lost for the future. The addition of a
major further and not readily limitable demand pressure, that for energy,
on top of present pressures is one which anyone with a realistic appreciat ion
of the conduct of contempor ary forestry operation s, who i s also concerned with
long-t erm conservat ion of the forests and remaining natural communiti e s, must
regard with alarm. The result of massive deforesta tion for energy purposes,
48,
r esemb li n g the deforesta tion of England at the beginning of th e Industrial
Revolution, again for ene rgy purposes, would be extensive and devastating
erosion in s t eeper lands and trop i cal are as , dese rtification in more a rid
r egions, possib le climatic change, and massive impoverishm en t of na tural
ecosystems .
Some of us do not wa nt to pass on - we are not entitled to pass
on - a de fores ted world to the future, any more than we want t o pass on on e
poisone d by nuclear products or polluted by coal p roduct s . In sh or t, a mere
swi t ch t o a more benign t e chnology - important though this i s - wi th out any
more bas ic structural and social change is inadequate .
Nor is such a simple technolo gi cal swi. tch likely to be achieved. It is
not as if political pressure could oblige the US government to stop its nuc lear
program (and that of the countrie s it influences, much of the world), in the
way pressure appeared
to succeed in halting the Vietnam war.
While without
doubt it would be good if this could be accomplishe d, it is ve ry un likely
give n th e inte gration of political powe rholders with those sponsoring nuclear
de velopment . 60
The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social
structure which promotes consumerism , consumption far beyo nd genuine needs, a nd
a n e conomic s tructure which en coura ge s increasing use of highly energy-inte nsive
mode s of prod uc tion. This means, for instance, trying to change a social
stru c ture in which those who are lucky enough to make it into the work f o rce
are cogs i n a production machine over which they have ve ry little r eal cont r ol
an d in which most people do unpleasant or boring work fro m which they derive
very 1i t tle real satisfactio n in orde r to obta i n the r eward of consume r goo ds
and services . A society in which social rewards are obtained primarily from
prod ucts rather than proc es s e s, fro m consumption , rath e r than from satisfac tion
in work an d in social r e lations and oth er activities , is virtually bound to be
one which generates a vast amount of unn e cessary consumption . (A production
system that produces goods not to meet genuine needs but fo r created and nongenuine needs is virtually bound to overproduce . ) Consumption frequently
be comes a substitute for satisfaction in other areas.
The adjustments focussed upon are only parts of the large r set of
adjustments involved in s ocially implementin g the New Paradigm , the move away
f rom consumerism is for examp le part of th e more ge ner al shift from ma t eri al ism
and ma terialist values .
The social change option tends to be obscured in mos t dis cussions o f
energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because it do e s
que stion unde rlying values of current social arrangemen ts . The conventiona l
discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with wants or
61
n ee ds
) as unchall e ngeable, and th e iss ue to be on e of which t ech nology can
49.
be most profi tably employed to meet th em.
This e ffectiv e ly pre s en ts a f a l se
choice, and is the result of taking needs and demand a s lacking a s ocial
contex t so that the social structure which produces the needs is similarly
take n as unchallengeable and unchangeable .
The point is readily illustrated.
It is commonly argue d by representat i ves
of such industries as trans!X)rtation and petroleum, as for exampl e by McGrowth
of the XS Consumption Co., that people want deep freezers, air conditioners,
powe r boats, ... It would be authoritarian to prevent th em from satisfying
th e se wants.
Such an argument conveniently ignores the social framework in
which such nee ds and wants arise or are produced.
To point to th e de t e rmination
of many such wants at the framework level is not however to accept a Marxist
approach a ccording to which they are entirely de t ermined at the framewo rk level
( e .g. by indu s trial organisation) and th e r e is no such thing as indivi dual
ch oic e or de termination at all.
It is to s ee the soci a l framework as a major
f a c t o r i n de t e rmining certain kinds of choices, such as those for travel ,
a n d t o see ap pare ntly individual choices made in such matte rs as being channelle d
a nd dire cte d by a social framework de t e rmined l argely i n th e inte r es t s o f
corporat e an d private pro f it and advantage .
The so cial change option is a hard option - at l e ast it wil l b e difficult
to obtain pol itically - but it is the only way , so it has been argued , of a voidin g
passing on serious costs to the future.
And there are other sorts of r easons t han
suc h ethical ones for taking it: it is the main, indeed the only sort of option
open to those who take a deeper ecological perspective 62 , a perspective integ ral
with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant
paradigm.
The ethical transmission requirement defended accordingl y requires,
hardly surprisingly, social and pol i tical adjustment.
The social and political changes that the deeper alternative require s will
be strongly resisted because they
and power structure.
mean changes in current social organisation
To the extent that the option repre sents some kind of
threat to parts of present political and economic arrangements it is not surp r ising
that official energy option discussion proceeds by misre pres enting and often
ob scuring i t .
But difficult though a change will be , es pec ially one with s uch
f a r - r eaching e ffects on th e prevailing power struc tur e , is to obt ai n, it is
imp e rative t o try: we are al l on the n uclear train.
FOOTNOTES
1.
All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Goodin, p. 417;
the last line is from the Fox Report, p. 6.
While it is unnecessary to know much about the nuclear fuel cycle
in order to consider ethical and social dimensions of nuclear power, it
helps to know a little.
& Abbotts , Gyorgy.
The basics are presented in many texts, e . g. Nader
Of course in order to assess fully reports as to such
important background and stage-settin g matters as the likelihood of a
core meltdown of a (lightwater ) reactor, much more information is required.
For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies
and decision theory is at least a s important as knowledge of nuclear technology.
2.
to the first, see references cited in Goodin , p . 417, footnote 1.
As regards the second see Cot grove and Duff, and some of the references
As
given therein.
3.
Cot grove and Duff, p. 339.
4.
The table is adapted from Cotgrove and Duff, p. 341;
Catton and Dunlap, especially p. 34 .
5.
compare also
See, e.g ., Gyorgy , pp . 357- 8.
6.
For one illustration , see the conclusions of Mr Justice Parker at
the Windscale inquiry (The Windscale Inquiry Vol. 1., Her Majesty 's
Stationery Office , London, 1978), discussed in both Cotgrove and
Duff , p. 347 and in Goodin, p. 501 ff.
7.
Much as with the argument of one theory or position against another .
One can argue both from one's own position against the other, and in the
other's own terms against the other.
8.
As well as screening the debate from the public such manoeuvres
favour the (pro-)nucle ar establishme nt, since they (those of th e
alliance of military, large industry, and government) control much of the
information and (subject to minor qualificatio ns) can release what, and only
what , suits them.
9.
This is a conclusion of several governmenta l inquiries and is
conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear deve lopment; for requisite
details up to 1977 see Routley (a).
The same conclus ion has been reached in
some, but not all, more recent official reports, see , e . g.,
2
10.
For some details see Gyorgy, p. 60 ff.
11 .
Se e the papers, and simulations, discussed in Goodin, p. 428.
lla.
Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has to be
taken into account in arriving at moral assessments.
Nuclea r radi ation , unlike
most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life and welfare.
But since the harm nuclear development may afflict on non-human life, for
exampl e , 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 convent ional
(Old Paradigm) way.
12.
On the pollution and waste disposal record of the nuclear industry,
see Nader and Abbotts, Lovins and Price, and Gyorgy.
On the more general
problem of effective pollution controls, see also, Routley (a), footnote 7.
13.
Back of thus Humanity Unlimited assumption is the idea of Man
replacing God.
First God had unlimited power, e.g. over nature, then when
during the Enlightenment Man replaced God, Man was to have unlimited
power.
Science and technology were the tools which were to put Man into the
position of unlimitedness.
More recent l y nuclear power is seen as providing
man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology.
[ability to manage technology repr esent s the past]
14 .
On such l imitation theorems, which go back to Finsler and Godel on one
side and to Arrow on the other, see, e.g. Routley 80.
All these theorems mimic
paradoxes, semantical "paradoxes" on one side and vot ing "p aradoxes" on the
other.
Other different limitation resu1 ts are presented in Routley 81 .
It
follows that there are many problems that have no solution and much that is
n e cessarily unknowable.
Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture.
According
th e Dominant Western Worldview,
the history of humanity is one of progress; for every problem
there is a solution, and thus progress need never cease (Catton
and Dunlap, p . 34) .
15.
See Lovins and Price .
15a .
The points also suggest a variant argument against a nuclear future,
namely
A nuclear future narrows the range of opportunities
open to future generations.
'What justice requires ... is that the overall range
of opportunities open to successor generations should not be
narrowed' (Barry, p. 24 3).
Therefor e ~ a nuclear f utur e contrav enes r equirements of justice .
3
16.
For examples , and for some details of the history of philosoph e rs'
positions on obligatio ns to the future, see Routley (a).
17 .
Passmore, p. 91.
Passmore' s position is ambivalen t and , to
all appearanc es, inconsist ent. It is considere d in detail in Routley (a),
as also is Rawls ' position.
18.
For related criticism s of the e conomists ' arguments for discounti ng,
a nd for citation of the often eminent economist s who sponsor them, see
Goodin , pp. 429-30.
19.
The reasons (not elaborate d here) are that the propertie s are different
e . g. a monetary reduction of value imposes a linear ordering on values to which
value rankings , being only partial orderings , do not conform.
20.
Goodin however puts his case against those rules in a less than
satisfact ory fashion . What he claims is tha t we cannot list all the
possible outcomes in the way that such rules as expe ct ed util ity maximiza tion
presuppos es, e.g. Goodin suggests that we cannot list all the things that can
go wrong with a nuclear power plant or with waste storage procedure s. But
outstandi ng alternativ es can always be comprehen ded logically , at worst by
saying "all the rest" (e.g. "'P covers everythin g except p). For example ,
outcomes Goodin says cannot be listed, can be comprehen ded along such lines
as "plant breakdown through human error". Furthermo re the different
more app ropriate rules Goodin subsequen tly considers also requir e listing of
"possible " outcomes .
Goodin's point can be alternati vely stated however.
There
are really two points.
The first trouble is that such ragbag alternati v es
cannot in general be assigned required quantitat ive probabil ities, and it is
at that point that applicati ons of the models breaks dovm. The breakdown is
just what separates decision making under uncertain ty from decision making
under risk. Secondly, many influenti al applicatio ns of decision theory methods,
the Rasmussen Report is a good example, do, illegitim ately, delete possible
alternati ves from their modelling s.
21 .
Discount, or bank, rates in the economis ts' sense are usually set to
follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson , Economics , 7th Edition, McGraw-H ill,
New York , 1967, p.351.
22 .
Thus the rates have little moral relevance .
A real possibili ty is one which there is evidence for believing could
eventuate . A real possibili ty requires producibl e evidence for its
considera tion . The contrast is with mere logical possibili ty.
23.
4
24.
Such a princip le is explici t both in classica l utilitar iani s m (e.g.
Sidgwick p. 414) , and in a range of contrac t and other theories from Kant and
Rousseau to Rawl s (p.293).
How the princip le is argu ed for will depe nd
heavily , however, on the underlyi ng theory; and we do not want to make our use
depend he avily on particu lar ethical theories .
25.
The latter question is taken up in section VII; see especia lly, the
Poverty argumen t.
26 .
SF, p. 27.
Shrader -Freche tte is herself somewha t critical of the
carte blanche adoption of these methods , suggesti ng that ' whoever aff irms or
den ies the desirab ility of ... [such] standard s is, to some degree,
symboll ically assentin g to a number of American value patterns and cu l tural
norms' (p. 28 ).
27.
The examp le paralle ls the sorts of countere xamp les often advance d to
utilitar ianism, e.g. the admissi ble lynching of an innocen t person because
of pleasure given to the large lynching party.
against utilitar ianism, see ...
For the more general case
28 .
US Atomic Energy Commissi on , Compara tive Risk-Co st-B en ef it Study of
Alterna tive sources of Electric al Energy (WASH-1224), US Governm ent Printing
Office , Washing ton, D.C., Decembe r 1974 , p.4-7 and p. 1-16.
29 .
As SF points out, p.37-44 ., in some detail. As she remarks,
... since standard s need not be met, so long as the
NRC [Nuclea r Regulato ry commiss ion] judges that the
licence shows 'a reasonab le effort' at meetin g them,
current policy allows governm ent regulato rs to trade
human health and welfare for the [apparen t ] good
intentio ns of the promo tors of technolo gy. [Such]
good intentio ns have never been known to be sufficie nt
for the morality of an act (p. 39).
The failure of state regulati on, even where the standard s are as mostl y not very
demandin g, and the alliance of regulato rs with those th ey a re s upposed t o be
r eg ulating, are conspicu ous features of modern environm ental control, not just
of (nuclear ) pollutio n control.
30 .
31 .
The figures are thos e from the origin al Bro okhaven Report: ' Theo r e
t ical
possib ilities and consequ ences of major accide nts in large nuclea
r plants ',
USAEC Report WASH-740, Governm ent Printin g Office , Washin gton , D. C.,
1957.
This r e port was r eques ted in the first place because the Commis sion
on Atomic Energy
wanted pos i tive safe t y conc l usions "to r eass ure th e
private insuran ce compan ies" so that they would pr ovid e
coverag e for th e nuclea r indust ry. Since even th e
cons e rvative statist ics of the r eport we r e alannin g it
was supp r essed and its data we r e not made public until.
almost 20 years later, after a suit was brough t as a r esult of
the Freedom of Inform ation Act (Shrad er-Frec hette, pp. 78-9).
32 .
Atomic Energy Commis sion, Re actor Safe ty Study: An Ass e ssment of
Acc ident Risks in US Comme rcial Nuclea r Power Plants , Governm ent
Printin g Offi ce ,
Washin gton, D.C., 1975 . This report, the only alleged ly comple te
study ,
conclud ed that fission reactor s presen ted only a minima l health risk
t o the
public .
Early in 1979, th e Nuclea r Regula tory Commis sion (th e r elevan t
organ isation that superse ded the trouble d Atomic Energy Commis sion)
withdre
w
i ts suppor t for the report, with the result that there is now no
compreh ensive
analys is of nuclea r power approve d by the US Governm ent.
32a .
Most presen t and planned r eactors are of this type: see Gyo r gy .
33 .
34 .
Even then relevan t environ ment factors may have been neglec t ed .
35.
There are variati ons on (i) and (ii) which multip ly costs agains t
number s such as probab ilities. In this way risks, constru ed as probab
le
cos ts, can be taken into accoun t in the assessm ent.
(Alt e rnative ly, risks may
be assesse d through such familia r method s as insuran ce.)
A princip le varying (ii), and fonnula ted as follows :
(ii ) a is ethica lly accepta ble if (for some b) a include s no more
risks than b
and b is sociall y acce pted. was the basic ethica l princip le in terms
of which
the Cluff Lak e Board of Inquiry recentl y decided that nuclea r power
de velo pme nt
1
in Saskat chewan is ethically acceptable :
s e e Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry Final
Report, Departme nt of Environment , Government of Saskatchewa n, 1978, p. 305 and
p . 288 . In this report, a is nuclear power and bis either a ctiviti e s clearl y
accepted by society as alternative power sources.
In other application s b has
been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring, mining and even the Vietna m War(!)
The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to principles
(i) - (ii'). The principles are certainly ethically substantive , since an
ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses, but they have an
inadmissibl e conventiona l character. For l ook at the origin of b: b may be
socia lly accepted though it is no longer socially acceptable, or though its
social acceptibili ty is no longer so cle arcut and it would not have been socially
accepted if as much as is now known had been known when it was introduced. 'What
is required in (ii'), for instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing
is then 'ethically acceptable' rather than 'socially accepted'. But even with
th e amendments the principles are invalid , for the reasons given in the text.
It is not disconcertin g that thes e arguments do not work . It would be
sad to see yet another area lost to the exper ts, namely ethics to actuaries.
36.
A main part of the tr oubl e with the models is that they are narrowly
utilitarian , and like utilitariani sm they neglect distributio nal features ,
involve na tu ralistic fallacies, et c.
Really they try to treat as an uncon-
straine d optimisatio n what is a deontically constraine d optimisatio n :
V. Routley 'An expensive repair kit for utilitarian ism'.
s ee R. and
37.
Ap parent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and redistr i bution
of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as it has to be i f taxation
is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social asset unfairly
monopolised by a minority of the population .
Example s such as that of motoring
dangerously do not constitute counterexam ples to the principle; for one is not
morally entitled to so motor.
38.
SF, p. 15, where references are also cited.
39 .
Goodin, p. 433.
40 .
On all these points see R. Grossman and G. Daneker, Guide to Jobs and
Energy , Environment a lists for Full Employment, Washington DC, 1977, pp.1-7,
and also the details supplied in substantiat ing th e interesting case of Commoner
[7 ] . On the absorption of available capital by the nuclear industry, see as
well [18], p. 23 . On th e employment issues, see too H. E. Daly in [ 9], p. 149.
7
A more fundamental challenge to the poverty argument appears in I. Illich,
Ene rgy and Equality , Calden and Boyars, London 1974, where it is argued that
the sort of development nuclear energy represents is exactly th e opp osite of
what the poor need.
41 .
For much more deta il on the inappropria teness see E.F . Schumacher,
Sma ll is Beauti ful, Blond and Briggs, London, 1973. As to the capital and
o ther requirement s, see [2] , p. 48 , and also [7] and [9] .
For an illuminatin g l ook at the sort of d evelopmen t high - energy
t e chnolo gy will t end to promote in the so-called unde rdeveloped countri es see
the pap e r of Waiko and other papers in The Melanesian Envfr•onment (edited
J . H. Wins l ow), Au s tr a l ian National University Press, Canb e rr a, 1977.
42 .
A useful survey is given in A. Lovins , Energy Strategy : The Road Not
Taken , Fr iends of the Earth Australia, 1977 (reprinted from Fo 1°eign Affair•s ,
Oc tob e r 1976); s ee also [ 17], [6 ] , [ 7], [14] , p . 233 ff, and Schumacher, op . cit .
43 .
An argument like this is suggested in Passmo re, Chapters 4 and 7,
with respect to the question of saving resources. In Passmore this argument
for the ove rriding importance of passing on contemporar y culture is underpinn e d
by what appears to be a future-dire cted ethical version of the Hidden Hand
argument of economics - that, by a coincidence which if correct would indeed he
fortunate, the best way to take care of the future (and perhaps even the only
way to do so, since do-good interventio n is almost certain to go wrong) is to
take proper care of t he present and immediate future. The argument has all
t he defects of the related Chain Argument discussed above and others.
44.
See Nader and Abbotts, p. 66, p . 191, and also Commoner .
45 .
Very persuasive arguments to this effect have been a dvanced by civ il
liberties groups and others in a number of countri e s: see especially M. Flood
and R. Grove-White , Nuclear Pr ospects. 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.
46.
' US energy policy, for example , since the passage of the 1954 Atomic
Energy Act , has been that nuclear powe r is necessary to provide "an e conomical
and reliable basis"
n eed ed "to sustain economic growth" (SF, p . 111, and
r efe rences there cit e d) .
47.
There are now a great many criticism s of the second premiss in th e
literat ure . For our criticism , and a r e formulati on of the premiss in terms
of selec tive economic growth (which would exclude nu clear developm ent), see
Routley (b) , and also Berkley and Seckler.
To simple-mi ndedly contrast e conomic growth with no-growth , in the fa shion
of some discussio ns of nuclear power, c . f . Elster, is to leave out
crucial
alte rnatives ; the contracti on of course much simplifie s the otherwise faulty
case for unalleged growth.
48.
In UK and USSR nuclear developme nt is explicitl y in the public domain,
in such countries as France and West Germany the governmen t has very s ubstantia l
interests in main nuclear involved companies . Even as regards nuclear plant
operation in the US,
it is difficult to obtain comprehen sive data.
Estimates of cost very dramtical ly according to the
sample of plants chosen and the assumptio ns made
concernin g the measureme nt of plant performan ce
(Gyorgy, p. 173).
49 .
See Kalmanoff , p .
50.
See Corney.
51.
Ref. to what it has to say about Price Anderson Act.
52.
Full ref to SF on argument
from ignorance etc.
53 .
These e . g. Elster, p. 377.
On deci sion theory see also,
54 .
A recent theme in much economic literatur e is that Bayesian dec ision
theory and risk analysis can be universal ly applied . The theme is upset as
soon as one steps outside of select Old Paradigm confines. In any case , even
within these confines there is no consensus at all on, a nd few (and
widely diverging ) figures for the probabili ty of a reactor core meltdown,
an d no reliable estimates as to the likelihoo d of a nuclear confronta t i on.
Thus Goodin argue s (in 78) that 'such uncertain ties plague energy theories'
as to 'rend er expected utility calculati ons impossibl e '.
55 .
For details see Gyorgy, p. 398 ff ., from which presentat ion of the
internati onal story is adapted.
1
56.
Gyo rgy, p . 307, and p. 308.
points, see Chomsky
For elaborati on of some of th e important
and Hermann.
57.
Whatever one thinks of the ethical principle s underlyin g the Old
Paradigm or its Modificat ion - and they do form a coherent set th at many
people can
respect - these are not the principle s unde rlying contempor ary
corporate capitalism and associate d third-wor ld i.mperialis m.
58.
Certainly practical transitio nal programs may involve tempo rary and
limited us e of unaccepta ble long t erm commoditi es such as coal, but in
presentin g su ch practical details one should not lose sigh t of the more basic
social and structura l changes, and the problem is really one of making those.
Similarly practical transitio nal strategie s should make use of such
measures as en vironment al (or replaceme nt) pricing of energy i . e . so that the
price of some energy unit includes the full cost of r e placing it by an
equivalen t unit taking account of environm ental cost of productio n. Other
(sometime s coopU.ve) s trategies towards more satisfact ory alternativ es should
a lso, of course , be adopted, in particula r the removal of institutio nal barriers
to energy conservat ion and alternati ve technolog y (e . g. local governmen t
regulatio ns blocking these), and the removal of state assistanc e to fuel and
power industrie s.
59.
Symptoma tic of the fact that it is not treated as r enewable is that
forest economics do not generally allow for full renewabi lity - if th ey did
the losses and deficits on forestry operation s would be much more s triking tha n
t hey already are often enough.
It is doubtful, furthermo re, that energy cropping of forests can be a
fully r e newable operation if net energy productio n is to be worthwhil e; see, e.g .
the argument in L. R.B . Mann 'Some difficult ies with energy farming for portable
fuels', and add in the costs of e cosystem maintenan ce.
60.
For an outline and explanati on of this phenomena see Gyorgy,
and also Woodmansee .
61 .
The requisite distinctio n is made in several places , e . g . Routley (b),
and (to take one example from the real Marxist literatur e), Baran and
Sw eezy .
62 .
The distinctio n between shallow and deep ecology was first emphasise d
by Naess. For its environm en tal i mpo rtance see Routl ey (c) (wher e
further reference s are cited) .
•
REFERENCES .
In o rde r to contai n refe r e n ces to a modes t length, r efrre ncc to
primary sources has often been replaced by referen ce through secondary sources .
Generally the reader can easily trace the primary sour ces . For those parts of
the text that ove rlap Routley (a), fuller references wil l be found by
consulting the latter article.
S. Cotgrove and A. Duff, 'Environmen talism, middle-clas s radicalism an d
politics', Sociologica l Review 28 (2) (1980), 333-51.
R.E . Goodin, 'No moral nukes ', Ethics 90 (1980), 417-49.
A. Gyorgy and Friends , No Nukes: everyone's guide to nuclear power, South End
Press, Boston, Mass., 1979.
R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Ato mic Energy, Outb ack Press , Melbourn e ,
1977.
R. a nd V. Routley, 'Nuclear energy and obligations to the future', Inquiry
21 ( 1978), 133-79 (cited as Routley (a)).
Fox Repo rt: Ranger Uranium Environmen tal I nquiry First Report , Australian
Go vernmen t Publishing Service, Canberra , 1977.
K.S. Schrader-Fr echet te, Nu clea r Power and Publi c Policy, Reidel, Do rdrecht,
1980 (refe rred to as SF).
W. R. Cat ton, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap, 'A new ecol ogical paradigm for post - ex uber an t
sociology', Ame rican Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980) 15-47 .
Unite d States Interagency Review group on Nuclea r Waste Managemen t, Repo rt
to the President, Wash i ngton. (Dept. of Energy) 1979. (Ref. No . El. 28 . TID29442) (cited as US(a)) .
A.B . Lovins and J.H. Price, Non-Nuc lear Futures : The Case for an Eth ical
Energy Strategy, Friends of the Earth Internation al, San Fran cisco , 1975.
R. Routley , 'On the impossibili ty of an ortho dox social theory and of an
orthodox solution to environmen tal problems', Logique et Analyse,
23 (1980), 145-66.
R. Routl ey , 'Necessa r y limits for knowledge: unknowable tru ths', in Es says in
honour of Paul Wei nga rtner,
(ed. E. Norscher ), Salzberg, 1980.
J. Passmore , Man's Responsibi lity for Nature, Du ckworth , London, 1974 .
,,,.
.-2.
R. and V. Routley, The Fight for the Forests, Third Editi on, RSSS, Austra lian
National University, 1975 (cited as Routley (b)).
J . Rawls , A Theory of Justice, Harvard Unive rsit y Press, Cambridge , Mass.,
19 71.
P . hl . Berkl ey a nd D.W . Seckler, Economic Gr owth and Environment a l Dec ay,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch , New York, 1972 .
J . Elster, 'Risk, uncertainty and nuclear power' , Soci al Science Information
18 (3) (1979) 371-400.
J. Robinson , Economic Heresi e s, Basic Books, New York, 1971.
B. Barry, 'Circumstan ces of Justice and future generat i ons ' in Obligations to
Future Generations (ed. R.I. Sikora and B. Barry), Templ e Universit y Press,
Philadelphi a, 1978.
H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics , Macmillan, London , 1962 (r e issue ).
B. Commoner, The Poverty of Power , Knopf, New York, 1975.
N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Right s , 2 vols., Black
Rose Books, Montreal, 1979 .
J. Woodmans ee , The World of a Giant Corporation , North Coun tr y Pr es s , Seattle ,
Washing ton, 1975.
P . A. B~r a n and P . Sweezy, Monopoly Capita l, Penguin, 1967.
A. Naess, ' The shallow and the deep, long range eco l ogy movement.
A summary ', Inquiry 16 (1973) 95-100.
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Box 59, Item 1873: Draft of Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions
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Typescript (photocopy) of draft, undated. Paper published, Routley R and Routley V (1982) 'Nuclear power—some ethical and social dimensions', in Regan T and VanDeVeer D (eds) And justice for all: new introductory essays in ethics and public policy, Rowman and Littlefield.
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Australian National University - Far Bookshelf - Second Bay - Top Shelf - Pile 2
Australian National University Office
Australian National University Office > Far Bookshelf > Second Bay > Top Shelf > Pile 2
Box 59: Nuclear
-
https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/afa9cbba22cebf06f3dc69f209f159a4.pdf
1d2e17f1654f4f1dfca304ea2d3c8ce9
PDF Text
Text
1875
�/IN/J , AJuncl)L
NUCLEAR POWER
•
-
ETHICA L,a& SOCIAL DIMENSIONS
---.. Compet ing paradig fus and · the nuclea r debate .
~
J C/l/'I
One hardly 1ieeds ini t.. i ation into the dark myster ies of nuclea r physic
s
to contrib ute useful ly to the debate now widely raging over nuclea r
power. While many import ant empiri cal questio ns are still
unreso lved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controv ersy.
Instead , it is a debate about values ...
\
many of the questio ~which arise are social and ethica l ones. 1
•.:tSociol ogica) investi gation s have confirm ed fJ £ a t~
I pa,i I 11g , I a1:a1Hiliit e:f! the
,!
01\.C!..
debate l=!S:&!!!!t'!~ primar ily over what is w.9rth having
or pursuin g and over what we are
'tli.a,., /i.,we 4ho cc,-.+·,r,.,../),l fl..,,/ it,, J;,'/.wh :1 ;•,l~:,~-11
.entitle d to do to others .~,] ii pelaFi oatienA
along the lines of compet ing
paradig ms. 2 Accord ing to the entrenc hed paradig vtldisc erned, that constel
lation. a'
of values , attitud es and beliefs often called the nomina nt Social
Paradig m
(herea fter
I ena ipsoiac to u hl:ttan f!nD
--)
I
r/
I
riteria become the benchm ark by which a v.;id..e/ range of
individ ual and social action is J IA"{'J4.l
and evalua ted.
AW'\d
belief in the market and market mechan isms is
quite centra l.
Clv'.:ite...<il"\<J
around this col'"e belief is the
convic tion that enterp rise flouris hes best in a system of
risks and r ew~ rds, that differe ntials are necess ary ..• , and in
the necess ity for some form of divisio n of labour , and a itfl1rar chy
of skills and expert ise. In particu lar, there is a belief in
the compet ence of ~xpert s in genera l and of scient ists in
particu lar , m More thau this, scient: ifie knowle dge aftd t:he scient ific
speei:r~:'i~/,;2··::.,,./
method enjoy a
-ef knowiftg , • , , A:Re
3
S = ~ : . . _ 4"--
quanti f ica.tion .
.status as
super, '(P'
::::j there 1s an emphas is on
~~,3
The rival world view, sometim es called the Altern ative Environ mental
Paradig m
( the ~ Paradig m) differs on almost every point, and, accord ing to
sociol ogists ,
in ways su~mar i~ din the followi ng table 4":Nature hostile/ne utral
Environm ent controllable
---·. ,csourccs limited
Nature benign
Nature clclicatdy balanced
\.
\
�EDGE
.,.
Confidence in science
and technology
~ation:ility of means~}
Limits to science
~ationality of ends
•
S.t-~te socialism, as practiced in most of the "EasteI11 bloc", differs from the
01/ PaLl.digm really only as to economic organisation, the market in particular
l\ ffl~'
being replaced by central planning (a market system by a command system).
/
o-Y
,r,~t)tlt
But
since there is virtually no debate over a nuclear future within the confines of
·
h
· 1·ism, 5 tat
variant on the Old Paradigm need not be delineated here.
minor
s t a t e socia
,,.... 1
Nctl.cu,t
.WailiaA the competing paradigm picture is a trifle s i m p l e ~ instead
~
a New Paradigm there are rather counterparadi gms, a cluster of not very well
out rositions that diverge from the cluster marked out as the
wo,•k~
Jfl01+,;.,./'cr-hJ,
)/o,ie,/{~(J
Old Paradigm~ i t is empirically investigable, and.I\ it enables the nuclear debate
be focussed.
Large-scale nuclear development, of the sort now occurring in much of
the world ,
counter to leading tenets (such as societal features) of
the New Paradigm.
Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the
assessment of nuclear power, instead of
~,..
olt-0u'-,
merely economic
1in addition to
jJa9.,-.d
..
u(_, \-"-..
factors such as cost and efficiency, isAto move somewhat
received paradigm.
g.gl; .. i le
the
For under the Old Paradig~, strictly construed, the nuclear
debate is confined to the terms of the narrow ut1litarianism upon which contemporary
economic practice is premissed, the issues to questions of economic means (to
assumed economistic ends) along with technological, social engineering and other
instrumental details
whatever falls outside these terms is (dismissed as)
irratfonal. I
/;,(4.(11,-,'1"4-J J~clear development receives its support from adherents of the Old
Paradigm.
Virtually all the arguments in favour of it are set within the
assumption framework of the Old Paradigm, and without these assumptions the
t:o
fails. But in
· and ultimately fails
fact the argument for a nuclear future from the Old Paradigm is itself broken-backedj)
case for the nuclear future the world is presently committed
unless the free enterprise economic assumptions are replaced
by the ethically
unacceptable assumptions of advanced (corporate) capitalism. r->~~~tt--en--e--a:nm~m-t~
7
�The two paradigm picture also enables our case against a nuclear future
(a case written from outside the Old Paradigm ) to be structur ed. There are two
main part~JJ :It is argued, firstly, from
the Old Paradigm , that nuclear
J&tfSe
developm ent is
ethicall y
unjusti fiable;
A
but that, secondly , even from within
e·th,t" I~ ,;,{,.l,fo "1
the framewo rk of the,\Old Paradigm , such developm ent is unaccep table, since signific
ant
features of nuclear developm ent conflic t with indispe nsible features of the Paradigm
(e.g. costs of project developm ent and state :s ... lPs ,l ,J"--f:,,;, •., with market
independ ence and criteria for project selectio n). It has _?~E_~ d accepta ble
from
within the claminan t paradigm only because )rfo,,Js
do not square with practice , only
because the assumpt ions of the Old Paradigm are but very ~A~~ty
applied in
contemp orary politica l practice the place of i ru.<<I!.(~., "'1( td)
,v
capitali sm having been usurped by corpora te capitali sm. It is because the nuclear
debate <:<1.vi bL.
carried on within the framewo rk
of the Old Paradigm that the
debate - although it is a debate about values, because of the conflict ingvalu
es
of the
<c.,..,.,fL-f;;"1
paradigm s - is not just a debate about values; it is also a
debate within a paradigm as to means to already assumed (ec:.on0" 1istid
ends, and
-:=:-
of rationa l choice as to energy option.5 within
(~
~ 0 1""Q;i1f
2'n this corner ~
0<,f/e,,..Jj4 ft!1ho',. "JllD I
most !i F I Im. decision
1
a predeter mined framewo rk of values.
tlrp~
theory argumen ts,often conside red
"
as encompa ssing
all the nuclear debate is ethicall y about, I\best util.i t~rian
means to predeter mined ends..,) be l : ~ For another leading charact eristic of the
nuclear debate is the attempt , under the dominan t par_adigyn, to r~c'1~ it from
t/•IIW 1f
the ethical and
social sphere) and to turR ; t into spec,iali st issues ef'
#"
whether over minutia? .and conting encies A present technolo gy or overme&lw,,/
~legal or
~)
mathem atical ,,' upeciaJ J y de, rs r 011 tbentetf c: and Stat Is Lica:1:, or amdie&t details.,8
/
£'
;or
The double approach can be applied as regards each of the main problems nuclear
.
developm ent poses.
There are 7any
A inter~e lated problems and -fl. t.- OAJ'""'"cd
· , is further
,)
I\
/_,flW4r
structur ed in terms of these.
For in the advancem ent and promotio n of nuclear ~
we encount er a remarka ble combina tion of factors, never before assemble d
establis hment,
on a massive scale, of an industry which involves at each stage of its process
ing
serious risks and at some stages of product ion possible catastro phe, which delivers
as a by-prod uct radioac tive wastes which require up to a million years' storage
but for which no sound and economi c storage methods are known, which gr~w up as
part of the war industry and which is easily $""h v,e..,rld to deliver nuclear weapons
,
which require s for its
operatio nconsid erable secrecy , limitati ons on the flow of
informa tion and restrict ions on civil libertie s, which depends for its economi
cs,
and in
order
to generate expected private profits, on Sl.\bs-i.4.,,/..,~/
state
subsidi zation, support , and interven tion. It is, in short, a very high technol
ogical
developm ent,
ba~«-f.
with problem s.
first importa nt problem .which serves also
to exempli fy ethical issues and princip les involved in other nuclear power questio
ns,
is the unresolv ed matter of disposa l of nuclear wastes.
A
�.------------- ------------ ------------ -------~--- ---.
f
5.
t
annual wastes containing 1000 times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.
of this waste is extremely toxic.
)
Much
For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium
part of the waste material
of even a
is enough to induce a lung
Wastes will include the reactors themselves,
...contamination
which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years,
and which, some have estimated, may require l½ million years to reach safe levels
of radioactivity.
P,,.tcAF
A~astes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire
For fission products the required storage period averages a
active lifetime.
thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include plutonium, there
is a half million to a million year storage problem. Serious problems have arisen
with both short-term and proposed long-term methods of storage, even with the
comparatively small quantities of waste produced over the last twenty years. ~ Shortterm methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer
term methods are subject to both human interference and risk of leakage through
non-human factors.
No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history
ti
of the earth over the last million years, a period whose fluctuations in climate
we are only just beginning to guage and which has seen four Ice Ages, could be
confident that a rigorous guarantee of safe storage could be provided for
the vast period of time involved.
Nor does the history of human affairs over the
last 3000 years give ground for confidence in safe storage by methods requiring
human intervention over perhaps a million years.
Proposed long-term storage methods
such as storage in granite formation s or in salt mines, are largely speculative and
relatively untested1 and have already proved to involve difficulties with attempts
made to put them into practice. Even as regards expensive recent proposals for
the result in
first embedding concentrated wastes in glass and enca/ulating
,i
multilayered metal containers before rock
radioactive material may not remain
deposit 1 si~ulation models reveal that
11.
.
, 'II isolated from human environments.
S'k,t.<\t1
f~4.
In short, the best present ~iapeoel proposals carry very real possibilities of
.J... /Id
•
//
I
lZ..t-u ~~~ •
irradiating future people- (V',i,,l.
Given the
c<c,,,~'7
I
Atu.lflf
.QA:Q;pQfiQWB
costs which could be involved for the future, and given
0
the known ~~mits of technology, it is £i?la:h:tw methodol@gi cal.ly unsound amt to bet,• as
nuclear
Mlin,-J
~
A
t~a.
have,• on the discovery of safe procedures for 1tis.pr19i,j of wastes.
Any
new procedures (required before 2000) will probably be but variations on present
proposals, and subjecJto the same inadequacies.
methods for safe
l
storage
For instance, none of the proposed
X "'t.H
has been properly tested, and they mayAprove to involve
ell :sorts o:fi unforseen 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
�,
I
I
09
when set in this context.
t,/wo/!
are not so ruf'I
What is worth remarking is that similar excuses
when the consigner, again~ "responsible" businessman, puts
).
his workers' health or other peoples' welfare at risk.
~
THE NUCLEAR WASTE DISPOSAL PROBLEM, AND THE1~IN PARABLE .
II.
A long distance country train has just pulled out.
crowded
carries both passengers and freight.
journey
The train which is
At an early stop in the
someone consigns as freight , to a far distant destination, a package
which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas.
container which> as the consigner
ii ava..r4- 1
Jii' l 'J I ems
This is packaged in a very thin
may~ not contain the gas for the
~ full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the train
should strike any real trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior
of the train becomes very hot, if the train should be derailed or involved in a collision,
or if some passenger should interfere
try; to steal some
1e t 11 r 5ffi'1jhQ~
ot
eliherately
~
the freight~
inadvertent!
Ml
tX,lA4'rcd,.
have happened on some previous journeys.
All
iii,.
~
with
fU:
ft,1-h ~
fCJ Laps
Conf• ;;bi.c, ;_,,,
of these tie:! cg ,..
,\
If the container should
"'
break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people on the
train in adjacent carriages, while others could be maimed or incur serious diseases .
..,.,
Most of us would Aoundly condemn such an action.
of the parcel say to try to justify it?
What might the consigner
He might say that it is not certain that
the gas will escape and that it is mere speculation to suppose it will, that the world
needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, and that in any case he is not
responsible for the train or the people on it.
These sorts of excuses however
1$
would normally be s een as ludicrous~
a11rlo'1er1
(~~up~~he says that it is hisgownA pressing needs which justify his action.
The ~ h e
0!111!!6,
,\
which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial
A
straits, and could•
n.,r
,. afford to produce a better container even if it knew how to
r~..../'441' ~ ,1/r
make one.
If t h e ~
§?PB
ersl~~, he and his family will suffer, his employees
r~L'~~
will lose their jobs and have to look for others, and the who}eA
1~,~,
through
loss of spending and the cancellation of the Multiplier Effect, will be worse off.
()It,/ rl.A~"/t ~ "
.fo-...
The ppor of t'he ¥.j)Jag_P,whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will
,1
suffer especially. ::,
,1r.,i/Q
G ew people would accept~ story1 even if correct, as justification. Even
where there are serious risks and costs to oneseLf or some group for whom one is
(o
concerned one is usually
m,""kM,l
ii,b. w;gil1'UA not
hacc.u_y
to be entitled to simply transfer the,4 burden
of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise
1
()r
1
CI U J
1
/JIZMJ' J )
from one's own.< chosefi Iife-style.ca:nd the t~nsfer af cos.ts creates a risk of
,ae-r ious harm t:e G - t ~ r
-----
The matter of nuclear waste disposal has many moral features which resem\1le
the train (i4.tqatiaeu
There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic
wastes generated by the nuclear plant~ that will be spread around the world as large/9
scale nuclear development goes ahead. ' The waste problem will be much more serious
than thut generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, withx'each one of the
2000 or so r actors envisaged by
,IJ
,f/4.
J.IYl/4w
l#i7 l,Q. ~~'4~ ,i·
dfi) flp,J4v{-
...,_,
jj{'. ,
,~IL
cue end of the century producing, on average,
A
. /"'-A
'VI
'/I
Ji?
t
•
s/4
/7
__
/ L_:~-..':~. . :~=====================
==---___,tl~===~l_____i_~
~----
------,_,.........----------~---_......._
----:,..........,__..
�6. {
of safety over th e s torage 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 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
.
. as
The assumption that it would be{ especially if,
~
used.
-
likely, such a method
proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency,
perfection and concern for the f uture which has not previously been e~counter~in
human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry.
1
.
Again,
unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long term storage sites
through perhaps a million years of possible future human ac t ivity, weapons-grade
radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million year storage period,
to any pa rt y who is in a position to retrieve it.
nonetheless be found 1 before 2000,
(no longer a mere disposal pfioblem)
s accordingly not t"~t,cnA '(
which gets around the waste storage problem
. like ma~v assumptions ?~ifH~s, It is an assumption supplied by the
based, but is ratne ~ ~an artitle or
The assumption that a way will
/!
Old Paradigm,
1
Cit M limitations assumption , that there are really no (development)
-
·
-.
problems that cannot be solved technologically (if not in a fashion
always immediately ·· economically feasible).
part in development plans and practice..
technological optimism (not to say
what humans can accomplish,
The assumption
that is
has played an important
It has not only encouraged an unwarranted
t3 -h(A.J,,.,·::, -____
);
that there are no limits to
;~;:14.
i<. through science ; it has led
to the em~rcation on
projects before crucial problems have been satisfactorily solved
t,r
a solution is
tNll.~ i n sight, and it has led to the idea that technology can always be suitably
controlled.
It has also led , not surprisingly, to disasters.
There are severe limits
on what technology can achieve (some of which are becoming known in the form of
'"'
limitation theorems,~ and in addition there are human limitations which modern
technological developments often fail to take due account of (risk analysis of the
·
, llliu:,,olll( lido-wliklihood of reac t or accidents is a relevant exampll). The original nuclear
technology dream
..fj 1>S1.l»-'I
was that nuclear
'clean unlimited supply of power').
apparently remains a net
will be but a quite
X
That dream soon shattered .
cons &-1>t1~
"!)hc..-l::-tM1<1
would provide unlimited energy (a
The nuclear industry
of power, and nuclear
..flt~, ;o,,..
s upplier of power/>
The risks :l.mposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development
then , significant.
are,
Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a
million years, but even with the (suspect) breeder reactor it could be an energy
source for only perhaps 150 years.
It will do nothing for the energy problems of the
people of the distant future whose lj_ves could be seriously affected by the wastes.
�I
pt,..."'tl.Mt..
It is for such reasons that the train aua]og; cannot be turned around
.p, .. ~,.,,,/(._
. s.
to work in favour of nuclear power, w1.·th .:e::g:.-"1 t, h e nuc 1 ear train b r1.n1.ng
I
4
relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (only) by nuclear power.
7.
~
~~----Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear
significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use
I.I f»l~)'r•jloiT,,j.,.
d
r{4.
of onlyAlO generations.
l''°/'k o.f
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 ene~gy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that
in due course the same problem, that of making a 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 ~
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 industrial:lsation are realised, 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
4
a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run·-down condition.
Such
pointf~~ll 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. Like the consigner in the train
parable, contemporary
indu st rial society proposes, in order to get itself out of _a
mess arising from its
chfik
Q,W:fl
life style - the creation of economies dependent on an
abundance of non-renewable energy, which is limited in supply - to pass on costs
and risks of serious harm to others who will obtain no corresponding benefits.
.
The ''solution" may enable the avoidance of some uncomfortable changes~n the lifetime
of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner's action
avoids uncomfortable changes for him and his immediate surroundings, but at the
expense of passing heavy burdens to other uninvolved parties, whose opportunity
to
/eJ J.Q.c~nt /,vu
Afli1J
may be seriously jeopardised.
Industrial society has - under e~ch paradigm, so it will be argued clear alternatives
(YJ>o~-t~
1
cf i patterns
~
w
to this action, which is taken essentially to avoid changing
c~mpet,Nil,iJo.l'J ~
of consumption and protect the interest of those,\who benefit
from them.
I r~ pcrca.,t1cd,
If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral
1
principles generally acknowledged (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the
contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development
firTr-/S~
inv61ves injustice
~
/:T4- •
with respect to the future 1,0
.I\
li
g s111l s n 1J e> . The.re appear to be
only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance
of
such a conclusion.
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8.
I
i
I
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
f{,_
because the recipients of...- nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future.
Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to
!eject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to
1
~
that there are
circumstances in which such an action might ~,.;s i];Jj'
no
be justifiable 1 or at least where the
the nuclear case.
f,t,,J/,e,,
~
is less clearcut.
It is the same with
Just as in the case of the consigner of the package there
is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether
(on(l,/e,r-
We ~urfl now to the first oA these possible escape
they apply in the present case.
h,1',.,. ,¼ ,,;I,11.
,~ 1V,r,q
routes for the proponent of nuclear developmen~, A~
the
~ ~ a i e::u,
question of
our obligations to the future.@
III
The especially problematic area
OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE.
is that of the distant (i.e.
~
,-inun({..!',l j ate) future,
11(
the future with
which people alive today will have no direct contact; by comparison, the immediate
&,I"
In fact the question of
future gives fe~ problems for most ethical theories.
obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories
( tl~eu,lf;"i,
a;iff.
ill}~-?~
•
•
1-t,u,· fe,!, 0 "! 1-ope:ram,o_rLJ
fail to pass, and also
o'Ji(~)
tlo
.-u-r ~ t/JM_
the adequacy of accepted;/ institutions which leave
future pe pl.c.
in political philosophy cen:e!r .. in:g
01:1~
<YP
of account~ the interests of
ll'd"-lvx~,
;>?Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on the issue.
A good
many of the 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 a lesser 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 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
pcr/1t,,/IJ
institutions,that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond ~those
f@raap,s 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 do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, who have
opted for the unconstrained position, many have based this view on accouna
of moral obligation which are builh. on relations which presuppose some ckiguhl uf
\
�9.
temporal or spatial contiguit y.
Thus moral obligatio n is seen as grounded on
or as presuppos ing various relations which could not hold between people widely
separated in time (or sometimes in space).
For example, obligatio n is seen
as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also nontransitiv e. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligatio n, or
requireme nts on moral obligatio n, which would rule out obligatio ns to the non.immediate future are these:-
Firstly there are those accounts which require that
someone to whom a moral obligatio n is held be able to claim his rights or
entitleme nt.
People in the distant future will not be able t'b-claim rights and
en«fw11.
entitleme nts as aga:inst us, and of course they can do nothingAt o enforce any
claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those
accounts which base moral obligatio ns on social or legal conventio n, for example
a conventio n which would require punishmen t of offenders or at least some kind
of social enforceme nt. But plainly these and other conventio ns will not hold
invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventio ns 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
contempo rary institutio n would do it for them.
~ Both the view that moral obligatio n requ{es the context of a moral
community and the view that it is contractu ally based appear to rule out the
distant future as a field of moral obligatio n as they not only require a
commonal ity or some sort of common basis which cannot be guarantee d in the case of
the distant future, but also a possibili ty of interchan ge or reciproci ty of action
which cannot apply to the future.
Where the basis of moral obligatio n 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 obligatio ns to the distant future also follows from those
views which attempt to ground moral obligatio ns in non-tran sitive relations of
short duration such as sympathy and love. As well there are difficult ies about
love and sympathy for (non-exis tent) people in the far distant future about whose
personal qualities and characte ristics one must know very little and who may well
Ji/fa,,,,be committed to a life-styl e for which one has no sympathy. On the current
1
showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that
contempo rary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would
appear to follow fr om this that contempor ary people had no obligatio ns concernin g
future people and could damage them as it suited them.
(
�10.
j
What all these views have in common is a 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
\b 5
fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empffathy).
{ t:#11/
Because obligation therefore
fOt1'0i7'1 )
c,4/t..,&,./.h.
become\conditional, features usually"' thought to characterise ia;~such as
universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding
features) ate
lost,~special.ly where there is a choice whether or not to do the thing required
to acquire the obligation, and so as to whether to acquire it.
The criteria
for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future.
The view that there are no moral constraints with respect to
future people, that one is free to act however one likes with respect to them,
Mt
is Ahowever
Jurn.mi).(/e.
,fl
·•=~
aH:llLalt one te ~t113ta1A J
Irr
Consider, elm example , a
a scientific
group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of
technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb 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 affecte.d,
but the population ofY the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a
The unconstrained position clearly
direct and predictabl~ result of the action.
implie s that this is an acceptable moral enterpris e, that whatever else we might
legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being overexpensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it
The unconstrained position also endorses as morally
J,,)rc'y:
acceptable the following sorts of linEOfflf':les:- A firm discovers it can make a
will do to future people.
handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material
which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate
descendents, 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 i .t does
,ren,,~
future
people.
Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view, which are easily varied
and multiplied, might seem childishly obvious.
Yet the unconstrained position
concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not
0...
only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it i s ~ clear
impli cation of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well
as of prevailing economic theory.
It seems that those who opt for the unconstrained
position have not considered such examples,
-, /J/(l.
by their position.
despite their being clearly implied
w ..ld cuh..117 ~o/1'1 Md;{ -
We suspect thatAwhen 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 for example, most of those who opted for
�11.
the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they
intende.d.
I
What many of 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 reponsible for their lives.
The popular 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,
r:--
in the counter/
example cases or in the nuclear case, the future is simply being
.....:.,...,
left alone
to take care of itself.
Present people are influencing it, and
in doing so thereby acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as
they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future, namely the
obligation to take account in what they do of people affected and their interests,
to be careful in their actions, to take account of the genuine probability of their
actions causing harm, and to see that they do not act so as to rob future people of
the chance of a good life.
Furthermore, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future
people does not amount to the same thing 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
acqu.ired 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 act.ion of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him.
These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the
(sometimes deliberate) failure to make an important distinction between acquired or
assumed obligations toward somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption
is required as a qualifying condition, and 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.
and kind of responsibility involved.
There is a considerable difference in the level
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
who is aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his 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
p{jf-lrr
(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 speci.al sacrifices for future people of an heroic kind, or even to help them
�12.
especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained
Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot
from harming them.
argue in justification of hi.s action that he has never assumed or acquired
responsfbility 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 concerning the train, 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 people involved.
There has been an attempt 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 the consigner
is resorting to heroic self- sacrifice in refraining from placing his dangerous
package 6n the train.
- 1~ ,-;.,,.
The conf~ of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the
attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off nonacquired
constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' both to
signify any type of deontic constraints and also to indicate rather something which
t?t-. con.Pl~"'
has to be assumed or acquired. a .~is encouraged by reductionist positions which,
in attempting to account for obligation in genera~mistakenly endeavour to collapse
all obligations into acquired obligations.
Hence the equation, and some main roots
{),nu,,WUI
of the unconstrained position, of theAbelief that there are no moral constraints
concerning the distant future.
The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent, positions, for example
the position that
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 condtion, and that is all; il,/7
there are irferactice
no obligations to the distant future.
A main argument
in favour of the latter theme is 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 or sympathy, only to the succeeding
-
generation.
/hftfe..
'U'L P..t (t A.,t
~ . A 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
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 often cannot be sheeted home to an entire generation.
Secondly, such chains,
since 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.
VThirdly, improvements for immediate
successors may be achieved at the expense oflcfi\advantages 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.
examples
Such cases can hardly be written off as "never-never land"
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 nonrenewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils
t.($l.
and forests through over crttl
If then such obvious injustices to future
W•
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.
IV.
ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATI_ONS TO THE FUTURE : ECONOMISTIC
r.\
Ul\tERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS.
While
there are grave
difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible
. , ~ ,;.
position.
According to thej 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 people should
proceed, even if people of the distant future are (somewhat) disadvantaged by them.
The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in
prevailing economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future
�( 'tJ
c./,~
14.
c,,...,.,,..7
e-.Al'I r~e/ ,,_0 /1//4,r.4'---/o/_/,._
costs and benefits (and so of future inter~s) is obtained by application over
time of a ! ~ discount rateJ l The attempt to apply eco~omics as
a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to
the qualified position.
J
What is objectionable in such an approach is that
rl..ooA.cl
economics~ operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just
A
as in practice it operates within legal constraints, not determine what those
There are moreover alternative economic theories and simply
constraints are.
to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future is to beg
~.rn.<)~
t=t.m questions at issue.
Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting
the future 1 the most threadbare is based ~n the assumption that future generations
J'{
than present ones > and so better placed to handle the waste
off
willj€:tter
Since there is mounting evidence that future generations may well UQ_l=
problem.
be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter, no argujJnent
can carry Much
discounting the interests of future generations on this basis
For it depends qf
Nor is that all that is wrong with the argujtnent.
weight.
~
1 ~.<f_.: ~
assumption that poorer contemporaries would be making
(ullRJ_td/., h-n.a-hc '"/ J
richer successors in foregoing such,i de.f5elopments as nuclear power. Tl,q•f ;1 1
il-.la/Jt,,,.1U
H:O::f t f ~ a ~ I
cl:e..vi?1tiprirn~
M
th. f:>.I~,. .Ly rcdr.lul
-Be:t,\ the sacrifice
{(J/0..)
lias , 1r cad, li @an
~
~
hi¥/~
-tl,e.,
on
sacrifices to
f or
8'1. Qto @h es.
t"/!"4;/
"r: toJ/IJ-f,444
the future
'i1:m:1 for the waste disposal problem to be
~
argument . Iii\ ""1
legitimately
generations, it would have to be shown, what recent
economic progress hardly justifies, that future generations will be, not just better
U 11.,t
J1' 011!.. C u.;,,;/,/e_.
off, but so much better offAthat they can duly absorb the nuclear waste burden.
A more plausible argument for discounting is d.i rectly in terms of
opportunity costs.
It is argued_, from the fact that a dollar gained now is worth
much more than a dollar received in the non-immediate future (because the first
dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is
required to obtain equivalent monetary values, and so f~r efficient allocation of
resources.
Similarly it is argued, by virtue again of
'r/'~/,·s-.-l,~.....
of monetary
value, that compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to cawii:a. to
71....r
a few pennies set
now than later. ~
costs much less_
economically
,1ov.)Q/"
--
,......
aside (e.g. in a trust fund)Ain the future, if need bev, will suffice to
compensate eventually for any
v,c. t,w>.f
of remote radioactive waste leakage.
There are, presently at least, in surmountable pract1cal _
_
difficulties about
applying such discounting, e.g. how to determine appropriate future discount rates.
A more serious objection is that
�15 .
applied generally, the argument presupposes , what is false, that compensatio n,
like value, can always be converted into monetary equivalents , that people ~ncluding
I
those outside market frameworks) can be monetarily compensated for a variety of
damages, including cancer and loss of life. There is no compensatin g a dead man,
or for a lost species.
In fact the argument presupposes
neither part of which can succeed
be represented
,
at all adequately
it is not just
/</
a double reduction
that value cannot in general
, -fa'
/J,'K~~
monetarily, but (as against utilitariani sm)
,t
-LJ..,.t
constraints and obligations can not be somehow reduced to matters of value. It
i s also presupposed that all decision methods, suitable for requisite nuclear
choic e s,'!_--- - -~
are bound ~o apply discounting . This is far from so :
indeed
A
Goodi~ argues that, on the
do not allow discounting , and discounting only works in practice with expected
utility rules (such as underlie cost-benef it and benefit-ris k analyses), which
,r,//
are, he contends strictly inapplicabl e for nuclear choices (since aJncrt
1 pnl'>Si],1 f3
{,/,11.{f al f<j''1. a,t /'.,~,,/,/;#b J
outcomes can
be duly determirte1, in the way that application of the rules
1-0
requir es).
1/
contrary, more appropriate decision £~1¢s
,,
As the f~e.ceid;nJ . arguments reveal, the discounting move often has the same
result as the unconstrain ed position. If, for instance, we consider the cancer
i
example and reduce costs to payable compensatio n, it is evident that over a
sufficientl y long period of time discounting at current prices would lead to the
conclus ion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no
constraints . I n short, even certain damage to future people could be written off.
One way to achieve the bi a s against future people is by the application of discount
rates which are set in accord with the current e conomic horizons of no more than about
15 years~2/ and appli.cation of such rates would
simply beg the question against
the interests a nd rights of fu t ure people.
Where there is certain future damage
of a mo rally f o rbidden t ype, f or example, the whole method of discounting is simply
inappl.icabl e, and its use would violate moral constraint s.~
Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections
from ca ses of c ert a in d a mage, comes from probability considerati ons. The distant
future, it is a rgued, is much more uncertain than
the present and immediate future,
so that probabiliti es are consequentl y lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding
with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.•
But then if we take
account of probabiliti es 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,
much) less than those of present and
must count for (very
neighbourin g people where (much) higher
probabj_lities are attached.
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 f(Jture against a much lower probability of indetermina te
�16.
costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally
be decided in favour of the present, assuming anything like similar costs and benefits
were involved.
But of course it cannot 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 am:±E doubtful fU" t, i :b4. benefits for some present people, in
f11(,i11i.1,~ c,HJcn.A,;;,. l';-of,Y~;l,7 or le
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.
or l"isl.~JwiolilSuch a cost-benefitAapproach to moral and decision problems, with or without
the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned
or to deal with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic
constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results.
it would follow on such principles that it is permissible
For example,
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 s1mple 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 on
y -
whi.ch are not susceptible to, a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted
J~
J,!01-Ult;,...
•F enenza, of nuclear energy, ltho attefl@J':=::f::fl=di-smiss the costs to future
,~~
#
"41'-
.
~'?f1¥=;ll,,
d?,,-,ipQ/i,,.
people~with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as
benefHs.
The limitations
of transfei:_ point is enough to invalidate the
comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear
--
risk, between nuclear risks and those from such activities as airplane travel or
cigarette smoking.
In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity
-3.
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 that of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or
temporaJ.ly 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
{happiness) sums as a way ~f solvini moral. conflict between diff_e_r ent parties, and the
.
.
-
1J.1
,,.
u/i'th:urty,-
~IJ-UJI--.
NJ/t.J1
~
O-?
'Hf/t• """~ aP/2~.i.-1-;-
1ntroduct1on of probabi.lity cons1derations.-l does not change the principles involved
but merely complicates the analysis.
One might further object to the probability
argument that piobabilities involving distant future situations are not always less
than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and
~
�17.
that the outcomes of some moral problems do not depend on a high level of
f
probability anyway.
In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the train parable
I
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, economists 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 sep-
aration, but frequently tangled up.
priori
Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a
grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds.
The first argument is a
generalised uncertainty argument which runs as follows:-
In contrast to the
exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain
-ft1Z'L:J
about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreli.able,wootl; and highly
A
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
X
uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future.
crudely:
More formally and
One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on
reliable information.
distant future.
There is no reli.able information at present as regards the
Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future.
This
first argument is essentially a variant 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 the adjacent future
and the 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 sceptic-proof 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.
Consider again the train example.
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
�18 .
in this sort of case.
risk of harnt
J
It does not matter if the decreased
well-being of the consigner is certain and that the prospects of the passengers
quite uncertain, the resolution of the problem is nevertheless clearly in favour
But if we do not require
of the so-called "speculative " and "unreliable".
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 for the future, episte.m ic standards 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 a~ 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
obligations to the future, we cannot in practice
theoretical
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 on it will be and therefore, however good our intentions
to the people of the distant future are, 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 be put alternatively
this way:-
If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form,
that is of such forms as "if
every (action) x" ,
x
has character
h
then
x
is wrong, for
then what the argument claims is that we cannot ever
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 obt.ain clear
conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the "It is wrong
to do x" type.
Many of the assumptions of the second argument
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 in practice not
be applicable to obtain 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 always is 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
�~~
--t9-.
argument has to assume.
There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as
I
to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point,
which was 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
-f/,u.'fN-r I
in a hundred years i n ~ names o r ~ footwear, or what praod1
of ice
•
•
.._A'.~
cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe,
especially if we consider 3000 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 t h e ~ earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present
makes it such a rich and interesting place.
Ill
uncertainty argument should be rejected.
For this sort of reason, the second
The case of nuclear waste storage,
and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, is one area where
uncertainty in morally relevant respects is not so great as to preclude moral
constraints on action, where we can 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.
In particular there is not 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~• eac. ~
eu,~
~ ··from the train example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this
{
type to make moral constraints applicable.
In terms of the def ects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can
see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to
0~1,.(t_
write off probable~ harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration.
Most of these popular moves emv
,< .loy 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~hings that would c,.ffect us.
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 mora.lly 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 of forever plugged into enjoyment of other
machines.
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 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. 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 oppo s ed to a logical possibility.
We can contrast with
these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks
of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilisation 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 ~ffect 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: that this app ears to be a
~
live possibility, and not merely a logical possibility, does not make
the action of the firm
tu
..c
tbeaa-:&-xam~ aiscussed
earlier
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 ?e required is
22
far more than a possibility, real or not
- 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
to protect themselves.
~tpected to apply
�~/l,.. a..,,.L- a«'if
The strategy of /tnost af rbes9 uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then,
I
and may be brought out by looking yet again at the train 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 train may break down and they may all
change to a different transport leaving the parcel behind, or the train 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
liC/t2-
they are any more than that, that is they are n o t ~ possibilities.
~k-
The
;\,
strategy is to stress such bH~sid& possibilities in order to create the false
impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real
possibility that the contai.ner will 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' takin~ account of the passengers' welfare and the real
possibility of harm from his parcel and thereby to excuse his action. A related
strategy is to stress a real vossibility, 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 of
harm, 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.
Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the
indeterminacy of the future. In particular it is argued that the indeterminacy,
for example with respect to the number and exact character of people at future
times, 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
,:J$
'<>A,
indeterminate and their interests unknown how, it is SloM!-d, 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 pr,Pblems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present
-fu,-- Q ~11.,,y,.La.. ..,, I,
and future people," wherf the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such
problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims
f
)
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 byVignoring such factors.
Nor are distributional problems as large and representative a cl'ass of moral
problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest.
can be conceded that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of
It
�the future will make co~flicts
very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble -
J
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 train example which is a conflict case of a type.
In particular, there will bi~ 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.
The crucial question which emerges is then: are there any features of
future people which would disqualify them fro~ral consideration or reduce their
claims to such below those of present people?
Prima facie,
The answer is :
in principle None.
,.
moral principles are universalisable, and lawlike, in that they apply
independently of position in space or in time, for example.
But universalisability
of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of deali.ng
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.
candidates
The only
for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the
logical features we have been looking at, such as uncertainty and indeterminacy; ht1 1l, ,
. ~ we have argued 1 p: ai-Oia) 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, nuclear development, where highly
determinate. or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class
likely to be harmed is not required, nor is certainty of damage.
To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability
principle is not required:
it is enough that the temporal position of a person
cannot af feet his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral
consideration ;i Zfj
inversely, that it is without basis to discriminate morally
against a person in virtue of his temporal position.
As a result of this
universalizahility, there are the same general obligations to future people as to the
present;
and thus there is the same ooligation 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 them of
what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy
tf,1'1 Q.v. a.
do not/\:krt: u s ~ 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
�I
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 already tentatively reached, that proposals for nuclear
development in the present and likely future state of technology and practices
for future waste disposal are immoral.
Before we consider (in section VII) the remaining escape route from this
conclusion, through appeal to overriding circumstances, it is important to
pick up the further case (which heavily reinforces the tentative conclusion)
against nuclear development, since much of it relies on ethical principles
similar to those that underlie obligations to the future, and since it too
is commonly met by similar appeal to extenuating circumstances.
V.
Problems of safe nuclear operation:
reactor emissions, and core meltdown.
ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to future creatures.
Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or entitlements to just
treatment, neither does location in spa ce, or a particular gqsgraphical position.
First of all, the problem of nuclear waste disposal raises serious questions of
distributive justice not only across time, across generations, but also across
space.
Is one state or region entitled to dump its radioactive pollution in
e,,- ,.q/Jjel'J
another state's or region's yard?
,(
When that region receives no due compensation
(whatever that would amount to, in such a case~ and the people do not agree
(though the leaders imposed upon them might)?
The answer, and the arguments under-
pinning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing to the tentative
conc.lusion concerning the injustice of imposing radioactive wastes upon future
people.
But the cases are not exactly the same:
USA and Japan cannot endeavour
fl'I- cf
to discount peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose to drop~ their
,a,ltdi;~ pollution in quite the way they can discount people of two centuries hence.
(But
what this consideration really reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that e ntitlement to just treatment can be discounted over time.)
!
�'
~
'· i
Eth~· c 1 i ssues of distr i bu tive j ustice, • as to equityI
/
,:,J
~ J.._ /,
,tJ
tc..id~,,..__
v J{
~iv9ly=~=in ~ , also arise elsewhere in the assessment of nuclear development ;
in particular, a s regards t h e treatment of those in the neighbour of reactors, and,
tud rorb
differently, as r~gards the distribution of (alleged) b~nefits Afrom nuclear power
across ~ ~5' (The la t ter ques tion is t aken up
,\
a~ s ~~~ ,
especja] Jy , tb s Pev etty argument . ) ~
Weople livin g or working in the vicinity
special costs and risks:
f
~w{ffitrrf oslde, al ll rn
;i" a
nuclear reactor are subject to
firstly, radioactive pollution, due to the fact tha t
reactors discharge radioactive ma terials into the air and water near the plant ,
and secondly catastrophic accidents, such a:; {steam) explosion of a reactor. ~ ,I/;.._
~ question is whether such cos t s and risks can be imposed, with any ethical legi-
timacy, on these people, who frequently have little or no say in their imposition,
and who have mostly not been informed of any choices regarding the "risk/benefit
--
tradeoffs" of nuclea r _technology. -:::)__
( That they are so imposed, without local participation, indeed often without
local input or awareness as with local opposition, reveals one part of the
antidemocratic face of nuclear development, a part that nuclear development
shares however with other large-scale polluting industry, where local
participation and questions, fundamental to a genuine democracy/ of regional
determination and popular sovereignty, are commonly ignored or avoided.
.-:-,,,
The "normal" ei 1ssion , during plant operation1 of low level rad~ ation
carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, there r mains
/,id,,
substantial disagreement over theAnumber of cancers and precise extent of genetic
damage induced by exposure to such radiation, over the local health costs involved.
Under the Old Paradigm, which (illegltimotely ) permits free transfer of costs
and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised is said to
be: what extent of c~5cer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for
the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions?
m
Under the Old Parad
the issue is then translated into decision-theor etic questions, such as to 'ho · to
e mploy risk/benefit analysis as a prelude to government regulation' and 'how t o
....1.
�25.
determine what is an acceptable level of risk/safety for the pub lic'
.:ii
}
3/
The Old Paradigm a t titude, ref~ted in the public policy o f s ome count r ie s
that have such policies, i s t ha t the economic benefits conferred by allowing
radiation emissions outweigh the costs of an increase in cancer and genetic
damage.
An example will reveal that such evaluations , which rely~ what appeal
they have on a dubious utilitarianism, will not pass muster.
It is a pity about
Aunt Ethyl getting cancer, but it's nice to have this air conditioner working in
summer.
Such frequently trivial and rather inessential benefits, which may be
obtained alternatively, e.g. by modification of houses, in no way compensate for
the (a;~nf Y, of cance~
'----
The point is that the costs to one party
27
are not justifie~
'-.:,.
especially when such benefits to other parties can be alternatively obtained
a,-,{,...~
without such ~
awful costs.:.
People, minorities, whose
,;.~;(a_,
.Jro/
~
within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.
p().~M...11£;
,1711~,
position isA compromised are thos\/ who live
(Ehildren, for example, are in aAparticularly
vulnerable position, since they are several times more likely to contract cancer
through exposure than normal adults.)
In USA, such people bear a risk of cancer
and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at l arge.
~i
A notinegl 11ble percentage (in excess of 3% of those exposed for 30 years) o f ~
qJ'~c~
R@r~ t a? s&&-eh:e people 1 in the area will di~j for the sake of the majority who are
111,(.ctaii-J"
'I
aailat.'@ffl benefitted byApower producti~n . ~e~~a
ft~elear.
Whatever charm t he
argument from overriding benefits had, even under the Old Paradigm, vanishes once
it is seen that there are alternative, and in several respects less expensive ~
ways/ of delivering the real benefits involved.
There are several other tricks used in showing that the imposition of radiation
t:Jt/~ or
on minorities, most of whom havei\ no genuine voice in the location of reactors in
their environment and cannot move away without serious losses, is quite (morally)
acceptable.
l~
One cheaper trick, deployed by the US Atomic Energy Corrnnission,
is to
suppose that it is permissible to double, through nuclear technology, the level of
(natural) rqdiation that a population have received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being
"natural" level) is also likely to have negligible consequences.
equivalent to the
The increased
amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted
normal,
and,
f<-,f- i, l(e,,... c-ltt<..,cd.
of course,,\ what is normal is morally acceptable.
in this argument is sound.
None of the steps
Drinking one bottle of wine a day may have no ill-effects,
whereas drinking two a day certainly may affect a person's well-being;
and while
the smaller intake may have become normal for the person, the larger one will,
under such conditions, not be.
Finally, what is or has become normal, e.g . two
murders or twenty cancers a day in a given city, may be far from acceptable.
In fact, even the USA, which has strict standards by comparison with most
other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiat i on emissions very
substantially in excess of the standards laid down;
so the emission situation is
worse than mere consideration of the standards wou'ld disclose.
Furthermore , the
�~------- -------- ----~-- -------- -------- -------- ---monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to the nuclear operators
themselves, scarcely di.sinterested parties. Public policy is determined not so as
to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a 'public pacifier' while
private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered~
While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation,
breakdown is, hopefully, not: an accident of magnitude is accounted, by official
definition, an 'extraordinary nuclear occurrence'. But such accidents can happen,
and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island) Y-Q
If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water)
1flore acto rs, then the core melts and 'containment failure' is likely, with ~he result
that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively contaminated. In the
event of the worst type of accident in a very small reactor, a steam explosion in
the reactor vessel, about 45,000 people would be killed instantly and at least
100,000 would die as a result of the accident, property damages would exceed $17
billion and an area H,e size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear
reactors are abo ut five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative
US government figures are giveti' : the consequences of a similar accident with a
modern reactor would accordingly b~Y~~eater still.
The consigner in ri sking the lifes, well-being and property of the passengers
on the train has acted i_nadmissibly. Does a government or govern~t-spon sored
private utility act in tay that is anything other than much less responsible in
siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on
the community train. The answer will be No, if the analogy holds good and the
consigners' action is, as we would ordinarily suppose, inadmissible and irresponsible. The proponents of nuclear power have in effect argued to the contrary,
while at the same time endeavouring to shift the dispute out of the ethical ar€/1
and into a technological dispute as to means (in accordance with the Old Paradigm).
It has been contended , firstly, what contrasts with the train example, that
there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. Indeed in the
'11-
influential Rassmussen report - which was extensively used to support public
confidence in US nuclear fission technology - an even stronger, an incredibly
strong, improbability claim was stated:
namely, the likelihood of a catastrophic
nuclear accident is so remote as to be (almost) impossible. The main argument for
this claim derives from the assumptions and estimates of the report itself. These
assumptions li ke the claim are undercut by nuclear incidents that came very cil:ose
to accidents, incidents which reflect what happens in a reactor rather better than
mathematical models.
As with the storage of nuclear wastes, so with the operation of nuclear reactors,
it is important to look at what happens in the actual world of technological
limitations and human error, of waste leak.age and reactor incidents and quite
possibly accidents, not in an ideal world far removed .from the actual, a technological
�27.
(
dream world where there is no real possibility of a nuclear catastrophe.
In such an ideal n ucle a r wo r ld , where waste disposal were fool-proof and reac tors
were accident-proof , things wo uld no doubt be morally different. But we do no t
live in such a world.
""
According to the Ra\ussen
report its calculation of extremely low accident
probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological assumptions
and is methodological ly sound.
This is very far from being the case.
The under-
lying mathematical methods, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability
as
estimating techniques", are unsound, because they exclude .-1 "not credible"
,>Difl~;l,,9'?~ ~
possibilities or as branches t;o:1:t!il fl Ellffl "not significant" that are real
.m:d" may well
b'1. rt:i./f,04,(
~1cq1pen1 in the real world.
\
It i.s the eliminations that are otherworldly. Infact
the methodology and data of the report has been soundly and decisively criticized .Ji
And it has been shown that there is a real possibili.ty, a notjpegligibJ.e probability,
of a serious accident.
It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negligible probability
of a reactor accident, still ibis acceptable, being of no greater order than
risks of accidents that are already socially accepted.
Here we encounter again
that insidious engineering approach to morality built into models of an economic
cast, e.g. benefit-cost balance sheets, risk assessment models, etc. Risk
assessment, a sophistication of transaction or trade-off models, purports to
provide a comparison between the relative risks attached to different options,
e.g. energy options,which settles their ethical status. The following lines of
argument are encountered in risk assessment a.s applied to energy options:
(i) if option a imposes costs on fewe.r people thq.n option b then option a is
preferable to optic+;
(ii)
option a involves a total net cost in terms of cost to people (e.g. deaths,
injuries, etc.) which is less than that of option b, which is already accepted;
therefore option a is acceptable. 3
f
For example, the number likely to be killed by nuclear power stations is less than
1,r 1'-i l'Jp.,( ,-c.c.,',l.ci...fs
~
the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, which jjB accepted: so nuclear pqwer
A
stations are acceptable. A little refle c tion reveals that this sort of risk
assessment argument involves the same kind of fallacy as ll!l!it transaction modek.
It is far too simple--minded, and it ignores distributional and other relevant
aspects of the context.
In order to obtain an ethical assessment we should need
a much fuller picture and we should need to know at least these things:- do the
costs and benefits go to the same parties;
and
i1·he
person who undertakes the
risks also the person who receives the benefits or primarily, as in driving or
cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed on ot e parties who do not benefit?
It is only if the parties a r e the same in the case of the options compared, and
there are no such distributional problems, that a comparison on such a basis would
be valid.i '})This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments
�Secondly, does the person incur the risk as a result of an
of energy options.
28.
activ.Lty which be knowingly unclcttakes in a situationw-iere he has a reasonable
choice, knowing it entails the risk, etc., and is the level of risk in proportion
to the level6f the relevant activity, e.g. as in smoking? Thirdly, for what
/
reason is the risk imposed: is it for a serious or a relatively trivial reason?
risk that is ethically acceptable for a serious reason may not be ethically
acceptable for a tr:Lvial reason. Both the arguments (i) and (ii) are often
A
employed in trying to justify nuclear power.
The second argument (ii) involves
the fallacies of the first (i) and an additional set, namely that of forgetting
that the health risks in the nuclear sense are cumulative, and ) 'n bhw ey ;i s g f:"
P'J;ct'.) pce i,1 e~ already
'°fc'
not A oo high.16
high if ~
1
The maxim "If you want the benefits you have to accept the costs" is one thing
and the maxim "If I want the benefits then you have to accept the costs (or some
of them at least)" is another and very different thing. It is a widely accepted
d/' l).,c-~ ~ flJ,;<d ,;k~4 .~ vr4..a)
I fl/rotl,7 ~~ kr 1/1
/ moc.tal plfinci'ple,\ that one' is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs
I
r7n
of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other
This
parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries~
transfer principle is especially clear in cases where the significant costs
iq;lude an effect on life or ~ealth or a ,risk thereof, a~d where the benefit to
j<2,c-(kUt , «J,•1
,r ·~ ,k
,-,1,-.r.:.. ,riz.._~,
t.4,/,:K/~7',-,t ~ ~ q:.:rLc-1- .
the benefit ting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature,.,\ { Thus ,tone is not
usually entitled to harm, or risk harming, another in the process of benefitting
CIA.en(~
Suppose, forA example, we consider a village which produces, as a
result of an i.ndustrial process by which it lives, a nox~us waste material which
is expensive and difficult to dispose of and yet creates a risk to life and health
oneself. f
if undisposed of.
Instead of giving up their industrial process and turning to
some other way of making a living such as farming the surrounding countryside,
they persist with this way of life but ship their problem on a one-way delivery
,Oil ·/J..0- ~ )
service Ato the next village. The inhabitants of this village are then forced
to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal
or ol,e_ i'1M,).; 1(4. e1/Tl~L. ~ ~ Cdt'-/.:/4r,h .
process or of sustaining risks to their own lives and healthA Most of us would
see this kind of transfer of costs as.
morally unacceptable.
From this arises a necessary condition for energy options: that to be
morally acceptable they should not involve the transfer of significant costs or
risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, do not use the energy source or
do not benefit correspondingly from its use. Included in the scope of this
/trl" gA'-,
condition are future people /§.~~~~ B ~eeiji~ a ~~~~m~aE~:iic=;m ;;~~i;E~~
1
The distribution of
-hut rd~ future generations (those of the next villages~;
costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. o~to non-benef
is one of its most
of certain widespread and serious fonns of
objectionable moraL£eatures- ;-- - -
/4' ..;~<fi'nt ~ ,u/4.v
tfi/1_
,.,c,,r
r«-,,.4/ .......,,_,,
f"u<H;f I
l4'(!,,r)
\
iaries is a characteristic
=&,
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-
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v /
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- •_
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,.
It is a corollary of the condition that we should not hand the world on to
our successors in substantial ly worse shape than we received it - the transmissio n
principle. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs.
(The corollary can be independen tly argued for on the basis of certain ethical
theories.)
eJpoc,"ct lly ru,clc>u- //)CL-;
•
Other social and environmen tal risks and costs of nuclear development ;~ The
problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmen tal, health and safety
VI.
risks and costs in or arising from the nuclear fuel cycle. The full fuel cycle
includes many stages both before and after reactor operation, apart from waste
disposal, namely mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and preparation , reprocessing spent fuel, and transportat ion of materials. Several of these stages
involve hazards. Unlike the special risks in the nuclear cycle - of sabotage of
plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferati on of
nuclear armaments - these hazards have p~rallels, if not exact equivalents , in
other very polluting methods of generating power, e.g. 'workers in the uranium
mining industry sustain 'the same risk' of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers
in the coal industry 1 1'f Furthennore , the various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sector of uranium fabrication should be differently
viewed from those resulting from location, for instance from already living where
a reactor is built or wastes are dumped. For an occupation is, in principle at
any rate, chosen (as is occupationa l relocation) , and many types of hazards incurred
fr/working with radioactive material are now known in advance of choice of such an
with where one already lives things are very different. The uranium
miner's choice of occupation can be compared with the airline pilot's choice,
whereas the Pacific Islander's 11 fact" of location cannot be. The social issue
occupation:
of arrangement s that contract occupationa l choices and opportuniti es and often
at least· ease people into hazardous occupations such as uranium or tin or coal
mining (where the risks, in contrast to airline piloting, are mostly not duly
compensated ), while very important, :i.s not an issue newly produced by nuclear
associated occupations .
Other social and environmen tal problems - though endemic where large-scale
industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitari an and include sectors
that are far from affluent - are more intimately linked with the nuclear power
cycle. Though pollution is a common and generally undesirable component of largescale industrial operation, radioactive pollution, such as uranium mining for
instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear developmen t, and a specially
C-,t.o ,,._.......,
eef, :i.i.lef
undesirable one, as~ rectificatio n eosb~ for dead radioactive lands and waterways
reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, so that modern
factory complexes are often guarded like concentrati on camps (but from us on the
�dire conse quen ces, of a diffe rent
outs ide), sabot age o a nuc ear react or can have
(cons ider again the effec ts of
orde r of magn itude from most indu stria l sabot age
more dubio us enter prise s such as
core meltd own) . Though theft of mate rial from
at large and can assis t terro rism ,
muni tions works can pose threa ts to popu latio ns
probl ems of the same orde r as
no theft s for alleg edly peac eful enter prise s pose
produ ces mate rials which so
theft of fissi onab le mate rial. No othe r indu stry
explo sives . No othe r indu stry is,
read ily perm it of fabri catio n into such mass ive
to sum it up, so vulne rable on so many front s.
, in part becau se of its long and
In part to ~ ; ; , . ; ; : ; ~ ~ ~ ~ r a b i l i t y
, the nucle ar indu stry is subje ct
conti nu ing asso ciati on with milit ary activ ities
ainly given their scale ) run
to, and enco urage s, seve ral prac tices which (cert
tiesy Th ese ~e secre cy,
coun ter to basic featu res of free and open socie
ial polic e and guard force s,
restr ictio n of infor mati on, form ation of spec
espio nage , curta ilme nt of civil liber ties.
/
'l
given extra ordin ary
Alrea dy ope rator s of nucle ar insta llati ons are
backg round and
the
te
stiga
powe rs, in vetti ng empl oyees , to inve
fami lies and
their
of
activ ities not only of emplo yees but also
them selve s
ons
llati
some times even of their frien ds. The insta
sens ibili ties.
sh
become armed camp~ which espe ciall y offen ds Briti
creat e d a
1976
of
The U.K. Atom ic Energ y (Spe cial Cons table s) Act
it
made
ons and
spec ial armed force to guard nucle ar insta llati
ority 1'
answ erabl e ... to the U.K. Atom ic Energ y Auth
If\ th,_ µ.• ;-fud K~~~fh
ar
worse in West Germ any, presa ge along with nucle
These devel opme nts, and
,-\
anti- demo crati c soci eties . That
devel opme nt .i ncrea singl y auth orita rian and litiui/
:conse quen ces tells heav ily again st it.
nucl ear devel opme nt appe ars to force such'
,/i.~tdi't-...
A conne ct1.on of
the
by
ly
tical
poli
:lslted
inia:i:
er
furth
is
Nucl ear devel opme nL
t ethic al ques ti?ns conc ernin g
nucle ar powe r with nucle ar war. It is ~&te -',tha
4 Of'}'4ff';
. unde r any
fiea,
justi
is
war
ar
nucle
a
nucle ar war - for exam ple, whet her
are disti ngui shab le from those
circu msta nces , and if so what circu msta nces er, the sprea d of nucle ar powe r is
conc ernin g nucle ar powe r. Undo ubted ly, howev
[tl~Jfc -,C,ltt
nucle ar war and so, to that exten t,
~inc re~i ng the techn ical means for engag ing in
,~ c.Aq,,,_ ceJ ef 1
Since nucle ar wars are ,fleJ de"') f'41' neve r
the oppo rtuni ty for 1 nuc1 ear engag emen t. e-;(4vry
J , / ~ a.r~«'../~ ~"'1 '~/e ..
,,t,uclo f¥ c.riu-1" CU'-11.
"
the"' lesse r of'm ajor evils ~Jhe eprea d
bes~
at
are
but
s,
good
tive
posi
le
acco untab
ty for / ~dc/a .-.,e,, -,
1
of nucle ar powe r acco rding ly expan ds the oppo rtuni
o/~
~ /Z/
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r
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-- -- -- -- ! - - -- -- -,77,._, ~ ~
t,-m k~/e
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�30.1
many. They are firstly technical, that it is a relatively straightforw ard
and inexpensive matter to make nuclear explosives given access to a nuclear
I
power plant, secondly political, that nuclear engagements on<~ inJf,ntf~u
likely to esculate and that those who control (or differently are likely to
force access to) nuclear power plants do not s.hrin k from nuclear confrontati on
and are certainly prepared to toy with nuclear engagement (up to " S'fr-c1.feeiic
v
"tla,ut
nuclear strikes; ), and thirdly ethical, that wats invariably have immoral
consequence s, such as massive damage to involved parties, however high sounding
their justificatio n is. Nuclear wars are certain to be considerabl y worse as
regards damage inflicted t har1 any previous wars (they are likely to be much worse
than all previous wars put together), because of the enormous destructive power
of nuclear weapons, and the extent of spread of their radioactive effects,
and because of the expected rapidity and irreversib ility of any such confrontati ons.
The supporting considerati ons are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and
-----------are designed to show that the chances of such undesirable outcomes is itsclf
unde si i- able. The c or e arguement is in brief this (the W"J"~.wt will be
in section :m:I) :- Energy choice between alternative options is
a case of decision making under uncertainty , because in particular of the JN.If
Utt.UrffJt~fi'es involved in nuclear developmen t. In cases of this type the
1"rlt•c':-iov/
appropriate procedure is to compare worst consequence s of each alternative ,
e. /c.J,orP>lt>A
A
'
to r e_Je-cL . those alternative s with tht
~-,
--the bs~t (the roaxiro m rule) ,
f.llCl'tf:"
~
of these worst consequence e-nd select
J
II
The nuclear alternative has, in particular
because of the) p,.o ssibility of a nuclear war, the WotJC
and is according 1a particularl y unde$itable alternative .
wo1"Jt
"'
.
( ~ ,i it
,'l, /4
/A-
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already observed, the consigner's action cannot be justified by purely economisti c
arguments , such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village woul
be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable
changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer Iffiinciple 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
�f
31.
For this r eason t he economistic argumen t s whi ch are t hos e mo s t
commonly advance d under the Old Paradigm to promote nuclear develo pment - e . g .
ch apness, efficiency, profitabili ty for electricity unilities, and the need
the nuclear case .
otherwise for un comfortable chan ges such as restructurin g of employment, i nves t ment
and consumption - do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an
Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present
people were correct - j_t will be contended that most of them are not - the arguments
) h as to
.
.- ;-,'d~er1.ves
· h it,\
~h ic
f rom w
.
.
·
(like t h e ut1· 1 1tar1an1sm
.
wou ld f a1· 1 b ecause economics
acceptable one .
operate within the framework of moral constraints , and not vice versa.
What do have to be considered are however moral conflict arguments, that is
/'~}
arguments to the effect that, unless the prim.a facie unacceptabr e~ alternative is
taken, some even more unacceptabl e alternatice is the only possible outcome; and
will ensue. For example, in the train parable, the consigner may argue that his
h,J
action is justified because unless it is taken~ village will starve. It is by
no means clear that even such a justificati on as this wou~ 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 circumstanc es.
Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing
~ 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 arglllll.ents
crucially on the presentatio n of a genuine and exhaustive set of
alternative s (or at least practical alternative s) and upon showing that the only
:is based
alternative s to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable
ones. If some pratical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to
be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument - for
"j 11~~
case it turns out that the -1ril1:agers have another option
e xample, if in the
t~:~~r:
)
~ to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living is some
othe r way - then the argwnent is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just .
such a suppression of practicable alternative s has occurred in the argument designed
to show that the alternative s 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 presentatio n of false dichotomies .
A 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 indusFailure 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 unemploymen t and poverty in the industriali sed
trialised countries.
nations .
�1
32. J
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 diversion of very much 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.~ "'°The argument that nuclear energy i1needed for the
third world is even less convincing.
Nuclear energy~ both politically and econom-
ically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of
capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, but creates
negligible local employment, and depends .for its feasibility upon, what is largely
lacking, established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities and
sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system.
Politically it increases
forei¾ dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for
lt/,zc
change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.
The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of the people of the third
world does not of course mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, ·
their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the
economies of these countries are usually organised, and wanted often for military
purposes.
It is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling
elites may make in the name of the poor.
The ooverty argument is then a fraud.
the poor.
Nuclear energy will not be used to help
Both for the third world and for the industrialised countries there
are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and t he practical option of developing
other energy sources~
alternatives
some of which offer far better prospects for
helping the poor.
It can no longer be pretended that there is no alternative to nuclear development:
indeed nuclear development is itself but a bridging, or stop-gap, procedure
on route
1~1
to solar or1 £usion developme nt.
And there are various alternatives:
coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including
aAi<J.1fiM.r
) eti~L._01,i:/j,:,,-;._
as well as narrowly solar, wind, water ami tidal power)1
'
A
"
<t.,,(C:...uf~...
Despite the availabiity ~~
.
of alternatives, it may still be pretended that nuclear development is necessary
for affluence ~( what will emerge is that it is advantageous for the power and
affluence of certain select groups )-: ~
.)uch an assumption really underlies part
of the poverty argument, which thus amounts to an
Q.la.bcn'~-l,;;,,.,,
trickle-down argument (much favoured within the Old Paradigm setting).
argument runs:affluence.
Affluence inevitably trickles down to the poor.
For the
_si,,,}:,~-l-,{v1.t.d.
Therefore nuclear
First, the argument does not on its own show
anything specific about nuclear power2:
is
of the
Nuclear development is necessary for / continuing and increasing)
development benefits the poor.
for 'nuclear'.
. ~2
,,,,7t ~~4
for j_t works equally well if 'energy'
It has also to be shown, what the JI • rsnd M,<J(t
major argument will try to claim, that nuclear development is unique among energy
�33.
alternati ves in increasin g affluence .
The second assumptio n, that affluence
(
inevitabl y trickles down, has now been roundly refuted, both by recent historica l
data, which show increasin g affluence (e.g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita)
coupled with increasin g poverty in several countries , both developin g and
developed , and through economic models_, which reveal how "affluenc e" can increase
Jt
without redistrib ution occurring -_J Another major argument advanced to show moral
conflict appeals to a set of supposedl y overridin g and competing obligatio ns to future
people . We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things
and institutio ns which our culture has developed . Unless our high-tech nology, high
energy industria l society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutio ns
and tradition s will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essential ly
that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it
alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilizat ion will go out.4J
Future people will be the losers.
The lights-go ing-out argument does raise questions as to what is valuable
in our society, and of what characte ristics are necessary for a good
society. But for the most part these large questions , which deserve much fuller
The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely
uncritica l position with respect to present high-tech nology societies , apparentl y
assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. It assumes that technolog ical
examinati on, can be avoided.
society is unmodifia ble, that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy
conservat ion or alternati ve (perhaps high technolog y) energy sources without
It has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited
supplies of energy -· such as nuclear and only nuclear power is alleged to { ..._v-.,, •sf.t -
collapse.
are essential to maintain this whole.
These assumptio ns are hard to accept.
The assumptio n that technolog ical
society's energy patterns are unmodifia ble is especiall y so - after all it has .
survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technolog ical
restructu ring and consumpti on modifica tion. If western society's demands for energy
are totally unmodifia ble without collapse, not only would it be committed to a
pro gram of i.ncreasin g destructi on, but one might ask what use its culture could be to
future people who would very likely, as a consequen ce of this destructi on, lack
the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of
contempo rary society.
There is also difficult y with the assumptio n of uniform valuablen ess;
but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain
existing high-tech nological society and its political institutio ns , but rather:
what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political
institutio ns which are needed to maintain those valuable things. While it may be
easy to argue that high energy consumpti on centrally controlle d is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to arguethat it
�....
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --~- ----34-.
(
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, for instance from history, is that no very high level of
material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable .
There is good x·eason i~ 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 chan1e in these directions is independen tly desirable , as we should
argue, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at leas;,
in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-goin g-out argument are wrong. No
enormous reduction of well-being is required to consume less evergy than a \ present,
and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of asstili1ption
which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.~ What the nuc~ear
strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in
western civilisatio n, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to
maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganz a.
In fact there is good reason to think that, fa r from the high energy
society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy
is obtained by nuclear fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which
has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralised , controlled and
cons 1.At'1f10"'
garrisoned, capital- and expertise-i ntensive ener gy source, must be one which is
highly susceptible to entrenchmen t of power, and one in which the forces which
control this energy source , whether capitalist or bureaucrati c, can exert
enenormous powe r over the political system and over people's lives, even more
Such a society would, almost inevitably tend to become
authoritari an and increasingl y anti-democ ratic, as an outcome, among other things,
of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. ~
than they do at present.
Nuclear development may thus help in passing on to future generations
some of the worst aspects of our society - the consumerism , alienation, destruction
of nature, and latent authoritaria nism - while many valuable aspects, such as the
degre e of political freedom and those opportuniti es for personal and collective
autonomy whic h exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom, for example,
is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagenc e.
the status quo, but what is valuable in our society, presumabl
1,
But it is not
that we have some
obligation to pass on to the future, and if possible enhance.
Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternative s,
: l?a,#1-0.'t\..t...G--
alternative socia;Aand political choices, which do not involve such unacceptabl e
consequence s are available. The alternative to the high technology- nuclear option
1
Ii- c,/~e/4,,._ ~
/4 f
ettl..i,,- fl.a,. u/4jr/iP- "f- "- ~
is not a retturn to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but~ the development
of a'tlJ,ernative technologie s and lifestyles which offer far greater scope for the
li).,j·
c-o,y(
/'IWQ.r rr '
~#a-r,
maintenance and further development of whAt . is valuable in our society than the
The lights-goin g-out argument, as a moral
highly centralised nuclear option. ~
�/;,.
conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a fa l se dichoto-y.
r fJ.J,..,
I(
J:r._,._
Th us the Aescape route/, the appeal to moral conflict aua
to t he appeal t o
1
fu
ty, ~ closed. If then we a pply - as we have argued we s hould - t he s ame
l.
J
standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the presen t,
the conclusion that large~-~sca le nuclear development is a crime agains t the f uture
is inevitable.
1 from reactor
Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes to other argumentst:IAtt Ji> <>'l ;'${1~
ma(/_ ~wn J
radiation emissions, Aetc:::::t
for · ~ / nuc ~
development
as morally unacceptabl e, for saying that it is not only a Acrime
against the distant future but also a ~
~rime against the present and immediate
future.
In sumJ nuclear development is morally unacceptabl e on several grounds.
A corn--o llary is that only political arrangement s that are morally unacceptabl e will ·
suppor_t th.e i(1!pending nuclear _future .
of future people
not tf'.I J ;,; I discounted (in contrast to the temporally - limited utilitariani sm
~"'of_
n,,ia,-k-4!.t - ~~economic theory)J and that serious costs and risk~ to health and
life.cannot admiss ~ ly be simply transferred to uninvolved parties ( h ~ I
/4- /4 ~1~
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will now be outlined whichAshow that even within the confines of the Old Paradigm,
choosing the nuclear future is not a rational choice .
..Jl:
Large-scale nuclear
on
&,<.
cc,,//,,,_.,,,;,, h-4111,
development is not just something that Mppens, it requires,.\ an immense input of
capital and energy. , J,.j ,:_ .~J.-..r~ ,,.,;_,R.J
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been i nvested in nuclear
.fiH1on
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Admittedly so much capital has already
research and development,
:i..n marked contra t
)I
to othe~rival sources of powes
that t hert is strong political incentive top
f1'7
- as distinct fromAreason s for further capital and energy inputs. ~
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�The main argume£~~~an economic growth
argument, upon which variat~S
, re played., is the following version of the lights-going-o ut argument (with economic
.
e~
/
growth duly standing in for ll'late•oal wealth, and Afor what is valuable!):Nuclear power is necessary to su.stai.n economic growth.
Economi c growth is
desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the
t:,'IU{ c·o,,,ae,cf,,l( /ocip,/ k/!Mff,
, , , ~ f()'f"
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to-1 postpone reJistribution problems,/\ etc.).
Therefore nuclear power is desira.ble ~
The first premiss is part of US energy policj~ and the second premiss is suppli ed
by standard economics textbooks.
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But both premisses are
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since the second premiss is an assumption of the dominant paradigm, the first
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( or rather · an appropriate,{ restatement of it )
fails even on Old Paradigm
For of course nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps
e:=-1:.I,~
alternatives.
N-.e,./41"
elaboration of the
/)tPwt--Y
ptemiss
out as 'most efficient',
etc .
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The premiss usually
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is s,ome
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growth, 'economically best' being filled
'cheapest', 'having most favourable
'cost' benefiti-ratio
~--_..,,
1
>
Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear
po er is none of these things decisively , unless a good deal of economic cheating
(easi..4 to do) ~
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37
//1.d'
The ~aradigm does not, it j/i«,f
7~r,) _sustain
the nuclear
jl.(ggernau~:l?The real _reasons for the continuing development program ~
commitment .,- -·-
A.~
the
r
--.. to the program have to be sought elsewhere,, outside the
Old Paradigm,
at leas-t as preached.® There are, firstly reaso?s of previous
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commitJ!lent, when nuclear power \ looked a cheaper and safer• deal. corpouations
(;~.&? ~
.
A
,{
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are ;\_ keer{ -t:o
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returns on capital,{ invested. There are lypical _,. ,
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s e l ~ reasons for commitment to the program, that
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~ i t s accrue to some, lil<e
' !}cr'o.-t,.J;'
~
in o__
liti
~ corporations, that are influent1·a1
c:--_ _r_
· _ca 1
·
.tr
Sf1n-~,
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·
a ff_airs,
an d as a
profits <;1-ccrue to others, tV't/ Jc on ·..,
-·1c J ear eng1 nee.,r,:i ng, -etG-:- There
.
J,.cLa.-t
are A
ideological reasons ~ a belief in the control of both political and phys ical
~ b1Z,/,e..f1 IYJ ScC/4 I c.on-l •✓-ol -f'.-e,,,-n itho ,/2
power by technocratic-entreprenial elite,
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a faith in the unlimitedne ss at ' .
technological enterprise, and nuclear in particular, so that any real problems
that arise will be solved as development proceeds.
Such beliefs are especially
conspicuous in the British scene, among the governing and technocratic classes.
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·these :;orts of reasons for nuclear development are,.\ linked, h
/, C-
C
i4t /-(!_.
• ~- t-h.,,
ret13f'lfl
tJ,tH those whose types of enterprise/
benefit
@8rf?lislit
O
n
,pi tq l i e
substantially
nuclear development are commonly those who hold the. requisite beliefs.
f;.C-A I <-0•1.:f°'7~1"U:I
.Lt is
ti _ corporate capitalism, , ~ its state enterprise image,
; / "''#.
Hu
· cm
t.min i;s;;;
pc e I if\~, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut.
corporate capitalism, which is the political · e
?t~r~,d
col'l.o,.,.._"/
v
To be sure,
largely thrust upon
us in ilr/es•-ern .11~ .sln e, is nnt ni>ce~sary fn:r a nuclear furur@; a totalitarian
state of the typ (~ such capitalism often supports in the third worl"d w.i ll suffice.
But, unlike a hypothetical state tl'tA--C. does conform to precepts of the Old
Paradigm, it is sufficient for a nuclear future - evidently, since we are well
embarke d 4111 such a future -/
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�~--v>~-e/f
1~,.~
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�_,,,""--'.___;:._;;_..::..::::.=-=-"-=:..::..:~;:_.:_~=-=...:.:...:::.;::_-=~-=-=L.:;;-=-~a~l~t~e~r~n~a~t~i~v~e~s=-=-.- The future energy
['cJ4¢-r
Y>tAlf't°' 0
ootion that is ttS11 a H-,A contrasted with nuclea~, namely coa¾, wMe
, _,., ,__,. I
/~u-
c/4u,,/f-r_a/'~k- t'a-- ~w.r
:>
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the likelihood of .;r;.edty serious (air) pollution and associated phenUIII-•
s uch as acid rain and atmospheric heating 1 not to mention the despoliation caused
by extensive strip mining 1 all of which will result from its use in meeting very ttigh
projected consumption figures. Such an option would also fail, it seems, to meet the
'j?u.-,/e,.
necessary~ condition, because it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for
r
some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the
full costs of production and replacement..iS$J
.
f>t.l.t-,;,..
lo
'these a
r 112'
conventiona~ options .-- a third is often added which emphasizes
r,,,u{ .:, Alt<K/l..11A. Gc-l7L-., "-yd/otJ/,: J.riufy
A.
_,t.,,...a,
softel.-4 benign technologies, such as those of solar' energyA The deeper choice,
which '!Ven soflllfpaths tend to neglect, is not technological but social, and involves
r~11la/lJ4~ ~Ht-,-4,,?
6<'tl
bot~ the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses:
at a more
basic level there is a choice between consumeristjc and nonconsumeristic futures.
These more fundamental choices between soci ,tl alternatives, conventicnal technologically
ol CA-V":fr ~fu~
oriented discussion At.ends to obscure. It is not just c. rr:.atter of deciding in ,;.,-hich
~
ytil•- Mr/
way to meerxt..:.nexam~nEd goals (as the Old Paradign ~ d
1·
of examining the goals.
14'
,
)t
J\..
Ml )' but alEC: a rr.atter
That is, we are not merely faced with the que.stion of
comparing different technologies or substitute ways of meeting some fixed or given
demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see whether we can meet this
with soft rather than hard technologies; we are also faced, and primarily, with the
a-
.
matter of examing those alleged needs and the cost o~ society that creates . them. It
is not just a question of devising less damaging wais to meet these alleged needs
conceived of us inevitable and unchangeable.
(Hence there are solar ways of
producing unn~cessary trivia no one really wants, as opposed to nuclear wayst al'
ber1.11ft o.f ~<1..
~ /J '1-tf--t'
~
A. ot(Ql.Se)'blie~s Hot uaat to deny that these softer optfons are superior • ethically
unacceptable features of the
'lltl
et :u ~ i b f
rt,~,
But it is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principl~will
h
likely to leave a tolerable world for~ future ,., . p:l:i2: if it is expected to meet
�f
38 .
u,.',awo.d.
i ~mit lcss and uncontrolled e nergy consumption and demands.
Even the more benign
technologies such as solar technology could be used in a way which creates costs
for future people and are likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to
them.
Consider, fo r exa mple, t he effect on t he world's forests, whic h are
commonly counted as a solar res ource, of use for production of methl•nol or of
electricity by woodchipping ( as already planned by f ~ist authorities
and contemplated by many other ener gy organisations) J\ f'ew would object to the
use of genuine waste material for energy production, -b:ttt the unrestricted exploitation
of forests - whether it goes under the name of "solar energy" or not - to meet
ever increasing energy demands could well be the final indignity for the world's
already hard- pressed natural fores t s.
The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the
r?ftJfiW
forests are often dicem:1Ht@d, even by soft technologicalists, by the simple
A-expedient of waving around the label 'renewable resources'. May forests are in
A
principle renewable, it is a true, given a certain (low) rate and kind of
exploitation, but in fact there are now very few forestry operations anywhere
in the world where the forests are treated as completely renewable in the sense
of the renewal of all their values . ~$, In many regions too the rate of
exploitation which would enable renewal has already been exceeded, so that a total
decline is widely thought to be immanent if not already well advanced. It certainly
has begun in( ~
n.--11>
regions, and for
U'-Plr,•0-:1:i!PJ~,;
~
which are,\ beifig 16st for the future.
that f o r ~
on top of ~
present
forest types (such ~s rainforest types)
amt "•i M11,f."5 /.~.t,.//4__
)!HtJ~
The addition of a major further ,\demand ee2rn:e,,,
J'f't!4J~
is one which anyone with a realistic
(o,t/<>,,./l_rl"~
.
appreciation of the conduct 6fAforestry operations, who is also concerned with
long-term conservation of the forests and remaining natural communities, must regard
with alarm. The result of massive deforestation for energy purposes ~ resembling
the deforestation of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again
for energy purposes, w ould be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands
and tropical ar eas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change,
and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems.
Some of us do not want to pass on -
we are not entitled to pass on - a deforested world to the future, any more than
we want to pass on one poisoned by nuclear products or polluted by coal products.
In
short, a mere switch to a more benign technology - i.mportant though this is - without any more basic structural and -locial change is inadequate.
f,,t,.,,IOJ1,",;/
Nor is such a simple.4 switch likely to be achieved.
~1&4-
It is no t as if
fc
political pressure could i -11st bene:,\ the US government,\ stop its nuclear
~ =
Ntn-G ( and
that of the countries it influences, much of the world), in the way pressure appeared
to succeed in 11,-1.lting the Vietnam war.
could be accomplished, it is very
While without doubt it would be good if this
unlikely given the integration of political
powerholders with those spons r ring nuclear development .'°
�I
The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social
, ,om......,,.;.,. ,A.. h~JG".t j"-.:; ~ no.odr,
s tructure which promotes consumerismAand ah economic structure which encourages
increasing use of highly energy-intensive modes of production.
This means, for
instance, trying to change a social structure in which those who are lucky enough
to make it into the work force are cogs in a production machine over which they have
very little real control and in which most people do unpleasant or boring work
from which they derive very little real satisfaction in order to obtain the reward
of consumer goods and services.
A
society in which social rewards are obtained
primarily from products rather than processes, from consumption, rather than from
rer~
satisfaction in work and in social re.lations and other activities, is.\ bound to be
one which generates a vast amount of unnecessary consumption. (A production system
that produces goods not to meet ge~uine needs but for created and non-genuine needs
is virtually bound to overproduce.)
Consumption frequently becomes a substitute
for satisfaction in other areas .
The adjustments focussed upon are only parts of the larger set
of adjustments involved in socially j_mplementing the New Paradigm, the move away
from
,:::6',t.SIArne<•S"Yl
is for example part of the more general shift from material ism
and materialist values. /
~
Th4
c
'
A=::O:f social change option tends to be obscured in most
ol
discussions of energy options andAhow to meet
.---.
@S
energy needs, in part because
question• underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional
6.,; ,.
nee~)
or
wants
with
conflo..W
(often
demand
alleged
taking
by
proceeds
discussion
as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can be most
profitably employed to meet them. This effectively presents a false choice, and
is the result of taking needs and demand as lacking a social context so that the
social structure which produces the needs is similarly taken as unchallengeable arid
unchangeable.
The point is readily illustrated., It is commonly argued by representatives
of such industries as transportation and petroleum, as for example by McGrowth of
the XS Consumption Co., that people ~deep ~ezers, air conditioners, power
boats, ... 1t would be authoritarian to ps:t:llp them satisfying these wants. ~ tl+c
A
argument conveniently ignores the soc:f.al framework in which such needs and wants
�To point to the determinati on of many such wants at t he
framework level is not however to accept a Marxist approach according to whic h
they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial
or are produced.
organisatio n) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determinati on at
all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain
kinds of choices , such as those for travel , Mle iafrastrtt~t u"v and to see apparently
individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and diLected by a
social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private prt,fit
and advantage.
The social change option is a hard option - at least it will be difficult
to obtain politically - but it is the only wa» so it has been argued, of avoiding
passing on serious costs to the future. And there are other sorts of reasons than
it is the main, indeed the only sort of option
open to those who take a deeper ecological perspectivef .2..-a perspective integral
with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant
such ethical ones for taking it:
paradigm.
tJa,,u#t;LJ J',;...,
The ethical , requirement defende.o<.,
I
social and political
d. -,
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t<~
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?t,(""f""e.u •
,uu1...l',1;1.ial
The socialAchan ges that the deeper alternative requires will be strongiy
r esisted because they mean changes in current social organisatio n and power structure •
..tt'ld<°f:o the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of presen t
political and economic arrangemen ts it is not surprising that official energy
option discussion proceeds by misrepresen ting and often obscuring it. But
i.,,·11 Jtz_
difficult though a change t,f t:icn~inant p: a @eigm, especially one with such ~rreaching effects on the prevailing power structure, is to obtain, it is imperative
to try;
we are all on the nuclear train.
�V
(
• I
-
FOOTNOTES
~
1.
-
All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Good in ., p. 417;
the last line is from the Fox Report, p. 6.
While it is unnecessary to know much about the nuclear .fuel cycle
in order to consider ethical and social dimensions of nuclear power, it
helps to know a little.
& Abbotts, Gyorgy.
The basics are presented in many texts, e.g. Nader
Of course in order to assess fully reports as to such
important background and stage-setting matters as the likelihood of a
core meltdown of a (lightwater) reactor, much more information is required.
For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fal la cies
and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology.
~
2.
As to the first, see references cited in Gooij_in, p. 417, footnote 1.
As regards the second see Cotgrove and Duff, and some of the references
given therein.
3.
Cotgrove and Duff, p. 339
4.
The table is adapted from Cotgrove and Duff, p. 341; compare also
catton and Dtinlap, especially p. 34.
--
5.
See, e.g., Gyorgy ~
e.nd$, pp. 357-8.
6.
For one illustration, see the conclusions of Mr. Justice
the Windscale inquiry (The Windscale Inquiry
Parker a~
Vol. 1. Her Majesty's
Office, London, 1978), discussed in both Cotgrove and
Duff, p. 347 and in Goodin, p. 501 ff.
7.
Much as with the argument of one theory or position against another.
One can argue
both from one's own position against the other, and in the
other's own terms against the other.
8.
As well as screening the debate from the public such manoeuvltfls
....
favour the (proLnuclear establishment, since they (those of the
alliance of military, large industry, and government) control much of the
�information and (subject to minor qualifications) can release what, and only
.
them.
what, s
f)f1ts
9.
This is a conclusion of several governmental inquiries and is
conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development; for requisite
The same conclusion has been reached in
details up to 1977 see Routley (a) .
L
/;..:i
/t,lrf
~t/ J
i I! rl. I e
·7.
[{CL
/i
10.
For some details see Gyorgy, p. 60 ff.
11.
eol
.
See the papers, and simulations, discuss :bal in GoodiA p. f-28.
/~
On the pollution and waste disposal ·r"ecoff'd of the n uclear industry,
, 12.
see Nader and Abbotts, Lovins and Price1 and Gyorgy.
On the more general
problem of e..f fective pollution controls, see also, Routley (a), footnote 7.
Back of this Humanity Unlimited assumption is the idea of
13.
replacing God.
power.
Man
First God had unlimited power, e.g. over- nature, then when
during the Englightenment
Man
replaced God, Man was to have unlimited
Science and technology were the tools which were to put '1an into the
position of unlimitedness.
More recently nuclear power is seen as providing
man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology.
[ability to
14.
manage technology represents the past]
On such limitation fhe.o~UJ?l, which go back to Finsler and Godel on one
side and to Arrow
.,-----------.....-
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d.n · o ther ·
.I\
~
see, e.g. Routley 80. ,j Other different
are presented in Routley 81.
'
l,,;,.;l-etht>,..,,
te1t1/tf
It follows that there are many problems that have
no solution and much that is necessarily
lJ/lkA•N4'/4. .
Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture.
According
the Dominant Western Worldview,
t he history of humanity is one of progress; for every problem there
is a solution, and thUf progress need never cease (C cttto,i and
p.34).
15.
See Lovins and Price.
,1
OS (a,:.J
Amore recent official reports, ft n r, <t:etieHlar
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I
For examples. and for some details of the history of philosophe~
16.
positions 4 n obligations to the future. see Routley (a).
Passmore, p. 91.
17.
Passmore's position is ambivalent and, to
all appearances, inconsistent.
as also is
Rciw/s ,
It is considered in detail in Routley (a),
position.
For related criticisms of the economists' arguments for
18.
discounting,
and for citation of the often eminent economists who sponsor them, see
. ,,
Good11, , pp 429-30.
19.
The reasons (not elaborated here) are that the properties are different
e.g. a monetary reduction of value imposes a
linear ordering on values to which
value rankings, being only partial orderings, do not conform.
20.
Goodin/ however puts his case against those rules in a less than
satisfactory fashion.
What he claims is that we cannot list all the
possible outcomes in the way that such rules as expected utility maximization
prefi, poses, e.g. Goodin suggests that we cannot list all the things that can
go wrong with a nuclear power plant or with waste storage procedures.
But
outstanding alternatives can always be comprehended logically, at worst by
saying "all the rest" (e.g.
"'P
covers everything except
Cll#l-
p) .
For example,
outcomes Goodin says cannot be listedJ aMI be comprehended along such lines
>.
as "plant breakdown through human error".
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l-9!"
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Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to
follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson, Economics , 7th Edition, McGrawHill, New York, 1967, p.351.
Thus the rates have little moral relevance.
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 me re logical possibility.
�Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitaria nism (e.g.
'lf.
J.H'.1,A'"
Sidgwick
p.414), and in a range of contract and other theories
How the principle is
from Kant and Rousseau to Rawls (J8(A" p.293).
argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlyin g theory;
and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particula r ethical
theories.
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�Even then relev ant envi ronm ental facto rs may have
been
negl ected .
,
1
Ther e are vari ation s on (i) and (ii) whic h mult
iply cost s
agai nst numb ers such as prob abil ities . In this
wav risk s,
cons trued as prob able cost s, can be taken into
' acco unt in
the asses smen t. (Alt erna tivel y, risks may be asse
ssed throu gh
such fami liar meth ods as insu ranc e).
'
A prin ciple vary
ing (ii), and form ulate d as follo ws:
(ii') a is ethi cally acce ptab le if (for some b)
a inclu des
no more risk s than band bis soci ally acce pted
.
was the basi c ethi cal prin ciple in term s of whic
Lake Boar d of Inqu iry rece ntly decid ed that nuclh the Cluf f
ear powe r
deve lopm ent in Sask atche wan
is ethi cally acce ptab le:
see Cluf f Lake Boar d of Inqu iry Fina l Repo rt, Depa
rtmen t of
Envi ronm ent, Gove rnme nt of Sask atche wan,
1978 , p.305 and
p.28 8.
In this repo rt, a is nucl ear powe r and bis eithe
r
acti vitie s clea rly acce pted by soci ety as alter
nativ e powe r
sour ces.
In othe r appl icati ons b has been taken as ciga rette
smok ing, moto ring, minin g and even the Vietn am
war( !)
The poin ts made in the text do not exha ust the
obje ction s to
prin ciple s (i)- (ii') . The prin ciple s are certa
inly
ethi cally
subs tanti ve, sinc e an ethi cal cons eque nce cann
ot be dedu ced fro m
none thica l prem isses , but they have an inad miss
char acte r. For look at the orig in of b: b may ible conv entio nal
be
acce pted thoug h it is no long er soci ally acce ptab soci ally
le,
or
thoug
h
its soci al acce ptib ility is no long er so clea rcut
and it woul d
not have been soci ally acce pted if as much as is
now
know n had
been know n when it was intro duce d. What is requ
ired
in (ii') ,
for insta nce, for the argum ent to begi n to look
conv incin g is
then 'ethi call y acce ptab le' rath er than 'soc ially
acce pted '.
But even with the amen dmen ts the prin ciple s are
inva
lid,f or the
reaso ns give n in the text .
It is not disc once rting that these argum ents do
not work .
It
woul d be sad to see yet anot her area lost to the
expe
rt~
name
Jy
ethic s to actu aries .
-
A main part of the trou ble with the mode ls_is
that
narro wly utili taria n, and like utili tari~ ni~m they they are
distr ibut iona l featu res, invo lve natu ralis tic fa~l~ n~gl ect
Real ly they try to trea t as an unco nstra ined optim cie~ , etc.
isati on what
is a deon tical ly cons train ed optim isati on: see
R. and V. Rout ley
'An expe nsive repa ir kit for utili taria nsim '.
I.-"\
Appa rent exce ption s to the prin ciple su~h as taxa
redi strib utio n of incom e gene rally ) vani sh when tion (~nd
weal th is
cons trued (as it has to be if taxa tion is to be
P:ope
r,J_y
justi fied ) as at leas t part ly a so~i al asse t unfa
irly mono polised by a mino rity of the popu latio n. -:)
·
~ Exam ples such as that of moto ring dang er~u sly
coun terex ampl es to the prin ciple ; for one is not do not cons t~tu t~
mora lly entit lcu
to so moto r.
�f,
;o».
,> /;o cfobs and
On all these points see R. Grossm an and G. Daneke r , t7w· L
E'nergy, Environ men 1:a]jsts for Fu.11 Employ ment, W;:ishington
DC, 1977,
ting
pp.1-7 , and also the details supplie d in substa ntiatin g the interes
case of Commoner · [7].
nuclea r indust ry,
On the absorp tion of availab le capita l by the
see as well [18], p.23.
On the employm ent issues ,
the
see too H.E. Daly in [9], p.149.X A more fundam ental challen ge to
poverty argume nt appear s in 1. I 11 i.rli
Energy a:nd Equal·i ty, Cal den and
Boyars , London 1974, where it is atgued that the sort of develop ment
need.
nuclea r energy represe nts is exactly the opposi te of what the poor
Small
For much more detail on the inappr opriate ness see E.F. Schuma cher,
is Beauti ful, Blond and Briggs , London , 1973.
As to the capita l and
other require ments, see [2], p.48, and also [7] and [9].
For an illumin ating look at the sort of develop ment high-en ergy
techno logy will tend to promot e in the so-cal led underd evelope d
countr ies see the paper .of Waiko and other papers in The Melane sian
Environ ment (edited J.H. Winslo w), Austra lian Nation al Univer sity Press,
Canber ra, 1977.
.-B9-..- -'.JT;lhHi~sHf§'..ia'!1ee,jtE---:1ii·ss-:1t.i·m;a:pE>cll-1.ic·e.eici~t±l:-;:v-r-4r:ee~c,QO'l:!g,i;ineii~s~e~0Hittrrr- [P.2f]~,:7p~.~5516J.
A use
Ta
1 survey is given in A. Lovins . Energy Strateg y:
The Road Not
n, Friend s of the Earth Austra lia, 1977 (reprin ted from Foreign
/
Af. airs, Octobe r 1976);
see also [17], [6], [7], [14], p.233 ff, and
Schum~ cher, op. cit.
//3·
An
argume nt like this is sugges ted in Passmo re
-f-fi, chapte rs 4 and 7,
with respec t to the questio n of saving resour ces.
In Passmo re this
argume nt for the overrid ing importa nce of passing on contem porary
l
culture is underp inned by what appear s to be a future -direct ed ethica
version of the Hidden Hand argume nt of econom ics -
that, by a coincid ence
care of
which if correc t would indeed be fortun ate, the best way t o take
the future (and perhap s even the only way to do so, since do-good
of
iRterv ention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care
the presen t and immedi ate future.
The argume nt has all the defects
of the related Chain Argume nt discuss ed above and others .
�/1, IA;, u,./n er
Very persuasive argurn en t sAh ave b een
advanced by civil liberties groups and othe.rs in
· a number of countries:
C.$ee especia· 11y M.
· , Nuclear Prospects.
y·
Flood and R. Grove-White,
A Comment on the Individual., the State and Nuclear
Power, 'F riends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural.
England _a~d National Council for Civil Liberties, London, 1976.
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Certainly practical transitional programs may involve tempor ary
and limited use of unacceptable long term commodities such a s
coal, but in presenting such practical details one should not
lose sight of the more basic social and structural changes, and
the problem is really one of making those.
Similarly practical transitional strategies should make use o f
such measures as environmental (or replacement) pricing of encn1y,
i.e. so that the price of some energy unit includes the full cosl
,.
------~--
�tl
~
-1
footno te le continued.
of replacing it by an equivalent unit taking ac count
of environmental cost of production . Other (sometimes
strategies towards more s a tisfactory altercooptive)
natives should also, of course, be adopted, in particul a r
the removal of institutional barriers to energy conservation and alternative technology (e.g. local g ove rnment
regulations blocking these), and the removal of state
assistance to fuel and power industries.
ff
Symptomatic of the fact that is it not treated a s rene wa ble
is that forest economics do not generally a llow for full
renewability - if they did the losses and de ficits on
forestry operations would be much more striking than they
already are often enough .
It is doubtful, furthermore, that energy cropping of
f o rests can be a ! fully renewable operation if net energy
see, e.g. the argument in
production is to be worthwhile;
L.R.B. Mann 'Some difficulties with energy farmin g fo r
portable fuels', and add in the costs of ecosy stem mainte nance.
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1875
/IN/J , AJuncl)L
NUCLEAR POWER
•
-
ETHICA L,a& SOCIAL DIMENSIONS
---.. Compet ing paradig fus and · the nuclea r debate .
~
J C/l/'I
One hardly 1ieeds ini t.. i ation into the dark myster ies of nuclea r physic
s
to contrib ute useful ly to the debate now widely raging over nuclea r
power. While many import ant empiri cal questio ns are still
unreso lved, these do not really lie at the centre of the controv ersy.
Instead , it is a debate about values ...
\
many of the questio ~which arise are social and ethica l ones. 1
•.:tSociol ogica) investi gation s have confirm ed fJ £ a t~
I pa,i I 11g , I a1:a1Hiliit e:f! the
,!
01\.C!..
debate l=!S:&!!!!t'!~ primar ily over what is w.9rth having
or pursuin g and over what we are
'tli.a,., /i.,we 4ho cc,-.+·,r,.,../),l fl..,,/ it,, J;,'/.wh :1 ;•,l~:,~-11
.entitle d to do to others .~,] ii pelaFi oatienA
along the lines of compet ing
paradig ms. 2 Accord ing to the entrenc hed paradig vtldisc erned, that constel
lation. a'
of values , attitud es and beliefs often called the nomina nt Social
Paradig m
(herea fter
I ena ipsoiac to u hl:ttan f!nD
--)
I
r/
I
riteria become the benchm ark by which a v.;id..e/ range of
individ ual and social action is J IA"{'J4.l
and evalua ted.
AW'\d
belief in the market and market mechan isms is
quite centra l.
Clv'.:ite...<il"\<J
around this col'"e belief is the
convic tion that enterp rise flouris hes best in a system of
risks and r ew~ rds, that differe ntials are necess ary ..• , and in
the necess ity for some form of divisio n of labour , and a itfl1rar chy
of skills and expert ise. In particu lar, there is a belief in
the compet ence of ~xpert s in genera l and of scient ists in
particu lar , m More thau this, scient: ifie knowle dge aftd t:he scient ific
speei:r~:'i~/,;2··::.,,./
method enjoy a
-ef knowiftg , • , , A:Re
3
S = ~ : . . _ 4"--
quanti f ica.tion .
.status as
super, '(P'
::::j there 1s an emphas is on
~~,3
The rival world view, sometim es called the Altern ative Environ mental
Paradig m
( the ~ Paradig m) differs on almost every point, and, accord ing to
sociol ogists ,
in ways su~mar i~ din the followi ng table 4":Nature hostile/ne utral
Environm ent controllable
---·. ,csourccs limited
Nature benign
Nature clclicatdy balanced
\.
\
EDGE
.,.
Confidence in science
and technology
~ation:ility of means~}
Limits to science
~ationality of ends
•
S.t-~te socialism, as practiced in most of the "EasteI11 bloc", differs from the
01/ PaLl.digm really only as to economic organisation, the market in particular
l\ ffl~'
being replaced by central planning (a market system by a command system).
/
o-Y
,r,~t)tlt
But
since there is virtually no debate over a nuclear future within the confines of
·
h
· 1·ism, 5 tat
variant on the Old Paradigm need not be delineated here.
minor
s t a t e socia
,,.... 1
Nctl.cu,t
.WailiaA the competing paradigm picture is a trifle s i m p l e ~ instead
~
a New Paradigm there are rather counterparadi gms, a cluster of not very well
out rositions that diverge from the cluster marked out as the
wo,•k~
Jfl01+,;.,./'cr-hJ,
)/o,ie,/{~(J
Old Paradigm~ i t is empirically investigable, and.I\ it enables the nuclear debate
be focussed.
Large-scale nuclear development, of the sort now occurring in much of
the world ,
counter to leading tenets (such as societal features) of
the New Paradigm.
Indeed to introduce ethical and social dimensions into the
assessment of nuclear power, instead of
~,..
olt-0u'-,
merely economic
1in addition to
jJa9.,-.d
..
u(_, \-"-..
factors such as cost and efficiency, isAto move somewhat
received paradigm.
g.gl; .. i le
the
For under the Old Paradig~, strictly construed, the nuclear
debate is confined to the terms of the narrow ut1litarianism upon which contemporary
economic practice is premissed, the issues to questions of economic means (to
assumed economistic ends) along with technological, social engineering and other
instrumental details
whatever falls outside these terms is (dismissed as)
irratfonal. I
/;,(4.(11,-,'1"4-J J~clear development receives its support from adherents of the Old
Paradigm.
Virtually all the arguments in favour of it are set within the
assumption framework of the Old Paradigm, and without these assumptions the
t:o
fails. But in
· and ultimately fails
fact the argument for a nuclear future from the Old Paradigm is itself broken-backedj)
case for the nuclear future the world is presently committed
unless the free enterprise economic assumptions are replaced
by the ethically
unacceptable assumptions of advanced (corporate) capitalism. r->~~~tt--en--e--a:nm~m-t~
7
The two paradigm picture also enables our case against a nuclear future
(a case written from outside the Old Paradigm ) to be structur ed. There are two
main part~JJ :It is argued, firstly, from
the Old Paradigm , that nuclear
J&tfSe
developm ent is
ethicall y
unjusti fiable;
A
but that, secondly , even from within
e·th,t" I~ ,;,{,.l,fo "1
the framewo rk of the,\Old Paradigm , such developm ent is unaccep table, since signific
ant
features of nuclear developm ent conflic t with indispe nsible features of the Paradigm
(e.g. costs of project developm ent and state :s ... lPs ,l ,J"--f:,,;, •., with market
independ ence and criteria for project selectio n). It has _?~E_~ d accepta ble
from
within the claminan t paradigm only because )rfo,,Js
do not square with practice , only
because the assumpt ions of the Old Paradigm are but very ~A~~ty
applied in
contemp orary politica l practice the place of i ru.<<I!.(~., "'1( td)
,v
capitali sm having been usurped by corpora te capitali sm. It is because the nuclear
debate <:<1.vi bL.
carried on within the framewo rk
of the Old Paradigm that the
debate - although it is a debate about values, because of the conflict ingvalu
es
of the
<c.,..,.,fL-f;;"1
paradigm s - is not just a debate about values; it is also a
debate within a paradigm as to means to already assumed (ec:.on0" 1istid
ends, and
-:=:-
of rationa l choice as to energy option.5 within
(~
~ 0 1""Q;i1f
2'n this corner ~
0<,f/e,,..Jj4 ft!1ho',. "JllD I
most !i F I Im. decision
1
a predeter mined framewo rk of values.
tlrp~
theory argumen ts,often conside red
"
as encompa ssing
all the nuclear debate is ethicall y about, I\best util.i t~rian
means to predeter mined ends..,) be l : ~ For another leading charact eristic of the
nuclear debate is the attempt , under the dominan t par_adigyn, to r~c'1~ it from
t/•IIW 1f
the ethical and
social sphere) and to turR ; t into spec,iali st issues ef'
#"
whether over minutia? .and conting encies A present technolo gy or overme&lw,,/
~legal or
~)
mathem atical ,,' upeciaJ J y de, rs r 011 tbentetf c: and Stat Is Lica:1:, or amdie&t details.,8
/
£'
;or
The double approach can be applied as regards each of the main problems nuclear
.
developm ent poses.
There are 7any
A inter~e lated problems and -fl. t.- OAJ'""'"cd
· , is further
,)
I\
/_,flW4r
structur ed in terms of these.
For in the advancem ent and promotio n of nuclear ~
we encount er a remarka ble combina tion of factors, never before assemble d
establis hment,
on a massive scale, of an industry which involves at each stage of its process
ing
serious risks and at some stages of product ion possible catastro phe, which delivers
as a by-prod uct radioac tive wastes which require up to a million years' storage
but for which no sound and economi c storage methods are known, which gr~w up as
part of the war industry and which is easily $""h v,e..,rld to deliver nuclear weapons
,
which require s for its
operatio nconsid erable secrecy , limitati ons on the flow of
informa tion and restrict ions on civil libertie s, which depends for its economi
cs,
and in
order
to generate expected private profits, on Sl.\bs-i.4.,,/..,~/
state
subsidi zation, support , and interven tion. It is, in short, a very high technol
ogical
developm ent,
ba~«-f.
with problem s.
first importa nt problem .which serves also
to exempli fy ethical issues and princip les involved in other nuclear power questio
ns,
is the unresolv ed matter of disposa l of nuclear wastes.
A
.------------- ------------ ------------ -------~--- ---.
f
5.
t
annual wastes containing 1000 times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb.
of this waste is extremely toxic.
)
Much
For example, a millionth of a gramme of plutonium
part of the waste material
of even a
is enough to induce a lung
Wastes will include the reactors themselves,
...contamination
which will have to be abandoned after their expected life times of perhaps 40 years,
and which, some have estimated, may require l½ million years to reach safe levels
of radioactivity.
P,,.tcAF
A~astes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for their entire
For fission products the required storage period averages a
active lifetime.
thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include plutonium, there
is a half million to a million year storage problem. Serious problems have arisen
with both short-term and proposed long-term methods of storage, even with the
comparatively small quantities of waste produced over the last twenty years. ~ Shortterm methods of storage require continued human intervention, while proposed longer
term methods are subject to both human interference and risk of leakage through
non-human factors.
No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history
ti
of the earth over the last million years, a period whose fluctuations in climate
we are only just beginning to guage and which has seen four Ice Ages, could be
confident that a rigorous guarantee of safe storage could be provided for
the vast period of time involved.
Nor does the history of human affairs over the
last 3000 years give ground for confidence in safe storage by methods requiring
human intervention over perhaps a million years.
Proposed long-term storage methods
such as storage in granite formation s or in salt mines, are largely speculative and
relatively untested1 and have already proved to involve difficulties with attempts
made to put them into practice. Even as regards expensive recent proposals for
the result in
first embedding concentrated wastes in glass and enca/ulating
,i
multilayered metal containers before rock
radioactive material may not remain
deposit 1 si~ulation models reveal that
11.
.
, 'II isolated from human environments.
S'k,t.<\t1
f~4.
In short, the best present ~iapeoel proposals carry very real possibilities of
.J... /Id
•
//
I
lZ..t-u ~~~ •
irradiating future people- (V',i,,l.
Given the
c<c,,,~'7
I
Atu.lflf
.QA:Q;pQfiQWB
costs which could be involved for the future, and given
0
the known ~~mits of technology, it is £i?la:h:tw methodol@gi cal.ly unsound amt to bet,• as
nuclear
Mlin,-J
~
A
t~a.
have,• on the discovery of safe procedures for 1tis.pr19i,j of wastes.
Any
new procedures (required before 2000) will probably be but variations on present
proposals, and subjecJto the same inadequacies.
methods for safe
l
storage
For instance, none of the proposed
X "'t.H
has been properly tested, and they mayAprove to involve
ell :sorts o:fi unforseen 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
,
I
I
09
when set in this context.
t,/wo/!
are not so ruf'I
What is worth remarking is that similar excuses
when the consigner, again~ "responsible" businessman, puts
).
his workers' health or other peoples' welfare at risk.
~
THE NUCLEAR WASTE DISPOSAL PROBLEM, AND THE1~IN PARABLE .
II.
A long distance country train has just pulled out.
crowded
carries both passengers and freight.
journey
The train which is
At an early stop in the
someone consigns as freight , to a far distant destination, a package
which contains a highly toxic and explosive gas.
container which> as the consigner
ii ava..r4- 1
Jii' l 'J I ems
This is packaged in a very thin
may~ not contain the gas for the
~ full distance for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the train
should strike any real trouble, for example if there is a breakdown and the interior
of the train becomes very hot, if the train should be derailed or involved in a collision,
or if some passenger should interfere
try; to steal some
1e t 11 r 5ffi'1jhQ~
ot
eliherately
~
the freight~
inadvertent!
Ml
tX,lA4'rcd,.
have happened on some previous journeys.
All
iii,.
~
with
fU:
ft,1-h ~
fCJ Laps
Conf• ;;bi.c, ;_,,,
of these tie:! cg ,..
,\
If the container should
"'
break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least some of the people on the
train in adjacent carriages, while others could be maimed or incur serious diseases .
..,.,
Most of us would Aoundly condemn such an action.
of the parcel say to try to justify it?
What might the consigner
He might say that it is not certain that
the gas will escape and that it is mere speculation to suppose it will, that the world
needs his product and it is his duty to supply it, and that in any case he is not
responsible for the train or the people on it.
These sorts of excuses however
1$
would normally be s een as ludicrous~
a11rlo'1er1
(~~up~~he says that it is hisgownA pressing needs which justify his action.
The ~ h e
0!111!!6,
,\
which produces the material as a by-product, is in bad financial
A
straits, and could•
n.,r
,. afford to produce a better container even if it knew how to
r~..../'441' ~ ,1/r
make one.
If t h e ~
§?PB
ersl~~, he and his family will suffer, his employees
r~L'~~
will lose their jobs and have to look for others, and the who}eA
1~,~,
through
loss of spending and the cancellation of the Multiplier Effect, will be worse off.
()It,/ rl.A~"/t ~ "
.fo-...
The ppor of t'he ¥.j)Jag_P,whom he would otherwise have been able to help, will
,1
suffer especially. ::,
,1r.,i/Q
G ew people would accept~ story1 even if correct, as justification. Even
where there are serious risks and costs to oneseLf or some group for whom one is
(o
concerned one is usually
m,""kM,l
ii,b. w;gil1'UA not
hacc.u_y
to be entitled to simply transfer the,4 burden
of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties, especially where they arise
1
()r
1
CI U J
1
/JIZMJ' J )
from one's own.< chosefi Iife-style.ca:nd the t~nsfer af cos.ts creates a risk of
,ae-r ious harm t:e G - t ~ r
-----
The matter of nuclear waste disposal has many moral features which resem\1le
the train (i4.tqatiaeu
There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic
wastes generated by the nuclear plant~ that will be spread around the world as large/9
scale nuclear development goes ahead. ' The waste problem will be much more serious
than thut generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present, withx'each one of the
2000 or so r actors envisaged by
,IJ
,f/4.
J.IYl/4w
l#i7 l,Q. ~~'4~ ,i·
dfi) flp,J4v{-
...,_,
jj{'. ,
,~IL
cue end of the century producing, on average,
A
. /"'-A
'VI
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Ji?
t
•
s/4
/7
__
/ L_:~-..':~. . :~=====================
==---___,tl~===~l_____i_~
~----
------,_,.........----------~---_......._
----:,..........,__..
6. {
of safety over th e s torage 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 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
.
. as
The assumption that it would be{ especially if,
~
used.
-
likely, such a method
proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of efficiency,
perfection and concern for the f uture which has not previously been e~counter~in
human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in the nuclear industry.
1
.
Again,
unless we assume continuous and faultless guarding of long term storage sites
through perhaps a million years of possible future human ac t ivity, weapons-grade
radioactive material will be accessible, over much of the million year storage period,
to any pa rt y who is in a position to retrieve it.
nonetheless be found 1 before 2000,
(no longer a mere disposal pfioblem)
s accordingly not t"~t,cnA '(
which gets around the waste storage problem
. like ma~v assumptions ?~ifH~s, It is an assumption supplied by the
based, but is ratne ~ ~an artitle or
The assumption that a way will
/!
Old Paradigm,
1
Cit M limitations assumption , that there are really no (development)
-
·
-.
problems that cannot be solved technologically (if not in a fashion
always immediately ·· economically feasible).
part in development plans and practice..
technological optimism (not to say
what humans can accomplish,
The assumption
that is
has played an important
It has not only encouraged an unwarranted
t3 -h(A.J,,.,·::, -____
);
that there are no limits to
;~;:14.
i<. through science ; it has led
to the em~rcation on
projects before crucial problems have been satisfactorily solved
t,r
a solution is
tNll.~ i n sight, and it has led to the idea that technology can always be suitably
controlled.
It has also led , not surprisingly, to disasters.
There are severe limits
on what technology can achieve (some of which are becoming known in the form of
'"'
limitation theorems,~ and in addition there are human limitations which modern
technological developments often fail to take due account of (risk analysis of the
·
, llliu:,,olll( lido-wliklihood of reac t or accidents is a relevant exampll). The original nuclear
technology dream
..fj 1>S1.l»-'I
was that nuclear
'clean unlimited supply of power').
apparently remains a net
will be but a quite
X
That dream soon shattered .
cons &-1>t1~
"!)hc..-l::-tM1<1
would provide unlimited energy (a
The nuclear industry
of power, and nuclear
..flt~, ;o,,..
s upplier of power/>
The risks :l.mposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development
then , significant.
are,
Nuclear fission creates wastes which may remain toxic for a
million years, but even with the (suspect) breeder reactor it could be an energy
source for only perhaps 150 years.
It will do nothing for the energy problems of the
people of the distant future whose lj_ves could be seriously affected by the wastes.
I
pt,..."'tl.Mt..
It is for such reasons that the train aua]og; cannot be turned around
.p, .. ~,.,,,/(._
. s.
to work in favour of nuclear power, w1.·th .:e::g:.-"1 t, h e nuc 1 ear train b r1.n1.ng
I
4
relief as well as wastes to a remote town powered (only) by nuclear power.
7.
~
~~----Thus perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced to bear
significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant) energy use
I.I f»l~)'r•jloiT,,j.,.
d
r{4.
of onlyAlO generations.
l''°/'k o.f
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 ene~gy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable that
in due course the same problem, that of making a 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 ~
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 industrial:lsation are realised, 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
4
a very important part of the basis of life, are in a run·-down condition.
Such
pointf~~ll 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. Like the consigner in the train
parable, contemporary
indu st rial society proposes, in order to get itself out of _a
mess arising from its
chfik
Q,W:fl
life style - the creation of economies dependent on an
abundance of non-renewable energy, which is limited in supply - to pass on costs
and risks of serious harm to others who will obtain no corresponding benefits.
.
The ''solution" may enable the avoidance of some uncomfortable changes~n the lifetime
of those now living and their immediate descendants, just as the consigner's action
avoids uncomfortable changes for him and his immediate surroundings, but at the
expense of passing heavy burdens to other uninvolved parties, whose opportunity
to
/eJ J.Q.c~nt /,vu
Afli1J
may be seriously jeopardised.
Industrial society has - under e~ch paradigm, so it will be argued clear alternatives
(YJ>o~-t~
1
cf i patterns
~
w
to this action, which is taken essentially to avoid changing
c~mpet,Nil,iJo.l'J ~
of consumption and protect the interest of those,\who benefit
from them.
I r~ pcrca.,t1cd,
If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral
1
principles generally acknowledged (in principle if perhaps often not in fact) in the
contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear development
firTr-/S~
inv61ves injustice
~
/:T4- •
with respect to the future 1,0
.I\
li
g s111l s n 1J e> . The.re appear to be
only two plausible moves that might enable the avoidance
of
such a conclusion.
(p)
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8.
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i
I
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
f{,_
because the recipients of...- nuclear parcel are in the non-immediate future.
Secondly, an attempt might be made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to
!eject the consigner's action in the circumstances outlined is not of course to
1
~
that there are
circumstances in which such an action might ~,.;s i];Jj'
no
be justifiable 1 or at least where the
the nuclear case.
f,t,,J/,e,,
~
is less clearcut.
It is the same with
Just as in the case of the consigner of the package there
is a need to consider what these justifying circumstances might be, and whether
(on(l,/e,r-
We ~urfl now to the first oA these possible escape
they apply in the present case.
h,1',.,. ,¼ ,,;I,11.
,~ 1V,r,q
routes for the proponent of nuclear developmen~, A~
the
~ ~ a i e::u,
question of
our obligations to the future.@
III
The especially problematic area
OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE.
is that of the distant (i.e.
~
,-inun({..!',l j ate) future,
11(
the future with
which people alive today will have no direct contact; by comparison, the immediate
&,I"
In fact the question of
future gives fe~ problems for most ethical theories.
obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories
( tl~eu,lf;"i,
a;iff.
ill}~-?~
•
•
1-t,u,· fe,!, 0 "! 1-ope:ram,o_rLJ
fail to pass, and also
o'Ji(~)
tlo
.-u-r ~ t/JM_
the adequacy of accepted;/ institutions which leave
future pe pl.c.
in political philosophy cen:e!r .. in:g
01:1~
<YP
of account~ the interests of
ll'd"-lvx~,
;>?Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on the issue.
A good
many of the 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 a lesser 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 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
pcr/1t,,/IJ
institutions,that there are no moral obligations to the future beyond ~those
f@raap,s 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 do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, who have
opted for the unconstrained position, many have based this view on accouna
of moral obligation which are builh. on relations which presuppose some ckiguhl uf
\
9.
temporal or spatial contiguit y.
Thus moral obligatio n is seen as grounded on
or as presuppos ing various relations which could not hold between people widely
separated in time (or sometimes in space).
For example, obligatio n is seen
as grounded in relations which are proximate or of short duration and also nontransitiv e. Among such suggested bases or grounds of moral obligatio n, or
requireme nts on moral obligatio n, which would rule out obligatio ns to the non.immediate future are these:-
Firstly there are those accounts which require that
someone to whom a moral obligatio n is held be able to claim his rights or
entitleme nt.
People in the distant future will not be able t'b-claim rights and
en«fw11.
entitleme nts as aga:inst us, and of course they can do nothingAt o enforce any
claims they might have for their rights against us. Secondly, there are those
accounts which base moral obligatio ns on social or legal conventio n, for example
a conventio n which would require punishmen t of offenders or at least some kind
of social enforceme nt. But plainly these and other conventio ns will not hold
invariant over change in society and amendment of legal conventio ns 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
contempo rary institutio n would do it for them.
~ Both the view that moral obligatio n requ{es the context of a moral
community and the view that it is contractu ally based appear to rule out the
distant future as a field of moral obligatio n as they not only require a
commonal ity or some sort of common basis which cannot be guarantee d in the case of
the distant future, but also a possibili ty of interchan ge or reciproci ty of action
which cannot apply to the future.
Where the basis of moral obligatio n 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 obligatio ns to the distant future also follows from those
views which attempt to ground moral obligatio ns in non-tran sitive relations of
short duration such as sympathy and love. As well there are difficult ies about
love and sympathy for (non-exis tent) people in the far distant future about whose
personal qualities and characte ristics one must know very little and who may well
Ji/fa,,,,be committed to a life-styl e for which one has no sympathy. On the current
1
showing in the case of nuclear energy it would be easy to conclude that
contempo rary society lacks both love and sympathy for future people; and it would
appear to follow fr om this that contempor ary people had no obligatio ns concernin g
future people and could damage them as it suited them.
(
10.
j
What all these views have in common is a 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
\b 5
fail to have (e.g. love, sympathy, empffathy).
{ t:#11/
Because obligation therefore
fOt1'0i7'1 )
c,4/t..,&,./.h.
become\conditional, features usually"' thought to characterise ia;~such as
universality of application and necessitation (i.e. the binding
features) ate
lost,~special.ly where there is a choice whether or not to do the thing required
to acquire the obligation, and so as to whether to acquire it.
The criteria
for acquisition suggested are such as to exclude people in the distant future.
The view that there are no moral constraints with respect to
future people, that one is free to act however one likes with respect to them,
Mt
is Ahowever
Jurn.mi).(/e.
,fl
·•=~
aH:llLalt one te ~t113ta1A J
Irr
Consider, elm example , a
a scientific
group which, for no particular reason other than to test a particular piece of
technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb 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 affecte.d,
but the population ofY the earth in the distant future would be wiped out as a
The unconstrained position clearly
direct and predictabl~ result of the action.
implie s that this is an acceptable moral enterpris e, that whatever else we might
legitimately criticize in the scientists' experiment, perhaps its being overexpensive or badly designed, we cannot lodge a moral protest about the damage it
The unconstrained position also endorses as morally
J,,)rc'y:
acceptable the following sorts of linEOfflf':les:- A firm discovers it can make a
will do to future people.
handsome profit from mining, processing and manufacturing a new type of material
which, although it causes no problem for present people or their immediate
descendents, 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 i .t does
,ren,,~
future
people.
Such counterexamples to the unconstrained view, which are easily varied
and multiplied, might seem childishly obvious.
Yet the unconstrained position
concerning the future from which they follow is far from being a straw man; not
0...
only have several philosophers endorsed this position, but it i s ~ clear
impli cation of many currently popular views of the basis of moral obligation, as well
as of prevailing economic theory.
It seems that those who opt for the unconstrained
position have not considered such examples,
-, /J/(l.
by their position.
despite their being clearly implied
w ..ld cuh..117 ~o/1'1 Md;{ -
We suspect thatAwhen 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 for example, most of those who opted for
11.
the unconstrained position would want to assert that it was not what they
intende.d.
I
What many of 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 reponsible for their lives.
The popular 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,
r:--
in the counter/
example cases or in the nuclear case, the future is simply being
.....:.,...,
left alone
to take care of itself.
Present people are influencing it, and
in doing so thereby acquire many of the same sorts of moral responsibilities as
they do in causally affecting the present and immediate future, namely the
obligation to take account in what they do of people affected and their interests,
to be careful in their actions, to take account of the genuine probability of their
actions causing harm, and to see that they do not act so as to rob future people of
the chance of a good life.
Furthermore, to say that we are not responsible for the lives of future
people does not amount to the same thing 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
acqu.ired 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 act.ion of advantage to oneself which could seriously harm him.
These difficulties for the unconstrained position arise in part from the
(sometimes deliberate) failure to make an important distinction between acquired or
assumed obligations toward somebody, for which some act of acquisition or assumption
is required as a qualifying condition, and 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.
and kind of responsibility involved.
There is a considerable difference in the level
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
who is aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his 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
p{jf-lrr
(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 speci.al sacrifices for future people of an heroic kind, or even to help them
12.
especially, only moral constraints are needed in order for us to be constrained
Thus, to return to the train parable, the consigner cannot
from harming them.
argue in justification of hi.s action that he has never assumed or acquired
responsfbility 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 concerning the train, 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 people involved.
There has been an attempt 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 the consigner
is resorting to heroic self- sacrifice in refraining from placing his dangerous
package 6n the train.
- 1~ ,-;.,,.
The conf~ of moral constraints with acquired obligation, and the
attempt therewith to view all constraints as acquired and to write off nonacquired
constraints, is facilitated through the use of the term 'moral obligation' both to
signify any type of deontic constraints and also to indicate rather something which
t?t-. con.Pl~"'
has to be assumed or acquired. a .~is encouraged by reductionist positions which,
in attempting to account for obligation in genera~mistakenly endeavour to collapse
all obligations into acquired obligations.
Hence the equation, and some main roots
{),nu,,WUI
of the unconstrained position, of theAbelief that there are no moral constraints
concerning the distant future.
The unconstrained view tends to give way, under the weight of counterexamples, to more qualified, and sometimes ambivalent, positions, for example
the position that
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 condtion, and that is all; il,/7
there are irferactice
no obligations to the distant future.
A main argument
in favour of the latter theme is 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 or sympathy, only to the succeeding
-
generation.
/hftfe..
'U'L P..t (t A.,t
~ . A 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
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 often cannot be sheeted home to an entire generation.
Secondly, such chains,
since 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.
VThirdly, improvements for immediate
successors may be achieved at the expense oflcfi\advantages 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.
examples
Such cases can hardly be written off as "never-never land"
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 nonrenewable resources and the long-term depletion of renewable resources such as soils
t.($l.
and forests through over crttl
If then such obvious injustices to future
W•
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.
IV.
ATTEMPTS TO QUALIFY OBLIGATI_ONS TO THE FUTURE : ECONOMISTIC
r.\
Ul\tERTAINTY AND INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS.
While
there are grave
difficulties for the unconstrained position, qualification leads to a more defensible
. , ~ ,;.
position.
According to thej 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 people should
proceed, even if people of the distant future are (somewhat) disadvantaged by them.
The qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in
prevailing economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of future
( 'tJ
c./,~
14.
c,,...,.,,..7
e-.Al'I r~e/ ,,_0 /1//4,r.4'---/o/_/,._
costs and benefits (and so of future inter~s) is obtained by application over
time of a ! ~ discount rateJ l The attempt to apply eco~omics as
a moral theory, something that is becoming increasingly common, can lead then to
the qualified position.
J
What is objectionable in such an approach is that
rl..ooA.cl
economics~ operate within the bounds of moral (deontic) constraints, just
A
as in practice it operates within legal constraints, not determine what those
There are moreover alternative economic theories and simply
constraints are.
to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future is to beg
~.rn.<)~
t=t.m questions at issue.
Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting
the future 1 the most threadbare is based ~n the assumption that future generations
J'{
than present ones > and so better placed to handle the waste
off
willj€:tter
Since there is mounting evidence that future generations may well UQ_l=
problem.
be better off than present ones, especially in things that matter, no argujJnent
can carry Much
discounting the interests of future generations on this basis
For it depends qf
Nor is that all that is wrong with the argujtnent.
weight.
~
1 ~.<f_.: ~
assumption that poorer contemporaries would be making
(ullRJ_td/., h-n.a-hc '"/ J
richer successors in foregoing such,i de.f5elopments as nuclear power. Tl,q•f ;1 1
il-.la/Jt,,,.1U
H:O::f t f ~ a ~ I
cl:e..vi?1tiprirn~
M
th. f:>.I~,. .Ly rcdr.lul
-Be:t,\ the sacrifice
{(J/0..)
lias , 1r cad, li @an
~
~
hi¥/~
-tl,e.,
on
sacrifices to
f or
8'1. Qto @h es.
t"/!"4;/
"r: toJ/IJ-f,444
the future
'i1:m:1 for the waste disposal problem to be
~
argument . Iii\ ""1
legitimately
generations, it would have to be shown, what recent
economic progress hardly justifies, that future generations will be, not just better
U 11.,t
J1' 011!.. C u.;,,;/,/e_.
off, but so much better offAthat they can duly absorb the nuclear waste burden.
A more plausible argument for discounting is d.i rectly in terms of
opportunity costs.
It is argued_, from the fact that a dollar gained now is worth
much more than a dollar received in the non-immediate future (because the first
dollar could meanwhile be invested at compound interest), that discounting is
required to obtain equivalent monetary values, and so f~r efficient allocation of
resources.
Similarly it is argued, by virtue again of
'r/'~/,·s-.-l,~.....
of monetary
value, that compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to cawii:a. to
71....r
a few pennies set
now than later. ~
costs much less_
economically
,1ov.)Q/"
--
,......
aside (e.g. in a trust fund)Ain the future, if need bev, will suffice to
compensate eventually for any
v,c. t,w>.f
of remote radioactive waste leakage.
There are, presently at least, in surmountable pract1cal _
_
difficulties about
applying such discounting, e.g. how to determine appropriate future discount rates.
A more serious objection is that
15 .
applied generally, the argument presupposes , what is false, that compensatio n,
like value, can always be converted into monetary equivalents , that people ~ncluding
I
those outside market frameworks) can be monetarily compensated for a variety of
damages, including cancer and loss of life. There is no compensatin g a dead man,
or for a lost species.
In fact the argument presupposes
neither part of which can succeed
be represented
,
at all adequately
it is not just
/</
a double reduction
that value cannot in general
, -fa'
/J,'K~~
monetarily, but (as against utilitariani sm)
,t
-LJ..,.t
constraints and obligations can not be somehow reduced to matters of value. It
i s also presupposed that all decision methods, suitable for requisite nuclear
choic e s,'!_--- - -~
are bound ~o apply discounting . This is far from so :
indeed
A
Goodi~ argues that, on the
do not allow discounting , and discounting only works in practice with expected
utility rules (such as underlie cost-benef it and benefit-ris k analyses), which
,r,//
are, he contends strictly inapplicabl e for nuclear choices (since aJncrt
1 pnl'>Si],1 f3
{,/,11.{f al f<j''1. a,t /'.,~,,/,/;#b J
outcomes can
be duly determirte1, in the way that application of the rules
1-0
requir es).
1/
contrary, more appropriate decision £~1¢s
,,
As the f~e.ceid;nJ . arguments reveal, the discounting move often has the same
result as the unconstrain ed position. If, for instance, we consider the cancer
i
example and reduce costs to payable compensatio n, it is evident that over a
sufficientl y long period of time discounting at current prices would lead to the
conclus ion that there are no recoverable damages and so, in economic terms, no
constraints . I n short, even certain damage to future people could be written off.
One way to achieve the bi a s against future people is by the application of discount
rates which are set in accord with the current e conomic horizons of no more than about
15 years~2/ and appli.cation of such rates would
simply beg the question against
the interests a nd rights of fu t ure people.
Where there is certain future damage
of a mo rally f o rbidden t ype, f or example, the whole method of discounting is simply
inappl.icabl e, and its use would violate moral constraint s.~
Another argument for the qualified position, which avoids the objections
from ca ses of c ert a in d a mage, comes from probability considerati ons. The distant
future, it is a rgued, is much more uncertain than
the present and immediate future,
so that probabiliti es are consequentl y lower, perhaps even approaching or coinciding
with zero for any hypothesis concerning the distant future.•
But then if we take
account of probabiliti es 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,
much) less than those of present and
must count for (very
neighbourin g people where (much) higher
probabj_lities are attached.
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 f(Jture against a much lower probability of indetermina te
16.
costs to an indeterminate number of distant future people, the issue would normally
be decided in favour of the present, assuming anything like similar costs and benefits
were involved.
But of course it cannot 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 am:±E doubtful fU" t, i :b4. benefits for some present people, in
f11(,i11i.1,~ c,HJcn.A,;;,. l';-of,Y~;l,7 or le
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.
or l"isl.~JwiolilSuch a cost-benefitAapproach to moral and decision problems, with or without
the probability frills, is quite inadequate where different parties are concerned
or to deal with cases of conflict of interest or moral problems where deontic
constraints are involved, and commonly yields counterintuitive results.
it would follow on such principles that it is permissible
For example,
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 s1mple 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 on
y -
whi.ch are not susceptible to, a simple cost-benefit approach of the sort adopted
J~
J,!01-Ult;,...
•F enenza, of nuclear energy, ltho attefl@J':=::f::fl=di-smiss the costs to future
,~~
#
"41'-
.
~'?f1¥=;ll,,
d?,,-,ipQ/i,,.
people~with the soothing remark that any development involves costs as well as
benefHs.
The limitations
of transfei:_ point is enough to invalidate the
comparison, heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear
--
risk, between nuclear risks and those from such activities as airplane travel or
cigarette smoking.
In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the activity
-3.
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 that of others who may be non-beneficiaries and who may be spatially or
temporaJ.ly 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
{happiness) sums as a way ~f solvini moral. conflict between diff_e_r ent parties, and the
.
.
-
1J.1
,,.
u/i'th:urty,-
~IJ-UJI--.
NJ/t.J1
~
O-?
'Hf/t• """~ aP/2~.i.-1-;-
1ntroduct1on of probabi.lity cons1derations.-l does not change the principles involved
but merely complicates the analysis.
One might further object to the probability
argument that piobabilities involving distant future situations are not always less
than those concerning the immediate future in the way the argument supposes, and
~
17.
that the outcomes of some moral problems do not depend on a high level of
f
probability anyway.
In some sorts of cases it is enough, as the train parable
I
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, economists 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 sep-
aration, but frequently tangled up.
priori
Both arguments are mistaken, the first on a
grounds, the second on a posteriori grounds.
The first argument is a
generalised uncertainty argument which runs as follows:-
In contrast to the
exact information we can obtain about the present, the information we can obtain
-ft1Z'L:J
about the effects of our actions on the distant future is unreli.able,wootl; and highly
A
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
X
uncertain effects of our actions on the distant future.
crudely:
More formally and
One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on
reliable information.
distant future.
There is no reli.able information at present as regards the
Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future.
This
first argument is essentially a variant 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 the adjacent future
and the 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 sceptic-proof 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.
Consider again the train example.
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
18 .
in this sort of case.
risk of harnt
J
It does not matter if the decreased
well-being of the consigner is certain and that the prospects of the passengers
quite uncertain, the resolution of the problem is nevertheless clearly in favour
But if we do not require
of the so-called "speculative " and "unreliable".
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 for the future, episte.m ic standards 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 a~ 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
obligations to the future, we cannot in practice
theoretical
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 on it will be and therefore, however good our intentions
to the people of the distant future are, 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 be put alternatively
this way:-
If moral principles are, like other principles, implicational in form,
that is of such forms as "if
every (action) x" ,
x
has character
h
then
x
is wrong, for
then what the argument claims is that we cannot ever
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 obt.ain clear
conclusions or directions concerning contemporary action of the "It is wrong
to do x" type.
Many of the assumptions of the second argument
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 in practice not
be applicable to obtain 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 always is 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
~~
--t9-.
argument has to assume.
There are some areas where uncertainty is not so great as
I
to exclude constraints on action, especially when account is taken of the point,
which was 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
-f/,u.'fN-r I
in a hundred years i n ~ names o r ~ footwear, or what praod1
of ice
•
•
.._A'.~
cream people will be eating if any, but we do have excellent reason to believe,
especially if we consider 3000 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 t h e ~ earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at present
makes it such a rich and interesting place.
Ill
uncertainty argument should be rejected.
For this sort of reason, the second
The case of nuclear waste storage,
and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, is one area where
uncertainty in morally relevant respects is not so great as to preclude moral
constraints on action, where we can 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.
In particular there is not 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~• eac. ~
eu,~
~ ··from the train example, the significant risk of harm is enough in cases of this
{
type to make moral constraints applicable.
In terms of the def ects of the preceding uncertainty arguments, we can
see the defects in a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to
0~1,.(t_
write off probable~ harm to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration.
Most of these popular moves emv
,< .loy 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~hings that would c,.ffect us.
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 mora.lly 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 of forever plugged into enjoyment of other
machines.
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 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. 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 oppo s ed to a logical possibility.
We can contrast with
these mere logical possibilities the very real historically supportable risks
of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilisation 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 ~ffect 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: that this app ears to be a
~
live possibility, and not merely a logical possibility, does not make
the action of the firm
tu
..c
tbeaa-:&-xam~ aiscussed
earlier
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 ?e required is
22
far more than a possibility, real or not
- 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
to protect themselves.
~tpected to apply
~/l,.. a..,,.L- a«'if
The strategy of /tnost af rbes9 uncertainty arguments is fairly clear then,
I
and may be brought out by looking yet again at the train 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 train may break down and they may all
change to a different transport leaving the parcel behind, or the train 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
liC/t2-
they are any more than that, that is they are n o t ~ possibilities.
~k-
The
;\,
strategy is to stress such bH~sid& possibilities in order to create the false
impression that there is gross uncertainty about the future, that the real
possibility that the contai.ner will 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' takin~ account of the passengers' welfare and the real
possibility of harm from his parcel and thereby to excuse his action. A related
strategy is to stress a real vossibility, 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 of
harm, 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.
Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the
indeterminacy of the future. In particular it is argued that the indeterminacy,
for example with respect to the number and exact character of people at future
times, 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
,:J$
'<>A,
indeterminate and their interests unknown how, it is SloM!-d, 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 pr,Pblems of sharing fixed quantities of resources among present
-fu,-- Q ~11.,,y,.La.. ..,, I,
and future people," wherf the numbers of the latter are indeterminate. Such
problems are indeed difficult, but they are not resolved by ignoring the claims
f
)
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 byVignoring such factors.
Nor are distributional problems as large and representative a cl'ass of moral
problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would suggest.
can be conceded that there will be cases where the indeterminacy of aspects of
It
the future will make co~flicts
very difficult to resolve or indeed irresoluble -
J
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 train example which is a conflict case of a type.
In particular, there will bi~ 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.
The crucial question which emerges is then: are there any features of
future people which would disqualify them fro~ral consideration or reduce their
claims to such below those of present people?
Prima facie,
The answer is :
in principle None.
,.
moral principles are universalisable, and lawlike, in that they apply
independently of position in space or in time, for example.
But universalisability
of principles is an outcome of those ethical theories which are capable of deali.ng
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.
candidates
The only
for characteristics that would fairly rule out future people are the
logical features we have been looking at, such as uncertainty and indeterminacy; ht1 1l, ,
. ~ we have argued 1 p: ai-Oia) 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, nuclear development, where highly
determinate. or certain information about the numbers and characteristics of the class
likely to be harmed is not required, nor is certainty of damage.
To establish obligations to the future a full universalizability
principle is not required:
it is enough that the temporal position of a person
cannot af feet his entitlement to just and fair treatment, to full moral
consideration ;i Zfj
inversely, that it is without basis to discriminate morally
against a person in virtue of his temporal position.
As a result of this
universalizahility, there are the same general obligations to future people as to the
present;
and thus there is the same ooligation 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 them of
what is necessary for the chance of a good life. Uncertainty and indeterminacy
tf,1'1 Q.v. a.
do not/\:krt: u s ~ 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
I
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 already tentatively reached, that proposals for nuclear
development in the present and likely future state of technology and practices
for future waste disposal are immoral.
Before we consider (in section VII) the remaining escape route from this
conclusion, through appeal to overriding circumstances, it is important to
pick up the further case (which heavily reinforces the tentative conclusion)
against nuclear development, since much of it relies on ethical principles
similar to those that underlie obligations to the future, and since it too
is commonly met by similar appeal to extenuating circumstances.
V.
Problems of safe nuclear operation:
reactor emissions, and core meltdown.
ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to future creatures.
Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or entitlements to just
treatment, neither does location in spa ce, or a particular gqsgraphical position.
First of all, the problem of nuclear waste disposal raises serious questions of
distributive justice not only across time, across generations, but also across
space.
Is one state or region entitled to dump its radioactive pollution in
e,,- ,.q/Jjel'J
another state's or region's yard?
,(
When that region receives no due compensation
(whatever that would amount to, in such a case~ and the people do not agree
(though the leaders imposed upon them might)?
The answer, and the arguments under-
pinning the answer, are both like those already given in arguing to the tentative
conc.lusion concerning the injustice of imposing radioactive wastes upon future
people.
But the cases are not exactly the same:
USA and Japan cannot endeavour
fl'I- cf
to discount peoples of the Pacific in whose regions they propose to drop~ their
,a,ltdi;~ pollution in quite the way they can discount people of two centuries hence.
(But
what this consideration really reveals is yet another flaw in the idea that e ntitlement to just treatment can be discounted over time.)
!
'
~
'· i
Eth~· c 1 i ssues of distr i bu tive j ustice, • as to equityI
/
,:,J
~ J.._ /,
,tJ
tc..id~,,..__
v J{
~iv9ly=~=in ~ , also arise elsewhere in the assessment of nuclear development ;
in particular, a s regards t h e treatment of those in the neighbour of reactors, and,
tud rorb
differently, as r~gards the distribution of (alleged) b~nefits Afrom nuclear power
across ~ ~5' (The la t ter ques tion is t aken up
,\
a~ s ~~~ ,
especja] Jy , tb s Pev etty argument . ) ~
Weople livin g or working in the vicinity
special costs and risks:
f
~w{ffitrrf oslde, al ll rn
;i" a
nuclear reactor are subject to
firstly, radioactive pollution, due to the fact tha t
reactors discharge radioactive ma terials into the air and water near the plant ,
and secondly catastrophic accidents, such a:; {steam) explosion of a reactor. ~ ,I/;.._
~ question is whether such cos t s and risks can be imposed, with any ethical legi-
timacy, on these people, who frequently have little or no say in their imposition,
and who have mostly not been informed of any choices regarding the "risk/benefit
--
tradeoffs" of nuclea r _technology. -:::)__
( That they are so imposed, without local participation, indeed often without
local input or awareness as with local opposition, reveals one part of the
antidemocratic face of nuclear development, a part that nuclear development
shares however with other large-scale polluting industry, where local
participation and questions, fundamental to a genuine democracy/ of regional
determination and popular sovereignty, are commonly ignored or avoided.
.-:-,,,
The "normal" ei 1ssion , during plant operation1 of low level rad~ ation
carcinogenic and mutagenic costs. While there are undoubtedly costs, there r mains
/,id,,
substantial disagreement over theAnumber of cancers and precise extent of genetic
damage induced by exposure to such radiation, over the local health costs involved.
Under the Old Paradigm, which (illegltimotely ) permits free transfer of costs
and risks from one person to another, the ethical issue directly raised is said to
be: what extent of c~5cer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for
the advantages of nuclear power, and under what conditions?
m
Under the Old Parad
the issue is then translated into decision-theor etic questions, such as to 'ho · to
e mploy risk/benefit analysis as a prelude to government regulation' and 'how t o
....1.
25.
determine what is an acceptable level of risk/safety for the pub lic'
.:ii
}
3/
The Old Paradigm a t titude, ref~ted in the public policy o f s ome count r ie s
that have such policies, i s t ha t the economic benefits conferred by allowing
radiation emissions outweigh the costs of an increase in cancer and genetic
damage.
An example will reveal that such evaluations , which rely~ what appeal
they have on a dubious utilitarianism, will not pass muster.
It is a pity about
Aunt Ethyl getting cancer, but it's nice to have this air conditioner working in
summer.
Such frequently trivial and rather inessential benefits, which may be
obtained alternatively, e.g. by modification of houses, in no way compensate for
the (a;~nf Y, of cance~
'----
The point is that the costs to one party
27
are not justifie~
'-.:,.
especially when such benefits to other parties can be alternatively obtained
a,-,{,...~
without such ~
awful costs.:.
People, minorities, whose
,;.~;(a_,
.Jro/
~
within 50 miles of a nuclear plant.
p().~M...11£;
,1711~,
position isA compromised are thos\/ who live
(Ehildren, for example, are in aAparticularly
vulnerable position, since they are several times more likely to contract cancer
through exposure than normal adults.)
In USA, such people bear a risk of cancer
and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that borne by the population at l arge.
~i
A notinegl 11ble percentage (in excess of 3% of those exposed for 30 years) o f ~
qJ'~c~
R@r~ t a? s&&-eh:e people 1 in the area will di~j for the sake of the majority who are
111,(.ctaii-J"
'I
aailat.'@ffl benefitted byApower producti~n . ~e~~a
ft~elear.
Whatever charm t he
argument from overriding benefits had, even under the Old Paradigm, vanishes once
it is seen that there are alternative, and in several respects less expensive ~
ways/ of delivering the real benefits involved.
There are several other tricks used in showing that the imposition of radiation
t:Jt/~ or
on minorities, most of whom havei\ no genuine voice in the location of reactors in
their environment and cannot move away without serious losses, is quite (morally)
acceptable.
l~
One cheaper trick, deployed by the US Atomic Energy Corrnnission,
is to
suppose that it is permissible to double, through nuclear technology, the level of
(natural) rqdiation that a population have received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument being that the additional amount (being
"natural" level) is also likely to have negligible consequences.
equivalent to the
The increased
amounts of radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted
normal,
and,
f<-,f- i, l(e,,... c-ltt<..,cd.
of course,,\ what is normal is morally acceptable.
in this argument is sound.
None of the steps
Drinking one bottle of wine a day may have no ill-effects,
whereas drinking two a day certainly may affect a person's well-being;
and while
the smaller intake may have become normal for the person, the larger one will,
under such conditions, not be.
Finally, what is or has become normal, e.g . two
murders or twenty cancers a day in a given city, may be far from acceptable.
In fact, even the USA, which has strict standards by comparison with most
other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiat i on emissions very
substantially in excess of the standards laid down;
so the emission situation is
worse than mere consideration of the standards wou'ld disclose.
Furthermore , the
~------- -------- ----~-- -------- -------- -------- ---monitoring of the standards "imposed" is entrusted to the nuclear operators
themselves, scarcely di.sinterested parties. Public policy is determined not so as
to guarantee public health, but rather to serve as a 'public pacifier' while
private nuclear operations proceed relatively unhampered~
While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation,
breakdown is, hopefully, not: an accident of magnitude is accounted, by official
definition, an 'extraordinary nuclear occurrence'. But such accidents can happen,
and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island) Y-Q
If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light water)
1flore acto rs, then the core melts and 'containment failure' is likely, with ~he result
that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively contaminated. In the
event of the worst type of accident in a very small reactor, a steam explosion in
the reactor vessel, about 45,000 people would be killed instantly and at least
100,000 would die as a result of the accident, property damages would exceed $17
billion and an area H,e size of Pennsylvania would be destroyed. Modern nuclear
reactors are abo ut five times the size of the reactor for which these conservative
US government figures are giveti' : the consequences of a similar accident with a
modern reactor would accordingly b~Y~~eater still.
The consigner in ri sking the lifes, well-being and property of the passengers
on the train has acted i_nadmissibly. Does a government or govern~t-spon sored
private utility act in tay that is anything other than much less responsible in
siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on
the community train. The answer will be No, if the analogy holds good and the
consigners' action is, as we would ordinarily suppose, inadmissible and irresponsible. The proponents of nuclear power have in effect argued to the contrary,
while at the same time endeavouring to shift the dispute out of the ethical ar€/1
and into a technological dispute as to means (in accordance with the Old Paradigm).
It has been contended , firstly, what contrasts with the train example, that
there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear accident. Indeed in the
'11-
influential Rassmussen report - which was extensively used to support public
confidence in US nuclear fission technology - an even stronger, an incredibly
strong, improbability claim was stated:
namely, the likelihood of a catastrophic
nuclear accident is so remote as to be (almost) impossible. The main argument for
this claim derives from the assumptions and estimates of the report itself. These
assumptions li ke the claim are undercut by nuclear incidents that came very cil:ose
to accidents, incidents which reflect what happens in a reactor rather better than
mathematical models.
As with the storage of nuclear wastes, so with the operation of nuclear reactors,
it is important to look at what happens in the actual world of technological
limitations and human error, of waste leak.age and reactor incidents and quite
possibly accidents, not in an ideal world far removed .from the actual, a technological
27.
(
dream world where there is no real possibility of a nuclear catastrophe.
In such an ideal n ucle a r wo r ld , where waste disposal were fool-proof and reac tors
were accident-proof , things wo uld no doubt be morally different. But we do no t
live in such a world.
""
According to the Ra\ussen
report its calculation of extremely low accident
probabilities is based upon reasonable mathematical and technological assumptions
and is methodological ly sound.
This is very far from being the case.
The under-
lying mathematical methods, variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability
as
estimating techniques", are unsound, because they exclude .-1 "not credible"
,>Difl~;l,,9'?~ ~
possibilities or as branches t;o:1:t!il fl Ellffl "not significant" that are real
.m:d" may well
b'1. rt:i./f,04,(
~1cq1pen1 in the real world.
\
It i.s the eliminations that are otherworldly. Infact
the methodology and data of the report has been soundly and decisively criticized .Ji
And it has been shown that there is a real possibili.ty, a notjpegligibJ.e probability,
of a serious accident.
It is contended, secondly, that even if there is a non-negligible probability
of a reactor accident, still ibis acceptable, being of no greater order than
risks of accidents that are already socially accepted.
Here we encounter again
that insidious engineering approach to morality built into models of an economic
cast, e.g. benefit-cost balance sheets, risk assessment models, etc. Risk
assessment, a sophistication of transaction or trade-off models, purports to
provide a comparison between the relative risks attached to different options,
e.g. energy options,which settles their ethical status. The following lines of
argument are encountered in risk assessment a.s applied to energy options:
(i) if option a imposes costs on fewe.r people thq.n option b then option a is
preferable to optic+;
(ii)
option a involves a total net cost in terms of cost to people (e.g. deaths,
injuries, etc.) which is less than that of option b, which is already accepted;
therefore option a is acceptable. 3
f
For example, the number likely to be killed by nuclear power stations is less than
1,r 1'-i l'Jp.,( ,-c.c.,',l.ci...fs
~
the likely number killed by cigarette smoking, which jjB accepted: so nuclear pqwer
A
stations are acceptable. A little refle c tion reveals that this sort of risk
assessment argument involves the same kind of fallacy as ll!l!it transaction modek.
It is far too simple--minded, and it ignores distributional and other relevant
aspects of the context.
In order to obtain an ethical assessment we should need
a much fuller picture and we should need to know at least these things:- do the
costs and benefits go to the same parties;
and
i1·he
person who undertakes the
risks also the person who receives the benefits or primarily, as in driving or
cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed on ot e parties who do not benefit?
It is only if the parties a r e the same in the case of the options compared, and
there are no such distributional problems, that a comparison on such a basis would
be valid.i '})This is rarely the case, and it is not so in the case of risk assessments
Secondly, does the person incur the risk as a result of an
of energy options.
28.
activ.Lty which be knowingly unclcttakes in a situationw-iere he has a reasonable
choice, knowing it entails the risk, etc., and is the level of risk in proportion
to the level6f the relevant activity, e.g. as in smoking? Thirdly, for what
/
reason is the risk imposed: is it for a serious or a relatively trivial reason?
risk that is ethically acceptable for a serious reason may not be ethically
acceptable for a tr:Lvial reason. Both the arguments (i) and (ii) are often
A
employed in trying to justify nuclear power.
The second argument (ii) involves
the fallacies of the first (i) and an additional set, namely that of forgetting
that the health risks in the nuclear sense are cumulative, and ) 'n bhw ey ;i s g f:"
P'J;ct'.) pce i,1 e~ already
'°fc'
not A oo high.16
high if ~
1
The maxim "If you want the benefits you have to accept the costs" is one thing
and the maxim "If I want the benefits then you have to accept the costs (or some
of them at least)" is another and very different thing. It is a widely accepted
d/' l).,c-~ ~ flJ,;<d ,;k~4 .~ vr4..a)
I fl/rotl,7 ~~ kr 1/1
/ moc.tal plfinci'ple,\ that one' is not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs
I
r7n
of a significant kind arising from an activity which benefits oneself onto other
This
parties who are not involved in the activity and are not beneficiaries~
transfer principle is especially clear in cases where the significant costs
iq;lude an effect on life or ~ealth or a ,risk thereof, a~d where the benefit to
j<2,c-(kUt , «J,•1
,r ·~ ,k
,-,1,-.r.:.. ,riz.._~,
t.4,/,:K/~7',-,t ~ ~ q:.:rLc-1- .
the benefit ting party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature,.,\ { Thus ,tone is not
usually entitled to harm, or risk harming, another in the process of benefitting
CIA.en(~
Suppose, forA example, we consider a village which produces, as a
result of an i.ndustrial process by which it lives, a nox~us waste material which
is expensive and difficult to dispose of and yet creates a risk to life and health
oneself. f
if undisposed of.
Instead of giving up their industrial process and turning to
some other way of making a living such as farming the surrounding countryside,
they persist with this way of life but ship their problem on a one-way delivery
,Oil ·/J..0- ~ )
service Ato the next village. The inhabitants of this village are then forced
to face the problem either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal
or ol,e_ i'1M,).; 1(4. e1/Tl~L. ~ ~ Cdt'-/.:/4r,h .
process or of sustaining risks to their own lives and healthA Most of us would
see this kind of transfer of costs as.
morally unacceptable.
From this arises a necessary condition for energy options: that to be
morally acceptable they should not involve the transfer of significant costs or
risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, do not use the energy source or
do not benefit correspondingly from its use. Included in the scope of this
/trl" gA'-,
condition are future people /§.~~~~ B ~eeiji~ a ~~~~m~aE~:iic=;m ;;~~i;E~~
1
The distribution of
-hut rd~ future generations (those of the next villages~;
costs and damage in such a fashion, i.e. o~to non-benef
is one of its most
of certain widespread and serious fonns of
objectionable moraL£eatures- ;-- - -
/4' ..;~<fi'nt ~ ,u/4.v
tfi/1_
,.,c,,r
r«-,,.4/ .......,,_,,
f"u<H;f I
l4'(!,,r)
\
iaries is a characteristic
=&,
7''7, ~ ,;_ ~
__../4;,,
-
7:.(,/,_.., ~
v /
__
- •_
__
·~-~---- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ---~
,.
It is a corollary of the condition that we should not hand the world on to
our successors in substantial ly worse shape than we received it - the transmissio n
principle. For if we did then that would be a significant transfer of costs.
(The corollary can be independen tly argued for on the basis of certain ethical
theories.)
eJpoc,"ct lly ru,clc>u- //)CL-;
•
Other social and environmen tal risks and costs of nuclear development ;~ The
problems already discussed by no means exhaust the environmen tal, health and safety
VI.
risks and costs in or arising from the nuclear fuel cycle. The full fuel cycle
includes many stages both before and after reactor operation, apart from waste
disposal, namely mining, milling, conversion, enrichment and preparation , reprocessing spent fuel, and transportat ion of materials. Several of these stages
involve hazards. Unlike the special risks in the nuclear cycle - of sabotage of
plants, of theft of fissionable material, and of the further proliferati on of
nuclear armaments - these hazards have p~rallels, if not exact equivalents , in
other very polluting methods of generating power, e.g. 'workers in the uranium
mining industry sustain 'the same risk' of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers
in the coal industry 1 1'f Furthennore , the various (often serious) hazards encountered in working in some sector of uranium fabrication should be differently
viewed from those resulting from location, for instance from already living where
a reactor is built or wastes are dumped. For an occupation is, in principle at
any rate, chosen (as is occupationa l relocation) , and many types of hazards incurred
fr/working with radioactive material are now known in advance of choice of such an
with where one already lives things are very different. The uranium
miner's choice of occupation can be compared with the airline pilot's choice,
whereas the Pacific Islander's 11 fact" of location cannot be. The social issue
occupation:
of arrangement s that contract occupationa l choices and opportuniti es and often
at least· ease people into hazardous occupations such as uranium or tin or coal
mining (where the risks, in contrast to airline piloting, are mostly not duly
compensated ), while very important, :i.s not an issue newly produced by nuclear
associated occupations .
Other social and environmen tal problems - though endemic where large-scale
industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitari an and include sectors
that are far from affluent - are more intimately linked with the nuclear power
cycle. Though pollution is a common and generally undesirable component of largescale industrial operation, radioactive pollution, such as uranium mining for
instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear developmen t, and a specially
C-,t.o ,,._.......,
eef, :i.i.lef
undesirable one, as~ rectificatio n eosb~ for dead radioactive lands and waterways
reveal. Though sabotage is a threat to many large industries, so that modern
factory complexes are often guarded like concentrati on camps (but from us on the
dire conse quen ces, of a diffe rent
outs ide), sabot age o a nuc ear react or can have
(cons ider again the effec ts of
orde r of magn itude from most indu stria l sabot age
more dubio us enter prise s such as
core meltd own) . Though theft of mate rial from
at large and can assis t terro rism ,
muni tions works can pose threa ts to popu latio ns
probl ems of the same orde r as
no theft s for alleg edly peac eful enter prise s pose
produ ces mate rials which so
theft of fissi onab le mate rial. No othe r indu stry
explo sives . No othe r indu stry is,
read ily perm it of fabri catio n into such mass ive
to sum it up, so vulne rable on so many front s.
, in part becau se of its long and
In part to ~ ; ; , . ; ; : ; ~ ~ ~ ~ r a b i l i t y
, the nucle ar indu stry is subje ct
conti nu ing asso ciati on with milit ary activ ities
ainly given their scale ) run
to, and enco urage s, seve ral prac tices which (cert
tiesy Th ese ~e secre cy,
coun ter to basic featu res of free and open socie
ial polic e and guard force s,
restr ictio n of infor mati on, form ation of spec
espio nage , curta ilme nt of civil liber ties.
/
'l
given extra ordin ary
Alrea dy ope rator s of nucle ar insta llati ons are
backg round and
the
te
stiga
powe rs, in vetti ng empl oyees , to inve
fami lies and
their
of
activ ities not only of emplo yees but also
them selve s
ons
llati
some times even of their frien ds. The insta
sens ibili ties.
sh
become armed camp~ which espe ciall y offen ds Briti
creat e d a
1976
of
The U.K. Atom ic Energ y (Spe cial Cons table s) Act
it
made
ons and
spec ial armed force to guard nucle ar insta llati
ority 1'
answ erabl e ... to the U.K. Atom ic Energ y Auth
If\ th,_ µ.• ;-fud K~~~fh
ar
worse in West Germ any, presa ge along with nucle
These devel opme nts, and
,-\
anti- demo crati c soci eties . That
devel opme nt .i ncrea singl y auth orita rian and litiui/
:conse quen ces tells heav ily again st it.
nucl ear devel opme nt appe ars to force such'
,/i.~tdi't-...
A conne ct1.on of
the
by
ly
tical
poli
:lslted
inia:i:
er
furth
is
Nucl ear devel opme nL
t ethic al ques ti?ns conc ernin g
nucle ar powe r with nucle ar war. It is ~&te -',tha
4 Of'}'4ff';
. unde r any
fiea,
justi
is
war
ar
nucle
a
nucle ar war - for exam ple, whet her
are disti ngui shab le from those
circu msta nces , and if so what circu msta nces er, the sprea d of nucle ar powe r is
conc ernin g nucle ar powe r. Undo ubted ly, howev
[tl~Jfc -,C,ltt
nucle ar war and so, to that exten t,
~inc re~i ng the techn ical means for engag ing in
,~ c.Aq,,,_ ceJ ef 1
Since nucle ar wars are ,fleJ de"') f'41' neve r
the oppo rtuni ty for 1 nuc1 ear engag emen t. e-;(4vry
J , / ~ a.r~«'../~ ~"'1 '~/e ..
,,t,uclo f¥ c.riu-1" CU'-11.
"
the"' lesse r of'm ajor evils ~Jhe eprea d
bes~
at
are
but
s,
good
tive
posi
le
acco untab
ty for / ~dc/a .-.,e,, -,
1
of nucle ar powe r acco rding ly expan ds the oppo rtuni
o/~
~ /Z/
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r
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30.1
many. They are firstly technical, that it is a relatively straightforw ard
and inexpensive matter to make nuclear explosives given access to a nuclear
I
power plant, secondly political, that nuclear engagements on<~ inJf,ntf~u
likely to esculate and that those who control (or differently are likely to
force access to) nuclear power plants do not s.hrin k from nuclear confrontati on
and are certainly prepared to toy with nuclear engagement (up to " S'fr-c1.feeiic
v
"tla,ut
nuclear strikes; ), and thirdly ethical, that wats invariably have immoral
consequence s, such as massive damage to involved parties, however high sounding
their justificatio n is. Nuclear wars are certain to be considerabl y worse as
regards damage inflicted t har1 any previous wars (they are likely to be much worse
than all previous wars put together), because of the enormous destructive power
of nuclear weapons, and the extent of spread of their radioactive effects,
and because of the expected rapidity and irreversib ility of any such confrontati ons.
The supporting considerati ons are, fourthly, drawn from decision theory, and
-----------are designed to show that the chances of such undesirable outcomes is itsclf
unde si i- able. The c or e arguement is in brief this (the W"J"~.wt will be
in section :m:I) :- Energy choice between alternative options is
a case of decision making under uncertainty , because in particular of the JN.If
Utt.UrffJt~fi'es involved in nuclear developmen t. In cases of this type the
1"rlt•c':-iov/
appropriate procedure is to compare worst consequence s of each alternative ,
e. /c.J,orP>lt>A
A
'
to r e_Je-cL . those alternative s with tht
~-,
--the bs~t (the roaxiro m rule) ,
f.llCl'tf:"
~
of these worst consequence e-nd select
J
II
The nuclear alternative has, in particular
because of the) p,.o ssibility of a nuclear war, the WotJC
and is according 1a particularl y unde$itable alternative .
wo1"Jt
"'
.
( ~ ,i it
,'l, /4
/A-
4.//t'dJ'
(l,- (fAt_~; d/6;-,rf ~ ~
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:.
aee-=o-=-l~o.s;gi.::i:..:c::a:.:l::_.:b::..:a::.:s=-e=-"'=-c,_:::._o..::f_..::.n:::u:.::c:.:l::.!e:.::a~r~d~e=-v.!..e:::..:::.l::::.01::p!!:m~e
:, t=.,;h~e=--=I=
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already observed, the consigner's action cannot be justified by purely economisti c
arguments , such as that his profits would rise, the firm or the village woul
be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly uncomfortable
changes would otherwise be needed. The transfer Iffiinciple 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
f
31.
For this r eason t he economistic argumen t s whi ch are t hos e mo s t
commonly advance d under the Old Paradigm to promote nuclear develo pment - e . g .
ch apness, efficiency, profitabili ty for electricity unilities, and the need
the nuclear case .
otherwise for un comfortable chan ges such as restructurin g of employment, i nves t ment
and consumption - do not even begin to show that the nuclear alternative is an
Even if these economistic assumptions about benefits to present
people were correct - j_t will be contended that most of them are not - the arguments
) h as to
.
.- ;-,'d~er1.ves
· h it,\
~h ic
f rom w
.
.
·
(like t h e ut1· 1 1tar1an1sm
.
wou ld f a1· 1 b ecause economics
acceptable one .
operate within the framework of moral constraints , and not vice versa.
What do have to be considered are however moral conflict arguments, that is
/'~}
arguments to the effect that, unless the prim.a facie unacceptabr e~ alternative is
taken, some even more unacceptabl e alternatice is the only possible outcome; and
will ensue. For example, in the train parable, the consigner may argue that his
h,J
action is justified because unless it is taken~ village will starve. It is by
no means clear that even such a justificati on as this wou~ 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 circumstanc es.
Some of the arguments advanced to show moral conflict are based on competing
~ 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 arglllll.ents
crucially on the presentatio n of a genuine and exhaustive set of
alternative s (or at least practical alternative s) and upon showing that the only
:is based
alternative s to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable
ones. If some pratical alternative which is not morally worse than the action to
be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument - for
"j 11~~
case it turns out that the -1ril1:agers have another option
e xample, if in the
t~:~~r:
)
~ to starving or to the sending off of the parcel, namely earning a living is some
othe r way - then the argwnent is defective and cannot readily be patched. Just .
such a suppression of practicable alternative s has occurred in the argument designed
to show that the alternative s 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 presentatio n of false dichotomies .
A 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 indusFailure 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 unemploymen t and poverty in the industriali sed
trialised countries.
nations .
1
32. J
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 diversion of very much 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.~ "'°The argument that nuclear energy i1needed for the
third world is even less convincing.
Nuclear energy~ both politically and econom-
ically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires massive amounts of
capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers, but creates
negligible local employment, and depends .for its feasibility upon, what is largely
lacking, established electricity transmission systems and back-up facilities and
sufficient electrical appliances to plug into the system.
Politically it increases
forei¾ dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for
lt/,zc
change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the problem.
The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of the people of the third
world does not of course mean that it is not in the interests of, and wanted by, ·
their rulers, the westernised and often military elites in whose interests the
economies of these countries are usually organised, and wanted often for military
purposes.
It is not paternalistic to examine critically the demands these ruling
elites may make in the name of the poor.
The ooverty argument is then a fraud.
the poor.
Nuclear energy will not be used to help
Both for the third world and for the industrialised countries there
are well-known energy-conserving alternatives and t he practical option of developing
other energy sources~
alternatives
some of which offer far better prospects for
helping the poor.
It can no longer be pretended that there is no alternative to nuclear development:
indeed nuclear development is itself but a bridging, or stop-gap, procedure
on route
1~1
to solar or1 £usion developme nt.
And there are various alternatives:
coal and other fossil fuels, geothermal, and a range of solar options (including
aAi<J.1fiM.r
) eti~L._01,i:/j,:,,-;._
as well as narrowly solar, wind, water ami tidal power)1
'
A
"
<t.,,(C:...uf~...
Despite the availabiity ~~
.
of alternatives, it may still be pretended that nuclear development is necessary
for affluence ~( what will emerge is that it is advantageous for the power and
affluence of certain select groups )-: ~
.)uch an assumption really underlies part
of the poverty argument, which thus amounts to an
Q.la.bcn'~-l,;;,,.,,
trickle-down argument (much favoured within the Old Paradigm setting).
argument runs:affluence.
Affluence inevitably trickles down to the poor.
For the
_si,,,}:,~-l-,{v1.t.d.
Therefore nuclear
First, the argument does not on its own show
anything specific about nuclear power2:
is
of the
Nuclear development is necessary for / continuing and increasing)
development benefits the poor.
for 'nuclear'.
. ~2
,,,,7t ~~4
for j_t works equally well if 'energy'
It has also to be shown, what the JI • rsnd M,<J(t
major argument will try to claim, that nuclear development is unique among energy
33.
alternati ves in increasin g affluence .
The second assumptio n, that affluence
(
inevitabl y trickles down, has now been roundly refuted, both by recent historica l
data, which show increasin g affluence (e.g. in terms of GNP averaged per capita)
coupled with increasin g poverty in several countries , both developin g and
developed , and through economic models_, which reveal how "affluenc e" can increase
Jt
without redistrib ution occurring -_J Another major argument advanced to show moral
conflict appeals to a set of supposedl y overridin g and competing obligatio ns to future
people . We have, it is said, a duty to pass on the immensely valuable things
and institutio ns which our culture has developed . Unless our high-tech nology, high
energy industria l society is continued and fostered, our valuable institutio ns
and tradition s will fall into decay or be swept away. The argument is essential ly
that without nuclear power, without the continued level of material wealth it
alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of our civilizat ion will go out.4J
Future people will be the losers.
The lights-go ing-out argument does raise questions as to what is valuable
in our society, and of what characte ristics are necessary for a good
society. But for the most part these large questions , which deserve much fuller
The reason is that the argument adopts an extremely
uncritica l position with respect to present high-tech nology societies , apparentl y
assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable. It assumes that technolog ical
examinati on, can be avoided.
society is unmodifia ble, that it cannot be changed in the direction of energy
conservat ion or alternati ve (perhaps high technolog y) energy sources without
It has to be accepted and assessed as a whole, and virtually unlimited
supplies of energy -· such as nuclear and only nuclear power is alleged to { ..._v-.,, •sf.t -
collapse.
are essential to maintain this whole.
These assumptio ns are hard to accept.
The assumptio n that technolog ical
society's energy patterns are unmodifia ble is especiall y so - after all it has .
survived events such as world wars which have required major social and technolog ical
restructu ring and consumpti on modifica tion. If western society's demands for energy
are totally unmodifia ble without collapse, not only would it be committed to a
pro gram of i.ncreasin g destructi on, but one might ask what use its culture could be to
future people who would very likely, as a consequen ce of this destructi on, lack
the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of
contempo rary society.
There is also difficult y with the assumptio n of uniform valuablen ess;
but if this is rejected the question becomes not: what is necessary to maintain
existing high-tech nological society and its political institutio ns , but rather:
what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in that society and the political
institutio ns which are needed to maintain those valuable things. While it may be
easy to argue that high energy consumpti on centrally controlle d is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo, it is not so easy to arguethat it
....
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- --~- ----34-.
(
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, for instance from history, is that no very high level of
material affluence or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable .
There is good x·eason i~ 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 chan1e in these directions is independen tly desirable , as we should
argue, it is not necessary to presuppose such a change, in the short term at leas;,
in order to see that the assumptions of the lights-goin g-out argument are wrong. No
enormous reduction of well-being is required to consume less evergy than a \ present,
and certainly far less than the large increase over present levels of asstili1ption
which is assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear energy.~ What the nuc~ear
strategy is really designed to do then is not to prevent the lights going out in
western civilisatio n, but to enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to
maintain and even increase the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganz a.
In fact there is good reason to think that, fa r from the high energy
society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy
is obtained by nuclear fission means, be positively inimical to it. A society which
has become heavily dependent upon an extremely high centralised , controlled and
cons 1.At'1f10"'
garrisoned, capital- and expertise-i ntensive ener gy source, must be one which is
highly susceptible to entrenchmen t of power, and one in which the forces which
control this energy source , whether capitalist or bureaucrati c, can exert
enenormous powe r over the political system and over people's lives, even more
Such a society would, almost inevitably tend to become
authoritari an and increasingl y anti-democ ratic, as an outcome, among other things,
of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the nuclear situation. ~
than they do at present.
Nuclear development may thus help in passing on to future generations
some of the worst aspects of our society - the consumerism , alienation, destruction
of nature, and latent authoritaria nism - while many valuable aspects, such as the
degre e of political freedom and those opportuniti es for personal and collective
autonomy whic h exist, would be lost or diminished: political freedom, for example,
is a high price to pay for consumerism and energy extravagenc e.
the status quo, but what is valuable in our society, presumabl
1,
But it is not
that we have some
obligation to pass on to the future, and if possible enhance.
Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternative s,
: l?a,#1-0.'t\..t...G--
alternative socia;Aand political choices, which do not involve such unacceptabl e
consequence s are available. The alternative to the high technology- nuclear option
1
Ii- c,/~e/4,,._ ~
/4 f
ettl..i,,- fl.a,. u/4jr/iP- "f- "- ~
is not a retturn to the cave, the loss of all that is valuable, but~ the development
of a'tlJ,ernative technologie s and lifestyles which offer far greater scope for the
li).,j·
c-o,y(
/'IWQ.r rr '
~#a-r,
maintenance and further development of whAt . is valuable in our society than the
The lights-goin g-out argument, as a moral
highly centralised nuclear option. ~
/;,.
conflict argument, accordingly fails, because it also is based on a fa l se dichoto-y.
r fJ.J,..,
I(
J:r._,._
Th us the Aescape route/, the appeal to moral conflict aua
to t he appeal t o
1
fu
ty, ~ closed. If then we a pply - as we have argued we s hould - t he s ame
l.
J
standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the presen t,
the conclusion that large~-~sca le nuclear development is a crime agains t the f uture
is inevitable.
1 from reactor
Closed also, in the same way, are the escape routes to other argumentst:IAtt Ji> <>'l ;'${1~
ma(/_ ~wn J
radiation emissions, Aetc:::::t
for · ~ / nuc ~
development
as morally unacceptabl e, for saying that it is not only a Acrime
against the distant future but also a ~
~rime against the present and immediate
future.
In sumJ nuclear development is morally unacceptabl e on several grounds.
A corn--o llary is that only political arrangement s that are morally unacceptabl e will ·
suppor_t th.e i(1!pending nuclear _future .
of future people
not tf'.I J ;,; I discounted (in contrast to the temporally - limited utilitariani sm
~"'of_
n,,ia,-k-4!.t - ~~economic theory)J and that serious costs and risk~ to health and
life.cannot admiss ~ ly be simply transferred to uninvolved parties ( h ~ I
/4- /4 ~1~
a-<<h'-,::4,~c..:.,__
o.;rr,llc,;.._.)f'c,d
/o
/ / , , / ).
7
CI//C-1~
e
a{_
&, N-
t-f"/<7/2#;,__,
~~
~~ LL ,, ~ ~
/~
~ "°''f"(JI{
will now be outlined whichAshow that even within the confines of the Old Paradigm,
choosing the nuclear future is not a rational choice .
..Jl:
Large-scale nuclear
on
&,<.
cc,,//,,,_.,,,;,, h-4111,
development is not just something that Mppens, it requires,.\ an immense input of
capital and energy. , J,.j ,:_ .~J.-..r~ ,,.,;_,R.J
.J""11 ~-.,,&./ 7'iN/ t>h- ?
~
/-7,._ rt..-JJu..7~-.',-
/4- '.,..... ~
o//-,.;?.,/ ~ /;: ,J''"'e"' eccJnom,'c__
/~t:'tJJ-rl,-~«
~ - ;t,4
r
r/4'-Ntr/
been i nvested in nuclear
.fiH1on
'4~
.-Utti,.r,
,r
~ -d'M.r
J
~?
Admittedly so much capital has already
research and development,
:i..n marked contra t
)I
to othe~rival sources of powes
that t hert is strong political incentive top
f1'7
- as distinct fromAreason s for further capital and energy inputs. ~
~
/(,v;,~..,.
6-4'C
t¾t
aff_
,,,1
~ IU-
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/'t~ /&J
7~
/ t:1/1). ...
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/<ff"" /J~ (~~6t;..._ )
/'~a.. o.u~•~,._•~/.c~
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~~ (
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The main argume£~~~an economic growth
argument, upon which variat~S
, re played., is the following version of the lights-going-o ut argument (with economic
.
e~
/
growth duly standing in for ll'late•oal wealth, and Afor what is valuable!):Nuclear power is necessary to su.stai.n economic growth.
Economi c growth is
desirable (for all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the
t:,'IU{ c·o,,,ae,cf,,l( /ocip,/ k/!Mff,
, , , ~ f()'f"
f'~
J
to-1 postpone reJistribution problems,/\ etc.).
Therefore nuclear power is desira.ble ~
The first premiss is part of US energy policj~ and the second premiss is suppli ed
by standard economics textbooks.
Ja U>'t~
fr
C(,a<~ A/~{
1~!
M ~k.
t~
-1<>c~JL
But both premisses are
~~<IL
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U,#\.r/Jo./ (2..-<~~c...·c--
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c.....
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~A;-,..,,rc.-,,..~ -I' CUI/I
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c,;,l~il/~C!- ,
I
7
·
/ More to the
since the second premiss is an assumption of the dominant paradigm, the first
{tltK.
!t(J (IQ~/,,,
( or rather · an appropriate,{ restatement of it )
fails even on Old Paradigm
For of course nuclear power is not necessary given that there are other, perhaps
e:=-1:.I,~
alternatives.
N-.e,./41"
elaboration of the
/)tPwt--Y
ptemiss
out as 'most efficient',
etc .
1',s
Je.feviltl
The premiss usually
l:.j,..1..
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//y b~--f::
.
is s,ome
"'-'AY i.Q ,&to--t;t:<11'\ 4!<:.e>;,c:>111tc..
growth, 'economically best' being filled
'cheapest', 'having most favourable
'cost' benefiti-ratio
~--_..,,
1
>
Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear development schemes, nuclear
po er is none of these things decisively , unless a good deal of economic cheating
(easi..4 to do) ~
I
1
I
~is done.
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37
//1.d'
The ~aradigm does not, it j/i«,f
7~r,) _sustain
the nuclear
jl.(ggernau~:l?The real _reasons for the continuing development program ~
commitment .,- -·-
A.~
the
r
--.. to the program have to be sought elsewhere,, outside the
Old Paradigm,
at leas-t as preached.® There are, firstly reaso?s of previous
1'ru,.J_
l e,iQAFa.-;~ , ~ PJ,/{/M.rfr,
,.J/.u
l;vf,f,,U_DN!;
commitJ!lent, when nuclear power \ looked a cheaper and safer• deal. corpouations
(;~.&? ~
.
A
,{
rd_,~
_A
ei/10
are ;\_ keer{ -t:o
,,e,,._(,:;<.,,
returns on capital,{ invested. There are lypical _,. ,
~~fl
~
uc/~/"-7
s e l ~ reasons for commitment to the program, that
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ra
o..c~IILL
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~ i t s accrue to some, lil<e
' !}cr'o.-t,.J;'
~
in o__
liti
~ corporations, that are influent1·a1
c:--_ _r_
· _ca 1
·
.tr
Sf1n-~,
1
·
a ff_airs,
an d as a
profits <;1-ccrue to others, tV't/ Jc on ·..,
-·1c J ear eng1 nee.,r,:i ng, -etG-:- There
.
J,.cLa.-t
are A
ideological reasons ~ a belief in the control of both political and phys ical
~ b1Z,/,e..f1 IYJ ScC/4 I c.on-l •✓-ol -f'.-e,,,-n itho ,/2
power by technocratic-entreprenial elite,
C&t/nd-- ~ /l~ ~i'tu.r
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a faith in the unlimitedne ss at ' .
technological enterprise, and nuclear in particular, so that any real problems
that arise will be solved as development proceeds.
Such beliefs are especially
conspicuous in the British scene, among the governing and technocratic classes.
/It ' ;,:. <=c<--,,../4-;:?-»'r~ ~~
_
-r -/-
I
cr~'-'-_0 , '
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·these :;orts of reasons for nuclear development are,.\ linked, h
/, C-
C
i4t /-(!_.
• ~- t-h.,,
ret13f'lfl
tJ,tH those whose types of enterprise/
benefit
@8rf?lislit
O
n
,pi tq l i e
substantially
nuclear development are commonly those who hold the. requisite beliefs.
f;.C-A I <-0•1.:f°'7~1"U:I
.Lt is
ti _ corporate capitalism, , ~ its state enterprise image,
; / "''#.
Hu
· cm
t.min i;s;;;
pc e I if\~, that fuels the nuclear juggernaut.
corporate capitalism, which is the political · e
?t~r~,d
col'l.o,.,.._"/
v
To be sure,
largely thrust upon
us in ilr/es•-ern .11~ .sln e, is nnt ni>ce~sary fn:r a nuclear furur@; a totalitarian
state of the typ (~ such capitalism often supports in the third worl"d w.i ll suffice.
But, unlike a hypothetical state tl'tA--C. does conform to precepts of the Old
Paradigm, it is sufficient for a nuclear future - evidently, since we are well
embarke d 4111 such a future -/
7
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'-~------------------------------~--"'
~--v>~-e/f
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_,,,""--'.___;:._;;_..::..::::.=-=-"-=:..::..:~;:_.:_~=-=...:.:...:::.;::_-=~-=-=L.:;;-=-~a~l~t~e~r~n~a~t~i~v~e~s=-=-.- The future energy
['cJ4¢-r
Y>tAlf't°' 0
ootion that is ttS11 a H-,A contrasted with nuclea~, namely coa¾, wMe
, _,., ,__,. I
/~u-
c/4u,,/f-r_a/'~k- t'a-- ~w.r
:>
/J / ~
the likelihood of .;r;.edty serious (air) pollution and associated phenUIII-•
s uch as acid rain and atmospheric heating 1 not to mention the despoliation caused
by extensive strip mining 1 all of which will result from its use in meeting very ttigh
projected consumption figures. Such an option would also fail, it seems, to meet the
'j?u.-,/e,.
necessary~ condition, because it would impose widespread costs on nonbeneficiaries for
r
some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to some users who do not pay the
full costs of production and replacement..iS$J
.
f>t.l.t-,;,..
lo
'these a
r 112'
conventiona~ options .-- a third is often added which emphasizes
r,,,u{ .:, Alt<K/l..11A. Gc-l7L-., "-yd/otJ/,: J.riufy
A.
_,t.,,...a,
softel.-4 benign technologies, such as those of solar' energyA The deeper choice,
which '!Ven soflllfpaths tend to neglect, is not technological but social, and involves
r~11la/lJ4~ ~Ht-,-4,,?
6<'tl
bot~ the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses:
at a more
basic level there is a choice between consumeristjc and nonconsumeristic futures.
These more fundamental choices between soci ,tl alternatives, conventicnal technologically
ol CA-V":fr ~fu~
oriented discussion At.ends to obscure. It is not just c. rr:.atter of deciding in ,;.,-hich
~
ytil•- Mr/
way to meerxt..:.nexam~nEd goals (as the Old Paradign ~ d
1·
of examining the goals.
14'
,
)t
J\..
Ml )' but alEC: a rr.atter
That is, we are not merely faced with the que.stion of
comparing different technologies or substitute ways of meeting some fixed or given
demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see whether we can meet this
with soft rather than hard technologies; we are also faced, and primarily, with the
a-
.
matter of examing those alleged needs and the cost o~ society that creates . them. It
is not just a question of devising less damaging wais to meet these alleged needs
conceived of us inevitable and unchangeable.
(Hence there are solar ways of
producing unn~cessary trivia no one really wants, as opposed to nuclear wayst al'
ber1.11ft o.f ~<1..
~ /J '1-tf--t'
~
A. ot(Ql.Se)'blie~s Hot uaat to deny that these softer optfons are superior • ethically
unacceptable features of the
'lltl
et :u ~ i b f
rt,~,
But it is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principl~will
h
likely to leave a tolerable world for~ future ,., . p:l:i2: if it is expected to meet
f
38 .
u,.',awo.d.
i ~mit lcss and uncontrolled e nergy consumption and demands.
Even the more benign
technologies such as solar technology could be used in a way which creates costs
for future people and are likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to
them.
Consider, fo r exa mple, t he effect on t he world's forests, whic h are
commonly counted as a solar res ource, of use for production of methl•nol or of
electricity by woodchipping ( as already planned by f ~ist authorities
and contemplated by many other ener gy organisations) J\ f'ew would object to the
use of genuine waste material for energy production, -b:ttt the unrestricted exploitation
of forests - whether it goes under the name of "solar energy" or not - to meet
ever increasing energy demands could well be the final indignity for the world's
already hard- pressed natural fores t s.
The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the
r?ftJfiW
forests are often dicem:1Ht@d, even by soft technologicalists, by the simple
A-expedient of waving around the label 'renewable resources'. May forests are in
A
principle renewable, it is a true, given a certain (low) rate and kind of
exploitation, but in fact there are now very few forestry operations anywhere
in the world where the forests are treated as completely renewable in the sense
of the renewal of all their values . ~$, In many regions too the rate of
exploitation which would enable renewal has already been exceeded, so that a total
decline is widely thought to be immanent if not already well advanced. It certainly
has begun in( ~
n.--11>
regions, and for
U'-Plr,•0-:1:i!PJ~,;
~
which are,\ beifig 16st for the future.
that f o r ~
on top of ~
present
forest types (such ~s rainforest types)
amt "•i M11,f."5 /.~.t,.//4__
)!HtJ~
The addition of a major further ,\demand ee2rn:e,,,
J'f't!4J~
is one which anyone with a realistic
(o,t/<>,,./l_rl"~
.
appreciation of the conduct 6fAforestry operations, who is also concerned with
long-term conservation of the forests and remaining natural communities, must regard
with alarm. The result of massive deforestation for energy purposes ~ resembling
the deforestation of England at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, again
for energy purposes, w ould be extensive and devastating erosion in steeper lands
and tropical ar eas, desertification in more arid regions, possible climatic change,
and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems.
Some of us do not want to pass on -
we are not entitled to pass on - a deforested world to the future, any more than
we want to pass on one poisoned by nuclear products or polluted by coal products.
In
short, a mere switch to a more benign technology - i.mportant though this is - without any more basic structural and -locial change is inadequate.
f,,t,.,,IOJ1,",;/
Nor is such a simple.4 switch likely to be achieved.
~1&4-
It is no t as if
fc
political pressure could i -11st bene:,\ the US government,\ stop its nuclear
~ =
Ntn-G ( and
that of the countries it influences, much of the world), in the way pressure appeared
to succeed in 11,-1.lting the Vietnam war.
could be accomplished, it is very
While without doubt it would be good if this
unlikely given the integration of political
powerholders with those spons r ring nuclear development .'°
I
The deeper social options involve challenging and trying to change a social
, ,om......,,.;.,. ,A.. h~JG".t j"-.:; ~ no.odr,
s tructure which promotes consumerismAand ah economic structure which encourages
increasing use of highly energy-intensive modes of production.
This means, for
instance, trying to change a social structure in which those who are lucky enough
to make it into the work force are cogs in a production machine over which they have
very little real control and in which most people do unpleasant or boring work
from which they derive very little real satisfaction in order to obtain the reward
of consumer goods and services.
A
society in which social rewards are obtained
primarily from products rather than processes, from consumption, rather than from
rer~
satisfaction in work and in social re.lations and other activities, is.\ bound to be
one which generates a vast amount of unnecessary consumption. (A production system
that produces goods not to meet ge~uine needs but for created and non-genuine needs
is virtually bound to overproduce.)
Consumption frequently becomes a substitute
for satisfaction in other areas .
The adjustments focussed upon are only parts of the larger set
of adjustments involved in socially j_mplementing the New Paradigm, the move away
from
,:::6',t.SIArne<•S"Yl
is for example part of the more general shift from material ism
and materialist values. /
~
Th4
c
'
A=::O:f social change option tends to be obscured in most
ol
discussions of energy options andAhow to meet
.---.
@S
energy needs, in part because
question• underlying values of current social arrangements. The conventional
6.,; ,.
nee~)
or
wants
with
conflo..W
(often
demand
alleged
taking
by
proceeds
discussion
as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology can be most
profitably employed to meet them. This effectively presents a false choice, and
is the result of taking needs and demand as lacking a social context so that the
social structure which produces the needs is similarly taken as unchallengeable arid
unchangeable.
The point is readily illustrated., It is commonly argued by representatives
of such industries as transportation and petroleum, as for example by McGrowth of
the XS Consumption Co., that people ~deep ~ezers, air conditioners, power
boats, ... 1t would be authoritarian to ps:t:llp them satisfying these wants. ~ tl+c
A
argument conveniently ignores the soc:f.al framework in which such needs and wants
To point to the determinati on of many such wants at t he
framework level is not however to accept a Marxist approach according to whic h
they are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial
or are produced.
organisatio n) and there is no such thing as individual choice or determinati on at
all. It is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain
kinds of choices , such as those for travel , Mle iafrastrtt~t u"v and to see apparently
individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and diLected by a
social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate and private prt,fit
and advantage.
The social change option is a hard option - at least it will be difficult
to obtain politically - but it is the only wa» so it has been argued, of avoiding
passing on serious costs to the future. And there are other sorts of reasons than
it is the main, indeed the only sort of option
open to those who take a deeper ecological perspectivef .2..-a perspective integral
with the New Paradigm but not essential to radical departure from the dominant
such ethical ones for taking it:
paradigm.
tJa,,u#t;LJ J',;...,
The ethical , requirement defende.o<.,
I
social and political
d. -,
£
CUr{f?'?~{j
~~~
J
t<~
~~
-f7 ~
?t,(""f""e.u •
,uu1...l',1;1.ial
The socialAchan ges that the deeper alternative requires will be strongiy
r esisted because they mean changes in current social organisatio n and power structure •
..tt'ld<°f:o the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to parts of presen t
political and economic arrangemen ts it is not surprising that official energy
option discussion proceeds by misrepresen ting and often obscuring it. But
i.,,·11 Jtz_
difficult though a change t,f t:icn~inant p: a @eigm, especially one with such ~rreaching effects on the prevailing power structure, is to obtain, it is imperative
to try;
we are all on the nuclear train.
V
(
• I
-
FOOTNOTES
~
1.
-
All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Good in ., p. 417;
the last line is from the Fox Report, p. 6.
While it is unnecessary to know much about the nuclear .fuel cycle
in order to consider ethical and social dimensions of nuclear power, it
helps to know a little.
& Abbotts, Gyorgy.
The basics are presented in many texts, e.g. Nader
Of course in order to assess fully reports as to such
important background and stage-setting matters as the likelihood of a
core meltdown of a (lightwater) reactor, much more information is required.
For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fal la cies
and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear technology.
~
2.
As to the first, see references cited in Gooij_in, p. 417, footnote 1.
As regards the second see Cotgrove and Duff, and some of the references
given therein.
3.
Cotgrove and Duff, p. 339
4.
The table is adapted from Cotgrove and Duff, p. 341; compare also
catton and Dtinlap, especially p. 34.
--
5.
See, e.g., Gyorgy ~
e.nd$, pp. 357-8.
6.
For one illustration, see the conclusions of Mr. Justice
the Windscale inquiry (The Windscale Inquiry
Parker a~
Vol. 1. Her Majesty's
Office, London, 1978), discussed in both Cotgrove and
Duff, p. 347 and in Goodin, p. 501 ff.
7.
Much as with the argument of one theory or position against another.
One can argue
both from one's own position against the other, and in the
other's own terms against the other.
8.
As well as screening the debate from the public such manoeuvltfls
....
favour the (proLnuclear establishment, since they (those of the
alliance of military, large industry, and government) control much of the
information and (subject to minor qualifications) can release what, and only
.
them.
what, s
f)f1ts
9.
This is a conclusion of several governmental inquiries and is
conceded by some leading proponents of nuclear development; for requisite
The same conclusion has been reached in
details up to 1977 see Routley (a) .
L
/;..:i
/t,lrf
~t/ J
i I! rl. I e
·7.
[{CL
/i
10.
For some details see Gyorgy, p. 60 ff.
11.
eol
.
See the papers, and simulations, discuss :bal in GoodiA p. f-28.
/~
On the pollution and waste disposal ·r"ecoff'd of the n uclear industry,
, 12.
see Nader and Abbotts, Lovins and Price1 and Gyorgy.
On the more general
problem of e..f fective pollution controls, see also, Routley (a), footnote 7.
Back of this Humanity Unlimited assumption is the idea of
13.
replacing God.
power.
Man
First God had unlimited power, e.g. over- nature, then when
during the Englightenment
Man
replaced God, Man was to have unlimited
Science and technology were the tools which were to put '1an into the
position of unlimitedness.
More recently nuclear power is seen as providing
man at least with unlimited physical power, power obtained through technology.
[ability to
14.
manage technology represents the past]
On such limitation fhe.o~UJ?l, which go back to Finsler and Godel on one
side and to Arrow
.,-----------.....-
fk
d.n · o ther ·
.I\
~
see, e.g. Routley 80. ,j Other different
are presented in Routley 81.
'
l,,;,.;l-etht>,..,,
te1t1/tf
It follows that there are many problems that have
no solution and much that is necessarily
lJ/lkA•N4'/4. .
Limitative results put a serious dent in the progress picture.
According
the Dominant Western Worldview,
t he history of humanity is one of progress; for every problem there
is a solution, and thUf progress need never cease (C cttto,i and
p.34).
15.
See Lovins and Price.
,1
OS (a,:.J
Amore recent official reports, ft n r, <t:etieHlar
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I
For examples. and for some details of the history of philosophe~
16.
positions 4 n obligations to the future. see Routley (a).
Passmore, p. 91.
17.
Passmore's position is ambivalent and, to
all appearances, inconsistent.
as also is
Rciw/s ,
It is considered in detail in Routley (a),
position.
For related criticisms of the economists' arguments for
18.
discounting,
and for citation of the often eminent economists who sponsor them, see
. ,,
Good11, , pp 429-30.
19.
The reasons (not elaborated here) are that the properties are different
e.g. a monetary reduction of value imposes a
linear ordering on values to which
value rankings, being only partial orderings, do not conform.
20.
Goodin/ however puts his case against those rules in a less than
satisfactory fashion.
What he claims is that we cannot list all the
possible outcomes in the way that such rules as expected utility maximization
prefi, poses, e.g. Goodin suggests that we cannot list all the things that can
go wrong with a nuclear power plant or with waste storage procedures.
But
outstanding alternatives can always be comprehended logically, at worst by
saying "all the rest" (e.g.
"'P
covers everything except
Cll#l-
p) .
For example,
outcomes Goodin says cannot be listedJ aMI be comprehended along such lines
>.
as "plant breakdown through human error".
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Discount, or bank, rates in the economists' sense are usually set to
follow the market, cf. P.A. Samuelson, Economics , 7th Edition, McGrawHill, New York, 1967, p.351.
Thus the rates have little moral relevance.
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 me re logical possibility.
Such a principle is explicit both in classical utilitaria nism (e.g.
'lf.
J.H'.1,A'"
Sidgwick
p.414), and in a range of contract and other theories
How the principle is
from Kant and Rousseau to Rawls (J8(A" p.293).
argued for will depend heavily, however, on the underlyin g theory;
and we do not want to make our use depend heavily on particula r ethical
theories.
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Even then relev ant envi ronm ental facto rs may have
been
negl ected .
,
1
Ther e are vari ation s on (i) and (ii) whic h mult
iply cost s
agai nst numb ers such as prob abil ities . In this
wav risk s,
cons trued as prob able cost s, can be taken into
' acco unt in
the asses smen t. (Alt erna tivel y, risks may be asse
ssed throu gh
such fami liar meth ods as insu ranc e).
'
A prin ciple vary
ing (ii), and form ulate d as follo ws:
(ii') a is ethi cally acce ptab le if (for some b)
a inclu des
no more risk s than band bis soci ally acce pted
.
was the basi c ethi cal prin ciple in term s of whic
Lake Boar d of Inqu iry rece ntly decid ed that nuclh the Cluf f
ear powe r
deve lopm ent in Sask atche wan
is ethi cally acce ptab le:
see Cluf f Lake Boar d of Inqu iry Fina l Repo rt, Depa
rtmen t of
Envi ronm ent, Gove rnme nt of Sask atche wan,
1978 , p.305 and
p.28 8.
In this repo rt, a is nucl ear powe r and bis eithe
r
acti vitie s clea rly acce pted by soci ety as alter
nativ e powe r
sour ces.
In othe r appl icati ons b has been taken as ciga rette
smok ing, moto ring, minin g and even the Vietn am
war( !)
The poin ts made in the text do not exha ust the
obje ction s to
prin ciple s (i)- (ii') . The prin ciple s are certa
inly
ethi cally
subs tanti ve, sinc e an ethi cal cons eque nce cann
ot be dedu ced fro m
none thica l prem isses , but they have an inad miss
char acte r. For look at the orig in of b: b may ible conv entio nal
be
acce pted thoug h it is no long er soci ally acce ptab soci ally
le,
or
thoug
h
its soci al acce ptib ility is no long er so clea rcut
and it woul d
not have been soci ally acce pted if as much as is
now
know n had
been know n when it was intro duce d. What is requ
ired
in (ii') ,
for insta nce, for the argum ent to begi n to look
conv incin g is
then 'ethi call y acce ptab le' rath er than 'soc ially
acce pted '.
But even with the amen dmen ts the prin ciple s are
inva
lid,f or the
reaso ns give n in the text .
It is not disc once rting that these argum ents do
not work .
It
woul d be sad to see yet anot her area lost to the
expe
rt~
name
Jy
ethic s to actu aries .
-
A main part of the trou ble with the mode ls_is
that
narro wly utili taria n, and like utili tari~ ni~m they they are
distr ibut iona l featu res, invo lve natu ralis tic fa~l~ n~gl ect
Real ly they try to trea t as an unco nstra ined optim cie~ , etc.
isati on what
is a deon tical ly cons train ed optim isati on: see
R. and V. Rout ley
'An expe nsive repa ir kit for utili taria nsim '.
I.-"\
Appa rent exce ption s to the prin ciple su~h as taxa
redi strib utio n of incom e gene rally ) vani sh when tion (~nd
weal th is
cons trued (as it has to be if taxa tion is to be
P:ope
r,J_y
justi fied ) as at leas t part ly a so~i al asse t unfa
irly mono polised by a mino rity of the popu latio n. -:)
·
~ Exam ples such as that of moto ring dang er~u sly
coun terex ampl es to the prin ciple ; for one is not do not cons t~tu t~
mora lly entit lcu
to so moto r.
f,
;o».
,> /;o cfobs and
On all these points see R. Grossm an and G. Daneke r , t7w· L
E'nergy, Environ men 1:a]jsts for Fu.11 Employ ment, W;:ishington
DC, 1977,
ting
pp.1-7 , and also the details supplie d in substa ntiatin g the interes
case of Commoner · [7].
nuclea r indust ry,
On the absorp tion of availab le capita l by the
see as well [18], p.23.
On the employm ent issues ,
the
see too H.E. Daly in [9], p.149.X A more fundam ental challen ge to
poverty argume nt appear s in 1. I 11 i.rli
Energy a:nd Equal·i ty, Cal den and
Boyars , London 1974, where it is atgued that the sort of develop ment
need.
nuclea r energy represe nts is exactly the opposi te of what the poor
Small
For much more detail on the inappr opriate ness see E.F. Schuma cher,
is Beauti ful, Blond and Briggs , London , 1973.
As to the capita l and
other require ments, see [2], p.48, and also [7] and [9].
For an illumin ating look at the sort of develop ment high-en ergy
techno logy will tend to promot e in the so-cal led underd evelope d
countr ies see the paper .of Waiko and other papers in The Melane sian
Environ ment (edited J.H. Winslo w), Austra lian Nation al Univer sity Press,
Canber ra, 1977.
.-B9-..- -'.JT;lhHi~sHf§'..ia'!1ee,jtE---:1ii·ss-:1t.i·m;a:pE>cll-1.ic·e.eici~t±l:-;:v-r-4r:ee~c,QO'l:!g,i;ineii~s~e~0Hittrrr- [P.2f]~,:7p~.~5516J.
A use
Ta
1 survey is given in A. Lovins . Energy Strateg y:
The Road Not
n, Friend s of the Earth Austra lia, 1977 (reprin ted from Foreign
/
Af. airs, Octobe r 1976);
see also [17], [6], [7], [14], p.233 ff, and
Schum~ cher, op. cit.
//3·
An
argume nt like this is sugges ted in Passmo re
-f-fi, chapte rs 4 and 7,
with respec t to the questio n of saving resour ces.
In Passmo re this
argume nt for the overrid ing importa nce of passing on contem porary
l
culture is underp inned by what appear s to be a future -direct ed ethica
version of the Hidden Hand argume nt of econom ics -
that, by a coincid ence
care of
which if correc t would indeed be fortun ate, the best way t o take
the future (and perhap s even the only way to do so, since do-good
of
iRterv ention is almost certain to go wrong) is to take proper care
the presen t and immedi ate future.
The argume nt has all the defects
of the related Chain Argume nt discuss ed above and others .
/1, IA;, u,./n er
Very persuasive argurn en t sAh ave b een
advanced by civil liberties groups and othe.rs in
· a number of countries:
C.$ee especia· 11y M.
· , Nuclear Prospects.
y·
Flood and R. Grove-White,
A Comment on the Individual., the State and Nuclear
Power, 'F riends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural.
England _a~d National Council for Civil Liberties, London, 1976.
y~.;.~
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Certainly practical transitional programs may involve tempor ary
and limited use of unacceptable long term commodities such a s
coal, but in presenting such practical details one should not
lose sight of the more basic social and structural changes, and
the problem is really one of making those.
Similarly practical transitional strategies should make use o f
such measures as environmental (or replacement) pricing of encn1y,
i.e. so that the price of some energy unit includes the full cosl
,.
------~--
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~
-1
footno te le continued.
of replacing it by an equivalent unit taking ac count
of environmental cost of production . Other (sometimes
strategies towards more s a tisfactory altercooptive)
natives should also, of course, be adopted, in particul a r
the removal of institutional barriers to energy conservation and alternative technology (e.g. local g ove rnment
regulations blocking these), and the removal of state
assistance to fuel and power industries.
ff
Symptomatic of the fact that is it not treated a s rene wa ble
is that forest economics do not generally a llow for full
renewability - if they did the losses and de ficits on
forestry operations would be much more striking than they
already are often enough .
It is doubtful, furthermore, that energy cropping of
f o rests can be a ! fully renewable operation if net energy
see, e.g. the argument in
production is to be worthwhile;
L.R.B. Mann 'Some difficulties with energy farmin g fo r
portable fuels', and add in the costs of ecosy stem mainte nance.
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Title
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Box 59, Item 1875: Draft of Nuclear power - ethical, social and political dimensions
Subject
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Typescript draft, with handwritten emendations and annotations, and handwritten notes, undated. Paper published, Routley R and Routley V (1982) 'Nuclear power—some ethical and social dimensions', in Regan T and VanDeVeer D (eds) And justice for all: new introductory essays in ethics and public policy, Rowman and Littlefield.
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<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a>
<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a>
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Box 59: Nuclear
-
https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/f51dc99ef93d040908b142ebb835179a.pdf
d210fbed6580d80dafbf3af881e514fc
PDF Text
Text
Elaboration of *Nuclear energy and obligations to the future*:
A note on expertise and methodology.
Some people may ask why philosophers, who know nothing about
nuclear physics, should be dealing with this area, which surely
should be left to the province of the real experts in the area,
nuclear physicists and those with direct experience and authority
in the area of nuclear power.
One of the most irritating things in this area for a
philosopher is the sight of such people constantly presented, by
themselves and others, as experts and authorities whose pronounce
ments on the issue should be accepted without question by laymen
(see e.g. articles [15] and [16]), when in fact the issues involve
quite crucially issues of and assumptions about values and morality^
matters concerning which the so-called ’’authorities" and "experts"
commonly know less than the average first year student in philosophy.
Value issues and moral issues and issues of social and political
theory are probably more crucially concerned in the nuclear issues
than are issues of fact concerning nuclear power, and certainly
they are just as important.
Few philosophers nowadays would want to claim to be "experts"
or "authorities" on matters of value or morality in the way nuclear
experts claim to be authorities on matters of nuclear power, who
can tell people what to do in way which is authoritative or
which must be uncritically accepted by the non-experts/non
philosophers.
Rejection of the argument from authority is basic
in proper philosophical method, going back to Plato and beyond,
and forming a basic position without which the subject, as critical
inquiry into basic assumptions, could not operate as it does and
traditionally has.
Indeed rejection of the argument from
authority is one feature which distinguishes philosophy proper
from closely related areas such as theology, casuistry, some
�2.
areas of legal thought and various types of apology.
But a form
/of the argument from authority*—the claim to entitlement to have
one’s word or views accepted, not on the basis of what one says
and how sound it is,!^ but of who one is - appears however to be
an important element in the modern cult of the ''scientific expert"
which has played such a large part in the contempory Australian
discussion of the neclear issue.
While most philosophers would
reject the view that they were "experts" in this sense on values
or moral issues, philosophers can fairly lay claim to a number of
special skills which enable them to bring out explicit assumptions
about values or morality, and expose defects in arguments.
Most
philosophers also have moral view’s, that is, they believe some
things to be morally acceptable and others morally unacceptable,
although some might prefer to express similar attitudes without
use of explicit moral terminology.
In writing this paper then we don’t hope to be accepted as
’authorities’ or ’experts’ on moral questions, but only to have
skills which may throw light on some areas.
We have tried to
bring out value and moral assumptions, expose logical defects and
inconsistencies in the structure of some of the arguments and in
certain sorts of argumentsconcerning the future, and to argue that
if one accepts a certain moral judgment (which we accept and which
we believe would be widely agreed on*), one should, if one is
going to be consistent, non-arbitrary, and follow through one’s
principles, accept a certain other one.
This seems to us a propei
area for philosophical work.
The non-philosophical or background factual assumptions which
are essential for discussing the issue are not large, and are in
substance only those of the Fox Report (p.110, in particular)•
* We are sure that philosophers can be found who will disagree wit!
virtually every statement we make.
�
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Title
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Draft Papers
Description
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Sylvan's literary executor encountered an archive in which “all his projects were current", since manuscripts were undated and unattributed.
Text
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Text
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Elaboration of *Nuclear energy and obligations to the future*:
A note on expertise and methodology.
Some people may ask why philosophers, who know nothing about
nuclear physics, should be dealing with this area, which surely
should be left to the province of the real experts in the area,
nuclear physicists and those with direct experience and authority
in the area of nuclear power.
One of the most irritating things in this area for a
philosopher is the sight of such people constantly presented, by
themselves and others, as experts and authorities whose pronounce
ments on the issue should be accepted without question by laymen
(see e.g. articles [15] and [16]), when in fact the issues involve
quite crucially issues of and assumptions about values and morality^
matters concerning which the so-called ’’authorities" and "experts"
commonly know less than the average first year student in philosophy.
Value issues and moral issues and issues of social and political
theory are probably more crucially concerned in the nuclear issues
than are issues of fact concerning nuclear power, and certainly
they are just as important.
Few philosophers nowadays would want to claim to be "experts"
or "authorities" on matters of value or morality in the way nuclear
experts claim to be authorities on matters of nuclear power, who
can tell people what to do in way which is authoritative or
which must be uncritically accepted by the non-experts/non
philosophers.
Rejection of the argument from authority is basic
in proper philosophical method, going back to Plato and beyond,
and forming a basic position without which the subject, as critical
inquiry into basic assumptions, could not operate as it does and
traditionally has.
Indeed rejection of the argument from
authority is one feature which distinguishes philosophy proper
from closely related areas such as theology, casuistry, some
2.
areas of legal thought and various types of apology.
But a form
/of the argument from authority*—the claim to entitlement to have
one’s word or views accepted, not on the basis of what one says
and how sound it is,!^ but of who one is - appears however to be
an important element in the modern cult of the ''scientific expert"
which has played such a large part in the contempory Australian
discussion of the neclear issue.
While most philosophers would
reject the view that they were "experts" in this sense on values
or moral issues, philosophers can fairly lay claim to a number of
special skills which enable them to bring out explicit assumptions
about values or morality, and expose defects in arguments.
Most
philosophers also have moral view’s, that is, they believe some
things to be morally acceptable and others morally unacceptable,
although some might prefer to express similar attitudes without
use of explicit moral terminology.
In writing this paper then we don’t hope to be accepted as
’authorities’ or ’experts’ on moral questions, but only to have
skills which may throw light on some areas.
We have tried to
bring out value and moral assumptions, expose logical defects and
inconsistencies in the structure of some of the arguments and in
certain sorts of argumentsconcerning the future, and to argue that
if one accepts a certain moral judgment (which we accept and which
we believe would be widely agreed on*), one should, if one is
going to be consistent, non-arbitrary, and follow through one’s
principles, accept a certain other one.
This seems to us a propei
area for philosophical work.
The non-philosophical or background factual assumptions which
are essential for discussing the issue are not large, and are in
substance only those of the Fox Report (p.110, in particular)•
* We are sure that philosophers can be found who will disagree wit!
virtually every statement we make.
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
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Box 59, Item 1: Draft of Elaboration of 'Nuclear energy and obligations to the future': a note on expertise and methodology
Subject
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Typescript of draft, with handwritten emendations, undated.
Description
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Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff.
Creator
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<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=val+routley&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Val Routley</a>
<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Routley&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Routley</a>
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<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&pageSize=20&sortBy=score&sortDirection=Desc&searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 1
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<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a>
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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>.
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Box 59: Nuclear
-
https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/382a1128067b3cf4c3bcc193ab4cac7d.pdf
b45dc2ea94eb2ca3936e966fc7a70ea7
PDF Text
Text
ETHICS PROJECTS AND ISSUES
1
l
That of putting together and justifying as
largely
evaded
Aristotelean,
outside
one
of
two
.
whole a svstem of ethics. ~t ask is ~
One
traditions.
which sets out with a
74.
R
where
it
is
tackled
is
the
conception of Man's end or uJ timate good, and
),J(
/ .'
)(~
then endeavours to show that the virtuous life - which is what ethics concerns - wilJ
1
ff/f'O
fulfil this or realise it.
By contrast,
Cicero begins with a fairly full-fledp-ed colJ ection of duties and
makes some attempt at showing personal advantage will not clash with those.
for
Duty's
together:
sake
requires a .iustification.
And collections
,-e_ 9. ~ ,; ~ru.:t:
there is a ~grneu-+: of coherence on ethical svstems .
21 Why want fallacies, such as those
fallacies?
be.
J abel1ec'l
have
naturaJ ism and
to
But nuty
be
pulled
prescriptive,
RR
Because if they weren't fallacies too much that is not determined would
Briefly,
one would not
expect
that is ohligatory or good
to fol low from the
scientific facts, because that would determine which value system to adhere to .
But
there is not a fina1 unique system delivered from the facts.
31
Def ea ting
objections
achieved by
to
consequentionalist objections
reliance
on
principles
( act - ) utilitarianism
is
that
to deontics .
sometjmes
a
One of the frequent
better outcome
or like act consequentialism ,
that ob,jection no longer carries any weight .
can
be
Under satisizing
It is· enough , at most , that application
of the principle yields a sufficiently good outcome .
T
�
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
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ETHICS PROJECTS AND ISSUES
1
l
That of putting together and justifying as
largely
evaded
Aristotelean,
outside
one
of
two
.
whole a svstem of ethics. ~t ask is ~
One
traditions.
which sets out with a
74.
R
where
it
is
tackled
is
the
conception of Man's end or uJ timate good, and
),J(
/ .'
)(~
then endeavours to show that the virtuous life - which is what ethics concerns - wilJ
1
ff/f'O
fulfil this or realise it.
By contrast,
Cicero begins with a fairly full-fledp-ed colJ ection of duties and
makes some attempt at showing personal advantage will not clash with those.
for
Duty's
together:
sake
requires a .iustification.
And collections
,-e_ 9. ~ ,; ~ru.:t:
there is a ~grneu-+: of coherence on ethical svstems .
21 Why want fallacies, such as those
fallacies?
be.
J abel1ec'l
have
naturaJ ism and
to
But nuty
be
pulled
prescriptive,
RR
Because if they weren't fallacies too much that is not determined would
Briefly,
one would not
expect
that is ohligatory or good
to fol low from the
scientific facts, because that would determine which value system to adhere to .
But
there is not a fina1 unique system delivered from the facts.
31
Def ea ting
objections
achieved by
to
consequentionalist objections
reliance
on
principles
( act - ) utilitarianism
is
that
to deontics .
sometjmes
a
One of the frequent
better outcome
or like act consequentialism ,
that ob,jection no longer carries any weight .
can
be
Under satisizing
It is· enough , at most , that application
of the principle yields a sufficiently good outcome .
T
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 683: Draft of Ethics projects and issues
Subject
The topic of the resource
Typescript draft, with emendations and annotations.
Description
An account of the resource
Note, one of three papers digitised from item 683.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</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&pageSize=20&sortBy=score&sortDirection=Desc&searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 683
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>.
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For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library.
Format
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[1] leaf. 794.1 KB.
Type
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Manuscript
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<a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:fa52764">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:fa52764</a>
Box 59: Nuclear
Como House
Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3
-
https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/9a0eaf07f4febb1ac32bde2cd9f153e1.pdf
05c51d75c317aed7f6e3c1eb1eb7d7d6
PDF Text
Text
UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION:
Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory
One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more
Kantian imperatival form:
Act only in such a way that you action would serve
to maximize net expected utility.
or
explained j
The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put
naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of
{ pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J
work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or
happiness - of members of some other base class.
But the further detail s are
not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are
in fact corrnnon to
often confused
utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism,
with utilitarianism.
To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required .
Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with
a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve.
Certainly its application can
still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to
racism or nuclear escalation:
so however can most rival ethical positions.
But
its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends,
and not merely with ~aJ e:
directions.
its serious adoption forces adherents in these
Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of
numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural
environ-
ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism.
So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism
should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position:
it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted.
�
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
UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION:
Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory
One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more
Kantian imperatival form:
Act only in such a way that you action would serve
to maximize net expected utility.
or
explained j
The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put
naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of
{ pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J
work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or
happiness - of members of some other base class.
But the further detail s are
not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are
in fact corrnnon to
often confused
utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism,
with utilitarianism.
To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required .
Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with
a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve.
Certainly its application can
still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to
racism or nuclear escalation:
so however can most rival ethical positions.
But
its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends,
and not merely with ~aJ e:
directions.
its serious adoption forces adherents in these
Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of
numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural
environ-
ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism.
So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism
should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position:
it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted.
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 683: Draft appendix, notes and cutting on utilitarianism
Subject
The topic of the resource
Typescript draft, with emendations and annotations. Includes photocopy of pages from publication by Hutcheson, with a note from Charles to Richard. Hutcheson F (1755) System of moral philosophy. A System of Moral Philosophy, Volume 2, Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139583688.019
Description
An account of the resource
Note, one of three papers digitised from item 683. Title in collection finding aid: Appendix: ts + ms draft - attached to xc from Hutcheson 'Adventitious Rights'. Published work 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+Sylvan&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</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&pageSize=20&sortBy=score&sortDirection=Desc&searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 683
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
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[8] leaves. 1.93 MB.
Type
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Manuscript
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
<a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:7aded01">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:7aded01</a>
Box 59: Nuclear
-
https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/b53260d8b71b1e884c7cd83c19548c36.pdf
05c51d75c317aed7f6e3c1eb1eb7d7d6
PDF Text
Text
UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION:
Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory
One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more
Kantian imperatival form:
Act only in such a way that you action would serve
to maximize net expected utility.
or
explained j
The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put
naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of
{ pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J
work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or
happiness - of members of some other base class.
But the further detail s are
not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are
in fact corrnnon to
often confused
utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism,
with utilitarianism.
To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required .
Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with
a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve.
Certainly its application can
still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to
racism or nuclear escalation:
so however can most rival ethical positions.
But
its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends,
and not merely with ~aJ e:
directions.
its serious adoption forces adherents in these
Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of
numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural
environ-
ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism.
So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism
should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position:
it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted.
�
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
UTILITARIANISM AS SUPEREROGATION:
Maximizing versus satisizing in value theory
One ought always to act in such a way as to maximi2e utility - or, in more
Kantian imperatival form:
Act only in such a way that you action would serve
to maximize net expected utility.
or
explained j
The5 e are ways utilitarianism is sometimes put
naturally these preliminaries have to be followed up by a lot of
{ pt9rl.~1:) :u~/J
work trying to cash out utility in terms of.,\features - such as pleasure or
happiness - of members of some other base class.
But the further detail s are
not the present concern - which is with the maximisation principles which are
in fact corrnnon to
often confused
utilitarianism and other positions, such as consequentialism,
with utilitarianism.
To maximize is however often to go far beyond what is required .
Utilitarianism is now, its main revolutionary force spent, treated with
a gen tle toleration it does not really deserve.
Certainly its application can
still serve for the underwriting of worthwhile causes, such as opposition to
racism or nuclear escalation:
so however can most rival ethical positions.
But
its application can also serve a numb er of undesirable, or even pernicious ends,
and not merely with ~aJ e:
directions.
its serious adoption forces adherents in these
Examples include approaches to world population, the maximization of
numbers being a constrained utilitarian objective, and on Lhe natural
environ-
ment, it being a mere instrument for human (or creature) uti)ity under ut i litarianism.
So, for those with environmental perception and respect, utilitarianism
should not be simply tolerated, as a reasonable and respectable ethical position:
it shou ld be rejected, and bette:, actively resisted.
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 683: Draft of Utilitarianism as supererogatory: maximizing versus satisizing in value theory
Subject
The topic of the resource
Typescript draft, with emendations and annotations.
Description
An account of the resource
Note, one of three papers digitised from item 683.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</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&pageSize=20&sortBy=score&sortDirection=Desc&searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span>, Box 59, Item 683
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
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[1] leaf. 503.45 KB.
Type
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Manuscript
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
<a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:da9203b">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:da9203b</a>
Box 59: Nuclear
Como House
Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3
-
https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/files/original/751b703fda71fa9f2929cc0337db77cb.pdf
1419dad761d2e92700a8b87ce6cff449
PDF Text
Text
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drLve Ls at work Ln Brentano, whLch Ls ManLfested
especLaLLy Ln hLs exLstentLaL reductLon prograM, Lt Ls a heavLLy qualLfLed
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where
a
two
God
world
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was the greatest good, and a practLcaL or secular
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The correctness of loving and hating, like that of
truly, or correctly, then the hypothetical judgment bejudging, is objective in that it' is impossible for anyone to
comes: "He apodictically rejects judgers who are both
correctly what anyone else hat.es correctly or to love
love
disjuncThe
correct A-acceptors and correct B-rejectors."
what anyone else hates incorrectly.
incorrectly
there
or
A's
are
there
either
that
judges
"He
tive judgment
Ethics must make use of the comparative concept bet•
are B's" could then become "He apodictically . rejects
~ ;11r\ ter than, for which there is no analogue in the theory of
judgers who are both correct A-rejectors and correct B1
. ~ ) knowledge. "A is better than B," according to Brentano,
rej:.!ctors."
h..1 ,- • means that it is correct to prefer A, as an end, to B.
The philosophical consequences of this nonpropositionEvidence and truth. Brentano's views on evidence and
~___,.al theory of judgment are far-reaching. One consequence is
· truth may be found in the posthumously published
~
an interpretation of Kant's dictum that "existence" is not a
Wahrheit und Evidenz (Oskar Kraus, ed., Leipzig, W30).
(
predicate. According to Brentano, when we say that A
The distinction between judging on the basis of evidence
'exist:
of
attribute
an
exists, "it is not the conjunction of
and judging "blindly" is not to be described in terms of
ence' with 'A,' but 'A' itself which we affirm." The word
instinct, feelings, degree of convictio.n, or impulse to be"exists" is a synsemantic tern1 that is used to express the
lieve. We arrive at the general concept of being evident,
act of judgment.
according to Brentano, in the same way we arrive at the
All of the doctrines set forth above fall within the provconcept of a correct emotion: by contemplating actual
Unpsychology.
ince of what Brentano called descriptive
instances of the concept, in this case actual instances of
and
genetic
ng
psychology-includi
experimental
like
evident judgments and of blind judgments.
physiological psychology-descrip tive psychology, accordEvery evident judgment is either directly or indirectly
ing to Brentano, is an exact science, capable of arriving at
if a judgment is indirectly evident, tts evidence is
evident;
laws that hold true universally and not merely . "for the
ultimately, by judgments that are directly eviconferred,
even
is
and
philosophy
all
for
basis
most part." It is the
dent. Directly evident judgments are of two kinds. First,
capable of providing a characteristica universalis of the
there are the judgments of "inner perception," such as the
sort that Leibniz had conceived. J)escriptive psychology is
that I am now judging in a certain way, that I
judgments
closely related to what Husser! was to call phenomenolsuch-and-such, that I think I remember so-andsee
to
seem
from
Vienna
in
ogy. Husser! had studied with Brentano
so. Second, there are judgments of reason or insights (Ei111884 to 1886, when Brentano used the expression besichten), such as the judgments that two things are more
schreibende Phiinomenologie ("descriptive phenomenolthan one thing; that that which is red is, as such, other than
ogy") as an alternative name for descriptive psychology.
that ·which is green; that there cannot be a triangle with
of
doctrine
Brentano's
(Husser! later wrote that without
four sides; or that a whole cannot exist if its parts do not
intentionality, "phenomenology could not have come into
exist.
being at all.") Brentano's conception of psychology has led
Every judgment that is evident is true, but not every
some of his critics to accuse him of what Frege and Husthat is true is evident. Most judgments of "outer
judgment
does
serl called psychologism. However, this accusation
(of the external world), Brentano believed, are
perception"
his
and
evidence
of
theory
Brentano's
account
not take into
true, but all of them are "blind"; they are not evident. He
moral philosophy, both of which he took to be branches of
argued, howeve r, that the hypoth esis of a three-dimendescriptive psychology.
sional external world , with its familiar details concerning
Moral philosophy. Brentano's ethical views are set forth
physical bodies, has an "infinitely greater probability"
ed.,
3d
1889;
(Leipzig,
Erkenntnis
in Ursprung sittlicher
than any of its alternative s. Judgments based on memory,
Oskar Kraus, ed., 1934), translated by Cecil Hague as The
too, are "blind"; but many of them confirm each other, and
Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (London,
they are worthy of our confide nce.
1902), and in Grundlegung und Aujbau der Ethik ("The
In WahrheU und Evidenz Brentano characterized truth
ed.,
Mayer-Hillebrand,
.
Basis and Structure of Ethics," F
reference to evidence: "Truth pertains to the judgment
by
assumpthe
upon
ethics
his
based
Bern, 1952). Brentano
of the person who judges correctly ... hence it pertains
tion that the members o( the third class of mental pheto the judgment of one who asserts what the person who
nomena, loving and hating, may be said to be correct or
judges with evid e nce would as sert" (p. 130). In addition,
incorrect, just as judgments may be said to be correct or into say that A exists is to say that anyone who judged about
correct. To say that something,_!\, is good is to say that it ') lrl'
with evidence would accept A, and to say that A does not
A
~~I
,
apodictiis
it
is,
that
is impossible to love A incorrectly;
exist is to say that anyone who judged about A with evi / ~ .>
cally to reject incorrect lovers of A Analogously, to say that
dence would reject A The "measure of all things," then, is
rect haters of A
A is bad is apodictically to ga·
the man who judges with evidence.
The only way to grasp the concept of correct emotion,
However, these statements, relating truth to evidence,
emoof
cases
actual
according to Brentano, is to contrast
not give us the whole of Brentano's theory of truth .
do
emotions
of
cases
with
correct"
as
"qualified
are
tions that
"Evident" is said to be predicate in the strict sense of the
that are not. This is analogous to the way in which we
term, but "true" and "exists" are not, being only synseunderstand, for example, what it is to be red and what it is
mantic. This brings us to Brentano's theory of categories.
·
to be colored. Thus we learn that knowledge is good, joy
Theory of categories. The basic theses of Brentano's
enrichment
every
bad),
is
what
in
is good (unless it is joy
theory of categories may be stated as (I) there is nothing
within the realm of ideas is good, love of the ood is ood, IJJI
other than concrete particular things, and (2) every judglove of the a is bad and the ri ht end in life is to choose prr
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�The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions.
Photocopy of title page and two pages from McAlister L L (ed) (1976) The philosophy of Brentano,
Duckwort, 36-37. (2 leaves)
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Notes, Correspondences and Marginalia
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The following has been redacted from access file (PDF) due to copyright restrictions.
Annotated photocopy of twenty-five pages from McAlister L (1982) The development of Franz
Bretano's ethics, Rodopi, 78-129, 154-155. (13 leaves)
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stLl,I, 1,ess coutd /4e ever ctLMb down to a
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though
a
strong
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one.
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teMporary stabi..LLty by
spLrLtual
So
drLve Ls at work Ln Brentano, whLch Ls ManLfested
especLaLLy Ln hLs exLstentLaL reductLon prograM, Lt Ls a heavLLy qualLfLed
The
the
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where
a
two
God
world
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between
theoretLcaL
or
was the greatest good, and a practLcaL or secular
reaLM, where utLLLtarLanLsM prevaLLed. The utLLLtarLan
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a
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The correctness of loving and hating, like that of
truly, or correctly, then the hypothetical judgment bejudging, is objective in that it' is impossible for anyone to
comes: "He apodictically rejects judgers who are both
correctly what anyone else hat.es correctly or to love
love
disjuncThe
correct A-acceptors and correct B-rejectors."
what anyone else hates incorrectly.
incorrectly
there
or
A's
are
there
either
that
judges
"He
tive judgment
Ethics must make use of the comparative concept bet•
are B's" could then become "He apodictically . rejects
~ ;11r\ ter than, for which there is no analogue in the theory of
judgers who are both correct A-rejectors and correct B1
. ~ ) knowledge. "A is better than B," according to Brentano,
rej:.!ctors."
h..1 ,- • means that it is correct to prefer A, as an end, to B.
The philosophical consequences of this nonpropositionEvidence and truth. Brentano's views on evidence and
~___,.al theory of judgment are far-reaching. One consequence is
· truth may be found in the posthumously published
~
an interpretation of Kant's dictum that "existence" is not a
Wahrheit und Evidenz (Oskar Kraus, ed., Leipzig, W30).
(
predicate. According to Brentano, when we say that A
The distinction between judging on the basis of evidence
'exist:
of
attribute
an
exists, "it is not the conjunction of
and judging "blindly" is not to be described in terms of
ence' with 'A,' but 'A' itself which we affirm." The word
instinct, feelings, degree of convictio.n, or impulse to be"exists" is a synsemantic tern1 that is used to express the
lieve. We arrive at the general concept of being evident,
act of judgment.
according to Brentano, in the same way we arrive at the
All of the doctrines set forth above fall within the provconcept of a correct emotion: by contemplating actual
Unpsychology.
ince of what Brentano called descriptive
instances of the concept, in this case actual instances of
and
genetic
ng
psychology-includi
experimental
like
evident judgments and of blind judgments.
physiological psychology-descrip tive psychology, accordEvery evident judgment is either directly or indirectly
ing to Brentano, is an exact science, capable of arriving at
if a judgment is indirectly evident, tts evidence is
evident;
laws that hold true universally and not merely . "for the
ultimately, by judgments that are directly eviconferred,
even
is
and
philosophy
all
for
basis
most part." It is the
dent. Directly evident judgments are of two kinds. First,
capable of providing a characteristica universalis of the
there are the judgments of "inner perception," such as the
sort that Leibniz had conceived. J)escriptive psychology is
that I am now judging in a certain way, that I
judgments
closely related to what Husser! was to call phenomenolsuch-and-such, that I think I remember so-andsee
to
seem
from
Vienna
in
ogy. Husser! had studied with Brentano
so. Second, there are judgments of reason or insights (Ei111884 to 1886, when Brentano used the expression besichten), such as the judgments that two things are more
schreibende Phiinomenologie ("descriptive phenomenolthan one thing; that that which is red is, as such, other than
ogy") as an alternative name for descriptive psychology.
that ·which is green; that there cannot be a triangle with
of
doctrine
Brentano's
(Husser! later wrote that without
four sides; or that a whole cannot exist if its parts do not
intentionality, "phenomenology could not have come into
exist.
being at all.") Brentano's conception of psychology has led
Every judgment that is evident is true, but not every
some of his critics to accuse him of what Frege and Husthat is true is evident. Most judgments of "outer
judgment
does
serl called psychologism. However, this accusation
(of the external world), Brentano believed, are
perception"
his
and
evidence
of
theory
Brentano's
account
not take into
true, but all of them are "blind"; they are not evident. He
moral philosophy, both of which he took to be branches of
argued, howeve r, that the hypoth esis of a three-dimendescriptive psychology.
sional external world , with its familiar details concerning
Moral philosophy. Brentano's ethical views are set forth
physical bodies, has an "infinitely greater probability"
ed.,
3d
1889;
(Leipzig,
Erkenntnis
in Ursprung sittlicher
than any of its alternative s. Judgments based on memory,
Oskar Kraus, ed., 1934), translated by Cecil Hague as The
too, are "blind"; but many of them confirm each other, and
Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (London,
they are worthy of our confide nce.
1902), and in Grundlegung und Aujbau der Ethik ("The
In WahrheU und Evidenz Brentano characterized truth
ed.,
Mayer-Hillebrand,
.
Basis and Structure of Ethics," F
reference to evidence: "Truth pertains to the judgment
by
assumpthe
upon
ethics
his
based
Bern, 1952). Brentano
of the person who judges correctly ... hence it pertains
tion that the members o( the third class of mental pheto the judgment of one who asserts what the person who
nomena, loving and hating, may be said to be correct or
judges with evid e nce would as sert" (p. 130). In addition,
incorrect, just as judgments may be said to be correct or into say that A exists is to say that anyone who judged about
correct. To say that something,_!\, is good is to say that it ') lrl'
with evidence would accept A, and to say that A does not
A
~~I
,
apodictiis
it
is,
that
is impossible to love A incorrectly;
exist is to say that anyone who judged about A with evi / ~ .>
cally to reject incorrect lovers of A Analogously, to say that
dence would reject A The "measure of all things," then, is
rect haters of A
A is bad is apodictically to ga·
the man who judges with evidence.
The only way to grasp the concept of correct emotion,
However, these statements, relating truth to evidence,
emoof
cases
actual
according to Brentano, is to contrast
not give us the whole of Brentano's theory of truth .
do
emotions
of
cases
with
correct"
as
"qualified
are
tions that
"Evident" is said to be predicate in the strict sense of the
that are not. This is analogous to the way in which we
term, but "true" and "exists" are not, being only synseunderstand, for example, what it is to be red and what it is
mantic. This brings us to Brentano's theory of categories.
·
to be colored. Thus we learn that knowledge is good, joy
Theory of categories. The basic theses of Brentano's
enrichment
every
bad),
is
what
in
is good (unless it is joy
theory of categories may be stated as (I) there is nothing
within the realm of ideas is good, love of the ood is ood, IJJI
other than concrete particular things, and (2) every judglove of the a is bad and the ri ht end in life is to choose prr
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Box 59: Nuclear
Como House
Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3
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00681
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'
{; /) f¼i:<:LL I
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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.
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•
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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)
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.
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.
•
•
•
•
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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)
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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)
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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)
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Men have always hunted in the fields around
They still do, but no
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(K. Bell, Not in Vain, University of ~oronto Press, 1973)
.,, Petigny and Falaise .
�
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00681
'
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{; /) f¼i:<:LL I
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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 .
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(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.
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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,
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(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.
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§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)
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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)
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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 .
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Box 59: Nuclear
Como House
Como House > Cupboard > Pile 3
-
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
�
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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 »'
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/ /'
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/
< / / 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
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AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE PHILOSOPHY:
Further investigations of the nonexistent.
‘The opinions of philosophers, with regard to the conditions of the possibility of a
public peace, shall be taken into consideration by states armed for war’ (Kant, ‘A
[the only!] secret article for perpetual peace’, p.158 - a surprising article, flattering no
doubt to philosophers, but neglecting their dominant bellicose tradition).
A defence philosophy is much more than a defence policy, just as a philosophy of
technology comprises much more than a technology policy. A policy can be given merely by a
list of directives as to what do in various circumstances; even at its best it need only involve
practical wisdom.
By contrast, a philosophy goes deeper and requires theoretical wisdom,
integration of the policy into a theoretical setting, which looks, among other things, at the
central arguments and key concepts involved: here, security, stability, control, protection,
defence, interests, national interests, intelligence, war, etc.
Defence philosophy is thus a
branch of political and social philosophy, and has long been treated as such, though under
such more familiar and honest headings as “of war” and “of peace”.
Like most parts of
philosophy, it can be applied, for instance in shaping policies, in regional ways among others.
A defence philosophy should integrate appropriate defence arrangements and approaches
to war and peace, not merely or superficially into “foreign policy” or assumed “international
relations”, but into the way and intended way of life of a country, both into on-going culture
and into the intended or planned cultural arrangements.
A defence policy typically takes
prevailing socio-political arrangements and power structures for granted; a defence philosophy
again penetrates deeper, questioning or rejecting features of these structures, enquiring as to
the merits of things and institutions of which defence is planned, asking what sort of society
should be defended by what sort of appropriate methods and at what lengths.
What, for
instance, is Australia, what are Australians, defending, concerned to defend, aiming to
defend? Here in Australia? In the region? Abroad? How much of what others have, or what
we have, is worth defending, preserving?
Does Randwick Racecourse, or Pine Gap, merit
defending?
Would anyone stage a last stand for Oaks Estate, one of Canberra’s dreariest
suburbs?
If the Indonesians
made a lightning strike in
Australia just
to remove
Bjelke-Petersen,1 should we resist?
Few of the necessary prerequisites have been adequately thought about in Australia,
where unplanned muddling through from immediate problem to immediate problem - reactive
contingency “planning”, if you want to be generous - is the main style of political life , and,
along with the traditional political game of “follow the leader”, of defence planning. Australia
�2
does not yet have a defence philosophy. Some of its critical philosophers could help to supply
it with the rudiments of one or more, and to inject some depth into broader defence
theorizing.
What follows is intended as a modest beginning: much of what is attempted,
unearthing arguments and assumptions, followed by analysis and criticism, and some
elaboration of alternative principles, falls squarely within the domains both of applied
philosophy and traditional philosophical practice.
1. Australia’s
inappropriate.
defence
“policy”:
incoherent,
obsolescent
Australia seems to lack even a clear and coherent defence policy.
American,
This is a commonplace
charge (made even by friends of Defence, interested in obtaining extra public funding for
defence and elements of C3I).^ The reasons concern not merely the major unsolved issues of
exactly what is being defended, what things and objects and what interests, and whose, what
freedoms and values, and what role American defence facilities in Australia are supposed to
have in this.
They concern the status of present treaty arrangements, such as the
“cornerstone”/“millstone” ANZUS treaty, signed between Australia, New Zealand and the
US, now in disarray (still ’‘maintained” by New Zealand, whom the US has unilaterally
announced expelled), and of subsequent associated memoranda of understanding (some secret,
involving the local storage of US nuclear weapons, entry of American personnel, etc.). They
also concern a range of more detailed lucunae such as: lack of clearly-defined priorities on
what needs defending and how it is to be accomplished; doubtful capacity of present defence
forces to handle low-level contingencies in and to the north of Australia and in maritime
zones; and unsatisfactory (or no) arrangements and planning for “defence-in-depth”, for civil
defence and use of civil infrastructure, mobilisation, wartime administration, protection of key
facilities and areas, and post-nuclear organization.
And, equally damaging, if its policy makers do have a coherent policy it is nowhere
satisfactorily revealed to the peoples of Australia.It is left to journalists and newspaper
watching academics to winkle out what local defence installations may be for and to make
various conjectures as to what the policy may be.
Of course there are many administrators
and policy makers who think that is the way it should be; the public should not be informed,
but kept satisfied with some “generalised” statements.As to coherence, Australian policy
makers have only recently found out that Australia has a (purely) regional defence role, not a
global one. This they were told by the Americans in Washington in talks allegedly designed
to clarify commitments under treaty arrangements with the USA. It thus begins to look as if
Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is still as much determined abroad, by US policy
makers, as it is locally in Australia.
�3
Much circumstantial evidence can be assembled to confirm the claim that Australia’s
vague defence policy can now be stamped Made in USA, as it used, before the last World War
(and British abandonment), to be stamped Made in UK. For one thing, Australia has had a
bipartisan defence policy, so it is claimed. That “policy” has however been essentially shaped
by the Liberal party, which has governed most of the time (as senior partner in a coalition).
But the Liberal party simply took over US arrangements for Australia (as planned in
Washington for ANZUS) and still does.
For instance, the latest package® from the Liberal
Party “Defence and Foreign Policy Unit” consists largely of US Defence Department material
packaged under a local cover.
The Strategic Basis Papers, endorsed by the Labor
Government, give virtually unqualified support to US military practices and to the American
view of the global strategic situation, and commit Australia to supporting, without any due
reservation, American positions in world forums.' The same dependent-policy conclusion can
be reached by more devious arguments.
regional defence role?
When, for example, did Australia find out it had a
After the Americans had found that they could no longer afford to
police the world on their own and would have to delegate some of that role and offload some
of the heavy associated costs, on reliable dogs-bodies; and also after Labor took some faltering
steps towards developing a broader foreign more independent policy with some indigenous
elements (Australian Minister Hayden was promptly flattened by US heavies such as Schultz).
Australian defence and foreign policy copies American policy in main respects, but lags
it. The Australian defence policy presented by the Labor government, to the extend that it is
visible, is conservative; it coincides with older American defence policy, and diverges from the
new (post-Reagan) American war policy. For Australian Labor defence policy supports what
the American administration supposedly used to support, namely
DI. Multilateral nuclear disarmament (within the framework of series of treaties and
agreements), and
D2. Deterrence in the interim, deterrence through mutual assured destruction (i.e. MAD).
The presence of American military facilities in Australia is supposed to be justified in the
framework of these assumptions.
For they are to assist in making deterrence under D2
effective, and to provide verification for the arms reduction arrangements under DI (both
stabilizing functions).
There is much evidence indicating however that American policy
makers have now abandoned both Dl and D2 and any serious attempts at nuclear arms
control8.
Certainly they have moved on to the following highly destabilizing doctrines:
Nuclear war-fighting, Limited nuclear wars, and Star-Wars (i.e. Strategic Defense Initiative).
While this American war policy may well be accepted by the next Liberal coalition
government, all of these military doctrines are explicitly rejected by the 1985 Labor
government.
Since the American “joint” facilities in Australia also facilitate the rejected
�4
objectives, the problems concerning these dubious facilities are much aggravated.
The
Government’s approach concerning them - withholding information concerning the full range
of their functions, and particularly their war-fighting roles from parliament and the public - is
certainly unsatisfactory, as several of its members realise; and as a result the Government
appear in not atypical disarray, further grist for the incoherence theme.
If there is perhaps a coherent Australian global defence approach somewhere away from
public exposure, it is most likely then an old abandoned American policy.9 But in that case it
certainly lacks - what it in any case appears to lack - justification.
For Australia, in
supporting US defence policy and activity, for instance in world forums, is supporting present
offensive American policy, not what it reputedly adheres to, deterrence (through MAD). The
point holds good whether or not American global policy still includes such deterrence as a
proper part10; for it certainly involves other very different and dubious strategies.
The commonplace, but increasingly feeble, justification given for Australian’s tagging
along after America is that Australian interests are the same as American11.
American interests by no means coincide with Australian
.
However
Consider, for instance, such
matters as enriching Americans, making conditions favourable for American business,
promoting Americans and things American.
Consider, differently, American practices in
Latin America, from undercutting Allende’s government in Chile to its practices against
Nicaragua, to its extensive export of arms and violent methods, there and elsewhere in the
world.
Thus America, like Russia, is busy meddling in Africa, but ‘Australian security
interests are not directly involved’ (SB, p.24).
Consider, differently again, escalation of the
nuclear arms race. Or consider American strategic planning, and all the game- and decision-
theoretic models which concern just USA and its adversary USSR, perhaps occasionally
adding Europe as part of the monolithic West, but rarely or never considering the Southern
Hemisphere - so that either Australia is part of America as Poland may be of Russia or it is
nothing.
Or consider American interests not merely in Soviet and communist containment,
but in containing socialism such as might (under more auspicious conditions) flourish in
Australia. An American policy answering to American interests is accordingly inappropriate
for Australia, inappropriate for Antipodean socialism.
Australians should do their own
defence thinking and work out a policy appropriate for Australia.
(That applies also to
Australian political representatives, who should stop parroting implausible American views
and begin developing some genuinely local and original ones.)
Should Australia be tagging along after the Americans in support of installation of their
style of free-enterprise capitalism everywhere feasible (i.e. that the state socialists don’t
already heavily control)?
What they quite seriously call ‘keeping the free world free’?
Of
�5
course freedom has, in this sort of context, multiple meanings and associations (as well as
multiple
inconsistencies,
appearing
information” and the like).
overtly
in
subsidized
“free trade”, selective
“free
Significant parts of what mainstream American culture admits
under the freedom umbrella, mainstream Australian culture would exclude: for instance,
active opposition to and undermining of social and socialist programs and governments,
bullying of small countries that impose barriers to US business or military practices (all part
of “free enterprise”), etc.
What of those intangible freedoms the cultures supposedly agree about, civil liberties,
freedom to information, to live and work where one chooses, to travel, and so on? These are
certainly important freedoms, better upheld in some parts of the unaligned West (e.g.
Sweden, Switzerland) than in most parts of the Eastern Block. But such freedoms, which run
counter to dependent policies, hardly require defence subservience.
influenced state practices are fast reducing freedom.
Moreover, military-
Many of the older freedoms have
vanished this century, such as freedom to travel, to work and live abroad, etc.; now one
requires permits, licences, passports, ... . And many more former freedoms are being or have
been eroded; soon it will be identity documents, restricted zones, ID cards, as already in parts
of the “free West”.
Now nuclearism in Europe ‘is devouring the very freedom it is said to
protect: [the Greens] point to the new laws proposed in 1983 designed to keep citizens from
assembling to protest deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles’ (Capra and Spretnak,
pp.58-9). Further structural changes required for the security of the state, imcompatible with
democratic freedoms, include ‘secrecy,
lack of commentability, permanent emergency,
concentration of authority, peacetime militarism, extensive apparatus of state intelligence and
police’ (Falk, in Feith p.24).
Nuclearism is not a smart strategy to preserve remaining
freedoms.
2. Inherited other-reliance, and the populist and elitist cases for patronage and
subservience.
Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is furthermore inherited rather than regularly
(re)thought through.
But that procedure - essentially the legal method of precedence,
whatever its very limited satisfactoriness in legalistic decision making - is defective when
applied in politics or to defence, especially where immediate independent action is required.
For precedence methods are extraordinarily slow, as well as characteristically conservative,
and as in defence exclude significant and rather urgent alternatives.
The unsatisfactory decision-making practices to be revealed in the case of defence are by
no means restricted to defence but are typical of the kind of advanced age capitalism
Australia operates under, or rather labours under, down under.
In setting down those
�4.
6
features of aged capitalism (‘of the Corporate State') that the New Left and Alternative
Australia movements were reacting against, Cock neatly summed up these practices:
Decisions were made from the top and on the basis of vested political interests,
rather than by rational goals and means that served public interests. The people
were rarely consulted effectively before a decision and often only partially informed
afterwards. Planning was based on a mere extension of the present. ... activists felt
they were given little opportunity to choose how they lived or worked.
The
availability of space, time, trees and air was also determined by others ... (p.18
italics added).14
As it was and is with one’s defence, military and civil, so it is with the matter of whether one
lives in a nuclear target zone or not, and so on (though immigration policy, uranium and
woodchip export policies, etc.)
In these areas planning remains top-down, with at best
consultative elements. No real choices are offered to people.
A major inherited assumption is that of other reliance, that Australia’s defence depends
on other more powerful allies. That ally was firstly Britain, and since World War II America;
but in any event the assumption is that to be safe Australia needs a powerful patron, a
protector.
A corollary is that Australia adopts a suitably submissive relation to its patron,
making expected concessions. And for the most part it has; however such a defence insurance
policy does not come cheap.15 It costs not only money and resources, but quality of life,
freedom and independence.
The assumption of other-reliance is however unsound, for several reasons.
Most
important, it characteristically depends upon the following themes, all of which lack solid
foundation:
1. Australia is threatened - or at least
1A. Australia is likely to be threatened in the near future.
2. Australia cannot defend itself.
3. Australia can however depend upon its patron (or ally), i.e. upon the USA.
These three themes in fact make up what has been called the populist case for the ANZUS
alliance.16 It is very different from the elitist case for ANZUS, said to hold sway with the
Australian government, which, while insisting upon premiss 3, essentially rejects 1 and 2 and
claims instead
4. Australian has a vital interest in global stability.
5. Global stability is under threat (constantly) by an expansionist Soviet Union.
6. Only USA can contain the Soviet threat and hold the global balance.
Some of techniques the US deploys for holding global balance operate through
dependent states and a network of alliances like ANZUS. But obviously further premisses are
required to reach the intended conclusions that Australia should be participating in any such
�alliance, and what is more, hosting US defence facilities and exercises. A first such premise is
the no-shirking theme, that Australia should be contributing its part to “holding the balance’’
(cf. Bell).
Even this first further step is pretty shaky; as we shall see, one shaky step in a
rather ramshackle case, since premisses 5 and 6 are decidedly dubious (and 4 may involve
equivocation). For it can be plausibly argued that Australia’s vital interests are not
guaranteed by US techniques, which threaten to upset the whole applecart, and can be
obtained by alternative more satisfactory means outside of such soft alliances as ANZUS. In
any case, it is unclear that local contributions enhance global (nuclear) stability (see e.g.
Mack and Davidson).
But first, there is more pernicious regionalist version of the elitist position to be
considered, what might be called the offshore elitist position. This position grants
2A*. Australia can defend itself against regional threats, and can look after itself regionally.
But it does not (as indeed other qualified elitist positions may not) grant 1A.
What the
offshore position insists upon is
1AI*. Australia’s interests could be threatened in the near future.
Since these interests - perhaps concerned with trade, Australian companies or Australians
abroad, or whatever - may have little or nothing to do with internal Australian security, this
premiss represents an extremely important shift (a shift not unrelated to the inverse
bureaucratic shift from war to defence).
It goes further than what has been called forward
defence. In extended form the offshore position does call for some sort of global policeman or
police force ready to intervene whenever a “free port” anywhere looks like closing its doors.
Part of the difficulty in getting to grips with the elitist position is that it tends to slide
through to the offshore position (by way of now evident immediate positions).
The arguments against both the populist and elitist cases, and indeed against virtually
all of themes 1 through 7 are sufficiently familiar to justify but a fairly brief outline of some of
the main points involved.
Of course just a couple of defections from themes 1 through 7
would serve logically defeat both cases, but there have been some interesting repair attempts,
designed to float the arguments on diminished premisses.
3. The brief against the popular populist case; the need for new directions.
Contra 1 and 1A.
While Australia is not at present under notice of threat, veiled threat or
harassment from abroad, a majority of its population appears to believe that it is.
As the
popular view is not the informed, administrative, or parliamentary view, it is worth inquiring
�8
why the popular view persists, as the opinion polls reveal it has.
The populace has been
deliberately kept in the dark (or even misinformed), because this suits bipartisan government
purposes.
Although both main Australian political parties are well enough aware that the
main assumptions underlying the populist case are false, the reasons for which they support
the American alliance (e.g. those of the elitist case) are much more difficult to sell to the
public. Accordingly the parties and Government have no political interest in undermining the
unsound populist case. In particular they have gone out of their way not to cast doubt upon
the connected assumption that US is a reliable guarantor against all threats.
Thus long-standing Australian psychological insecurity about security has been allowed
to stand, and has not been assuaged by any requisite informational and educational effort. In
particular, older attitudes to Asia persist not far below the surface of popular Australia: fear,
mistrust and xenophobia, patched over by a pragmatic attachment to trade and tourism.
This misplaced insecurity is fuelled by popular misconceptions of Australia and its place in
the world: metaphorically, that Australia is a luscious plum ripe for Eastern picking, instead
of the Asians view that Australia, so far as they are aware of it at all, is a remote desiccated
uncouth place perhaps good for some trade and investment. Or, to get towards more concrete
assumptions,
Australians
apparently
tend
to
their
view
country
as
affluent
but
underpopulated, resource rich but largely defenceless; yet not far to the north are Asian
hordes who are impoverished, resource poor, and so on
.
Such a view is seriously out of touch with reality.
Parts of Asia are now at least as
affluent (on conventional economic indicators) as Australia.
They do not see themselves as
overpopulated, in a way that calls for mass exodus; and in those areas which are as
overpopulated as Europe, such as Java, bribes and force are required to move people on
transmigration programs to relatively unoccupied parts of the Indonesian empire.
So far as
they require them, they can purchase Australian resources - which are not unique - much more
easily and cheaply (because they even carry significant local subsidies) than they could obtain
•
them by seizure.
1s
For these sorts of reasons, and because Australia itself poses no threat, no other state
has a genuine interest in attempting to invade Australia.
As it is for interests, so it is for
capabilities. No regional power has the capacity to launch a successful invasion of Australia,
or is likely to have such a capacity in the near future. As the joint Parliamentary Committee
concluded,
Currently only the United States would have the physical capacity to launch a full
scale invasion of Australia, and it clearly lacks any motive to do so (TAS, p.94).
�9
As the report also stated, quoting Synnot (former Chief of Defence Staff),
... to raise the sort of force which would be required for a mass invasion of Australia
could not possibly be done in under five years by other than the superpowers (TAS).
But neither superpower is at all likely to expend effort or resources to such an end.
An obvious naive question which at once arises is: Why bother then with much defence?
(A later question to entertain is: why not be a free-rider on collectively provided global
security, such as it is?) Why not proceed forthwith to unilateral disarmament? Mack for one,
having reassembled the now-standard telling case that Australia is not threatened ‘now or for
the foreseeable future’, and so having broken the populist argument, is confronted by the
awkward option of unilateral disarmament for Australia. He stages a hasty retreat, points to
the dependence of premisses 1 and 1A on premiss 2, and proceeds to claim that ‘the populist
case for ANZUS is sustained’ even without premisses 1 and 1A.
It is however a decidedly
problematic retreat.
While it is true that the arguments against 1 and 1A may sometimes take it for granted
that Australia can look after itself to some extend, put up some resistance, it is far from clear
that they depend essentially on assumptions approximating premiss 2.
Consider the no
interests argument, which appears decisive given the (estimated) very limited invasion
capabilities of potential invaders.
The main consideration adduced appears to depend in no
essential way, indeed in no obvious way at all, on Australia’s dynamic fighting forces.
Australian mineral resources, to repeat one of the more sensitive examples involved, can be
obtained more readily and cheaply by trade methods than military ones. What all this seems
to show is that a rather minimal streamlined force, if any, would presently meet Australia’s
military requirements.
It is not as if Australia is ‘entirely defenceless’ without a conventional military force,
like a babe-in-arms.
The whole apparatus of nonmilitary defence is available on a continent
well suited to its use, though lacking a population trained in its techniques. But even without
requisite popular training in defence methods, Australia would be a difficult place to govern,
Australians a difficult lot to subjugate. It was such features of the Australian character that
deterred the Japanese on a previous occasion
“If the invasion is attempted, the Australians, in view of their national character,
would resist to the end. Also, because the geographical conditions of Australia
present numerous difficulties in a military sense, it is apparent that a military
venture in that country would be a difficult one” (TAS, p.62).
The points still hold good, and could be strengthened.
There are several parts to any such
�10
program of nonmilitary defence: making it happen, and putting it abroad (ideally with
dinkum Australian exaggeration) that it has happened.
To the issue of alternative defence we are bound to return. For now, when Australia is
not threatened, is a good occasion to reconsider, and begin to adapt, defence arrangements.
For example, it looks very much as if enormous sums, which could be valuably directed
elsewhere, are being spent, largely to make many Australians feel secure.But a much more
effective and inexpensive way to such results would be through requisite popular education
and psychological therapy - with, if it were well done, much more satisfactory results, a more
secure and better informed people.
Contra 2. As a result of post-War developments in weapons systems and C3I capabilities, the
military defence of Australia has become much easier.
It comes down to enhancing, through
new robust and reliable systems, the enormous strategic advantages Australia enjoys by virtue
of geographical isolation. In principle, any maritime invading force can now be detected well
in advance of arrival, through modern radar warning systems, and destroyed by precision
guided munitions.
And any invaders that did manage to gain a foothold on Australian soil
would face severe logistic problems, and be subject to disproportionate responses from local
defence. Standard discussions (as in Dibb, Mack) proceed to introduce a great deal of “Boys’
Own War Games” stuff concerning contemporary weapon and C3I systems; the essential point
is that these could serve to turn Australia into a pretty unvulnerable armed fortress, and into
an extremely difficult territory were the oceanic moat crossed and the fortress entered (see
especially D. Martin).
Under such armed neutrality and (differently) fortified Australia defence scenarios, even
invasion from outside the region by an inimical world power could be resisted with reasonable
prospect of success.
There is no power at all likely to mount such an invasion; there is
apparently (as noted above) only one power that could, that good ally the USA (reckoned
however a likely invader by 6-7% of the Australian population!). Nonetheless the threat of a
Soviet invasion is taken seriously not only by the larger populace but by committees of their
elected representatives.
But the Soviet military has never undertaken such a long-range
massive force projection, is ill-equipped to do so, and lacks any plausible reason to try such a
stunt (for details see, e.g., D. Martin; also SS, ST).
The only credible Soviet threat to
Australia is in the context of a superpower war, when American facilities in Australia and
perhaps Australian cities, would be struck at by intercontinental missiles.
While this would
be bad enough, it is highly unlikely that it would be followed or accompanied by an invasion.
Soviet forces are once again not sufficient, and not thought sufficient by the Soviets for that
sort of diversion; they would be required elsewhere in a superpower war; and they would be
devastated, unless USA is militarily even more incompetent than sometimes depicted.
�i.
11
Contra 3.
What will be argued is not the negation of 3, that the Americans cannot be relied
upon, but rather that 3 is dubious, and that it would be rash to place excess reliance on
American protection.
That being so, and other patrons being even less promising, Australia
should look more to its own resources, as the American administration is kindly advising.
Especially since the American “Vietnam debacle” and the fall of Saigon, things have
changed in important ways which cast doubt on the reliability of American patronage. First,
the relative economic and military strength of the USA has declined significantly.
It no
longer has such a large share of world product(ivity); as a connected matter of policy, US
world warfighting aspirations have been reduced. Its ability to act as, and afford to be, global
policeman has also markedly declined/
Secondly, the willingness of Americans to engage in
remote foreign wars has correspondingly tumbled.
Although the American administration
includes more than enough hawks, to be sure, the people and Congress are not longer in a
mood for gratuitous foreign adventures, especially when the fun may not appear to be in
American interests.
Since Vietnam, US opinion polls regularly show strong popular
opposition to overseas military involvement. This “Vietnam syndrome” has served as a major
constraint on US military policy and foreign involvement.
An important manifestation of these changes is the Guam Doctrine, calling upon US
regional allies to take primary responsibility for their own defence in regional conflicts.
Another important outcome is Defense statements to the pointed effect that before US troops
are committed abroad there must be reasonable assurance of Congressional and popular
support (Weinberger, reported in PC p.14). As Mack comments, ‘such assurance is impossible
to guarantee - especially for remote countries where no US vital national interests are at
stake’. Certainly no more is assured under the ANZUS treaty which provides only that each
signatory ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes’
(article 4).
All the treaty strictly requires is consultation; there is no undertaking or
commitment. Isn’t the treaty backed up by informal verbal reassurances? None that are not
undermined by others, in American administrative multiple-speak.
Even the elite view is that Australia has to ‘work ... to maximize the prospect of US
support’ and that the Americans cannot be counted upon.
For ‘the threshold of direct US
combat involvement could be quite high, and circumstances at the time could significantly
limit US willingness or ability to help Australia in other ways?. ‘... we cannot rely upon US
support in a defence emergency arising within our own neighbourhood’ (SB, pp.29-30).
However a special case has been made for American reliability in Australia’s case - as
�12
opposed to examples of American abandonment of earlier military undertakings (in Vietnam,
Cambodia, Iran) - on the basis of permanent friendship, common interests, and shared values
and democratic traditions. There are two difficulties with this type of special pleading: first,
as to the basis, and, second, as to the adequacy of such a basis in by-passing Congress, the
American people, and slow constitutional processes.
Historical evidence hardly sustains the
adequacy of the basis in analogous cases. And here, as already indicated, the basis is shaky.
For there is not a common culture shared by Australia and America: rather values diverge
significantly on quite crucial issues. Even less are interests always common, as the matter of
subsidised agricultural produce reveals, and as missile testing and nuclear ships issues in the
South Pacific have recently confirmed. Interests diverged, for instance, when Australia toyed
with opposing Indonesia’s claim to West Papua. So it is dubious at least that American
interests would coincide with Australian in disputes or confrontation with Asian nations to
the North, e.g. with Indonesia or Japan.
Of course if the special case argument did hold
water, Australia and America really were mates, then the treaty would be otiose. There was
in fact no treaty in operation in 1942; but by then American interests in countering the
Japanese were independently aroused.
4. Other-reliance and regional self-reliance
A major problem with other-reliance for defence is then that it cannot be deemed entirely
reliable, yet precisely here unreliability can hardly be tolerated.
When the Indonesians are
rolling into Brisbane it won’t do for Defense to call up with a message like that from local
Services, "We can’t get there till tomorrow’’, or “until after Congress meets”, or “Sorry,
Mate!”.
More seriously, handing defence over to others means handing control of our lives
over to others; and given nuclear defence, which too many Antipodean administrations have
opted for, it quite likely means literally handing our lives over for many of us. Another
problem of other-reliance is thus its adequacy. A further problem is its cost. In principle, if a
State hires out its defence it would no doubt look, other things being equal, for the cheaper
bidder - if, that is, defence is a commodity of a sort, like national shipping, meterological
services, etc. The trouble with global defence is that the market is monopolistic, with
currently only one supplier of the right complexion22, who accordingly can exact a very high
price, and has - making the whole country a nuclear target and demanding substantial
subservience. Similar points make part of the case, well-enough appreciated, for not trying to
press defence, plainly a collective good, into a marketable commodity.
When a country can supply its own defence, it therefore makes very good sense for it to
do so, since it normally has a stronger interest in its own proper defence than most other
parties. Should it also be cheaper in costs that matter, then self-reliance not just makes good
sense but pays; other-reliance does not.
But in that event, it surely does not need nuclear
�13
patrons, or to farm out some of its defence.
Such self-reliance undermines an important part of the older case based on other-reliance
for alliances such as ANZUS. However newer bipartisan approaches to defence try to combine
them (thus e.g. Australian minister Beazley as reported by Davidson) - approaches which thus
begin to empty ANZUS of what little content it had, and remove much of the apparent point
of such older alliances. Since the ANZUS arrangements contain no clear commitments beyond
consultation but are merely vague articles of understanding, a simple course is of course to
allow them to be emptied of content, so that the alliance, an expensive and outdated
“insurance” policy, dies a natural death.
It may however be death by seizure or convulsion
should American defence facilities be closed or internationalised and passage of American
nuclear equipped or powered transport be excluded from Australia.
That would no doubt
sacrifice the deterrence and other advantages the treaty supposedly affords
, while making
way for the greater advantages of friendly nonalignment, of no longer being a nuclear target,
or so on.
But self-reliance pure and simple is insufficient. The world does not consist of separable
isolated pieces, as becomes increasingly evident. Most dramatically, Australia will not escape
the effects of nuclear winter.
The picture is much the same as for other dynamic subjects,
such as plants which are not internally self-sufficient but depend crucially on their
environment - and indeed as for States themselves. The question then is what form the
additional holistic component of policy should take? Put this way, it is almost obvious that
the appropriate move is not taking sides (as in a kids’ war game or tug-of-war game that is
already set up) and doing one’s bit for confrontation. For that will not contribute to stability,
to a proper holistic approach, but rather to sectionalism and fragmentation, and to bringing
nuclear winter closer.
Other-reliance and self-reliance typically present a false contrast, and certainly do with
pure self-reliance - a false contrast like that of holism and partism (EE, p.223), and of
dependence versus isolationism. In between lie a range of positions, one of which - favoured
by a long line of peacefully-disposed philosophers from Rousseau and Kant onwards - might be
called integrated reliance or federated reliance. The elitist case, insofar as it were to call for
such reliance (e.g. in assumption 4), could hardly be faulted. But it doesn’t; and is satisfied
with much less.
Integration may reach only certain inadequate levels, the level of modern
alliances and alignment, which are essentially coupled with opposition to an other side, e.g.
the monolithic East (or West). It is into just this trap that elitist arguments fall.
�14
5. The decline and fall of elitist arguments.
Premisses 4 and 5 of the elitist argument turn around the crucial notion of stability, as related
arguments revolve around that of security. But stability and security are value-laden terms,
which are not cultural invariants.
What stability comprehends in American administrative
perception is very different from what highland villages take it to include.
In each case a system is stable if it returns to a given stationary state under
perturbations of sufficiently small magnitude. But both the relevant states and the stationary
among them are relative to given frames of reference; for instance, what is stable at a
macrolevel may well not be at a microlevel. As Trudeau has said of the superpowers, ‘they
share a global perception according to which even remote events can threaten their interests
or their associates’ (p.10) and disturb stability.
But lesser states or regional people, not
counting remote business or military interests as relevant, report no instability. Bureaucrats
invariably view bombs as necessary to stability, and the nuclear fix as stability; by contrast,
gentle people increasingly see bombs as tools of terrorism and as characteristically antithetical
to peace.
ad 4: Of course Australia has a vital interest in global stability and security: what sizeable
nation does not? But the determinable motherhood interpretation (of italicised terms), while
no doubt diplomatically convenient, conceals crucial differences, highly material to the
argument. For one global stability means something different in USA from what it means in
Costa Rica and likely what it intends in Australia. Certainly vital interests are different.
America is interested in containing socialism (in Australia as elsewhere), and it tends, in more
popular rhetoric at least, to equate containing socialism with containing communism and both
with Soviet containment. A continental swing to socialism (or Non-Soviet communism) in
Latin America, or in Africa, would upset global stability, on American perception, and would
indeed have significant effects on US business or investment; but it would not on its own
upset or affect most Australians or directly threaten Antipodean stability, and it certainly
need not affect nuclear stability. Australians generally are not opposed in principle to
socialism or notably interested in containing its spread (indeed perhaps the opposite).
Australia is not interested in (and oughtn’t to be charmed by the idea of) defence of the
(American) “free enterprise” system, or in the defence of uglier forms of capitalism wherever
they are presently initiated or opposed (cf. Chomsky and Herman).
Contra 5.
It can be conceded, without granting the main thrust of the premiss, that the
Soviets are expansionistic, at least in that they are interested in extending their influence
where they can.
So also are most empires, including American and Indonesian (so for that
matter are many academics and most sales-people).
But the Soviets have an ideological
�15
message to spread, Marxism-Leninism, an ideology they used to anticipate being installed
everywhere.
But the Americans also have a message, a capitalist message, Free Enterprise
Inc, which they are working to sell pretty much everywhere accessible to them.
And they
need to be expansionistic to have it adopted, whereas the Russians and Chinese need simply
wait for history to take its allegedly determined course (though a little assistance - reflecting
legitimate doubt about this determinism? - would surely spread their disconcertingly different
forms of “progress” without interfering). But surely the Russian message is pernicious?
All
these messages are pernicious (for familiar reasons: see e.g. Erlich).
The proper question is whether on its own Soviet international activity threatens, in
some damaging way, global stability. Undoubtedly Soviet-American confrontation, as in the
Cuban missile affair, does threaten global stability; though not in a way that has any bearing
on Australian defence.
In fact no Russian expansionary tendency, military or otherwise, has
an untoward direct effect on Australia, little of significance reaches into the Antipodes (see
Dibb SS). So what is the local excitement about? In large measure the excitement has been
drummed up by the political right, East European expatriates, and pork-barrelling politicians.
The effect of Soviet expansionism is much exaggerated and overexploited (Mack ST).
Viewed from the Antipodes it is hardly a problem, unless the Soviets should get locked into
military confrontation with USA - a real problem to be addressed.
With that problem
however, the Antipodes can better assist as part of a third nonaligned group which helps to
referee and to prize apart the heavies, not by seconding and inciting the USA.
But
confrontation apart, Soviet internationalism, hardly a great success story, does not seriously
disturb global stability, as seen from Australia.
For a proper assessment of Soviet internationalism, types of expansion should be
distinguished - military, potential military, influence with military access, and mere influence.
In actual military expansion and involvement since W’orld War II, the Russian record is
hardly striking by comparison with the USA or several other states.
The one conspicuous
case involving control of new territory, that of Afghanistan, has actually had little effect on
global stability.
The usual Western apprehension concerns not anything the Soviets have
accomplished, but what they might attempt militarily, especially in Europe.
But the idea of
Soviet military adventure in Europe is a Western invention and bogey, lacking in plausibility.
The Soviet military lacks the force ratio needed to be assured of military success in Europe,
both by their own standards of what is required and by Western strategic standards. And the
Soviets have no good reasons or interests in undertaking such an exercise which would draw
them into nuclear war. They already face enough economic difficulties and troubles with East
European client states which they cannot control satisfactorily.
�16
The extension of Soviet influence has largely been in the Third world.
But it has
hardly been successful, with as many failures and losses to record as Soviet “gains” - gains
which add to the imperial burden since they involve countries wracked with problems, such as
Vietnam.
The Third World exercises are marred by Soviet inaptitude and limited by the
state of their own economy.
They scarcely displace the global structure enough to test its
stability; and they produce no shock waves or even significant ripples in the Antipodes.
Contra 6.
The main current threat to world stability appears to come not from one of the
dancers in the East-West dance of death, but from the escalating confrontation, easily ignited,
between the lead dancers. With this US policies and practices have at least as much to do as
USSR ones.
Recent US practices are more destabilizing than Soviet ones, and indeed highly
destabilising, because of new weapons and weapons systems, because of rejection of arms
control and Soviet proposals, and because of “star wars” preparation which both accelerates
the arms race on earth and begins a new one in space.
A vast increase in tension and
suspicion accompanies the “arms race” which is in large measure due to US intransigence and
US war-fighting doctrines, new weapons systems, with built-in incentives for pre-emption, and
deliberate abandonment of arms control (see PR).
Such considerations, duly assembled,
demolish the received (but nonetheless crazy) theme that an alliance or alignment with USA
helps increase stability. American practices are to be resisted as much as Soviet.
6. The East-West balance argument: American alignment versus friendly
independence
The need for Australian alignment with the USA is supposed to be shown by the East-West
This politically-important balance argument, which shares key premisses
nr
with the related elitist argument, runs as follows :
balance argument.
7. Global stability is the key to world peace.
8. Stability of the international order is a matter of maintaining a global balance.
But
5. The global balance is constantly threatened by an expansionist USSR.
6A. The threat is [only] checked by the USA, which
(6A.1) guarantees an open and pluralistic international order.
9. Australia’s primary security concern, indeed most vital interest, is this stability.
Hence
10. Australia’s role is to help America maintain the balance.
The rest of Australia’s intervolvement with American military arrangements is then
taken to follow.
But there are many reasons for halting the argument before it reaches this
stage of practical (and allegedly moral) detail. The balance argument assumes much that has
already been rebutted, for instance that the Soviet threat thesis is correct (i.e. 5) and that US
�17
policy is stabilizing (part of 6A).
It also takes for granted, what now is at least in serious
doubt, that American policy is directed at balance and deterrence, rather than what the
American administration appears to be aiming at, superiority. But in that event, Australia is
not really engaged in some longer term balancing feat, so much as in helping USA prevail in
nuclear race, contradicting the goal of world peace of premiss 7.
Contra 10. and its derivation.
The derivation is inadequate: it does not follow that
Australia’s role is such a lackey’s one.
If the balance of strength is leaning in America’s
direction, as most less-biassed evidence indicates, then Australia should surely be throwing its
slight weight in with the Eastern team (that is what such images as the balanced tug-of-war
would suggest).
Presumably premiss 6A.1 is designed to exclude this deplorable thought, of
Australia teaming up with totalitarians.
Nevertheless Australia should be putting its slight
weight where it is effective, given its own broader objectives, interests, principles and
supposedly pluralistic ideals.
There are several different roles Australia could fulfil which
would enable it to make a more satisfactory, less passive, contribution to world peace, among
them de-escalation through active nonalignment, appropriate aid, and so forth.
Thus 10 is hardly well-supported or evident. A more direct approach would be better
than throwing Australian weight unreflectively on one side of the balance.
As a little
reflection attests, the balance image and argument point not in the direction intended, but
towards nonalignment.
Contra 6A (and 6). The theme that US maintains the balance, and hence preserves the peace,
is of course false. For again, it takes two to tango. While it can be granted that the USA is
interlocked with and checks the USSR in this munitions dance, the history of the dance
reveals that the pace-escalation has flowed from the interaction of the one partner with the
other.
That is, but for the USA, the USA would not be required to check the USSR (the
interaction is two-way as with Hegel’s famous master-slave relation).
In any case, it looks as if, on a different historical trajectory, the main states of Western
Europe could match the Soviet Union militarily (for they have comparable combined GNP,
technological resources, etc.; cf. note 20) Thus it is doubtful that the current Soviet build-up,
produced in interaction with the USA, could only be, or have been, checked by the US.
ad 6A.1. As the premiss is only of marginal relevance to the argument, it is enough to observe
that the international order the USA helps maintain leaves very much to be desired.
In its
intervention, militarily, economically and indirectly, USA has assisted substantially in
reducing plurality and openness, is well as in establishing or propping up rotten regimes, etc.
The negative side of American imperialism as well-enough documented, if not widely enough
read or known by Americans themselves (cf. again Chomsky and Herman).
Only under
scandalously low redefinitions of ‘open’ and ‘pluralistic’ is the present “free” world order
�18
either open or pluralistic.
ad 8, and the damaging equivocation on ‘the balance’.
While balance is one way of
maintaining stability in the world arrangements that have presently come to pass, the balance
structure can only carry so much loading.
Add too much weight (of arms tension, and so
forth) to both sides and the precarious structure will fail, probably catastrophically.
increasing probability of catastrophic breakdown, for a variety of reasons
The
(accident,
miscalculation, computer error, human interference, etc.), has been argued elsewhere (e.g.
WPI).
While a certain neither overloaded nor overstressed balance may serve for stability, the
present increasingly stressed balance will probably not.
The balance argument, however,
neglects this dynamical situation, illegitimately switching from a (certain post) balance in
premiss 8 to the (on-going) balance in subsequent premisses.
The balance argument itself
breaks down through equivocation. What the dynamic picture also indicates is the importance
of removing some weight from the balance, most obviously by arms limitation and tension
reduction. It points too to a different role for Australasia, to a less aligned position genuinely
directed at stability. It is to the emerging case for a different role for Australia, and to action
for achieving this different role, that the positive argument will now begin to swing.
The inadequate East-West balance argument is typically combined with attacks upon
proposals for a different role for Australia than American alliance and. service.
effect of these additions is to generate extra confusion and dust.
The main
For the additions are
inessential to the argument, and do not serve to repair it or reinforce it. For example, against
nonalignment or neutralism is set the alleged pervasiveness of nuclear winter. We might as
well be aligned (it’s good for trade and other economic perquisites), so it is sometimes argued
from up top, because if the central balance fails we are all dead. This is a conspicuous
nonsequitur^, worse than ex nihilo quodlibet (because it also suggests that balance is a
prerequisite for stability). But, in the main, the attack is irrelevant, because the point of
nonalignment is to help remove overload and to break down confrontation and its escalation
to war; it is a thing to do now, be fore winter descends, to delay or halt its descent, and most
important, to reduce its extent and severity.
Australia’s weight may be slight, another irrelevant addition goes, but psychologically it
is important for the West.
Any further spread of the “Kiwi disease” (from New Zealand)
would show the weakening of Western resolve, and give the green light for Soviet
expansionism.
Bell, a leading exponent of the balance argument, virtually gives the
impression that if Australia dropped out of American alignment, the Russians would be on the
�road down through the isles to Australia tomorrow/
Much of this sort of rhetoric is
reminiscent of the baseless fear-mongering of an earlier pre-Vietnam time. The Russians have
no such military interests, or present capabilities. And if they were to gear up and set out,
they would be met by substantial resistance along most of the route, resistance obtaining
Western assistance. For America, for one, has major interests, different from Australia’s, in
both Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as elsewhere in East Asia.
The addition, so far
from strengthening the argument, depends, in its “green light for expansion” comparison, on
the previously faulted premiss 5 of Soviet expansionism.
In fact most of the further case for American alignment of one sort or another - when it
is argued-, often nonalignment and neutrality are simply denounced in good old-fashioned
authoritarian style - turns upon already-faulted assumptions.
Catley, for example, another
exponent of “central balance”, presents the following ‘consideration’:
... whatever the Swedes or Swiss may think about the matter, Australia is locked by
considerations of culture, economics, and political philosophy into the defence of the
Western world.
It has both an obligation and a duty to contribute its share to that defence if
necessary by hosting facilities which cannot easily be located elsewhere (p.15).
The premiss is false for reasons essentially indicated: and the premiss in no way sustains the
conclusion, the argument involving among other things, the prescriptive (is-ought) fallacy.
Consider the premiss. Australia is not, unless Catley has information withheld from most of
the rest of us, locked into Western nuclear defence, but in principle independent and free to
reconsider and rethink its options. (American use of the “facilities” is not irrevocable, and
shortly comes up, in principle at least, for reconsideration.)
How do culture, economics and
political philosophy provide locks and chains for Australia but not for nonaligned Western
European states? They do not:
Australia is not a part of USA or altogether a client state;
and the cultures, interests, economic frameworks and political philosophies of the two nations
are significantly different (for details, see CPD). But even if the ideological frameworks were
much more similar than they are, that would not entail similar defence practices (as, e.g.,
ANZUS in all its weakness shows), nor any such defence obligations.
Most of the arguments against nonalignment are of Catley calibre - or worse.
Fortunately, then, such arguments are examined in detail elsewhere, notably by D. Martin in
his examination of counter-arguments to Australian armed neutrality, the legally-recognised
non-belligerent form of nonalignment he favours.
Virtually none of Martin’s counter-case
depends for its success on features of neutrality, which is not advocated here. Virtually all of
Martin’s argument is moreover couched in negative form; his positive brief is very brief. It
�20
reduces to this: alignment or alliance with the USA 'cannot make us secure against such
dangers as we may one day have to meet, while it needlessless exposes to other dangers,
including nuclear war (p.l, italics added). While the message is correct enough, and in need
of wide propagation, it does little on its own to support neutrality, and it by no means
exhausts the positive case for weakening alignment. In particular, there are more positive
arguments of much theoretical interest, to be drawn from systems theory and from the
burgeoning theory of collective goods and action.
7. Contributions towards stability: free-riding, enlarging group size, and
increasing variety.
The strategic world situation we now confront can be viewed as a game with more than 100
players, counting in nation-states and leaving out (for convenience) major organisations such
as the largest 100 transnational companies.
These organisational players align themselves
around two large poles, East and West, as indicated:
NON-ALIGNED
N
N
WEST
EAST
India
NATO States
Japan, Israel
Sweden*
Switzerland*
NZUS: Australi
I
Ireland1*
^Most Latin
' American States
I
Tanzania
Costa Rica**
State
capitalist
Key: N:
*:
**:
State
communist
Nuclear weapons states
Neutral states
Nonmilitary states
There are various - a great many - games these state players are playing, some of which are
practically important for peace and for stability. Some of these games, such as World Empire
and Chicken (already played under one representation), are played essentially between the
East-West superplayers.
There are several problems about East-West games: for instance,
what representation they have, the repeatability of the games (clearly some nuclear games
�21
may, like Russian roulette, end after one round, as they will with the Big One), and the
negative sum characters of some games. And the monolithic East/monolithic West dichotomy
is misleading, and, as will appear, discards crucial detail (in the way simplifications may). So
game-theoretical modelling will be approached differently and more obliquely.
World Security, like regional and local security, is a collective good (technically, an
item, quality unspecified, in joint supply and precluding exclusion). That is not of course to
say that there are not conditions under which security may leave much to be desired, for
instance where security is guaranteed by a narrow and intolerant despotism; but then, so it
can be argued, the trouble lies with the provisioning, not the particular product.
collective good G for the collection of N nation-states.
It is a
It is, furthermore, a collective good
which permits the possibility of free-riding by nation-states. Looked at from this perspective
the recent American complaint about its allies, Japan for example, and their insufficient
expenditure on defence, is a complaint about their free-riding.
Within the balance of power framework the conditions for free-riding are satisfied, for
instance by unaligned and unilaterally disarming states. For
1. G is available to all N members of the collective if it is available to any, and the
achievement (or maintenance) of G by any will make every member better off.
2. G is achieved iff some number m (no larger than that of group K) contribute towards its
provision, where under the balance of power assumption
Il C K C N and II = {USA, USSR}.
3. The expected value of contributing to G or its maintenance is less than the expected value
of not doing so, i.e. likely costs of contribution exceed likely benefits - except perhaps for
members of II given that G is largely provided by II.
There is what can be called a pegged (or asymmetric) free-rider problem, pegged by members
of II for whom the free-rider option is not open - within the confines of the balance of power
assumption - and for whom condition 3 is only satisfied under certain ways of looking at the
matter (e.g. there will be a war 10 years down the road so the expected costs each year exceed
the expected benefits).
For most members of N, by contrast, the benefits of G are available
even should they reduce their contributions.
There is a straightforward case (in narrow game-theoretical terms) for recommending
Australian, and regional, free-riding on the balance of power provision of G. Some arguments,
beyond or adding to those already in effect presented, are these:- Either stability breaks down
catastrophically and there is a large-scale war or it does not. If it does then the region is
�22
better off than it would be if (strongly) aligned because it is unlikely to be (so heavily)
targetted. (Here the dreadful new argument that nuclear winter means that the Antipodes
might as well be involved gets challenged and rejected: as to how see e.g. MF and B. Martin).
If, alternatively, stability doesn’t break down then the region has the benefits in any case,
without the costs. For there is no clear evidence that our alignment and cooperation with the
USA enhances global stability, etc.; indeed, as remarked and will be further argued, the
evidence points to the contrary. As regards Australasian regional weight in the Western block,
do we seriously believe it is significant? That the Australian voice, though useful for
propaganda purposes, makes much real difference in the halls of Northern power? We
shouldn’t: and if we do we’re living in a delusional framework. Australia has been left out of
the picture in virtually all major strategic planning exercises, most difference-making peace
initiatives, etc.,etc.
Now Eastern block countries would hardly object to Antipodean free-riding, rather than
no
offering support (however trifling), comfort and incitement to their opposition/ Furthermore
free-riding is how the Americans, on their theoretical principles, would expect Australia to
act, the rational self-interested procedure (see CPD). It is how lesser nations should act. For
it is economically rational; contributing is not. But won’t the US make things economically
dear for Australia? In threats and theory, yes; but in practice, no more than it has already
done with subsidized wheat deals to the Soviets, no more than it threatened to do already in
the case of New Zealand over the nuclear-ships issue. For except for short term aberrations,
America will never give up trade or business arrangements: one gets the impressions that
America would trade with the Devil Himself, if doing so would open some new markets in
Hell.
Despite its political stigma, free-riding need be no problem, or in any way immoral or
irregular. Perhaps the buses are free; perhaps there is a voluntary payment system, to which
only some need contribute, etc.
With the nuclear fix, free-riding is indeed the moral course;
contributing is not.29 Free-riding, though often protrayed as a problem, is only a problem in
certain cases of collective provisioning, where the good involved is sufficiently desirable and
will not be provided because of too many free- riders.
This is not the situation with global
security, which will be provided, in the curious and precarious way that it is, whether or not
Australia stays on the escalating treadmill or gets off and rides free.
Australia's free-riding
may be a problem for America; it is not for Australia. Interests diverge again.
What is more, judicious free-riding can increase stability.
In pictorial terms, the
stability of a structure is typically increased up to a certain point by securing it more
�23
adequately; for example, if it is a wind tower or similar building, by increasing its rigid ties or
supports to the ground. Then a tripod (or better still a quadrapod) tower is much less likely
to topple than a bipedal one, and requires less guying to stay up. Increasing the diversity, or
variety, of supports increases stability. The theme that diversity correlates with stability has
been sharpened and confirmed in ecology, for instance in the theory of “spreading the risks”
(see EW). The related theme, that a certain variety increases stability, has been elaborated
in cybernetics.
The core eco-systemic idea to be developed is that Australia’s free-riding in
defence, and consequent nonalignment, could help to enhance diversity and variety, and
accordingly to increase stability (especially if done in concert with other client and suppliant
states).
Two interlocked supports in tension, East and West, well dug in but hardly well guyed,
are inadequate for the long-term stability of the precarious structure of world peace.
What
makes engineering sense is not however adding weight to the structure, or even strengthening
the supports that are there, helping the East when the balance is disturbed by the more
powerful West’s surging ahead and likely overburdening the structure. What makes more
sense is increasing the variety of supports, enlarging and diversifying group size, as significant
independent grouping could do.
The monolithic East/monolithic West picture is much more than a convenient
simplification, for instance for strategic thinking.
It may force damaging mistakes in
conceptualisation, mzsconceptualisation perhaps convenient for some larger players.
One
main reason for mistakes concerns group size. Whereas 11+ = {West, East} is a small group,
the number N of nation-states is not, but is considerably larger. But the collective behaviour
of large groups differs in theory from that of small groups; group size is a highly significant
factor (though its precise import remains contentious).
The group N of nation-states is a large group, of essentially self-interested parties,
indeed of substantially economic actors.
collective action applies:
So we may expect that the American theory of
that the groups will behave in a counterintuitive way.
Though
expected to act in the common interest, to obtain security in particular, the collection will
not. On this account (that elaborated by Olson), the common interest can only be guaranteed
by outside influence or imposition (coercion in Olson’s rapid thinking).
But with the
collective of nations, there is, as experience has shown, no outside mediator or influence of
sufficient authority to ensure attainment of the collective good.
The prognosis looks very
gloomy: this most important (though far from unique) collective good will not be provided.
Fortunately the reasoning, like much of the “logic” of collective action, has been too
�21
swift.
The group, though large, is highly privileged, in containing several actors for whom
costs of war exceed benefits (note the shift in perspective from the earlier free-riding condition
3).
Indeed an important economic effect of the knowledge of an ominous nuclear winter is
that virtually all actors involved should now be in that position; for (subjectively) expected
costs of nuclear war have become very high.
To go back to basics, Olson's grand theory is
based on the accountants’ tautology (defining ‘net’)
net agent benefit = gross agent benefits - gross agent costs, i.e. in symbols, for each agent or
o
actor i (in collective N), A- = V-Cj. A group is privileged if Aj is positive for some i in N. It
needs little argument to show that for vulnerable European nation-states the net benefits of
global security are decidedly positive (e.g. with a nuclear war their respective future GDPs
would expectedly fall to near zero). The fact that the group of nation-states is privileged does
not however imply that the collective good involved, security, will be supplied, particularly in
the longer term. The simple logic is not dynamic; it takes no account of mistake, error, or the
like, or of stability achieved through superiority or intermediate instability. An improved
modelling - which can take some account of group size and of the dynamics, through iterated
games - is gained by returning to game-theoretic grounds.
A free rider “problem” is tantamount to a dilemma of some sort; according to the
conventional wisdom, it is a prisoners’ dilemma (cf.
Pettit, but contrast Taylor and Ward).
The argument can go this way:- a free rider problem or issue is defined in terms of the
provisioning of a collective good; but the theory of collective goods is equivalent to that of a
.QI,
generalised prisoners’ dilemma.
Certainly the global nuclear situation appears to present a
dilemma; as much is a commonplace claim. Elsewhere (e.g. WPI) it is argued in detail that it
does indeed present a moral dilemma.
Here the argument - which can proceed through the
theoretical route just sketched above or in the more piecemeal way to be indicated - is that it
is also a prudential dilemma (for many members of N).°2
Consider first, since these have obtained some investigation (e.g. Hardin), the range of
apparent two party games being played by the US and Soviet Union administration (labelled
US and SU respectively) in 1985 as regards the moves of further nuclear armament, A, or
nuclear disarmament, N. (It is supposed, naturally, that the game is set in some background
context, e.g. nuclear disarmament is not considered in isolation from on-going French and
Chinese nuclear armament).
It is important here, as other places, to distinguish the
administration - which for the most part calls the shots - from the society and the people. It
is administrations or governments that generally take people into war; etc.
The American
people seem rather more inclined towards nuclear de-escalation than their administration; the
German people were clearly opposed to the new nuclear missiles their administration
proceeded to install.
The strategy games involved are then administration games, which we
�25
can suppose to be played over successive time intervals, e.g. years; so there is interaction and
feedback as the games go on - until the Big Ones explode.
Within this simplistic setting, the apparent games being played by US and SU are those
diagrammed next:
New Initial game
Prisoners’ Dilemma Game
SU
SU
D
US
A
Revised Game
D
2,2
A
4,1
1,4
3,3
D
US
A
SU
D
3,2
A
4,1
1,4
2,3
D
US
A
D
3,3
A
4,1
1,4
2,2
According to Hardin, ‘giving evidence of [his] deformation professionelle’, the Prisoners’
Dilemma (PD) ‘represents the preference ordering of virtually all the articulate policy
analysts in the United States and presumably also in the Soviet Union’ (p.248). While PD
may have represented US policy, there is considerable evidence (as already indicated) that it
no longer does, that the US administration has shifted to a more aggressive, war-fighting,
phase.
That is, the US has interchanged its rankings of (D,D) and (A,A), presumably some
time between 1978 and 1984 games. The Soviets, who have been much more consistent (and
no doubt better censored) in their policy pronouncements, appear not to have changed their
game, but have stuck with their form of deterrence and no-first-strike.
However they are
bound to try to keep up with the Americans, and so are presumably pushed towards the
Revised Game shown, which pleasantly restores symmetry.
Stable or equilibrium outcomes for each game are circled.
An outcome is said to be
stable if neither player has incentive to switch strategies unilaterally on the strength of the
game, i.e. to alter the outcome except by influencing the other player also to alter strategies.
All these games provide dilemmas, in a broad sense, that equilibrium is achieved in an
undesirable and dangerous outcome.
In all the apparent games, arming is the dominant
strategy for each player; yet in the PD game that is even Pareto-suboptimal, whence the
economic fascination.
But as the other games deliver results which are socially suboptimal
(and below a satisfying threshold), all these games are dilemmas.
And the same applies to
suggested alternative games that might plausibly be taken to represent the superpower
situation, and such as Chicken.
A recognisably suboptimal outcome is guaranteed by the
independent ‘‘stable” strategies. What is worse, iteration of games does not help (as it may in
other political circumstances). For there are substantial political and military incentives for
the superpower players not to adjust their preferences substantially in socially superior
directions after repeated games, but to do what the US at least appears to have done, to make
the situation worse.
�26
It is important then to attempt to modify or curtail these self-interested superpower
games.
There are various connected ways of going about this.
One is for other parties to
combine to limit or discourage these games. Another alternative is for them to try to alter the
games. Thus much socially preferable would be a switch to a coordination game of some sort;
for instance, to the game which neutrals tend to play (and which Lackey, in contrast to other
more bellicose utilitarians, sees utilitarian superpowers playing; hence Hardin’s provocative
label for this game, ‘Lackey’s game’). In the coordination game diagrammed, WN represents
a western-inclined neutral and EN an Eastern inclined neutral (e.g. Yugoslavia):
EN
WN
D
D
1,1
A
3,2
A
2,3
4,4
[Other coordination games, with
(D,D) assigned (1,1)]
Now the dilemmatic and coordination games are not played in isolation; they come
together in international settings such as United Nations’ committees (and elsewhere, since
coordination games are frequently peoples’ games as well).
Superimposing the games, with
coordination games of the first sort applied to previously given US and SU games, leads to the
following augmented East (E) and West (W) games:
New
Game, Augmented
Prisoners’ Dilemma
Augmented
E
E
A
D
Revised
Game, Augmented
A
4,1
2,2 :
*4,1' \
: 3^2 ’
D 1
:
W .........
1,4:
A
2/3:
2/3;
D ; 1
w ........
: 1,4
3,3 ;
a
4
;
E
D
2/3
• • — •-
: 3-3’**:
D ; 1
W
I
2,3
; .
• 2.3
A
D
2/3
2,2
a
4
■ 4,1*
! . ;
: 2/3 J
4
Key: rh represents a sequence of ms, i.e. m, m, m ... for each coordination player; 2/3 a
sequence of 2s and 3s in some order.
As augmenting games reveals, to play with a superpower is to help reinforce a stable
deadlock.
But playing an independent coordination game increases variety and can help in
breaking the deadlock, in fact in several ways. For one, enough significant players playing a
coordination game can alter the overall dominant strategy towards disarmament.
For
another, much more pressure can be brought to bear on the superpowers. For example, with
less support, unilateral action by the US administration on Star-Wars and arms build-up can
be exposed.
Superpower
militarism and
power excursions would stand
naked
and
�27
unsupported.
Australia’s impact, in particular, would be rather greater as a nonaligned
free-rider pressing seriously for disarmament and regional nuclear-freedom (instead of, as at
present, white-wash polemics and token ambassadors, undermined by a none-too-tacit policy
of US support).
The strategy suggested by game-theoretic modelling converges then with that suggested
by other approaches, notably regional and ecological approaches.
The strategy is that of
limitation, of disengagement from escalating US/USSR war games, and progressive alteration
of their likely outcomes by defusing coordination moves.
In more practical terms, the
approaches mean trying to limit and modify superpower games by restricting their games and
supporting regional or local coordination of players, in forms of organisations both of nations
and of people. Such organisations would work, as many have already been doing, to contract
the regions and spheres of influence and access of US and USSR military administrations, and
to diminish support for their war-fighting objectives.
For example, Antipodean groups could, and should, coordinate to ease the American
military out of the South Pacific region, meanwhile resisting any intrusion of Russian
military. Then, while the Europeans are doing their coordinated de-escalating, denuclearising
things right across Europe, the Russian and American war games are progressively excluded
from the entire Southern Hemisphere. An eventual aim geographically is, to send their
weapons of war back home, to restrict their (and French and other) global military enterprises
to their “own” backyards, where they would not always be so enthusiastically received.
Fortunately such an ambitious and optimistic project, so unlikely to come to pass given
present nation-state arrangments, can be accomplished piecemeal, from small and significant
beginnings, already to be seen.
As a result of recent movements in the region, a South Pacific nuclear-free region is now
a politically-achievable option. A first token step has already been taken. But next steps,
towards genuine nuclear-freedom, require above all cooperation of a less aligned Australia,
joining other disengaging “free-riders” in the region.
That in turn requires, as a practical
component, closure of American bases in Australia as their leases terminate, cessation of
American nuclear ship visits and aircraft staging, and an end to uranium mining and sales.
As Australia is the only country in the region supplying uranium, and the main location of US
bases, such steps would be most significant. Even so, the Pacific regional effect would remain
unduly limited, so long as France and the US are based within the region, and transit of
nuclear ships is internationally sanctioned everywhere on the shrinking high seas.
Plainly
there are further more difficult steps on the way to southern Pacific nuclear-freedom and
independence, i.e. even for one of the easier oceanic regions.
But there is no good reason to
�28
expect that removing the nuclear scourge, any more than eliminating other major politico
social evils, will be easy.
Permanent removal and a less dubious “peace” than we presently
enjoy is not something that will be achieved by more of what we have witnessed, or even
through clever diplomacy and smart technological tricks, such as new defensive weapons; it
will take difficult structural and radical design change.
8. On the need for, possibility of, and prospect of appropriate structural
change.
There is little doubt that certain sorts of structural political change would be highly
conducive to peace (e.g. democratic reorganisation of the superpowers), and that certain
fundamental changes may even be sufficient for permanent peace.
With that in view they
have long been advocated - at least from Rousseau and Kant onwards.
But it has also been
supposed that some such changes are necessary for lasting peace; ‘it is also necessary to
transform the structures that lead to war’ (B. Martin, p.12). To render this theme immune to
obvious criticisms - for example, that straightforward authoritarian extension of certain
established structures could bring an end to war - further desiderata, typically presupposed,
are invoked, for instance that certain freedoms, modest material standards of life, and so on,
are duly guaranteed, and also the type of necessity involved is wound back to some lower
technical level (not excluded however by present practicalities). These adjustments make the
necessity theme more difficult to assess, but also more difficult to sustain.
There are two parts to its assessment and defence, a negative and critical part,
demolishing a range of arguments from determinism, human nature, and the like, to the effect
that arrangements have to be more or less the way they are, and a positive part, comprising
direct arguments for the theme.
The large negative part of this enterprise will simply be
illustrated.34
According to deterministic and mechanistic approaches, such as that of (marxist)
technological determinism, nuclear weapons, like megamachines generally, are no aberration.
They are an integral part of the business of industrial and ecological conquest, a further stage
in human intervention which has already involved substantial disruption through pesticides,
wastes, etc. The argument tends to the fatalistic. The megamachines of conquest are made,
and once made they will be used. No change in political arrangement, which would make any
difference, is possible. Sometimes technological enthusiasts push their position and luck, even
further, that a weapon or device once invented by humans will be used: there is no stopping
progress.
But in doing so they overextend themselves.
While there is, sadly a fair induction
from the manufacture of weapons (of any given type, for many batches are never deployed) to
their use, inductions from invention of machines or the like to their manufacture are
�c
29
unreliable and subject to many counterexamples (and many machines that do eventually get
made have been reinvented or independently rediscovered).
But even the good inductions do
not show that weapons of various sorts must be used, that a change in background political
organisation would not frustrate the inductions.
The broader deterministic position is of
course that such background changes are not possible either; political arrangements too, like
the rest of social life, are technologically or economically determined.
But (nonanalytical)
determinism, technological and other, is false, so it is argued elsewhere (JB, CPD). Different
political arrangements, which alleviate problems, are technically possible, and arrangements
would be different in differently evolved worlds. Things did not and do not have to be the way
they are, or the social and political sort of way they are.
Many routes, none of deductive strength, lead to the conclusion that the dominant
political structures of our time, fashioned
(with
much input from schemes of past
philosophers) from feudal institutions, require extensive structural alteration.
In particular,
they need to be superseded by alternative structures less intricately tied to war, which do not
promote or lead so readily to war. Such a theme has been argued directly from the nuclear fix
itself (as e.g. WP1, p.47ff.).
But suppose, improbable as it may seem, that nuclear weapons
all vanished, thereby removing the current nuclear fix; for instance, they turned out to be
quietly
self-destructing,
or
a
disarmament actually took place.
massive
thermodynamic
miracle
occurred,
or
nuclear
The problem of war would not be thereby removed, and
even that of nuclear war would only be given some respite. For the structural arrangements
for war would remain intact.04 Conventional weapons would remain, along with weapons
perhaps as dangerous as nuclear weapons, such as chemical and biological ones.
Nuclear
weapons, insofar as they were removed (for small caches are easily hidden away), could soon
be replaced, especially if nuclear power plants remained intact; and nothing would prevent the
development of (Star-Wars) weapons more diabolical than nuclear ones.
War cannot be eliminated while leaving the rest of society as it is - by freezing the
status quo. ... The structural conditions for war need to be removed - not reinforced
as appeals to elites may do - and superseded by alternative structures which do not
lead to war (B. Martin, p.12: Martin goes on to indicate the types of structures, and
how to reach them).
Structural adjustments can provide conditions for lasting satisfactory peace. An initial,
somewhat simplistic, Kantian argument for the proposition that peace is possible (presented
by Latta, introducing Permanent Peace), runs as follows:-
Peace, perpetual peace, is an ideal, not merely of a speculative kind but a practical
idea, a moral principle. Hence this ideal ought to be realised, i.e. there ought
(morally) to be peace. But ought entails can; therefore peace is possible.
�30
From Heracleit.us through Hegel there buzzes an impressive swarm of philosophers"*6 who have
rejected the second premiss. Some are even captivated by such extravagant counter-claims as
that with peace everything would stop, that competition, with war as one limit, is essential to
motion and progress!
would
now
be
With the recent shift in philosophical fashions, the second premiss
more widely
conceded,
though
often
not
on
Kantian
grounds,
but
consequentialist. Such grounds to support the theme that peace is desirable and ought to be
realised, but are more discriminating in that they help indicate what sort of peace.
Unfortunately, however it is done, the second premiss does not sustain the conclusion, ought
does not entail can, as many moral dilemmas reveal (see MD, WP1).
So fortunately, there is a more satisfactory and revealing route to the conclusion that
peace is possible, and indeed is feasible. That is the more elaborate method of (semantical)
modelling: present in detail scenarios of societies where peace persists (for the sceptical it may
be necessary to recall n-human models, with n small). This sort of thing is of course already
done, in more pleasing fashion than logicians could hope to emulate, if rather less precisely, by
OQ
novelists and science-fiction writers, and by activists like the different Martins.
What all
these scenarios point to, however, are societies considerably different from our own - though
not in the people involved, who have their weaknesses, their power drives, and so forth, but
because of significant structural alterations in the societies depicted.
By way of such modellings we can not merely argue to the feasibility of lasting peace,
but push ahead with the argument, that societies of these restructured sorts are desirable
alternatives to contemporary military- industrial arrangements.
For those of us then who
want to move towards such pacific alternatives, the practical inference, from feasibility and
desirability is clear: we should begin on the real work of structural change.
Peace is possible and desirable, but the prospects are poor (as Heilbroner has said of the
human prospect).
Present arrangements, though contingent and fashioned in large measure
from the schemes of past intellectuals, are thoroughly entrenched, and enforced, both
ideologically and by much physical power, often as if along with natural law they were God
given, though they are no longer appropriate. Even small nonstructural changes look difficult
to achieve in present political climates. Through climates have not changed that much, major
social improvements have been gained, not instantanously, but in longer-term struggles with
government. Such short-term difficulties did not deter social theorists such as Kant, who like
Rousseau before him and many after him, were concerned with obtaining lasting peace.
The world has changed enormously since the time of Kant’s proposals for peace (of
1795), and even since the time of Veblen’s more cynical additions (in 1917). Hard science and
�31
destructive power have grown enormously; and even theoretical knowledge of collective
behaviour, especially that admitting of game-theoretic treatment, though still slight, has
advanced.
But political arrangements and what can be accomplished politically have, in
important respects, changed very little, since Rousseau complained (around 1761) that
governments were probably too short-sighted to appreciate the merits of his project for
perpetual peace.
Governments have long been, and been seen as, main obstacles to peace. Thus Veblen
rightly maintained that ‘... if the peace is to be kept it will have to come about irrespective of
governmental management, - in spite of the State rather than by its good offices’ (p.7).^^ So
it has been with most major social changes; for they have involved structural political change
disturbing to governmental conservatism.
In his search for the indispensible conditions for lasting peace, Kant claimed, as others
have claimed since, that peace is not possible under present structural arrangements of an
unregulated competing nation-state kind.
As times have changed, so, to a limited extent,
have state structural arrangements, since Kant compiled his conditions. In particular, there is
now, in the shape of the United Nations, a very weak reflection of what Kant looks for, a
world (or European!) federation of nations.
But crucial ingredients in Kant’s resolution are
still lacking:- namely, at the upper level, what is required for a standard resolution of
Prisoners Dilemma type situations - some surrender of national sovereignty, especially as
regards war,
and, at the lower level, “republican” states.
Major blockages to adequate
arrangements for peace remain at two critical levels of organisation, that concentrated upon
of the organisation of collectives of states and, in part by devolution, that of the internal
organisation of individual states themselves.
Much evidence has now accumulated that more far-reaching changes than Kant,
Rousseau and Veblen envisaged are required at both international and nation-state levels if
genuine peace is to be secured. Indeed significant changes are wanted even in republician
states for peace movements to get their mixed message through already fixed channels to state
control systems.
For this sort of reason, movements on a single front, such as peace, are
unlikely to succeed on their own, but should be linked into a broader plurality of movements,
which seek to widen informational and democratic channels, and to alter the character and
membership of state systems, and thereby render them much more controllable and
accountable.40
Many longer-haul structural changes depend upon diverting nuclear war in the
meantime. Thus arguing for more far-reaching changes, for an altered nonaligned Australia,
�32
for a nuclear-free South Pacific, for regional structural changes, certainly does not exclude
arguing and working for obvious measures for reducing risks of nuclear war. These include: a
serious commitment to arms control by the superpowers (whose practices threaten our
futures, though most of us lack representation in either); a move away from war-fighting
strategies and associated destabilising weapons-systems;
moderation
of confrontational
rhetoric and other tensions-inducing practices by superpower administrations, and improved
efforts at mutual understanding (as well some appreciation of the elements of political
pluralism); and then, remote though it may appear, significant steps towards nuclear
disarmament.
Richard Sylvan 41
Bungendore NSW
�33
NOTES
1.
Queensland premier, with destructive deep-South policies.
2.
The point, which has become controversial, is argued in effect in Gilbert.
3.
See especially Dibb, as reported in the ANU Reporter, and for a more guarded
elaboration, his IAD (e.g. p.163 ‘At present, planning for the defence of Australia lack
coherence because there is no clear definition, in priority order, of what needs
defending’); see also Sharp, p.l48ff and differently Langtry and Ball, p.575ff., p.6O5ff.
The much-heralded Dibb Review of mid-1986 would, if (as already seems unlikely) it
were adopted, remove some of the lesser incoherence in Australian policy, that involving
details of regional defensive defence (as would also Langtry and Ball, if followed
through).
While Dibb appears to have demolished what he refers to scathingly as the ‘largely
mythical “core force” concept’, a new controversy has sprung up over whether
Australia’s more self-reliant defence should be purely defensive defence, Dibb’s ill-named
‘strategy of denial’, or whether it should include an offensive component. Dibb himself
has rather rapidly shifted ground on this important issue.
In late 1983 he was
contending that ‘Australia should have in the force-in-being significant deterrent
capabilities, based on present air and naval strike assets, which can mount defensive and
offensive operations against attacking forces, their staging bases and lines of resupply’
(IAP, p.166). But in the otherwise conservative Review of 1986 such offensive defence is
abandoned; no such forces and equipment for offensive off-shore operations are
recommended. Instead ‘the review proposes a layered strategy of defence within our
area of direct military interest. Our most important defence planning concern is to
ensure that an enemy would have substantial difficulty in crossing the sea and air gap’.
The new offensive/defensive defence controversy puts the Review’s adoption in
increasing doubt - in which event the local incoherence in strategic planning processes
and militational difficulties Dibb alludes to early in his statement will presumably
persist.
The Review not merely fails to address significant regional issues, as to defence
priorities, and as to multiple purpose roles for Australian armed forces given that they
will be involved in virtually no military activity other than maintenance and a certain
“preparedness” (for on Dibb’s overstatement of the prevailing view of Australia’s very
favourable regional security prospects, ‘there is no conceivable prospect of any power
contemplating invasion of our continent and subjugation of our population’). But
further, the Review is itself vague to incoherent, concerning wider defence issues, vague
as to the post-ANZUS situation, and incoherent about Australia’s role in US global
“defence” activity.
According the Dibb (CT, p.16), ‘there is no requirement for
Australia to become involved in United States contingency planning for global war. The
presence of the joint facilities, together with the access that we provide to visits by
United States warships and the staging through of Australia of B-52 bombers, are a
sufficient tangible contribution to the Alliance.’
These contributions are not
involvement? That is not how the USSR views the matter: they are the reported sole
�34
basis of USSR nuclear targetting of Australia (see Dibb. SS p.13).
global stance is left essentially to the USA.
And Australia's
Amazingly, in the Strategic Basis Papers (SB), Australia criticizes New Zealand because
‘it has still developed no policy for national defence and tends to look to ... the US as its
primary source of defence guidance’ (p.29). Note that C3I abbreviates the mouthful,
Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence.
4.
See Sharp, p.l46ff. An Australian policy should moreover fit with the genuine needs
and shared aspirations of local people - to the extent, presumably, that these are
commendable; again the presupposed value framework is critical.
5.
Thus e.g. Gray (p.17) on the Reagan Administration’s ‘foolhardy brief willingness to
talk publicly about nuclear strategy’, and his distain for public involvement or input.
There is some concern, especially among neo-conservatives, about US defence strategies
being ‘undermined by well-meaning persons who believe they are helping the cause of
peace’ (Bell p.10; similarly Gray).
Even those not so far right support partial
information releases which maintain public confidence; e.g. Dibb on ‘the release of a
generalised statement about ;the] functions of the US bases in Australia ... to give
Australians more confidence about their crucial contribution to the Allied cause’ (ISA,
p.166). ‘Our defence policy-making process is probably more “closed” than that of any
other advanced Western democracy’ according to Langtry and Ball (p.608), who
contend that ‘the public needs to be involved much more in our defence planning and
operations'.
For a justified critique of public exclusion and leave-it-to-the-experts
approaches, see B. Martin; also Sharp.
6.
The paper was drafted in mid-1985.
7.
For those amassing evidence that Australia falls into the inexact class of client states,
the following Australian contribution is noteworthy: ‘The US prefers to act as a
member of a group, and a contribution by Australia can also assist in demonstrating to
Congressional and public opinion that the objectives sought are significant enough to
attract allied support’ (SB, p.28)
8.
As to DI and arms control, see, e.g. Mack PR and Gray. As to D2, ‘USA has now an
announced first-strike nuclear targeting policy’ technologically reinforced, Hayes, p.4;
and see also Mack AC, p.111. The goal of the Reagan administration is superiority (a
conveniently ambiguous term). Thus e.g. Gray (p.32): ‘it is of course essential that the
United States modernize its offensive forces so as to render the Soviet Union genuinely
offensive-counterforce incompetent.’
9.
On the major changes in American policy, see e.g. Gray p.118 ff. Though America is
now said to have a ‘new national security concept of which SDI is the centerpiece’ it
may still lack an ‘arms control policy’ (Gray, p.25,pll). Not only arms control, but
American commitment to the security of allies, remain at least decidedly cloudy
matters. Thus it is of little avail to contend that Australia does have a coherent secondorder global policy, namely the (discreditable) one of following prevailing American
policy. For the US lacks a first-order policy which is sufficiently clear in relevant
respects.
The American direction of Australian policy had better be away from too much public
exposure because Australians, no more than New Zealanders, mostly do not like being
pushed around, even by Americans.
�35
10.
Thus we can avoid the important debate as to whether, and to what extent, deterrence
remains part of US global “defence” policy (though it certainly remains part of the
policy sold to the American public). As to the philosophical significance of the debate,
see Gay, p.l29ff. and Benn.
11.
The common-interest theme is often traced to (partly self-interested) American action in
the Pacific in World War II. Curiously Australia’s interests are are now said also to
converge with those of Japan, but to be diametrically opposed to those of the USSR
(despite increasing trade).
12.
Nor, though this is a longer story, does Australian culture by any means coincide with
American: see CPD. Thus a uniform treatment is entirely inappropriate. Similarly, a
single overarching treatment for a monolithic West is thoroughly inadequate: see further
below in the text.
13.
Australian planning should be looking at strategic models (game-theoretic and other)
which include Australia. For, as argued below, abandoning the uniformity assumption
of the monolithic West, of the West as one parish, makes significant differences to the
results yielded.
14.
As Cock goes on: ‘These basic issues increasingly become lost in the array of consumer
choices’.
15.
‘The serf societies - more or less willingly - accept the status of “allies”, i.e. protection
with rights and duties as in feudal societies. They become client countries’ (Galtung,
p.169).
16.
So-called by Mack PC. But the formulation presented follows G. Davidson’s more
satisfactory account in Canberra Times, Wednesday, May 8, 1985, p.2. Mack considers
that what amounts to the elitist case is the ‘altogether more sophisticated argument
[which] holds sway ... in government’ (p.l, italics added)!
17.
The “Asian hordes” derive from one of the less spoken about successors to the Yellow
Peril, from the immediate past days of the Asian communist threat, the Domino theory,
and White Australia.
18.
As Stephenson argued, less fortunately, 20 years ago. Even when around World War II
Japan, did have interest in access to strategic raw materials, the Japanese High
Command decided against invading Australia because of the difficulty of dealing with
the people - a point of much importance.
19.
Of course, such military expenditure is also encouraged by economic forces, e.g. like
much Third World hard currency expenditure it helps the American economy along a
bit.
20.
Heilbroner has traced some of the economic components and consequences of what, with
excess exaggeration and insufficient irony, he calls ‘the rise and subsequent fall of the
American imperium’ (p.52): it hasn’t fallen that far yet. ‘Empires have always been
expensive and the American empire was no exception. ... The sheer military cost ... for
the United States alone ... is roughly ten percent of ... GNP for the last 25 years ($2 x
10) in 1972 dollars)’. American imperial spending supplemented by other capitalist
countries fueled inflation, enhanced poverty, etc., and was complements by, what it was
represented as required by, counterexpenditure and efforts by the USSR.
�36
‘The establishment of an American hegemony [consisted and: resulted not just in very
large military expenditures, but in the rapid build-up of American capital investments
abroad. Between 1950 and 1970, the value of American-owned plant and equipment
abroad leaped from $12 billion to $78 billion’ (p.54). A result of the expenditure abroad
was a serious balance of payments problem (negative “capital flows” and balances), and
a growing accumulation of IOUs. On this sort of basis, Heilbroner speculates that ‘the
mere operations of the American imperium by itself - deemed of such critical importance
to preserve the peace and security of the capitalist world - was in all likelihood a
sufficient condition for the globalisation of the inflationary phenomena’ (p.57 with insert
from p.56).
According to Heilbroner, ‘Long before the Vietnam debacle, it was clear that American
arms could not prevent the rise of revolutionary governments in the under-developed
world’ (p.57). But really very little evidence of collapse is presented by Heilbroner; and
seemingly there is little. What there is more substantial evidence for is the marked
decline of the American imperium in the period (1973-8) concerned. One piece of
evidence is the sharp decline in America’s share of World GDP, shown in the following
table of select leading national economies:
SHARE OF WORLD GDP (%)
POPULATION
SHARE
COUNTRY
RANK
1968
1975
1984
(1984 est)
USA
1
35.0
24.3
25.0
5.2
USSR
2
11.1
11.0
13.8
6.2
JAPAN
3
5.2
8.0
9.5
2.7
GERMANY FDR
4
5.1
6.7
5.7
1.5
FRANCE
5
4.6
5.4
CHINA
6
2.9
4.8
4.3
22.6
UK
8
2.8
2.8
2.3
1.3
4.4
1.3
INDIA
12
1.3
1.5
1.1
15.1
AUSTRALIA
15
1.1
1.4
1.0
0.3
�37
The table should also make it clear that if the USA cannot sustain a grand empire, nor
can the USSR. A totalitarian Pax Sovietica is even less likely than a capitalistic Pax
American was.
21.
Although, so the documents continue, ‘neighbourhood contingencies .... are at present
assessed as impossible’!
The theme that the USA affords no sure guarantee of Australian defence is reiterated in
Langtry and Bell, e.g. p.608. They go on there to outline the major points that reliance
upon the US has distorted Australian arrangements (with forces better equipped to fight
alongside the Americans in Asia than on their own in defending Australia) and has led
to neglect of the regional priorities, ‘to defence planning which at least would recently
paid little attention to the direct defence of our continent and the protection of our
remote communities’ (p.608).
22.
The French, who operate a global network second only to the Americans and more
extensive than the Russians, with many forces in the Pacific region, have never been
seriously considered. Yet in certain significant respects French social and cultural
arrangements are closer to Antipodean ones than American arrangements are. In these
days of technological warfare, the post-Waterloo loss record of the French should not be
given too much weight; we don’t after all look very hard at the American record of
defeats and incompetence. Etc.
23.
If Australia is not likely to be threatened there is no real deterrence advantage because
nothing to deter. Other advantages of the ANZUS alliance such as access to high-level
intelligence are not only dubious (see PC, D. Martin), but not always guaranteed by the
alliance as the blackout of New Zealand shows.
24.
Soviet activity is undoubtedly perceived rather differently by American administrations
than Antipodean ones. ‘An agressive, treacherous, ruthlessly self-interested, expansionist
increasingly powerful, and hence increasingly threatening state - that is the image of the
Soviet Union in America.
It is the image which has legitimised the strategic
modernation and Star Wars programs’ (to adopt Mack ST, pl). To see that this is
indeed the intellectually shoddy route by which these grand and dangerous programs are
justified, it is enough to work through fundamentalist sources, such as Gray. It is
almost as if Americans had projected some of their own occasionally-manifested worst
features into the giant enemy.
25.
After some considerable reconstruction, that is. For the argument, curiously referred as
that of “central balance” in newspaper-level publications of academics (e.g. Catley,
Bell), is never presented in requisite detail - which is one reason why it has proved hard
to criticise and refute.
26.
As well both the premiss and its usual substitutes are false (see MF). The type of
argument exhibited is a good example of prevalent Australian consequentialist thinking.
A parallel argument, enjoying unwarranted popularity, runs: We might as well sell
uranium (e.g. to France), because if we don’t someone else will - as if motives counted
morally for nothing.
27.
See also the discussion of Bell’s claims in D. Martin and in Mack PC.
28.
Since the New Zealand restrictions on nuclear ships, ‘the Soviet media has been full of
gloating references to the prospect of the collapse of the ANZUS treaty’ according to
Dibb (SS, p.14). Given the unimportance of the Antipodes to Soviet interests (as Dibb
�38
himself explains), Dibb is surely exaggerating, at least, when he later claims that ‘the
prospect of the breakup of the AN ZUS treaty would be of enormous benefit to the
USSR’s world-wide interests’ (SS p.31).
Soviet support for Antipodean independence and for ‘a real nuclear weapon-free zones'
in the South Pacific has its disconcerting elements (‘with friends like that ...’); but
luckily the quality of ideas does not depend essentially on their sources and supporters.
29.
As WPI serves to show. In a different context, Bell objects to Australian free-loading
‘on other people’s risks and burdens. That has certainly not been our tradition, and I
hope it will not become so, since it is morally quite indefensible’ (p.7). Not so: bludging,
for instance, is a well-established, if disapproved of, part of the tradition; and in some
cases it is morally in order. However, free-riding is not being proposed merely for self
interested reasons, e.g. to remove the present risks of nuclear targetting; it is being
proposed with a view to altering the two great alliance structures that at present
dominate international politics. Bell’s objection to such a course is that it ‘would on the
one hand tend to increase the tendency of the superpowers to unilateralism, and on the
other hand tend to induce many of the minor powers in question (including Australia)
to consider acquiring nuclear capacity’ (p.7). The second alternative neglects the non
proliferation treaty, to which Australia is a signatory; the first appears to assume
erroneously that friendly relations with America are foregone; both are pretty minor
considerations (and both can be dealt with in other negotiated ways) compared with the
major problem of nuclear war.
30.
The less than perspicuous symbolism is that used in Hardin (CA, p.20, p.39), but with
agents’ costs or contributions, C, duly agent relativized. Hardin misleadingly treats C
as a fixed parameter, thus strictly falsifying the tautology.
31.
Thus Hardin who (in CA) claims to ‘demonstrate the equivalence of the logic of
collective action and the Prisoners’ Dilemma’ (p.4) The demonstration is given on
p.25ff.
32.
But of course the two types of dilemma interconnect.
33.
Even so, significant change in USA looks unlikely. Present arrangements suit not only
the American corporate-administrative power elite, which can direct public opinion
through its control of the main communications media, but many other fat-cat
Americans, rather well. The polarisation of the world into two camps increases US
control of the larger and far wealthier camp, yet scarcely reduces US trade or markets.
While it does limit the global coverage of US business and multinationals, and
somewhat restricts the transfer of other regions’ surplus value to the USA, it ensures the
much greater advantage of being able to maintain the US domestic political economy on
a military basis. The US and the USSR not only dance together; they were made for
each other.
Abroad US hegemony is maintained through a series of alliances and economic control
strategies. Particularly ominous for the South Pacific are the Trilateral and Pacific Rim
arrangements (which, with much local assistance, are helping to send Australia on its
present economic trajectory). When advice or persuasion directed at allies and client
states fail, economic measures can be resorted to (capital outflows, for instance, being a
highly effective mechanism, “aid” a lesser device). For the most part, the imperial war
machine can remain in the background. At home updated and improved imperial
measures also work well. The mass consumerist society affords a rich and diverting
selection of bread (much of it again imported) for a majority of Americans; television
�39
and its entertainment variants offer a constant diet of circuses. For passive middle
mainstream America, the vast police and security network remains a largely background
and even unnoticed phenomenon; what is seen is even welcomed as a necessary shield
from that other, dangerous, minority America.
American social, educational and media management of opinion is obviously successful.
Of present relevance, most Americans have been convinced that unilateral disarmament
would be unAmerican. Thus the American administration, being hedged in by opinion
they have helped to generate, cannot move in any such directions. For, given popular
opinion, it would of course be politically disastrous, as well as undemojl’cratic!
In the USSR, where political control is exercised to a much greater extent through overt
power, present change of substance appears even less likely.
34.
More of the negative enterprise is attempted elsewhere, e.g. a critique of the supposed
strait-jacket of human nature is begun in CPD. From Plato through Hegel and into
contemporary times it has been erroneously supposed that war, like aggression, is part
of human nature, that war is a permanent (and perhaps even desirable) condition of
human and social existence. For a refutation, see e.g. Trainer and Waite.
35.
As observed by B. Martin, who uses this important form of argument for institutional
change to get this thick book started (pp.12-13).
36.
The swarm includes some anomalies, such as that somewhat tarnished hero of deep
ecology, Spinoza: see e.g. Northedge.
37.
Perhaps Kant had some such scenario in view in his theme that peace is empirically
possible, which he coupled with his striking claim that peace is morally and rationally
imperative. The latter claim, running in direct opposition to the long line of bellicose
philosophers, really relies on the correct, but controversial, assumption that states are
subject to the same moral relations as individual persons. Both then have an obligation
to seek peace derived from forms of the categorial morality, notably from rational
autonomy, the universality of maxims, and the ultimate value of persons (or, yet more
chauvinistically, of humanity).
38.
Veblen argued against the State on the basis that ‘governmental establishments and ...
powers ... are derived from feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which in turn, are
of a predatory origin and of an irresponsible character’ (p.9), however the Christianfeudal origin of the State provided only one - and a coersive - evolutionary pattern of
organisation (pp. 12-13), a pattern much influenced moreover by schemes of
intellectuals. Other patterns remain feasible.
39.
There are now theoretical arguments for Kant’s claim, as well as practical arguments of
an inductive sort.
40.
Such is also the new message from America: for the peace movement to get through to
the administration, American democracy must be overhauled and revitalised, capitalist
democracy superseded by true democracy or “republicanism” (see especially Cohen and
Rogers, and earlier Chomsky). But the message, like the US peace movements’ very
limited demands for peace, leaves the State, as the bringer of wars, and main source of
violence essentially intact; the structural changes suggested, which will be slow to
achieve, are much too narrowly conceived.
41.
My thanks for information to Andrew Mack and David Bennett, and for comments to
�Grover Foley and Russell Hardin.
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Volume 6, Macmillan, New York, 1967, 63-67.
M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965.
P. Pettit, ‘Free riding and foul dealing’, Journal of Philosophy, to appear,
J.J. Rousseau, A Project for Perpetual Peace (trans. E.M. Nuttal), London, 1927 (first
Published 1761).
R. Routley, ‘On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence, and the political
fall out’, Discussion papers in Environmental philosophy #5, Research School of Social
Sciences, Australian National University, 1984.
R. Routley, ‘Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament’, Philosophy and Social
Criticism 3/4(1984) 19-34; referred to as MF.
R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion
Papers in Environmental Philosophy #6, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian
National University, 1984; referred to as MD.
�43
R. Sharp (ed.), Apocalypse No. Pluto Press, Sydney, 1984.
P.R. Stephenson, The Foundations of Culture, W.J. Miles, Sydney, 1936.
R. Sylvan, ‘Culture and the roots of political divergence’, typescript, Canberra, 1985; referred
to as CPD.
M. Taylor and H. Ward, "Chickens, whales, and bumpy goods: alternative models of public
goods provision’, Political Studies 30(1982) 350-370.
T. Trainer and H. Waite, ‘Culture and the production of aggression’, in Sharp, ep.cit,
205-226.
The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy, leaked extracts published in the National
Times, March 30-April 5, 1984, 23-30; referred to as SB.
Threats to Australian Security, Parliamentary Joint Committee for Foreign Affairs and
Defence, Australian Government Printer, Canberra; referred to as TAS.
T. Veblen, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation, Viking
Press, New York, 1945 (first published 1917).
�
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AUSTRALIA’S DEFENCE PHILOSOPHY:
Further investigations of the nonexistent.
‘The opinions of philosophers, with regard to the conditions of the possibility of a
public peace, shall be taken into consideration by states armed for war’ (Kant, ‘A
[the only!] secret article for perpetual peace’, p.158 - a surprising article, flattering no
doubt to philosophers, but neglecting their dominant bellicose tradition).
A defence philosophy is much more than a defence policy, just as a philosophy of
technology comprises much more than a technology policy. A policy can be given merely by a
list of directives as to what do in various circumstances; even at its best it need only involve
practical wisdom.
By contrast, a philosophy goes deeper and requires theoretical wisdom,
integration of the policy into a theoretical setting, which looks, among other things, at the
central arguments and key concepts involved: here, security, stability, control, protection,
defence, interests, national interests, intelligence, war, etc.
Defence philosophy is thus a
branch of political and social philosophy, and has long been treated as such, though under
such more familiar and honest headings as “of war” and “of peace”.
Like most parts of
philosophy, it can be applied, for instance in shaping policies, in regional ways among others.
A defence philosophy should integrate appropriate defence arrangements and approaches
to war and peace, not merely or superficially into “foreign policy” or assumed “international
relations”, but into the way and intended way of life of a country, both into on-going culture
and into the intended or planned cultural arrangements.
A defence policy typically takes
prevailing socio-political arrangements and power structures for granted; a defence philosophy
again penetrates deeper, questioning or rejecting features of these structures, enquiring as to
the merits of things and institutions of which defence is planned, asking what sort of society
should be defended by what sort of appropriate methods and at what lengths.
What, for
instance, is Australia, what are Australians, defending, concerned to defend, aiming to
defend? Here in Australia? In the region? Abroad? How much of what others have, or what
we have, is worth defending, preserving?
Does Randwick Racecourse, or Pine Gap, merit
defending?
Would anyone stage a last stand for Oaks Estate, one of Canberra’s dreariest
suburbs?
If the Indonesians
made a lightning strike in
Australia just
to remove
Bjelke-Petersen,1 should we resist?
Few of the necessary prerequisites have been adequately thought about in Australia,
where unplanned muddling through from immediate problem to immediate problem - reactive
contingency “planning”, if you want to be generous - is the main style of political life , and,
along with the traditional political game of “follow the leader”, of defence planning. Australia
2
does not yet have a defence philosophy. Some of its critical philosophers could help to supply
it with the rudiments of one or more, and to inject some depth into broader defence
theorizing.
What follows is intended as a modest beginning: much of what is attempted,
unearthing arguments and assumptions, followed by analysis and criticism, and some
elaboration of alternative principles, falls squarely within the domains both of applied
philosophy and traditional philosophical practice.
1. Australia’s
inappropriate.
defence
“policy”:
incoherent,
obsolescent
Australia seems to lack even a clear and coherent defence policy.
American,
This is a commonplace
charge (made even by friends of Defence, interested in obtaining extra public funding for
defence and elements of C3I).^ The reasons concern not merely the major unsolved issues of
exactly what is being defended, what things and objects and what interests, and whose, what
freedoms and values, and what role American defence facilities in Australia are supposed to
have in this.
They concern the status of present treaty arrangements, such as the
“cornerstone”/“millstone” ANZUS treaty, signed between Australia, New Zealand and the
US, now in disarray (still ’‘maintained” by New Zealand, whom the US has unilaterally
announced expelled), and of subsequent associated memoranda of understanding (some secret,
involving the local storage of US nuclear weapons, entry of American personnel, etc.). They
also concern a range of more detailed lucunae such as: lack of clearly-defined priorities on
what needs defending and how it is to be accomplished; doubtful capacity of present defence
forces to handle low-level contingencies in and to the north of Australia and in maritime
zones; and unsatisfactory (or no) arrangements and planning for “defence-in-depth”, for civil
defence and use of civil infrastructure, mobilisation, wartime administration, protection of key
facilities and areas, and post-nuclear organization.
And, equally damaging, if its policy makers do have a coherent policy it is nowhere
satisfactorily revealed to the peoples of Australia.It is left to journalists and newspaper
watching academics to winkle out what local defence installations may be for and to make
various conjectures as to what the policy may be.
Of course there are many administrators
and policy makers who think that is the way it should be; the public should not be informed,
but kept satisfied with some “generalised” statements.As to coherence, Australian policy
makers have only recently found out that Australia has a (purely) regional defence role, not a
global one. This they were told by the Americans in Washington in talks allegedly designed
to clarify commitments under treaty arrangements with the USA. It thus begins to look as if
Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is still as much determined abroad, by US policy
makers, as it is locally in Australia.
3
Much circumstantial evidence can be assembled to confirm the claim that Australia’s
vague defence policy can now be stamped Made in USA, as it used, before the last World War
(and British abandonment), to be stamped Made in UK. For one thing, Australia has had a
bipartisan defence policy, so it is claimed. That “policy” has however been essentially shaped
by the Liberal party, which has governed most of the time (as senior partner in a coalition).
But the Liberal party simply took over US arrangements for Australia (as planned in
Washington for ANZUS) and still does.
For instance, the latest package® from the Liberal
Party “Defence and Foreign Policy Unit” consists largely of US Defence Department material
packaged under a local cover.
The Strategic Basis Papers, endorsed by the Labor
Government, give virtually unqualified support to US military practices and to the American
view of the global strategic situation, and commit Australia to supporting, without any due
reservation, American positions in world forums.' The same dependent-policy conclusion can
be reached by more devious arguments.
regional defence role?
When, for example, did Australia find out it had a
After the Americans had found that they could no longer afford to
police the world on their own and would have to delegate some of that role and offload some
of the heavy associated costs, on reliable dogs-bodies; and also after Labor took some faltering
steps towards developing a broader foreign more independent policy with some indigenous
elements (Australian Minister Hayden was promptly flattened by US heavies such as Schultz).
Australian defence and foreign policy copies American policy in main respects, but lags
it. The Australian defence policy presented by the Labor government, to the extend that it is
visible, is conservative; it coincides with older American defence policy, and diverges from the
new (post-Reagan) American war policy. For Australian Labor defence policy supports what
the American administration supposedly used to support, namely
DI. Multilateral nuclear disarmament (within the framework of series of treaties and
agreements), and
D2. Deterrence in the interim, deterrence through mutual assured destruction (i.e. MAD).
The presence of American military facilities in Australia is supposed to be justified in the
framework of these assumptions.
For they are to assist in making deterrence under D2
effective, and to provide verification for the arms reduction arrangements under DI (both
stabilizing functions).
There is much evidence indicating however that American policy
makers have now abandoned both Dl and D2 and any serious attempts at nuclear arms
control8.
Certainly they have moved on to the following highly destabilizing doctrines:
Nuclear war-fighting, Limited nuclear wars, and Star-Wars (i.e. Strategic Defense Initiative).
While this American war policy may well be accepted by the next Liberal coalition
government, all of these military doctrines are explicitly rejected by the 1985 Labor
government.
Since the American “joint” facilities in Australia also facilitate the rejected
4
objectives, the problems concerning these dubious facilities are much aggravated.
The
Government’s approach concerning them - withholding information concerning the full range
of their functions, and particularly their war-fighting roles from parliament and the public - is
certainly unsatisfactory, as several of its members realise; and as a result the Government
appear in not atypical disarray, further grist for the incoherence theme.
If there is perhaps a coherent Australian global defence approach somewhere away from
public exposure, it is most likely then an old abandoned American policy.9 But in that case it
certainly lacks - what it in any case appears to lack - justification.
For Australia, in
supporting US defence policy and activity, for instance in world forums, is supporting present
offensive American policy, not what it reputedly adheres to, deterrence (through MAD). The
point holds good whether or not American global policy still includes such deterrence as a
proper part10; for it certainly involves other very different and dubious strategies.
The commonplace, but increasingly feeble, justification given for Australian’s tagging
along after America is that Australian interests are the same as American11.
American interests by no means coincide with Australian
.
However
Consider, for instance, such
matters as enriching Americans, making conditions favourable for American business,
promoting Americans and things American.
Consider, differently, American practices in
Latin America, from undercutting Allende’s government in Chile to its practices against
Nicaragua, to its extensive export of arms and violent methods, there and elsewhere in the
world.
Thus America, like Russia, is busy meddling in Africa, but ‘Australian security
interests are not directly involved’ (SB, p.24).
Consider, differently again, escalation of the
nuclear arms race. Or consider American strategic planning, and all the game- and decision-
theoretic models which concern just USA and its adversary USSR, perhaps occasionally
adding Europe as part of the monolithic West, but rarely or never considering the Southern
Hemisphere - so that either Australia is part of America as Poland may be of Russia or it is
nothing.
Or consider American interests not merely in Soviet and communist containment,
but in containing socialism such as might (under more auspicious conditions) flourish in
Australia. An American policy answering to American interests is accordingly inappropriate
for Australia, inappropriate for Antipodean socialism.
Australians should do their own
defence thinking and work out a policy appropriate for Australia.
(That applies also to
Australian political representatives, who should stop parroting implausible American views
and begin developing some genuinely local and original ones.)
Should Australia be tagging along after the Americans in support of installation of their
style of free-enterprise capitalism everywhere feasible (i.e. that the state socialists don’t
already heavily control)?
What they quite seriously call ‘keeping the free world free’?
Of
5
course freedom has, in this sort of context, multiple meanings and associations (as well as
multiple
inconsistencies,
appearing
information” and the like).
overtly
in
subsidized
“free trade”, selective
“free
Significant parts of what mainstream American culture admits
under the freedom umbrella, mainstream Australian culture would exclude: for instance,
active opposition to and undermining of social and socialist programs and governments,
bullying of small countries that impose barriers to US business or military practices (all part
of “free enterprise”), etc.
What of those intangible freedoms the cultures supposedly agree about, civil liberties,
freedom to information, to live and work where one chooses, to travel, and so on? These are
certainly important freedoms, better upheld in some parts of the unaligned West (e.g.
Sweden, Switzerland) than in most parts of the Eastern Block. But such freedoms, which run
counter to dependent policies, hardly require defence subservience.
influenced state practices are fast reducing freedom.
Moreover, military-
Many of the older freedoms have
vanished this century, such as freedom to travel, to work and live abroad, etc.; now one
requires permits, licences, passports, ... . And many more former freedoms are being or have
been eroded; soon it will be identity documents, restricted zones, ID cards, as already in parts
of the “free West”.
Now nuclearism in Europe ‘is devouring the very freedom it is said to
protect: [the Greens] point to the new laws proposed in 1983 designed to keep citizens from
assembling to protest deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles’ (Capra and Spretnak,
pp.58-9). Further structural changes required for the security of the state, imcompatible with
democratic freedoms, include ‘secrecy,
lack of commentability, permanent emergency,
concentration of authority, peacetime militarism, extensive apparatus of state intelligence and
police’ (Falk, in Feith p.24).
Nuclearism is not a smart strategy to preserve remaining
freedoms.
2. Inherited other-reliance, and the populist and elitist cases for patronage and
subservience.
Australia’s defence policy, such as it is, is furthermore inherited rather than regularly
(re)thought through.
But that procedure - essentially the legal method of precedence,
whatever its very limited satisfactoriness in legalistic decision making - is defective when
applied in politics or to defence, especially where immediate independent action is required.
For precedence methods are extraordinarily slow, as well as characteristically conservative,
and as in defence exclude significant and rather urgent alternatives.
The unsatisfactory decision-making practices to be revealed in the case of defence are by
no means restricted to defence but are typical of the kind of advanced age capitalism
Australia operates under, or rather labours under, down under.
In setting down those
4.
6
features of aged capitalism (‘of the Corporate State') that the New Left and Alternative
Australia movements were reacting against, Cock neatly summed up these practices:
Decisions were made from the top and on the basis of vested political interests,
rather than by rational goals and means that served public interests. The people
were rarely consulted effectively before a decision and often only partially informed
afterwards. Planning was based on a mere extension of the present. ... activists felt
they were given little opportunity to choose how they lived or worked.
The
availability of space, time, trees and air was also determined by others ... (p.18
italics added).14
As it was and is with one’s defence, military and civil, so it is with the matter of whether one
lives in a nuclear target zone or not, and so on (though immigration policy, uranium and
woodchip export policies, etc.)
In these areas planning remains top-down, with at best
consultative elements. No real choices are offered to people.
A major inherited assumption is that of other reliance, that Australia’s defence depends
on other more powerful allies. That ally was firstly Britain, and since World War II America;
but in any event the assumption is that to be safe Australia needs a powerful patron, a
protector.
A corollary is that Australia adopts a suitably submissive relation to its patron,
making expected concessions. And for the most part it has; however such a defence insurance
policy does not come cheap.15 It costs not only money and resources, but quality of life,
freedom and independence.
The assumption of other-reliance is however unsound, for several reasons.
Most
important, it characteristically depends upon the following themes, all of which lack solid
foundation:
1. Australia is threatened - or at least
1A. Australia is likely to be threatened in the near future.
2. Australia cannot defend itself.
3. Australia can however depend upon its patron (or ally), i.e. upon the USA.
These three themes in fact make up what has been called the populist case for the ANZUS
alliance.16 It is very different from the elitist case for ANZUS, said to hold sway with the
Australian government, which, while insisting upon premiss 3, essentially rejects 1 and 2 and
claims instead
4. Australian has a vital interest in global stability.
5. Global stability is under threat (constantly) by an expansionist Soviet Union.
6. Only USA can contain the Soviet threat and hold the global balance.
Some of techniques the US deploys for holding global balance operate through
dependent states and a network of alliances like ANZUS. But obviously further premisses are
required to reach the intended conclusions that Australia should be participating in any such
alliance, and what is more, hosting US defence facilities and exercises. A first such premise is
the no-shirking theme, that Australia should be contributing its part to “holding the balance’’
(cf. Bell).
Even this first further step is pretty shaky; as we shall see, one shaky step in a
rather ramshackle case, since premisses 5 and 6 are decidedly dubious (and 4 may involve
equivocation). For it can be plausibly argued that Australia’s vital interests are not
guaranteed by US techniques, which threaten to upset the whole applecart, and can be
obtained by alternative more satisfactory means outside of such soft alliances as ANZUS. In
any case, it is unclear that local contributions enhance global (nuclear) stability (see e.g.
Mack and Davidson).
But first, there is more pernicious regionalist version of the elitist position to be
considered, what might be called the offshore elitist position. This position grants
2A*. Australia can defend itself against regional threats, and can look after itself regionally.
But it does not (as indeed other qualified elitist positions may not) grant 1A.
What the
offshore position insists upon is
1AI*. Australia’s interests could be threatened in the near future.
Since these interests - perhaps concerned with trade, Australian companies or Australians
abroad, or whatever - may have little or nothing to do with internal Australian security, this
premiss represents an extremely important shift (a shift not unrelated to the inverse
bureaucratic shift from war to defence).
It goes further than what has been called forward
defence. In extended form the offshore position does call for some sort of global policeman or
police force ready to intervene whenever a “free port” anywhere looks like closing its doors.
Part of the difficulty in getting to grips with the elitist position is that it tends to slide
through to the offshore position (by way of now evident immediate positions).
The arguments against both the populist and elitist cases, and indeed against virtually
all of themes 1 through 7 are sufficiently familiar to justify but a fairly brief outline of some of
the main points involved.
Of course just a couple of defections from themes 1 through 7
would serve logically defeat both cases, but there have been some interesting repair attempts,
designed to float the arguments on diminished premisses.
3. The brief against the popular populist case; the need for new directions.
Contra 1 and 1A.
While Australia is not at present under notice of threat, veiled threat or
harassment from abroad, a majority of its population appears to believe that it is.
As the
popular view is not the informed, administrative, or parliamentary view, it is worth inquiring
8
why the popular view persists, as the opinion polls reveal it has.
The populace has been
deliberately kept in the dark (or even misinformed), because this suits bipartisan government
purposes.
Although both main Australian political parties are well enough aware that the
main assumptions underlying the populist case are false, the reasons for which they support
the American alliance (e.g. those of the elitist case) are much more difficult to sell to the
public. Accordingly the parties and Government have no political interest in undermining the
unsound populist case. In particular they have gone out of their way not to cast doubt upon
the connected assumption that US is a reliable guarantor against all threats.
Thus long-standing Australian psychological insecurity about security has been allowed
to stand, and has not been assuaged by any requisite informational and educational effort. In
particular, older attitudes to Asia persist not far below the surface of popular Australia: fear,
mistrust and xenophobia, patched over by a pragmatic attachment to trade and tourism.
This misplaced insecurity is fuelled by popular misconceptions of Australia and its place in
the world: metaphorically, that Australia is a luscious plum ripe for Eastern picking, instead
of the Asians view that Australia, so far as they are aware of it at all, is a remote desiccated
uncouth place perhaps good for some trade and investment. Or, to get towards more concrete
assumptions,
Australians
apparently
tend
to
their
view
country
as
affluent
but
underpopulated, resource rich but largely defenceless; yet not far to the north are Asian
hordes who are impoverished, resource poor, and so on
.
Such a view is seriously out of touch with reality.
Parts of Asia are now at least as
affluent (on conventional economic indicators) as Australia.
They do not see themselves as
overpopulated, in a way that calls for mass exodus; and in those areas which are as
overpopulated as Europe, such as Java, bribes and force are required to move people on
transmigration programs to relatively unoccupied parts of the Indonesian empire.
So far as
they require them, they can purchase Australian resources - which are not unique - much more
easily and cheaply (because they even carry significant local subsidies) than they could obtain
•
them by seizure.
1s
For these sorts of reasons, and because Australia itself poses no threat, no other state
has a genuine interest in attempting to invade Australia.
As it is for interests, so it is for
capabilities. No regional power has the capacity to launch a successful invasion of Australia,
or is likely to have such a capacity in the near future. As the joint Parliamentary Committee
concluded,
Currently only the United States would have the physical capacity to launch a full
scale invasion of Australia, and it clearly lacks any motive to do so (TAS, p.94).
9
As the report also stated, quoting Synnot (former Chief of Defence Staff),
... to raise the sort of force which would be required for a mass invasion of Australia
could not possibly be done in under five years by other than the superpowers (TAS).
But neither superpower is at all likely to expend effort or resources to such an end.
An obvious naive question which at once arises is: Why bother then with much defence?
(A later question to entertain is: why not be a free-rider on collectively provided global
security, such as it is?) Why not proceed forthwith to unilateral disarmament? Mack for one,
having reassembled the now-standard telling case that Australia is not threatened ‘now or for
the foreseeable future’, and so having broken the populist argument, is confronted by the
awkward option of unilateral disarmament for Australia. He stages a hasty retreat, points to
the dependence of premisses 1 and 1A on premiss 2, and proceeds to claim that ‘the populist
case for ANZUS is sustained’ even without premisses 1 and 1A.
It is however a decidedly
problematic retreat.
While it is true that the arguments against 1 and 1A may sometimes take it for granted
that Australia can look after itself to some extend, put up some resistance, it is far from clear
that they depend essentially on assumptions approximating premiss 2.
Consider the no
interests argument, which appears decisive given the (estimated) very limited invasion
capabilities of potential invaders.
The main consideration adduced appears to depend in no
essential way, indeed in no obvious way at all, on Australia’s dynamic fighting forces.
Australian mineral resources, to repeat one of the more sensitive examples involved, can be
obtained more readily and cheaply by trade methods than military ones. What all this seems
to show is that a rather minimal streamlined force, if any, would presently meet Australia’s
military requirements.
It is not as if Australia is ‘entirely defenceless’ without a conventional military force,
like a babe-in-arms.
The whole apparatus of nonmilitary defence is available on a continent
well suited to its use, though lacking a population trained in its techniques. But even without
requisite popular training in defence methods, Australia would be a difficult place to govern,
Australians a difficult lot to subjugate. It was such features of the Australian character that
deterred the Japanese on a previous occasion
“If the invasion is attempted, the Australians, in view of their national character,
would resist to the end. Also, because the geographical conditions of Australia
present numerous difficulties in a military sense, it is apparent that a military
venture in that country would be a difficult one” (TAS, p.62).
The points still hold good, and could be strengthened.
There are several parts to any such
10
program of nonmilitary defence: making it happen, and putting it abroad (ideally with
dinkum Australian exaggeration) that it has happened.
To the issue of alternative defence we are bound to return. For now, when Australia is
not threatened, is a good occasion to reconsider, and begin to adapt, defence arrangements.
For example, it looks very much as if enormous sums, which could be valuably directed
elsewhere, are being spent, largely to make many Australians feel secure.But a much more
effective and inexpensive way to such results would be through requisite popular education
and psychological therapy - with, if it were well done, much more satisfactory results, a more
secure and better informed people.
Contra 2. As a result of post-War developments in weapons systems and C3I capabilities, the
military defence of Australia has become much easier.
It comes down to enhancing, through
new robust and reliable systems, the enormous strategic advantages Australia enjoys by virtue
of geographical isolation. In principle, any maritime invading force can now be detected well
in advance of arrival, through modern radar warning systems, and destroyed by precision
guided munitions.
And any invaders that did manage to gain a foothold on Australian soil
would face severe logistic problems, and be subject to disproportionate responses from local
defence. Standard discussions (as in Dibb, Mack) proceed to introduce a great deal of “Boys’
Own War Games” stuff concerning contemporary weapon and C3I systems; the essential point
is that these could serve to turn Australia into a pretty unvulnerable armed fortress, and into
an extremely difficult territory were the oceanic moat crossed and the fortress entered (see
especially D. Martin).
Under such armed neutrality and (differently) fortified Australia defence scenarios, even
invasion from outside the region by an inimical world power could be resisted with reasonable
prospect of success.
There is no power at all likely to mount such an invasion; there is
apparently (as noted above) only one power that could, that good ally the USA (reckoned
however a likely invader by 6-7% of the Australian population!). Nonetheless the threat of a
Soviet invasion is taken seriously not only by the larger populace but by committees of their
elected representatives.
But the Soviet military has never undertaken such a long-range
massive force projection, is ill-equipped to do so, and lacks any plausible reason to try such a
stunt (for details see, e.g., D. Martin; also SS, ST).
The only credible Soviet threat to
Australia is in the context of a superpower war, when American facilities in Australia and
perhaps Australian cities, would be struck at by intercontinental missiles.
While this would
be bad enough, it is highly unlikely that it would be followed or accompanied by an invasion.
Soviet forces are once again not sufficient, and not thought sufficient by the Soviets for that
sort of diversion; they would be required elsewhere in a superpower war; and they would be
devastated, unless USA is militarily even more incompetent than sometimes depicted.
i.
11
Contra 3.
What will be argued is not the negation of 3, that the Americans cannot be relied
upon, but rather that 3 is dubious, and that it would be rash to place excess reliance on
American protection.
That being so, and other patrons being even less promising, Australia
should look more to its own resources, as the American administration is kindly advising.
Especially since the American “Vietnam debacle” and the fall of Saigon, things have
changed in important ways which cast doubt on the reliability of American patronage. First,
the relative economic and military strength of the USA has declined significantly.
It no
longer has such a large share of world product(ivity); as a connected matter of policy, US
world warfighting aspirations have been reduced. Its ability to act as, and afford to be, global
policeman has also markedly declined/
Secondly, the willingness of Americans to engage in
remote foreign wars has correspondingly tumbled.
Although the American administration
includes more than enough hawks, to be sure, the people and Congress are not longer in a
mood for gratuitous foreign adventures, especially when the fun may not appear to be in
American interests.
Since Vietnam, US opinion polls regularly show strong popular
opposition to overseas military involvement. This “Vietnam syndrome” has served as a major
constraint on US military policy and foreign involvement.
An important manifestation of these changes is the Guam Doctrine, calling upon US
regional allies to take primary responsibility for their own defence in regional conflicts.
Another important outcome is Defense statements to the pointed effect that before US troops
are committed abroad there must be reasonable assurance of Congressional and popular
support (Weinberger, reported in PC p.14). As Mack comments, ‘such assurance is impossible
to guarantee - especially for remote countries where no US vital national interests are at
stake’. Certainly no more is assured under the ANZUS treaty which provides only that each
signatory ‘act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes’
(article 4).
All the treaty strictly requires is consultation; there is no undertaking or
commitment. Isn’t the treaty backed up by informal verbal reassurances? None that are not
undermined by others, in American administrative multiple-speak.
Even the elite view is that Australia has to ‘work ... to maximize the prospect of US
support’ and that the Americans cannot be counted upon.
For ‘the threshold of direct US
combat involvement could be quite high, and circumstances at the time could significantly
limit US willingness or ability to help Australia in other ways?. ‘... we cannot rely upon US
support in a defence emergency arising within our own neighbourhood’ (SB, pp.29-30).
However a special case has been made for American reliability in Australia’s case - as
12
opposed to examples of American abandonment of earlier military undertakings (in Vietnam,
Cambodia, Iran) - on the basis of permanent friendship, common interests, and shared values
and democratic traditions. There are two difficulties with this type of special pleading: first,
as to the basis, and, second, as to the adequacy of such a basis in by-passing Congress, the
American people, and slow constitutional processes.
Historical evidence hardly sustains the
adequacy of the basis in analogous cases. And here, as already indicated, the basis is shaky.
For there is not a common culture shared by Australia and America: rather values diverge
significantly on quite crucial issues. Even less are interests always common, as the matter of
subsidised agricultural produce reveals, and as missile testing and nuclear ships issues in the
South Pacific have recently confirmed. Interests diverged, for instance, when Australia toyed
with opposing Indonesia’s claim to West Papua. So it is dubious at least that American
interests would coincide with Australian in disputes or confrontation with Asian nations to
the North, e.g. with Indonesia or Japan.
Of course if the special case argument did hold
water, Australia and America really were mates, then the treaty would be otiose. There was
in fact no treaty in operation in 1942; but by then American interests in countering the
Japanese were independently aroused.
4. Other-reliance and regional self-reliance
A major problem with other-reliance for defence is then that it cannot be deemed entirely
reliable, yet precisely here unreliability can hardly be tolerated.
When the Indonesians are
rolling into Brisbane it won’t do for Defense to call up with a message like that from local
Services, "We can’t get there till tomorrow’’, or “until after Congress meets”, or “Sorry,
Mate!”.
More seriously, handing defence over to others means handing control of our lives
over to others; and given nuclear defence, which too many Antipodean administrations have
opted for, it quite likely means literally handing our lives over for many of us. Another
problem of other-reliance is thus its adequacy. A further problem is its cost. In principle, if a
State hires out its defence it would no doubt look, other things being equal, for the cheaper
bidder - if, that is, defence is a commodity of a sort, like national shipping, meterological
services, etc. The trouble with global defence is that the market is monopolistic, with
currently only one supplier of the right complexion22, who accordingly can exact a very high
price, and has - making the whole country a nuclear target and demanding substantial
subservience. Similar points make part of the case, well-enough appreciated, for not trying to
press defence, plainly a collective good, into a marketable commodity.
When a country can supply its own defence, it therefore makes very good sense for it to
do so, since it normally has a stronger interest in its own proper defence than most other
parties. Should it also be cheaper in costs that matter, then self-reliance not just makes good
sense but pays; other-reliance does not.
But in that event, it surely does not need nuclear
13
patrons, or to farm out some of its defence.
Such self-reliance undermines an important part of the older case based on other-reliance
for alliances such as ANZUS. However newer bipartisan approaches to defence try to combine
them (thus e.g. Australian minister Beazley as reported by Davidson) - approaches which thus
begin to empty ANZUS of what little content it had, and remove much of the apparent point
of such older alliances. Since the ANZUS arrangements contain no clear commitments beyond
consultation but are merely vague articles of understanding, a simple course is of course to
allow them to be emptied of content, so that the alliance, an expensive and outdated
“insurance” policy, dies a natural death.
It may however be death by seizure or convulsion
should American defence facilities be closed or internationalised and passage of American
nuclear equipped or powered transport be excluded from Australia.
That would no doubt
sacrifice the deterrence and other advantages the treaty supposedly affords
, while making
way for the greater advantages of friendly nonalignment, of no longer being a nuclear target,
or so on.
But self-reliance pure and simple is insufficient. The world does not consist of separable
isolated pieces, as becomes increasingly evident. Most dramatically, Australia will not escape
the effects of nuclear winter.
The picture is much the same as for other dynamic subjects,
such as plants which are not internally self-sufficient but depend crucially on their
environment - and indeed as for States themselves. The question then is what form the
additional holistic component of policy should take? Put this way, it is almost obvious that
the appropriate move is not taking sides (as in a kids’ war game or tug-of-war game that is
already set up) and doing one’s bit for confrontation. For that will not contribute to stability,
to a proper holistic approach, but rather to sectionalism and fragmentation, and to bringing
nuclear winter closer.
Other-reliance and self-reliance typically present a false contrast, and certainly do with
pure self-reliance - a false contrast like that of holism and partism (EE, p.223), and of
dependence versus isolationism. In between lie a range of positions, one of which - favoured
by a long line of peacefully-disposed philosophers from Rousseau and Kant onwards - might be
called integrated reliance or federated reliance. The elitist case, insofar as it were to call for
such reliance (e.g. in assumption 4), could hardly be faulted. But it doesn’t; and is satisfied
with much less.
Integration may reach only certain inadequate levels, the level of modern
alliances and alignment, which are essentially coupled with opposition to an other side, e.g.
the monolithic East (or West). It is into just this trap that elitist arguments fall.
14
5. The decline and fall of elitist arguments.
Premisses 4 and 5 of the elitist argument turn around the crucial notion of stability, as related
arguments revolve around that of security. But stability and security are value-laden terms,
which are not cultural invariants.
What stability comprehends in American administrative
perception is very different from what highland villages take it to include.
In each case a system is stable if it returns to a given stationary state under
perturbations of sufficiently small magnitude. But both the relevant states and the stationary
among them are relative to given frames of reference; for instance, what is stable at a
macrolevel may well not be at a microlevel. As Trudeau has said of the superpowers, ‘they
share a global perception according to which even remote events can threaten their interests
or their associates’ (p.10) and disturb stability.
But lesser states or regional people, not
counting remote business or military interests as relevant, report no instability. Bureaucrats
invariably view bombs as necessary to stability, and the nuclear fix as stability; by contrast,
gentle people increasingly see bombs as tools of terrorism and as characteristically antithetical
to peace.
ad 4: Of course Australia has a vital interest in global stability and security: what sizeable
nation does not? But the determinable motherhood interpretation (of italicised terms), while
no doubt diplomatically convenient, conceals crucial differences, highly material to the
argument. For one global stability means something different in USA from what it means in
Costa Rica and likely what it intends in Australia. Certainly vital interests are different.
America is interested in containing socialism (in Australia as elsewhere), and it tends, in more
popular rhetoric at least, to equate containing socialism with containing communism and both
with Soviet containment. A continental swing to socialism (or Non-Soviet communism) in
Latin America, or in Africa, would upset global stability, on American perception, and would
indeed have significant effects on US business or investment; but it would not on its own
upset or affect most Australians or directly threaten Antipodean stability, and it certainly
need not affect nuclear stability. Australians generally are not opposed in principle to
socialism or notably interested in containing its spread (indeed perhaps the opposite).
Australia is not interested in (and oughtn’t to be charmed by the idea of) defence of the
(American) “free enterprise” system, or in the defence of uglier forms of capitalism wherever
they are presently initiated or opposed (cf. Chomsky and Herman).
Contra 5.
It can be conceded, without granting the main thrust of the premiss, that the
Soviets are expansionistic, at least in that they are interested in extending their influence
where they can.
So also are most empires, including American and Indonesian (so for that
matter are many academics and most sales-people).
But the Soviets have an ideological
15
message to spread, Marxism-Leninism, an ideology they used to anticipate being installed
everywhere.
But the Americans also have a message, a capitalist message, Free Enterprise
Inc, which they are working to sell pretty much everywhere accessible to them.
And they
need to be expansionistic to have it adopted, whereas the Russians and Chinese need simply
wait for history to take its allegedly determined course (though a little assistance - reflecting
legitimate doubt about this determinism? - would surely spread their disconcertingly different
forms of “progress” without interfering). But surely the Russian message is pernicious?
All
these messages are pernicious (for familiar reasons: see e.g. Erlich).
The proper question is whether on its own Soviet international activity threatens, in
some damaging way, global stability. Undoubtedly Soviet-American confrontation, as in the
Cuban missile affair, does threaten global stability; though not in a way that has any bearing
on Australian defence.
In fact no Russian expansionary tendency, military or otherwise, has
an untoward direct effect on Australia, little of significance reaches into the Antipodes (see
Dibb SS). So what is the local excitement about? In large measure the excitement has been
drummed up by the political right, East European expatriates, and pork-barrelling politicians.
The effect of Soviet expansionism is much exaggerated and overexploited (Mack ST).
Viewed from the Antipodes it is hardly a problem, unless the Soviets should get locked into
military confrontation with USA - a real problem to be addressed.
With that problem
however, the Antipodes can better assist as part of a third nonaligned group which helps to
referee and to prize apart the heavies, not by seconding and inciting the USA.
But
confrontation apart, Soviet internationalism, hardly a great success story, does not seriously
disturb global stability, as seen from Australia.
For a proper assessment of Soviet internationalism, types of expansion should be
distinguished - military, potential military, influence with military access, and mere influence.
In actual military expansion and involvement since W’orld War II, the Russian record is
hardly striking by comparison with the USA or several other states.
The one conspicuous
case involving control of new territory, that of Afghanistan, has actually had little effect on
global stability.
The usual Western apprehension concerns not anything the Soviets have
accomplished, but what they might attempt militarily, especially in Europe.
But the idea of
Soviet military adventure in Europe is a Western invention and bogey, lacking in plausibility.
The Soviet military lacks the force ratio needed to be assured of military success in Europe,
both by their own standards of what is required and by Western strategic standards. And the
Soviets have no good reasons or interests in undertaking such an exercise which would draw
them into nuclear war. They already face enough economic difficulties and troubles with East
European client states which they cannot control satisfactorily.
16
The extension of Soviet influence has largely been in the Third world.
But it has
hardly been successful, with as many failures and losses to record as Soviet “gains” - gains
which add to the imperial burden since they involve countries wracked with problems, such as
Vietnam.
The Third World exercises are marred by Soviet inaptitude and limited by the
state of their own economy.
They scarcely displace the global structure enough to test its
stability; and they produce no shock waves or even significant ripples in the Antipodes.
Contra 6.
The main current threat to world stability appears to come not from one of the
dancers in the East-West dance of death, but from the escalating confrontation, easily ignited,
between the lead dancers. With this US policies and practices have at least as much to do as
USSR ones.
Recent US practices are more destabilizing than Soviet ones, and indeed highly
destabilising, because of new weapons and weapons systems, because of rejection of arms
control and Soviet proposals, and because of “star wars” preparation which both accelerates
the arms race on earth and begins a new one in space.
A vast increase in tension and
suspicion accompanies the “arms race” which is in large measure due to US intransigence and
US war-fighting doctrines, new weapons systems, with built-in incentives for pre-emption, and
deliberate abandonment of arms control (see PR).
Such considerations, duly assembled,
demolish the received (but nonetheless crazy) theme that an alliance or alignment with USA
helps increase stability. American practices are to be resisted as much as Soviet.
6. The East-West balance argument: American alignment versus friendly
independence
The need for Australian alignment with the USA is supposed to be shown by the East-West
This politically-important balance argument, which shares key premisses
nr
with the related elitist argument, runs as follows :
balance argument.
7. Global stability is the key to world peace.
8. Stability of the international order is a matter of maintaining a global balance.
But
5. The global balance is constantly threatened by an expansionist USSR.
6A. The threat is [only] checked by the USA, which
(6A.1) guarantees an open and pluralistic international order.
9. Australia’s primary security concern, indeed most vital interest, is this stability.
Hence
10. Australia’s role is to help America maintain the balance.
The rest of Australia’s intervolvement with American military arrangements is then
taken to follow.
But there are many reasons for halting the argument before it reaches this
stage of practical (and allegedly moral) detail. The balance argument assumes much that has
already been rebutted, for instance that the Soviet threat thesis is correct (i.e. 5) and that US
17
policy is stabilizing (part of 6A).
It also takes for granted, what now is at least in serious
doubt, that American policy is directed at balance and deterrence, rather than what the
American administration appears to be aiming at, superiority. But in that event, Australia is
not really engaged in some longer term balancing feat, so much as in helping USA prevail in
nuclear race, contradicting the goal of world peace of premiss 7.
Contra 10. and its derivation.
The derivation is inadequate: it does not follow that
Australia’s role is such a lackey’s one.
If the balance of strength is leaning in America’s
direction, as most less-biassed evidence indicates, then Australia should surely be throwing its
slight weight in with the Eastern team (that is what such images as the balanced tug-of-war
would suggest).
Presumably premiss 6A.1 is designed to exclude this deplorable thought, of
Australia teaming up with totalitarians.
Nevertheless Australia should be putting its slight
weight where it is effective, given its own broader objectives, interests, principles and
supposedly pluralistic ideals.
There are several different roles Australia could fulfil which
would enable it to make a more satisfactory, less passive, contribution to world peace, among
them de-escalation through active nonalignment, appropriate aid, and so forth.
Thus 10 is hardly well-supported or evident. A more direct approach would be better
than throwing Australian weight unreflectively on one side of the balance.
As a little
reflection attests, the balance image and argument point not in the direction intended, but
towards nonalignment.
Contra 6A (and 6). The theme that US maintains the balance, and hence preserves the peace,
is of course false. For again, it takes two to tango. While it can be granted that the USA is
interlocked with and checks the USSR in this munitions dance, the history of the dance
reveals that the pace-escalation has flowed from the interaction of the one partner with the
other.
That is, but for the USA, the USA would not be required to check the USSR (the
interaction is two-way as with Hegel’s famous master-slave relation).
In any case, it looks as if, on a different historical trajectory, the main states of Western
Europe could match the Soviet Union militarily (for they have comparable combined GNP,
technological resources, etc.; cf. note 20) Thus it is doubtful that the current Soviet build-up,
produced in interaction with the USA, could only be, or have been, checked by the US.
ad 6A.1. As the premiss is only of marginal relevance to the argument, it is enough to observe
that the international order the USA helps maintain leaves very much to be desired.
In its
intervention, militarily, economically and indirectly, USA has assisted substantially in
reducing plurality and openness, is well as in establishing or propping up rotten regimes, etc.
The negative side of American imperialism as well-enough documented, if not widely enough
read or known by Americans themselves (cf. again Chomsky and Herman).
Only under
scandalously low redefinitions of ‘open’ and ‘pluralistic’ is the present “free” world order
18
either open or pluralistic.
ad 8, and the damaging equivocation on ‘the balance’.
While balance is one way of
maintaining stability in the world arrangements that have presently come to pass, the balance
structure can only carry so much loading.
Add too much weight (of arms tension, and so
forth) to both sides and the precarious structure will fail, probably catastrophically.
increasing probability of catastrophic breakdown, for a variety of reasons
The
(accident,
miscalculation, computer error, human interference, etc.), has been argued elsewhere (e.g.
WPI).
While a certain neither overloaded nor overstressed balance may serve for stability, the
present increasingly stressed balance will probably not.
The balance argument, however,
neglects this dynamical situation, illegitimately switching from a (certain post) balance in
premiss 8 to the (on-going) balance in subsequent premisses.
The balance argument itself
breaks down through equivocation. What the dynamic picture also indicates is the importance
of removing some weight from the balance, most obviously by arms limitation and tension
reduction. It points too to a different role for Australasia, to a less aligned position genuinely
directed at stability. It is to the emerging case for a different role for Australia, and to action
for achieving this different role, that the positive argument will now begin to swing.
The inadequate East-West balance argument is typically combined with attacks upon
proposals for a different role for Australia than American alliance and. service.
effect of these additions is to generate extra confusion and dust.
The main
For the additions are
inessential to the argument, and do not serve to repair it or reinforce it. For example, against
nonalignment or neutralism is set the alleged pervasiveness of nuclear winter. We might as
well be aligned (it’s good for trade and other economic perquisites), so it is sometimes argued
from up top, because if the central balance fails we are all dead. This is a conspicuous
nonsequitur^, worse than ex nihilo quodlibet (because it also suggests that balance is a
prerequisite for stability). But, in the main, the attack is irrelevant, because the point of
nonalignment is to help remove overload and to break down confrontation and its escalation
to war; it is a thing to do now, be fore winter descends, to delay or halt its descent, and most
important, to reduce its extent and severity.
Australia’s weight may be slight, another irrelevant addition goes, but psychologically it
is important for the West.
Any further spread of the “Kiwi disease” (from New Zealand)
would show the weakening of Western resolve, and give the green light for Soviet
expansionism.
Bell, a leading exponent of the balance argument, virtually gives the
impression that if Australia dropped out of American alignment, the Russians would be on the
road down through the isles to Australia tomorrow/
Much of this sort of rhetoric is
reminiscent of the baseless fear-mongering of an earlier pre-Vietnam time. The Russians have
no such military interests, or present capabilities. And if they were to gear up and set out,
they would be met by substantial resistance along most of the route, resistance obtaining
Western assistance. For America, for one, has major interests, different from Australia’s, in
both Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as elsewhere in East Asia.
The addition, so far
from strengthening the argument, depends, in its “green light for expansion” comparison, on
the previously faulted premiss 5 of Soviet expansionism.
In fact most of the further case for American alignment of one sort or another - when it
is argued-, often nonalignment and neutrality are simply denounced in good old-fashioned
authoritarian style - turns upon already-faulted assumptions.
Catley, for example, another
exponent of “central balance”, presents the following ‘consideration’:
... whatever the Swedes or Swiss may think about the matter, Australia is locked by
considerations of culture, economics, and political philosophy into the defence of the
Western world.
It has both an obligation and a duty to contribute its share to that defence if
necessary by hosting facilities which cannot easily be located elsewhere (p.15).
The premiss is false for reasons essentially indicated: and the premiss in no way sustains the
conclusion, the argument involving among other things, the prescriptive (is-ought) fallacy.
Consider the premiss. Australia is not, unless Catley has information withheld from most of
the rest of us, locked into Western nuclear defence, but in principle independent and free to
reconsider and rethink its options. (American use of the “facilities” is not irrevocable, and
shortly comes up, in principle at least, for reconsideration.)
How do culture, economics and
political philosophy provide locks and chains for Australia but not for nonaligned Western
European states? They do not:
Australia is not a part of USA or altogether a client state;
and the cultures, interests, economic frameworks and political philosophies of the two nations
are significantly different (for details, see CPD). But even if the ideological frameworks were
much more similar than they are, that would not entail similar defence practices (as, e.g.,
ANZUS in all its weakness shows), nor any such defence obligations.
Most of the arguments against nonalignment are of Catley calibre - or worse.
Fortunately, then, such arguments are examined in detail elsewhere, notably by D. Martin in
his examination of counter-arguments to Australian armed neutrality, the legally-recognised
non-belligerent form of nonalignment he favours.
Virtually none of Martin’s counter-case
depends for its success on features of neutrality, which is not advocated here. Virtually all of
Martin’s argument is moreover couched in negative form; his positive brief is very brief. It
20
reduces to this: alignment or alliance with the USA 'cannot make us secure against such
dangers as we may one day have to meet, while it needlessless exposes to other dangers,
including nuclear war (p.l, italics added). While the message is correct enough, and in need
of wide propagation, it does little on its own to support neutrality, and it by no means
exhausts the positive case for weakening alignment. In particular, there are more positive
arguments of much theoretical interest, to be drawn from systems theory and from the
burgeoning theory of collective goods and action.
7. Contributions towards stability: free-riding, enlarging group size, and
increasing variety.
The strategic world situation we now confront can be viewed as a game with more than 100
players, counting in nation-states and leaving out (for convenience) major organisations such
as the largest 100 transnational companies.
These organisational players align themselves
around two large poles, East and West, as indicated:
NON-ALIGNED
N
N
WEST
EAST
India
NATO States
Japan, Israel
Sweden*
Switzerland*
NZUS: Australi
I
Ireland1*
^Most Latin
' American States
I
Tanzania
Costa Rica**
State
capitalist
Key: N:
*:
**:
State
communist
Nuclear weapons states
Neutral states
Nonmilitary states
There are various - a great many - games these state players are playing, some of which are
practically important for peace and for stability. Some of these games, such as World Empire
and Chicken (already played under one representation), are played essentially between the
East-West superplayers.
There are several problems about East-West games: for instance,
what representation they have, the repeatability of the games (clearly some nuclear games
21
may, like Russian roulette, end after one round, as they will with the Big One), and the
negative sum characters of some games. And the monolithic East/monolithic West dichotomy
is misleading, and, as will appear, discards crucial detail (in the way simplifications may). So
game-theoretical modelling will be approached differently and more obliquely.
World Security, like regional and local security, is a collective good (technically, an
item, quality unspecified, in joint supply and precluding exclusion). That is not of course to
say that there are not conditions under which security may leave much to be desired, for
instance where security is guaranteed by a narrow and intolerant despotism; but then, so it
can be argued, the trouble lies with the provisioning, not the particular product.
collective good G for the collection of N nation-states.
It is a
It is, furthermore, a collective good
which permits the possibility of free-riding by nation-states. Looked at from this perspective
the recent American complaint about its allies, Japan for example, and their insufficient
expenditure on defence, is a complaint about their free-riding.
Within the balance of power framework the conditions for free-riding are satisfied, for
instance by unaligned and unilaterally disarming states. For
1. G is available to all N members of the collective if it is available to any, and the
achievement (or maintenance) of G by any will make every member better off.
2. G is achieved iff some number m (no larger than that of group K) contribute towards its
provision, where under the balance of power assumption
Il C K C N and II = {USA, USSR}.
3. The expected value of contributing to G or its maintenance is less than the expected value
of not doing so, i.e. likely costs of contribution exceed likely benefits - except perhaps for
members of II given that G is largely provided by II.
There is what can be called a pegged (or asymmetric) free-rider problem, pegged by members
of II for whom the free-rider option is not open - within the confines of the balance of power
assumption - and for whom condition 3 is only satisfied under certain ways of looking at the
matter (e.g. there will be a war 10 years down the road so the expected costs each year exceed
the expected benefits).
For most members of N, by contrast, the benefits of G are available
even should they reduce their contributions.
There is a straightforward case (in narrow game-theoretical terms) for recommending
Australian, and regional, free-riding on the balance of power provision of G. Some arguments,
beyond or adding to those already in effect presented, are these:- Either stability breaks down
catastrophically and there is a large-scale war or it does not. If it does then the region is
22
better off than it would be if (strongly) aligned because it is unlikely to be (so heavily)
targetted. (Here the dreadful new argument that nuclear winter means that the Antipodes
might as well be involved gets challenged and rejected: as to how see e.g. MF and B. Martin).
If, alternatively, stability doesn’t break down then the region has the benefits in any case,
without the costs. For there is no clear evidence that our alignment and cooperation with the
USA enhances global stability, etc.; indeed, as remarked and will be further argued, the
evidence points to the contrary. As regards Australasian regional weight in the Western block,
do we seriously believe it is significant? That the Australian voice, though useful for
propaganda purposes, makes much real difference in the halls of Northern power? We
shouldn’t: and if we do we’re living in a delusional framework. Australia has been left out of
the picture in virtually all major strategic planning exercises, most difference-making peace
initiatives, etc.,etc.
Now Eastern block countries would hardly object to Antipodean free-riding, rather than
no
offering support (however trifling), comfort and incitement to their opposition/ Furthermore
free-riding is how the Americans, on their theoretical principles, would expect Australia to
act, the rational self-interested procedure (see CPD). It is how lesser nations should act. For
it is economically rational; contributing is not. But won’t the US make things economically
dear for Australia? In threats and theory, yes; but in practice, no more than it has already
done with subsidized wheat deals to the Soviets, no more than it threatened to do already in
the case of New Zealand over the nuclear-ships issue. For except for short term aberrations,
America will never give up trade or business arrangements: one gets the impressions that
America would trade with the Devil Himself, if doing so would open some new markets in
Hell.
Despite its political stigma, free-riding need be no problem, or in any way immoral or
irregular. Perhaps the buses are free; perhaps there is a voluntary payment system, to which
only some need contribute, etc.
With the nuclear fix, free-riding is indeed the moral course;
contributing is not.29 Free-riding, though often protrayed as a problem, is only a problem in
certain cases of collective provisioning, where the good involved is sufficiently desirable and
will not be provided because of too many free- riders.
This is not the situation with global
security, which will be provided, in the curious and precarious way that it is, whether or not
Australia stays on the escalating treadmill or gets off and rides free.
Australia's free-riding
may be a problem for America; it is not for Australia. Interests diverge again.
What is more, judicious free-riding can increase stability.
In pictorial terms, the
stability of a structure is typically increased up to a certain point by securing it more
23
adequately; for example, if it is a wind tower or similar building, by increasing its rigid ties or
supports to the ground. Then a tripod (or better still a quadrapod) tower is much less likely
to topple than a bipedal one, and requires less guying to stay up. Increasing the diversity, or
variety, of supports increases stability. The theme that diversity correlates with stability has
been sharpened and confirmed in ecology, for instance in the theory of “spreading the risks”
(see EW). The related theme, that a certain variety increases stability, has been elaborated
in cybernetics.
The core eco-systemic idea to be developed is that Australia’s free-riding in
defence, and consequent nonalignment, could help to enhance diversity and variety, and
accordingly to increase stability (especially if done in concert with other client and suppliant
states).
Two interlocked supports in tension, East and West, well dug in but hardly well guyed,
are inadequate for the long-term stability of the precarious structure of world peace.
What
makes engineering sense is not however adding weight to the structure, or even strengthening
the supports that are there, helping the East when the balance is disturbed by the more
powerful West’s surging ahead and likely overburdening the structure. What makes more
sense is increasing the variety of supports, enlarging and diversifying group size, as significant
independent grouping could do.
The monolithic East/monolithic West picture is much more than a convenient
simplification, for instance for strategic thinking.
It may force damaging mistakes in
conceptualisation, mzsconceptualisation perhaps convenient for some larger players.
One
main reason for mistakes concerns group size. Whereas 11+ = {West, East} is a small group,
the number N of nation-states is not, but is considerably larger. But the collective behaviour
of large groups differs in theory from that of small groups; group size is a highly significant
factor (though its precise import remains contentious).
The group N of nation-states is a large group, of essentially self-interested parties,
indeed of substantially economic actors.
collective action applies:
So we may expect that the American theory of
that the groups will behave in a counterintuitive way.
Though
expected to act in the common interest, to obtain security in particular, the collection will
not. On this account (that elaborated by Olson), the common interest can only be guaranteed
by outside influence or imposition (coercion in Olson’s rapid thinking).
But with the
collective of nations, there is, as experience has shown, no outside mediator or influence of
sufficient authority to ensure attainment of the collective good.
The prognosis looks very
gloomy: this most important (though far from unique) collective good will not be provided.
Fortunately the reasoning, like much of the “logic” of collective action, has been too
21
swift.
The group, though large, is highly privileged, in containing several actors for whom
costs of war exceed benefits (note the shift in perspective from the earlier free-riding condition
3).
Indeed an important economic effect of the knowledge of an ominous nuclear winter is
that virtually all actors involved should now be in that position; for (subjectively) expected
costs of nuclear war have become very high.
To go back to basics, Olson's grand theory is
based on the accountants’ tautology (defining ‘net’)
net agent benefit = gross agent benefits - gross agent costs, i.e. in symbols, for each agent or
o
actor i (in collective N), A- = V-Cj. A group is privileged if Aj is positive for some i in N. It
needs little argument to show that for vulnerable European nation-states the net benefits of
global security are decidedly positive (e.g. with a nuclear war their respective future GDPs
would expectedly fall to near zero). The fact that the group of nation-states is privileged does
not however imply that the collective good involved, security, will be supplied, particularly in
the longer term. The simple logic is not dynamic; it takes no account of mistake, error, or the
like, or of stability achieved through superiority or intermediate instability. An improved
modelling - which can take some account of group size and of the dynamics, through iterated
games - is gained by returning to game-theoretic grounds.
A free rider “problem” is tantamount to a dilemma of some sort; according to the
conventional wisdom, it is a prisoners’ dilemma (cf.
Pettit, but contrast Taylor and Ward).
The argument can go this way:- a free rider problem or issue is defined in terms of the
provisioning of a collective good; but the theory of collective goods is equivalent to that of a
.QI,
generalised prisoners’ dilemma.
Certainly the global nuclear situation appears to present a
dilemma; as much is a commonplace claim. Elsewhere (e.g. WPI) it is argued in detail that it
does indeed present a moral dilemma.
Here the argument - which can proceed through the
theoretical route just sketched above or in the more piecemeal way to be indicated - is that it
is also a prudential dilemma (for many members of N).°2
Consider first, since these have obtained some investigation (e.g. Hardin), the range of
apparent two party games being played by the US and Soviet Union administration (labelled
US and SU respectively) in 1985 as regards the moves of further nuclear armament, A, or
nuclear disarmament, N. (It is supposed, naturally, that the game is set in some background
context, e.g. nuclear disarmament is not considered in isolation from on-going French and
Chinese nuclear armament).
It is important here, as other places, to distinguish the
administration - which for the most part calls the shots - from the society and the people. It
is administrations or governments that generally take people into war; etc.
The American
people seem rather more inclined towards nuclear de-escalation than their administration; the
German people were clearly opposed to the new nuclear missiles their administration
proceeded to install.
The strategy games involved are then administration games, which we
25
can suppose to be played over successive time intervals, e.g. years; so there is interaction and
feedback as the games go on - until the Big Ones explode.
Within this simplistic setting, the apparent games being played by US and SU are those
diagrammed next:
New Initial game
Prisoners’ Dilemma Game
SU
SU
D
US
A
Revised Game
D
2,2
A
4,1
1,4
3,3
D
US
A
SU
D
3,2
A
4,1
1,4
2,3
D
US
A
D
3,3
A
4,1
1,4
2,2
According to Hardin, ‘giving evidence of [his] deformation professionelle’, the Prisoners’
Dilemma (PD) ‘represents the preference ordering of virtually all the articulate policy
analysts in the United States and presumably also in the Soviet Union’ (p.248). While PD
may have represented US policy, there is considerable evidence (as already indicated) that it
no longer does, that the US administration has shifted to a more aggressive, war-fighting,
phase.
That is, the US has interchanged its rankings of (D,D) and (A,A), presumably some
time between 1978 and 1984 games. The Soviets, who have been much more consistent (and
no doubt better censored) in their policy pronouncements, appear not to have changed their
game, but have stuck with their form of deterrence and no-first-strike.
However they are
bound to try to keep up with the Americans, and so are presumably pushed towards the
Revised Game shown, which pleasantly restores symmetry.
Stable or equilibrium outcomes for each game are circled.
An outcome is said to be
stable if neither player has incentive to switch strategies unilaterally on the strength of the
game, i.e. to alter the outcome except by influencing the other player also to alter strategies.
All these games provide dilemmas, in a broad sense, that equilibrium is achieved in an
undesirable and dangerous outcome.
In all the apparent games, arming is the dominant
strategy for each player; yet in the PD game that is even Pareto-suboptimal, whence the
economic fascination.
But as the other games deliver results which are socially suboptimal
(and below a satisfying threshold), all these games are dilemmas.
And the same applies to
suggested alternative games that might plausibly be taken to represent the superpower
situation, and such as Chicken.
A recognisably suboptimal outcome is guaranteed by the
independent ‘‘stable” strategies. What is worse, iteration of games does not help (as it may in
other political circumstances). For there are substantial political and military incentives for
the superpower players not to adjust their preferences substantially in socially superior
directions after repeated games, but to do what the US at least appears to have done, to make
the situation worse.
26
It is important then to attempt to modify or curtail these self-interested superpower
games.
There are various connected ways of going about this.
One is for other parties to
combine to limit or discourage these games. Another alternative is for them to try to alter the
games. Thus much socially preferable would be a switch to a coordination game of some sort;
for instance, to the game which neutrals tend to play (and which Lackey, in contrast to other
more bellicose utilitarians, sees utilitarian superpowers playing; hence Hardin’s provocative
label for this game, ‘Lackey’s game’). In the coordination game diagrammed, WN represents
a western-inclined neutral and EN an Eastern inclined neutral (e.g. Yugoslavia):
EN
WN
D
D
1,1
A
3,2
A
2,3
4,4
[Other coordination games, with
(D,D) assigned (1,1)]
Now the dilemmatic and coordination games are not played in isolation; they come
together in international settings such as United Nations’ committees (and elsewhere, since
coordination games are frequently peoples’ games as well).
Superimposing the games, with
coordination games of the first sort applied to previously given US and SU games, leads to the
following augmented East (E) and West (W) games:
New
Game, Augmented
Prisoners’ Dilemma
Augmented
E
E
A
D
Revised
Game, Augmented
A
4,1
2,2 :
*4,1' \
: 3^2 ’
D 1
:
W .........
1,4:
A
2/3:
2/3;
D ; 1
w ........
: 1,4
3,3 ;
a
4
;
E
D
2/3
• • — •-
: 3-3’**:
D ; 1
W
I
2,3
; .
• 2.3
A
D
2/3
2,2
a
4
■ 4,1*
! . ;
: 2/3 J
4
Key: rh represents a sequence of ms, i.e. m, m, m ... for each coordination player; 2/3 a
sequence of 2s and 3s in some order.
As augmenting games reveals, to play with a superpower is to help reinforce a stable
deadlock.
But playing an independent coordination game increases variety and can help in
breaking the deadlock, in fact in several ways. For one, enough significant players playing a
coordination game can alter the overall dominant strategy towards disarmament.
For
another, much more pressure can be brought to bear on the superpowers. For example, with
less support, unilateral action by the US administration on Star-Wars and arms build-up can
be exposed.
Superpower
militarism and
power excursions would stand
naked
and
27
unsupported.
Australia’s impact, in particular, would be rather greater as a nonaligned
free-rider pressing seriously for disarmament and regional nuclear-freedom (instead of, as at
present, white-wash polemics and token ambassadors, undermined by a none-too-tacit policy
of US support).
The strategy suggested by game-theoretic modelling converges then with that suggested
by other approaches, notably regional and ecological approaches.
The strategy is that of
limitation, of disengagement from escalating US/USSR war games, and progressive alteration
of their likely outcomes by defusing coordination moves.
In more practical terms, the
approaches mean trying to limit and modify superpower games by restricting their games and
supporting regional or local coordination of players, in forms of organisations both of nations
and of people. Such organisations would work, as many have already been doing, to contract
the regions and spheres of influence and access of US and USSR military administrations, and
to diminish support for their war-fighting objectives.
For example, Antipodean groups could, and should, coordinate to ease the American
military out of the South Pacific region, meanwhile resisting any intrusion of Russian
military. Then, while the Europeans are doing their coordinated de-escalating, denuclearising
things right across Europe, the Russian and American war games are progressively excluded
from the entire Southern Hemisphere. An eventual aim geographically is, to send their
weapons of war back home, to restrict their (and French and other) global military enterprises
to their “own” backyards, where they would not always be so enthusiastically received.
Fortunately such an ambitious and optimistic project, so unlikely to come to pass given
present nation-state arrangments, can be accomplished piecemeal, from small and significant
beginnings, already to be seen.
As a result of recent movements in the region, a South Pacific nuclear-free region is now
a politically-achievable option. A first token step has already been taken. But next steps,
towards genuine nuclear-freedom, require above all cooperation of a less aligned Australia,
joining other disengaging “free-riders” in the region.
That in turn requires, as a practical
component, closure of American bases in Australia as their leases terminate, cessation of
American nuclear ship visits and aircraft staging, and an end to uranium mining and sales.
As Australia is the only country in the region supplying uranium, and the main location of US
bases, such steps would be most significant. Even so, the Pacific regional effect would remain
unduly limited, so long as France and the US are based within the region, and transit of
nuclear ships is internationally sanctioned everywhere on the shrinking high seas.
Plainly
there are further more difficult steps on the way to southern Pacific nuclear-freedom and
independence, i.e. even for one of the easier oceanic regions.
But there is no good reason to
28
expect that removing the nuclear scourge, any more than eliminating other major politico
social evils, will be easy.
Permanent removal and a less dubious “peace” than we presently
enjoy is not something that will be achieved by more of what we have witnessed, or even
through clever diplomacy and smart technological tricks, such as new defensive weapons; it
will take difficult structural and radical design change.
8. On the need for, possibility of, and prospect of appropriate structural
change.
There is little doubt that certain sorts of structural political change would be highly
conducive to peace (e.g. democratic reorganisation of the superpowers), and that certain
fundamental changes may even be sufficient for permanent peace.
With that in view they
have long been advocated - at least from Rousseau and Kant onwards.
But it has also been
supposed that some such changes are necessary for lasting peace; ‘it is also necessary to
transform the structures that lead to war’ (B. Martin, p.12). To render this theme immune to
obvious criticisms - for example, that straightforward authoritarian extension of certain
established structures could bring an end to war - further desiderata, typically presupposed,
are invoked, for instance that certain freedoms, modest material standards of life, and so on,
are duly guaranteed, and also the type of necessity involved is wound back to some lower
technical level (not excluded however by present practicalities). These adjustments make the
necessity theme more difficult to assess, but also more difficult to sustain.
There are two parts to its assessment and defence, a negative and critical part,
demolishing a range of arguments from determinism, human nature, and the like, to the effect
that arrangements have to be more or less the way they are, and a positive part, comprising
direct arguments for the theme.
The large negative part of this enterprise will simply be
illustrated.34
According to deterministic and mechanistic approaches, such as that of (marxist)
technological determinism, nuclear weapons, like megamachines generally, are no aberration.
They are an integral part of the business of industrial and ecological conquest, a further stage
in human intervention which has already involved substantial disruption through pesticides,
wastes, etc. The argument tends to the fatalistic. The megamachines of conquest are made,
and once made they will be used. No change in political arrangement, which would make any
difference, is possible. Sometimes technological enthusiasts push their position and luck, even
further, that a weapon or device once invented by humans will be used: there is no stopping
progress.
But in doing so they overextend themselves.
While there is, sadly a fair induction
from the manufacture of weapons (of any given type, for many batches are never deployed) to
their use, inductions from invention of machines or the like to their manufacture are
c
29
unreliable and subject to many counterexamples (and many machines that do eventually get
made have been reinvented or independently rediscovered).
But even the good inductions do
not show that weapons of various sorts must be used, that a change in background political
organisation would not frustrate the inductions.
The broader deterministic position is of
course that such background changes are not possible either; political arrangements too, like
the rest of social life, are technologically or economically determined.
But (nonanalytical)
determinism, technological and other, is false, so it is argued elsewhere (JB, CPD). Different
political arrangements, which alleviate problems, are technically possible, and arrangements
would be different in differently evolved worlds. Things did not and do not have to be the way
they are, or the social and political sort of way they are.
Many routes, none of deductive strength, lead to the conclusion that the dominant
political structures of our time, fashioned
(with
much input from schemes of past
philosophers) from feudal institutions, require extensive structural alteration.
In particular,
they need to be superseded by alternative structures less intricately tied to war, which do not
promote or lead so readily to war. Such a theme has been argued directly from the nuclear fix
itself (as e.g. WP1, p.47ff.).
But suppose, improbable as it may seem, that nuclear weapons
all vanished, thereby removing the current nuclear fix; for instance, they turned out to be
quietly
self-destructing,
or
a
disarmament actually took place.
massive
thermodynamic
miracle
occurred,
or
nuclear
The problem of war would not be thereby removed, and
even that of nuclear war would only be given some respite. For the structural arrangements
for war would remain intact.04 Conventional weapons would remain, along with weapons
perhaps as dangerous as nuclear weapons, such as chemical and biological ones.
Nuclear
weapons, insofar as they were removed (for small caches are easily hidden away), could soon
be replaced, especially if nuclear power plants remained intact; and nothing would prevent the
development of (Star-Wars) weapons more diabolical than nuclear ones.
War cannot be eliminated while leaving the rest of society as it is - by freezing the
status quo. ... The structural conditions for war need to be removed - not reinforced
as appeals to elites may do - and superseded by alternative structures which do not
lead to war (B. Martin, p.12: Martin goes on to indicate the types of structures, and
how to reach them).
Structural adjustments can provide conditions for lasting satisfactory peace. An initial,
somewhat simplistic, Kantian argument for the proposition that peace is possible (presented
by Latta, introducing Permanent Peace), runs as follows:-
Peace, perpetual peace, is an ideal, not merely of a speculative kind but a practical
idea, a moral principle. Hence this ideal ought to be realised, i.e. there ought
(morally) to be peace. But ought entails can; therefore peace is possible.
30
From Heracleit.us through Hegel there buzzes an impressive swarm of philosophers"*6 who have
rejected the second premiss. Some are even captivated by such extravagant counter-claims as
that with peace everything would stop, that competition, with war as one limit, is essential to
motion and progress!
would
now
be
With the recent shift in philosophical fashions, the second premiss
more widely
conceded,
though
often
not
on
Kantian
grounds,
but
consequentialist. Such grounds to support the theme that peace is desirable and ought to be
realised, but are more discriminating in that they help indicate what sort of peace.
Unfortunately, however it is done, the second premiss does not sustain the conclusion, ought
does not entail can, as many moral dilemmas reveal (see MD, WP1).
So fortunately, there is a more satisfactory and revealing route to the conclusion that
peace is possible, and indeed is feasible. That is the more elaborate method of (semantical)
modelling: present in detail scenarios of societies where peace persists (for the sceptical it may
be necessary to recall n-human models, with n small). This sort of thing is of course already
done, in more pleasing fashion than logicians could hope to emulate, if rather less precisely, by
OQ
novelists and science-fiction writers, and by activists like the different Martins.
What all
these scenarios point to, however, are societies considerably different from our own - though
not in the people involved, who have their weaknesses, their power drives, and so forth, but
because of significant structural alterations in the societies depicted.
By way of such modellings we can not merely argue to the feasibility of lasting peace,
but push ahead with the argument, that societies of these restructured sorts are desirable
alternatives to contemporary military- industrial arrangements.
For those of us then who
want to move towards such pacific alternatives, the practical inference, from feasibility and
desirability is clear: we should begin on the real work of structural change.
Peace is possible and desirable, but the prospects are poor (as Heilbroner has said of the
human prospect).
Present arrangements, though contingent and fashioned in large measure
from the schemes of past intellectuals, are thoroughly entrenched, and enforced, both
ideologically and by much physical power, often as if along with natural law they were God
given, though they are no longer appropriate. Even small nonstructural changes look difficult
to achieve in present political climates. Through climates have not changed that much, major
social improvements have been gained, not instantanously, but in longer-term struggles with
government. Such short-term difficulties did not deter social theorists such as Kant, who like
Rousseau before him and many after him, were concerned with obtaining lasting peace.
The world has changed enormously since the time of Kant’s proposals for peace (of
1795), and even since the time of Veblen’s more cynical additions (in 1917). Hard science and
31
destructive power have grown enormously; and even theoretical knowledge of collective
behaviour, especially that admitting of game-theoretic treatment, though still slight, has
advanced.
But political arrangements and what can be accomplished politically have, in
important respects, changed very little, since Rousseau complained (around 1761) that
governments were probably too short-sighted to appreciate the merits of his project for
perpetual peace.
Governments have long been, and been seen as, main obstacles to peace. Thus Veblen
rightly maintained that ‘... if the peace is to be kept it will have to come about irrespective of
governmental management, - in spite of the State rather than by its good offices’ (p.7).^^ So
it has been with most major social changes; for they have involved structural political change
disturbing to governmental conservatism.
In his search for the indispensible conditions for lasting peace, Kant claimed, as others
have claimed since, that peace is not possible under present structural arrangements of an
unregulated competing nation-state kind.
As times have changed, so, to a limited extent,
have state structural arrangements, since Kant compiled his conditions. In particular, there is
now, in the shape of the United Nations, a very weak reflection of what Kant looks for, a
world (or European!) federation of nations.
But crucial ingredients in Kant’s resolution are
still lacking:- namely, at the upper level, what is required for a standard resolution of
Prisoners Dilemma type situations - some surrender of national sovereignty, especially as
regards war,
and, at the lower level, “republican” states.
Major blockages to adequate
arrangements for peace remain at two critical levels of organisation, that concentrated upon
of the organisation of collectives of states and, in part by devolution, that of the internal
organisation of individual states themselves.
Much evidence has now accumulated that more far-reaching changes than Kant,
Rousseau and Veblen envisaged are required at both international and nation-state levels if
genuine peace is to be secured. Indeed significant changes are wanted even in republician
states for peace movements to get their mixed message through already fixed channels to state
control systems.
For this sort of reason, movements on a single front, such as peace, are
unlikely to succeed on their own, but should be linked into a broader plurality of movements,
which seek to widen informational and democratic channels, and to alter the character and
membership of state systems, and thereby render them much more controllable and
accountable.40
Many longer-haul structural changes depend upon diverting nuclear war in the
meantime. Thus arguing for more far-reaching changes, for an altered nonaligned Australia,
32
for a nuclear-free South Pacific, for regional structural changes, certainly does not exclude
arguing and working for obvious measures for reducing risks of nuclear war. These include: a
serious commitment to arms control by the superpowers (whose practices threaten our
futures, though most of us lack representation in either); a move away from war-fighting
strategies and associated destabilising weapons-systems;
moderation
of confrontational
rhetoric and other tensions-inducing practices by superpower administrations, and improved
efforts at mutual understanding (as well some appreciation of the elements of political
pluralism); and then, remote though it may appear, significant steps towards nuclear
disarmament.
Richard Sylvan 41
Bungendore NSW
33
NOTES
1.
Queensland premier, with destructive deep-South policies.
2.
The point, which has become controversial, is argued in effect in Gilbert.
3.
See especially Dibb, as reported in the ANU Reporter, and for a more guarded
elaboration, his IAD (e.g. p.163 ‘At present, planning for the defence of Australia lack
coherence because there is no clear definition, in priority order, of what needs
defending’); see also Sharp, p.l48ff and differently Langtry and Ball, p.575ff., p.6O5ff.
The much-heralded Dibb Review of mid-1986 would, if (as already seems unlikely) it
were adopted, remove some of the lesser incoherence in Australian policy, that involving
details of regional defensive defence (as would also Langtry and Ball, if followed
through).
While Dibb appears to have demolished what he refers to scathingly as the ‘largely
mythical “core force” concept’, a new controversy has sprung up over whether
Australia’s more self-reliant defence should be purely defensive defence, Dibb’s ill-named
‘strategy of denial’, or whether it should include an offensive component. Dibb himself
has rather rapidly shifted ground on this important issue.
In late 1983 he was
contending that ‘Australia should have in the force-in-being significant deterrent
capabilities, based on present air and naval strike assets, which can mount defensive and
offensive operations against attacking forces, their staging bases and lines of resupply’
(IAP, p.166). But in the otherwise conservative Review of 1986 such offensive defence is
abandoned; no such forces and equipment for offensive off-shore operations are
recommended. Instead ‘the review proposes a layered strategy of defence within our
area of direct military interest. Our most important defence planning concern is to
ensure that an enemy would have substantial difficulty in crossing the sea and air gap’.
The new offensive/defensive defence controversy puts the Review’s adoption in
increasing doubt - in which event the local incoherence in strategic planning processes
and militational difficulties Dibb alludes to early in his statement will presumably
persist.
The Review not merely fails to address significant regional issues, as to defence
priorities, and as to multiple purpose roles for Australian armed forces given that they
will be involved in virtually no military activity other than maintenance and a certain
“preparedness” (for on Dibb’s overstatement of the prevailing view of Australia’s very
favourable regional security prospects, ‘there is no conceivable prospect of any power
contemplating invasion of our continent and subjugation of our population’). But
further, the Review is itself vague to incoherent, concerning wider defence issues, vague
as to the post-ANZUS situation, and incoherent about Australia’s role in US global
“defence” activity.
According the Dibb (CT, p.16), ‘there is no requirement for
Australia to become involved in United States contingency planning for global war. The
presence of the joint facilities, together with the access that we provide to visits by
United States warships and the staging through of Australia of B-52 bombers, are a
sufficient tangible contribution to the Alliance.’
These contributions are not
involvement? That is not how the USSR views the matter: they are the reported sole
34
basis of USSR nuclear targetting of Australia (see Dibb. SS p.13).
global stance is left essentially to the USA.
And Australia's
Amazingly, in the Strategic Basis Papers (SB), Australia criticizes New Zealand because
‘it has still developed no policy for national defence and tends to look to ... the US as its
primary source of defence guidance’ (p.29). Note that C3I abbreviates the mouthful,
Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence.
4.
See Sharp, p.l46ff. An Australian policy should moreover fit with the genuine needs
and shared aspirations of local people - to the extent, presumably, that these are
commendable; again the presupposed value framework is critical.
5.
Thus e.g. Gray (p.17) on the Reagan Administration’s ‘foolhardy brief willingness to
talk publicly about nuclear strategy’, and his distain for public involvement or input.
There is some concern, especially among neo-conservatives, about US defence strategies
being ‘undermined by well-meaning persons who believe they are helping the cause of
peace’ (Bell p.10; similarly Gray).
Even those not so far right support partial
information releases which maintain public confidence; e.g. Dibb on ‘the release of a
generalised statement about ;the] functions of the US bases in Australia ... to give
Australians more confidence about their crucial contribution to the Allied cause’ (ISA,
p.166). ‘Our defence policy-making process is probably more “closed” than that of any
other advanced Western democracy’ according to Langtry and Ball (p.608), who
contend that ‘the public needs to be involved much more in our defence planning and
operations'.
For a justified critique of public exclusion and leave-it-to-the-experts
approaches, see B. Martin; also Sharp.
6.
The paper was drafted in mid-1985.
7.
For those amassing evidence that Australia falls into the inexact class of client states,
the following Australian contribution is noteworthy: ‘The US prefers to act as a
member of a group, and a contribution by Australia can also assist in demonstrating to
Congressional and public opinion that the objectives sought are significant enough to
attract allied support’ (SB, p.28)
8.
As to DI and arms control, see, e.g. Mack PR and Gray. As to D2, ‘USA has now an
announced first-strike nuclear targeting policy’ technologically reinforced, Hayes, p.4;
and see also Mack AC, p.111. The goal of the Reagan administration is superiority (a
conveniently ambiguous term). Thus e.g. Gray (p.32): ‘it is of course essential that the
United States modernize its offensive forces so as to render the Soviet Union genuinely
offensive-counterforce incompetent.’
9.
On the major changes in American policy, see e.g. Gray p.118 ff. Though America is
now said to have a ‘new national security concept of which SDI is the centerpiece’ it
may still lack an ‘arms control policy’ (Gray, p.25,pll). Not only arms control, but
American commitment to the security of allies, remain at least decidedly cloudy
matters. Thus it is of little avail to contend that Australia does have a coherent secondorder global policy, namely the (discreditable) one of following prevailing American
policy. For the US lacks a first-order policy which is sufficiently clear in relevant
respects.
The American direction of Australian policy had better be away from too much public
exposure because Australians, no more than New Zealanders, mostly do not like being
pushed around, even by Americans.
35
10.
Thus we can avoid the important debate as to whether, and to what extent, deterrence
remains part of US global “defence” policy (though it certainly remains part of the
policy sold to the American public). As to the philosophical significance of the debate,
see Gay, p.l29ff. and Benn.
11.
The common-interest theme is often traced to (partly self-interested) American action in
the Pacific in World War II. Curiously Australia’s interests are are now said also to
converge with those of Japan, but to be diametrically opposed to those of the USSR
(despite increasing trade).
12.
Nor, though this is a longer story, does Australian culture by any means coincide with
American: see CPD. Thus a uniform treatment is entirely inappropriate. Similarly, a
single overarching treatment for a monolithic West is thoroughly inadequate: see further
below in the text.
13.
Australian planning should be looking at strategic models (game-theoretic and other)
which include Australia. For, as argued below, abandoning the uniformity assumption
of the monolithic West, of the West as one parish, makes significant differences to the
results yielded.
14.
As Cock goes on: ‘These basic issues increasingly become lost in the array of consumer
choices’.
15.
‘The serf societies - more or less willingly - accept the status of “allies”, i.e. protection
with rights and duties as in feudal societies. They become client countries’ (Galtung,
p.169).
16.
So-called by Mack PC. But the formulation presented follows G. Davidson’s more
satisfactory account in Canberra Times, Wednesday, May 8, 1985, p.2. Mack considers
that what amounts to the elitist case is the ‘altogether more sophisticated argument
[which] holds sway ... in government’ (p.l, italics added)!
17.
The “Asian hordes” derive from one of the less spoken about successors to the Yellow
Peril, from the immediate past days of the Asian communist threat, the Domino theory,
and White Australia.
18.
As Stephenson argued, less fortunately, 20 years ago. Even when around World War II
Japan, did have interest in access to strategic raw materials, the Japanese High
Command decided against invading Australia because of the difficulty of dealing with
the people - a point of much importance.
19.
Of course, such military expenditure is also encouraged by economic forces, e.g. like
much Third World hard currency expenditure it helps the American economy along a
bit.
20.
Heilbroner has traced some of the economic components and consequences of what, with
excess exaggeration and insufficient irony, he calls ‘the rise and subsequent fall of the
American imperium’ (p.52): it hasn’t fallen that far yet. ‘Empires have always been
expensive and the American empire was no exception. ... The sheer military cost ... for
the United States alone ... is roughly ten percent of ... GNP for the last 25 years ($2 x
10) in 1972 dollars)’. American imperial spending supplemented by other capitalist
countries fueled inflation, enhanced poverty, etc., and was complements by, what it was
represented as required by, counterexpenditure and efforts by the USSR.
36
‘The establishment of an American hegemony [consisted and: resulted not just in very
large military expenditures, but in the rapid build-up of American capital investments
abroad. Between 1950 and 1970, the value of American-owned plant and equipment
abroad leaped from $12 billion to $78 billion’ (p.54). A result of the expenditure abroad
was a serious balance of payments problem (negative “capital flows” and balances), and
a growing accumulation of IOUs. On this sort of basis, Heilbroner speculates that ‘the
mere operations of the American imperium by itself - deemed of such critical importance
to preserve the peace and security of the capitalist world - was in all likelihood a
sufficient condition for the globalisation of the inflationary phenomena’ (p.57 with insert
from p.56).
According to Heilbroner, ‘Long before the Vietnam debacle, it was clear that American
arms could not prevent the rise of revolutionary governments in the under-developed
world’ (p.57). But really very little evidence of collapse is presented by Heilbroner; and
seemingly there is little. What there is more substantial evidence for is the marked
decline of the American imperium in the period (1973-8) concerned. One piece of
evidence is the sharp decline in America’s share of World GDP, shown in the following
table of select leading national economies:
SHARE OF WORLD GDP (%)
POPULATION
SHARE
COUNTRY
RANK
1968
1975
1984
(1984 est)
USA
1
35.0
24.3
25.0
5.2
USSR
2
11.1
11.0
13.8
6.2
JAPAN
3
5.2
8.0
9.5
2.7
GERMANY FDR
4
5.1
6.7
5.7
1.5
FRANCE
5
4.6
5.4
CHINA
6
2.9
4.8
4.3
22.6
UK
8
2.8
2.8
2.3
1.3
4.4
1.3
INDIA
12
1.3
1.5
1.1
15.1
AUSTRALIA
15
1.1
1.4
1.0
0.3
37
The table should also make it clear that if the USA cannot sustain a grand empire, nor
can the USSR. A totalitarian Pax Sovietica is even less likely than a capitalistic Pax
American was.
21.
Although, so the documents continue, ‘neighbourhood contingencies .... are at present
assessed as impossible’!
The theme that the USA affords no sure guarantee of Australian defence is reiterated in
Langtry and Bell, e.g. p.608. They go on there to outline the major points that reliance
upon the US has distorted Australian arrangements (with forces better equipped to fight
alongside the Americans in Asia than on their own in defending Australia) and has led
to neglect of the regional priorities, ‘to defence planning which at least would recently
paid little attention to the direct defence of our continent and the protection of our
remote communities’ (p.608).
22.
The French, who operate a global network second only to the Americans and more
extensive than the Russians, with many forces in the Pacific region, have never been
seriously considered. Yet in certain significant respects French social and cultural
arrangements are closer to Antipodean ones than American arrangements are. In these
days of technological warfare, the post-Waterloo loss record of the French should not be
given too much weight; we don’t after all look very hard at the American record of
defeats and incompetence. Etc.
23.
If Australia is not likely to be threatened there is no real deterrence advantage because
nothing to deter. Other advantages of the ANZUS alliance such as access to high-level
intelligence are not only dubious (see PC, D. Martin), but not always guaranteed by the
alliance as the blackout of New Zealand shows.
24.
Soviet activity is undoubtedly perceived rather differently by American administrations
than Antipodean ones. ‘An agressive, treacherous, ruthlessly self-interested, expansionist
increasingly powerful, and hence increasingly threatening state - that is the image of the
Soviet Union in America.
It is the image which has legitimised the strategic
modernation and Star Wars programs’ (to adopt Mack ST, pl). To see that this is
indeed the intellectually shoddy route by which these grand and dangerous programs are
justified, it is enough to work through fundamentalist sources, such as Gray. It is
almost as if Americans had projected some of their own occasionally-manifested worst
features into the giant enemy.
25.
After some considerable reconstruction, that is. For the argument, curiously referred as
that of “central balance” in newspaper-level publications of academics (e.g. Catley,
Bell), is never presented in requisite detail - which is one reason why it has proved hard
to criticise and refute.
26.
As well both the premiss and its usual substitutes are false (see MF). The type of
argument exhibited is a good example of prevalent Australian consequentialist thinking.
A parallel argument, enjoying unwarranted popularity, runs: We might as well sell
uranium (e.g. to France), because if we don’t someone else will - as if motives counted
morally for nothing.
27.
See also the discussion of Bell’s claims in D. Martin and in Mack PC.
28.
Since the New Zealand restrictions on nuclear ships, ‘the Soviet media has been full of
gloating references to the prospect of the collapse of the ANZUS treaty’ according to
Dibb (SS, p.14). Given the unimportance of the Antipodes to Soviet interests (as Dibb
38
himself explains), Dibb is surely exaggerating, at least, when he later claims that ‘the
prospect of the breakup of the AN ZUS treaty would be of enormous benefit to the
USSR’s world-wide interests’ (SS p.31).
Soviet support for Antipodean independence and for ‘a real nuclear weapon-free zones'
in the South Pacific has its disconcerting elements (‘with friends like that ...’); but
luckily the quality of ideas does not depend essentially on their sources and supporters.
29.
As WPI serves to show. In a different context, Bell objects to Australian free-loading
‘on other people’s risks and burdens. That has certainly not been our tradition, and I
hope it will not become so, since it is morally quite indefensible’ (p.7). Not so: bludging,
for instance, is a well-established, if disapproved of, part of the tradition; and in some
cases it is morally in order. However, free-riding is not being proposed merely for self
interested reasons, e.g. to remove the present risks of nuclear targetting; it is being
proposed with a view to altering the two great alliance structures that at present
dominate international politics. Bell’s objection to such a course is that it ‘would on the
one hand tend to increase the tendency of the superpowers to unilateralism, and on the
other hand tend to induce many of the minor powers in question (including Australia)
to consider acquiring nuclear capacity’ (p.7). The second alternative neglects the non
proliferation treaty, to which Australia is a signatory; the first appears to assume
erroneously that friendly relations with America are foregone; both are pretty minor
considerations (and both can be dealt with in other negotiated ways) compared with the
major problem of nuclear war.
30.
The less than perspicuous symbolism is that used in Hardin (CA, p.20, p.39), but with
agents’ costs or contributions, C, duly agent relativized. Hardin misleadingly treats C
as a fixed parameter, thus strictly falsifying the tautology.
31.
Thus Hardin who (in CA) claims to ‘demonstrate the equivalence of the logic of
collective action and the Prisoners’ Dilemma’ (p.4) The demonstration is given on
p.25ff.
32.
But of course the two types of dilemma interconnect.
33.
Even so, significant change in USA looks unlikely. Present arrangements suit not only
the American corporate-administrative power elite, which can direct public opinion
through its control of the main communications media, but many other fat-cat
Americans, rather well. The polarisation of the world into two camps increases US
control of the larger and far wealthier camp, yet scarcely reduces US trade or markets.
While it does limit the global coverage of US business and multinationals, and
somewhat restricts the transfer of other regions’ surplus value to the USA, it ensures the
much greater advantage of being able to maintain the US domestic political economy on
a military basis. The US and the USSR not only dance together; they were made for
each other.
Abroad US hegemony is maintained through a series of alliances and economic control
strategies. Particularly ominous for the South Pacific are the Trilateral and Pacific Rim
arrangements (which, with much local assistance, are helping to send Australia on its
present economic trajectory). When advice or persuasion directed at allies and client
states fail, economic measures can be resorted to (capital outflows, for instance, being a
highly effective mechanism, “aid” a lesser device). For the most part, the imperial war
machine can remain in the background. At home updated and improved imperial
measures also work well. The mass consumerist society affords a rich and diverting
selection of bread (much of it again imported) for a majority of Americans; television
39
and its entertainment variants offer a constant diet of circuses. For passive middle
mainstream America, the vast police and security network remains a largely background
and even unnoticed phenomenon; what is seen is even welcomed as a necessary shield
from that other, dangerous, minority America.
American social, educational and media management of opinion is obviously successful.
Of present relevance, most Americans have been convinced that unilateral disarmament
would be unAmerican. Thus the American administration, being hedged in by opinion
they have helped to generate, cannot move in any such directions. For, given popular
opinion, it would of course be politically disastrous, as well as undemojl’cratic!
In the USSR, where political control is exercised to a much greater extent through overt
power, present change of substance appears even less likely.
34.
More of the negative enterprise is attempted elsewhere, e.g. a critique of the supposed
strait-jacket of human nature is begun in CPD. From Plato through Hegel and into
contemporary times it has been erroneously supposed that war, like aggression, is part
of human nature, that war is a permanent (and perhaps even desirable) condition of
human and social existence. For a refutation, see e.g. Trainer and Waite.
35.
As observed by B. Martin, who uses this important form of argument for institutional
change to get this thick book started (pp.12-13).
36.
The swarm includes some anomalies, such as that somewhat tarnished hero of deep
ecology, Spinoza: see e.g. Northedge.
37.
Perhaps Kant had some such scenario in view in his theme that peace is empirically
possible, which he coupled with his striking claim that peace is morally and rationally
imperative. The latter claim, running in direct opposition to the long line of bellicose
philosophers, really relies on the correct, but controversial, assumption that states are
subject to the same moral relations as individual persons. Both then have an obligation
to seek peace derived from forms of the categorial morality, notably from rational
autonomy, the universality of maxims, and the ultimate value of persons (or, yet more
chauvinistically, of humanity).
38.
Veblen argued against the State on the basis that ‘governmental establishments and ...
powers ... are derived from feudal establishments of the Middle Ages; which in turn, are
of a predatory origin and of an irresponsible character’ (p.9), however the Christianfeudal origin of the State provided only one - and a coersive - evolutionary pattern of
organisation (pp. 12-13), a pattern much influenced moreover by schemes of
intellectuals. Other patterns remain feasible.
39.
There are now theoretical arguments for Kant’s claim, as well as practical arguments of
an inductive sort.
40.
Such is also the new message from America: for the peace movement to get through to
the administration, American democracy must be overhauled and revitalised, capitalist
democracy superseded by true democracy or “republicanism” (see especially Cohen and
Rogers, and earlier Chomsky). But the message, like the US peace movements’ very
limited demands for peace, leaves the State, as the bringer of wars, and main source of
violence essentially intact; the structural changes suggested, which will be slow to
achieve, are much too narrowly conceived.
41.
My thanks for information to Andrew Mack and David Bennett, and for comments to
Grover Foley and Russell Hardin.
REFERENCES
G.
H.
Andrewartha and L.C. Birch, The Ecological Web, University of Chicago Press, 1984.
W.R. Ashby, Design for a Brain, Second edition, Wiley, New York, 1960.
S.Beer, Designing Freedom, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto, 1974.
C. Bell, ‘The case against neutrality’, Current Affairs Bulletin 61(4) (1984) 4-10.
S.I. Benn, ‘Deterrence or appeasement? or, On trying to be rational about nuclear war’,
Journal of Applied Philosophy 1(1984) 5-19.
F. Capra and C. Spretnak, Green Politics, Hutchinson, London, 1984.
R. Catley, ‘Along with the Bomb ...’ (Review of D. Martin), The Weekend Australian
Magazine, 7-8 April, 1984.
N. Chomsky and E.S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, Black Rose Books,
Montreal, 1979.
P. Cock, Alternative Australia, Quartet Books, Melbourne, 1979.
J. Cohen and J. Rogers, On Democracy, Penguin, New York, 1984.
P. Dibb (as reported) ‘Defence Planning “lacks coherence” - researcher’, ANU Reporter, 1983.
P. Dibb, ‘Issues in Australian defence’, Australian Outlook 37 (1983) 160-166; referred to as
IAD.
P. Dibb, ‘Soviet strategy towards Australia, New Zealand and Oceania’ paper prepared for
Soviet Strategy Against Asia converence, Tokyo, November 1984; referred to as SS.
P. Dibb, Review of Australia's Defence Capabilities, Report to the Minister of Defence,
Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1986; edited text also published in The
Canberra Times, 4 June 1986, pp.16-18; referred to as the Dibb Review.
P. and A. Erlich, Population, Resources, Environment, Second edition, Freeman, San
Francisco, 1976.
H. Feith,‘Richard Falk, World order radical’, Peace Studies 24 (1985) 24-5.
J. Galtung, There are Alternatives, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1984.
W.C. Gay, ‘Myths about nuclear war: misconceptions in public beliefs and governmental
plans’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 9(1982) 117-144.
A. Gilbert, ‘The state and nature in Australia’, Australian Cultural History 1981 (ed.
S. Goldberg and F.B. Smith), Canberra, 1982, pp.9-28.
42
C.S. Gray, ‘The Reagan administration and arms control’, paper presented at The Future of
Arms Control Conference, Canberra. August 1985.
R. Hardin, Collective Action, Resources for the Future, Washington, 1982; referred to as CA.
R. Hardin, ‘Unilateral versus mutual disarmament’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12(1983)
236-254.
M.D. Hayes, ‘Defending the sunburnt country’, Chain Reaction 33(August-September 1983)
11-17.
R.L. Heilbroner, Beyond Boom and Bust, Norton, New York, 1978.
I. Kant, Perpetual Peace (trans, and introd. M. Campbell Smith), Swan Sonnerschein,
London, 1903 (first published 1795).
J. O. Langtry and D Ball (eds), A Vunerable Country, Australian National University Press,
Canberra, 1986.
A. Mack, ‘Farewell to Arms Controls’, Peace Research 9(1984) 9ff.; referred to as PR.
A. Mack, ‘The pros and cons of ANZUS’, Fabian ANZUS Conference, Lome, 4-5 May 1985;
referred to as PC.
A. Mack, ‘Arms control, disarmament and the concept of defensive defence’, Disarmament
8(3)(1984) 109-119; referred to as AC.
A. Mack, ‘The Soviet threat thesis: perceptions, capabilities and interests’ typescript,
Canberra, May 1985; referred to as ST.
B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984.
B. Martin, Armed Neutrality for Australia, Drummond Books, Melbourne, 1984.
F.S. Northedge, ‘Peace, war and philosophy’, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed P. Edwards),
Volume 6, Macmillan, New York, 1967, 63-67.
M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1965.
P. Pettit, ‘Free riding and foul dealing’, Journal of Philosophy, to appear,
J.J. Rousseau, A Project for Perpetual Peace (trans. E.M. Nuttal), London, 1927 (first
Published 1761).
R. Routley, ‘On the ethics of large-scale nuclear war and nuclear deterrence, and the political
fall out’, Discussion papers in Environmental philosophy #5, Research School of Social
Sciences, Australian National University, 1984.
R. Routley, ‘Metaphysical fall-out from the nuclear predicament’, Philosophy and Social
Criticism 3/4(1984) 19-34; referred to as MF.
R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion
Papers in Environmental Philosophy #6, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian
National University, 1984; referred to as MD.
43
R. Sharp (ed.), Apocalypse No. Pluto Press, Sydney, 1984.
P.R. Stephenson, The Foundations of Culture, W.J. Miles, Sydney, 1936.
R. Sylvan, ‘Culture and the roots of political divergence’, typescript, Canberra, 1985; referred
to as CPD.
M. Taylor and H. Ward, "Chickens, whales, and bumpy goods: alternative models of public
goods provision’, Political Studies 30(1982) 350-370.
T. Trainer and H. Waite, ‘Culture and the production of aggression’, in Sharp, ep.cit,
205-226.
The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy, leaked extracts published in the National
Times, March 30-April 5, 1984, 23-30; referred to as SB.
Threats to Australian Security, Parliamentary Joint Committee for Foreign Affairs and
Defence, Australian Government Printer, Canberra; referred to as TAS.
T. Veblen, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation, Viking
Press, New York, 1945 (first published 1917).
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WAR AND PEACE IV:
TAO AND DEEP-GREEN
Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many
issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific
doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress
mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific
purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the
role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to
military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through
Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and
towards deep-green theory.
1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism.
War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy.
Generally
aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions:
for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military
tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself
right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much
further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no
net benefit at any level (SB p.227).
What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation
practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate
to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB
P-212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao
Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to
the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu'
(Chan, p.154, p.17.)
But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not
assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war,
militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced
from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who
possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils.
Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed
to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among
the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works,
a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism.
The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has
been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) - not so much
however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much
�2
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special
dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given
that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of
universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done.
• Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils
There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices
paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special
paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter
attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the
possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from
all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful)
conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward
generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some
practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas
assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the
conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a
Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious
and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle
paradox.
Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the
positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable
preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war
and militarism. One key pasage runs:
Fine weapons are instruments of evil
They are hated by creatures
Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ...
Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler.
When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best
principle
Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy,
For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.
He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ...
For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies
(LT p.154).
Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil.
They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes
unavoidable (also p.152).
Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils.
Such discourse,
obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of
dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse
which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of
clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao
�3
does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death.
Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories,
underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where
something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is
excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses),
an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars
have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects.
Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the
military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking:
It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of
taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic
and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita
chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma
whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or
should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17).
‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in
contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible
duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of
one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties.
These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding
war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling
reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps
overlapping, set of reasons).
A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate
treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable
strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or
develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account
of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is
the fashion in which ij manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic
discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear
inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism
of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements
and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious
feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is
missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism
sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic
dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show:
�4
Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved,”.
Deep-green chart:
Arguments to
Processing of dilemma,
directive
dilemma
incompatible
situational procedures
output
input
prescriptions
Corresponding Taoist chart:
Black
directive
Box
output
It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box
rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory,
e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is
i.
indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to
deep ecological theory (see UT).
We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes
deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of
Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas.
The
principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality
(or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved
parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account,
see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists
will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued.
So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other
dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior
substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil
(typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of
wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided,
through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained,
through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc.
Through a typology of wars (coming up) that
conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs.
Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an
occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other
types of war. But, more generally, try this:-
�5
Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor
could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore,
every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable.
Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events
unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor,
an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such
examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for
instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions.
The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided
perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely
averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when
there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is
unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant
features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive
action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be
unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided.
Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For
whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur
before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is
“unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like
survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of
unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within
range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes.
State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably
high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example,
be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose
that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith
which depicts all hunqpns as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday
machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine
be unavoidable?1
In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate.
Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But
deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the
human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically*
1
Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that
such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received
doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter;
coherence requires relativization to ‘just wax for party d’.)
�6
unavoidable.
Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves
illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e.
excessive ethical costs such as extermination.
Let us explain deontic unavoidability
analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical
costs. Then z/it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of
war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then
that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined
towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is
also justifiable, on pacific grounds.
Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable
require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of
standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken
to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition.
The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized:
Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow.
Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152).
And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition
of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very
early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not
however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And
only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a
military objective, with environmental security.
The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and
roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should
exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing
of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and
similar.
This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing
kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What
the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters.
But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that
should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than
being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”).
2
But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in
confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for
what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT.
�7
2.
On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism.
Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though
generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about
how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the
damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature
of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep
green theory begins to diverge from Taoism.
In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections
to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in
its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by
force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game — in the
generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the
contestants, (warnng) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set
up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several
analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object,
construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These
we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities.
Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include
surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life
style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently
military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns.
An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as
reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not
quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures,
races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably
abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or,
perhaps by extension,.between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang
wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and
virtually all the worst wars.
While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token
wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams
representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are
hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should
not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial
contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much
larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us
distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the
�8
technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure
(indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to
this effort).
Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An
offensive war is one which ventures off a given party’s territory or recognised pad, “invading”
that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded.
Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not
strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can
easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless
they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor,
which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars
between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory,
e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were
defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken
(LT p.152).3
The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the
subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If
they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.)
Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as
redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or
allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place
(whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is
engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part
of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy)
democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive.
Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to
resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is
represented as a war qf liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones,
such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and
so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market
3
There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For
deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be
appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability
or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation:
I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive:
I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222).
These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting.
�9
capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion.
The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the
advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for
economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without
war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without
expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars
were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy
meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of
political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit
repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons
economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed
economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in
effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu:
When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to
fertilize (the fields ...).
When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs.
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181).
But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for
cessation of such practices.
The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is
reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the
Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15
years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth,
the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years
(the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a
favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite
targets.
Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and
abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military
practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism.
A main distinction is between
• conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals,
and
• social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is
carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4
4
Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin.
�10
It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will
have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No
doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in
secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark
about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies
of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons
of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should
retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more
generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether.
Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily
acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism.
For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations
frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and
authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep
green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important
preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of
state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has
no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an
elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference.
A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the
means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include
• elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and
• force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed
very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in
• contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in
• elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social
defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation.
Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by
considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp
curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been
primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social
fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a
matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars
should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline
and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon
endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize
just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust
facts.
�11
Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive
perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also
facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long
and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into
long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all
this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and
glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally
shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities)
and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means
vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the
practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components
into the industrial engine.
With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the
dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength.
Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly
worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The
opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women
in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs;
likewise conquest.
Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further
strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be
strengthened, through the following syllogism:
All wars should be fully just wars.
Modem wars cannot be fully just wars.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast
in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that
available this century.
The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much
information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is
always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial
requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation
or chemical or biological weapons around.
From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just
defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features
introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant
cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the
chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or
environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf
�12
Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow
a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of
value, of what counts.
The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension,
neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars
are typically environmental atrocities.
Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply
backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama.
Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental
ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no
similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any
such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological
wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological
disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even
less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species
than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity.
Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism:
All wars should be environmentally sound wars.
Modem wars cannot be environmentally sound.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information
accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars
both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them.
The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There
are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the
technology for, modem environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As
well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that
make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity
and cruelty.
3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence
‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which
strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’
strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism?
Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does
not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the
emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling.
The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include
• seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222)
�13
• surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics:
marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting
enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of
the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel
the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing
smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’
(p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous
consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194).
• advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will
overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233).
• coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies
are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices
the charge of deviousness looks feeble.
The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For
the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and
elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general,
unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to
meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the
legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving
‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But
in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give
my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of
benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary
first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to
bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured
natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly
illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and
weakness turned hardness and strength.
The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp
weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we
have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted
(p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained
unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons
deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there
are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and
other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices
�14
paradox).5
The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition
to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an
ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an
unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may
occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence.
To force the growth of life means ill omen.
For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence
(LT p. 197).
One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing
requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wwwei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony.
To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and
violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is
condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice
violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non
interference that are excluded.
However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite
5
Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of
quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and
very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible.
A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things
that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An
important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of
war, above all from irresponsible state power.
As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so
difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is
technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent
or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has
to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out;
there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is
because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness,
itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size,
such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive
technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small
technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria
for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off:
reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of
operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair
inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs.
�15
right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts
as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates,
profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some
specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to
regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather
intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a
range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the
machines of war industry stop.
Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and
ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with
much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent
paradox concerning war and nonviolence:
• War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and
the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an
anachronism.
• Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence
involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the
process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it
could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war.
0 But then war cannot be abolished without war.
Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6
This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far.
For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let
the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that
the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need
be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the
conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the
argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the
6
Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it
- designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative,
thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism,
revolved around the following inconsistent triad:
• capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained.
• capitalism cannot be removed without repression.
• repression is antithetical to liberty.
The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist”
action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing
capitalism.
�i
16
second premiss.
4. Standard and moral pacifism.
Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and
accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the
central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart
defensive wars.
• It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance
through the watershed thesis
P2.
It is morally wrong to use violence.
By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is
committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles.
Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism,
notably European forms. Is deep green?
There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the
warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of
contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war.
The most prominent
contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they
claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use.
As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly.
They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to
wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and
cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix).
Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily
in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and
continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire
consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and
important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery
can be thwarted in this way.
Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and
contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component
is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of
warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what
it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation,
arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g.
of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),.... In brief standard pacifism is
opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means.
�17
Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military
(using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the
ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent
demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g.
turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident,
then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative
components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise
English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and
of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism
which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise
English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item:
‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any
circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has
many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non
violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest.
Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries,
of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions.
They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and
organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is
very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched
notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which
P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism
(unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being
the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more
problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially
different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim.
Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy
critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a
target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”,
“fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and
treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous
investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism
was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant
violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism
7
In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism:
overcomprehensive might have been better.
�18
could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects
envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and
many ordinary women, but much more extensively.
The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of
moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands
the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to
WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances
develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable
wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the
literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist
shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the
literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details
of both see MD p. 10).
Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent
decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such
decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad
faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see
MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however
be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation.
This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by
Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes
pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation
trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ
from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong
one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent
acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the
commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was
supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8
Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is
hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the
commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced
that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace
movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most
people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and
8
JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his
criticism, I don't know.
�19
accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle,
pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a
radical doctrine.
As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism
is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter
pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level
of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism
pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is
said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not
generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such
principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A
small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a
principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it.
A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma
situations into purely consequentialist form.
In fact consequential decision theory was
deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic
procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective
vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts
in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS
p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision
making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38).
Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to
reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in
principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where
motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential
calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism,
sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed.
A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to
“second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What
was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist
considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic
principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that
consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The
conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray.
After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon
consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find
... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised
by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152)
�There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular.
As well he has
wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes.
There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow
too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153).
This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than
populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed
on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts,
providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153).
Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never
part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly
erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle
free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to
prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is
no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence.
What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially
justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it
remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby
inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent
with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is
‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the
threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence
which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The
‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons
are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would
enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense
stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper
bound on level of force.
As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing
objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far
hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced,
hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally
compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed.
To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non
violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious
difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of
which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world.
Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to
meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage
�21
routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that
the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to
vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog
biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and
beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be
somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be
converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of
hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their
own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the
practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable
improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as
alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is
it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in
order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly.
More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended,
be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent
depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and
predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus,
for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of
orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the
“natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral
dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not
separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route:
The natural order is not an immoral order
The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence.
Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly
occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory
carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral
(neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far).
The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was
alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable,
ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical
theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of
modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to
carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to
�i
22
peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably
modified
P2
results:
MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9
To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the
proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has
to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modem humans; it sets too high a
moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for
something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace
sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively:
Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for
much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is
supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced.
Richard Sylvan*
Appendix
I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the
American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just
made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much
talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the
modem quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and
again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than
two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke
solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for
peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic?
President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with
many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will
prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be
done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as
on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little
that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to
9
The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of
environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes
MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use
vandolence.
Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in
JWS)
�
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WAR AND PEACE IV:
TAO AND DEEP-GREEN
Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many
issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific
doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress
mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific
purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the
role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to
military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through
Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and
towards deep-green theory.
1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism.
War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy.
Generally
aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions:
for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military
tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself
right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much
further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no
net benefit at any level (SB p.227).
What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation
practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate
to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB
P-212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao
Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to
the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu'
(Chan, p.154, p.17.)
But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not
assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war,
militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced
from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who
possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils.
Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed
to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among
the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works,
a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism.
The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has
been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) - not so much
however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much
2
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special
dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given
that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of
universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done.
• Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils
There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices
paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special
paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter
attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the
possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from
all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful)
conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward
generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some
practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas
assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the
conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a
Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious
and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle
paradox.
Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the
positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable
preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war
and militarism. One key pasage runs:
Fine weapons are instruments of evil
They are hated by creatures
Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ...
Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler.
When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best
principle
Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy,
For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.
He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ...
For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies
(LT p.154).
Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil.
They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes
unavoidable (also p.152).
Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils.
Such discourse,
obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of
dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse
which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of
clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao
3
does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death.
Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories,
underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where
something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is
excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses),
an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars
have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects.
Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the
military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking:
It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of
taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic
and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita
chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma
whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or
should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p.17).
‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in
contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible
duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of
one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties.
These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding
war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling
reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps
overlapping, set of reasons).
A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate
treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable
strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or
develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account
of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is
the fashion in which ij manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic
discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear
inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism
of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements
and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious
feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is
missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism
sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic
dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show:
4
Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved,”.
Deep-green chart:
Arguments to
Processing of dilemma,
directive
dilemma
incompatible
situational procedures
output
input
prescriptions
Corresponding Taoist chart:
Black
directive
Box
output
It is evident that Taoism can be extended; information can be put into the Black Box
rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory,
e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is
i.
indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to
deep ecological theory (see UT).
We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes
deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of
Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas.
The
principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality
(or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved
parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account,
see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists
will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued.
So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other
dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior
substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil
(typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of
wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided,
through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained,
through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc.
Through a typology of wars (coming up) that
conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs.
Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an
occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other
types of war. But, more generally, try this:-
5
Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor
could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore,
every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable.
Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events
unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor,
an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such
examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for
instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions.
The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided
perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely
averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when
there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is
unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant
features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive
action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be
unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided.
Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For
whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur
before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is
“unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like
survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of
unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within
range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes.
State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably
high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example,
be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose
that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith
which depicts all hunqpns as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday
machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine
be unavoidable?1
In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate.
Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But
deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the
human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically*
1
Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that
such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received
doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter;
coherence requires relativization to ‘just wax for party d’.)
6
unavoidable.
Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves
illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e.
excessive ethical costs such as extermination.
Let us explain deontic unavoidability
analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical
costs. Then z/it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of
war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then
that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined
towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is
also justifiable, on pacific grounds.
Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable
require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of
standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken
to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition.
The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized:
Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow.
Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152).
And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition
of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very
early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not
however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And
only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a
military objective, with environmental security.
The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and
roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should
exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing
of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and
similar.
This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing
kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What
the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters.
But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that
should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than
being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”).
2
But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in
confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for
what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT.
7
2.
On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism.
Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though
generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about
how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the
damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature
of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep
green theory begins to diverge from Taoism.
In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections
to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in
its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by
force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game — in the
generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the
contestants, (warnng) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set
up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several
analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object,
construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These
we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities.
Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include
surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life
style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently
military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns.
An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as
reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not
quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures,
races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably
abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or,
perhaps by extension,.between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang
wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and
virtually all the worst wars.
While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token
wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams
representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are
hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should
not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial
contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much
larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us
distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the
8
technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure
(indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to
this effort).
Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An
offensive war is one which ventures off a given party’s territory or recognised pad, “invading”
that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded.
Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not
strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can
easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless
they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor,
which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars
between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory,
e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were
defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken
(LT p.152).3
The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the
subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If
they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.)
Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as
redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or
allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place
(whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is
engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part
of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy)
democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive.
Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to
resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is
represented as a war qf liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones,
such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and
so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market
3
There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For
deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be
appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability
or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation:
I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive:
I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222).
These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting.
9
capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion.
The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the
advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for
economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without
war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without
expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars
were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy
meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of
political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit
repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons
economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed
economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in
effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu:
When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to
fertilize (the fields ...).
When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs.
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181).
But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for
cessation of such practices.
The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is
reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the
Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15
years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth,
the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years
(the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a
favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite
targets.
Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and
abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military
practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism.
A main distinction is between
• conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals,
and
• social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is
carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4
4
Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin.
10
It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will
have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No
doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in
secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark
about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies
of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons
of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should
retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more
generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether.
Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily
acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism.
For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations
frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and
authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep
green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important
preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of
state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has
no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an
elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference.
A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the
means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include
• elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and
• force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed
very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in
• contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in
• elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social
defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation.
Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by
considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp
curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been
primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social
fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a
matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars
should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline
and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon
endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize
just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust
facts.
11
Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive
perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also
facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long
and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into
long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all
this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and
glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally
shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities)
and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means
vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the
practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components
into the industrial engine.
With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the
dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength.
Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly
worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The
opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women
in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs;
likewise conquest.
Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further
strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be
strengthened, through the following syllogism:
All wars should be fully just wars.
Modem wars cannot be fully just wars.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast
in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that
available this century.
The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much
information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is
always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial
requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation
or chemical or biological weapons around.
From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just
defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features
introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant
cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the
chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or
environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf
12
Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow
a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of
value, of what counts.
The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension,
neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars
are typically environmental atrocities.
Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply
backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama.
Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental
ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no
similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any
such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological
wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological
disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even
less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species
than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity.
Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism:
All wars should be environmentally sound wars.
Modem wars cannot be environmentally sound.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information
accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars
both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them.
The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There
are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the
technology for, modem environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As
well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that
make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity
and cruelty.
3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence
‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which
strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’
strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism?
Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does
not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the
emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling.
The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include
• seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222)
13
• surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201). The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics:
marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting
enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of
the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel
the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing
smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’
(p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous
consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194).
• advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will
overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233).
• coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies
are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices
the charge of deviousness looks feeble.
The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For
the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and
elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general,
unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to
meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the
legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving
‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But
in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give
my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of
benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary
first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to
bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured
natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly
illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and
weakness turned hardness and strength.
The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp
weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we
have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted
(p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained
unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons
deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there
are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and
other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices
14
paradox).5
The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition
to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an
ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an
unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may
occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence.
To force the growth of life means ill omen.
For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence
(LT p. 197).
One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing
requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wwwei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony.
To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and
violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is
condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice
violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non
interference that are excluded.
However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite
5
Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of
quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and
very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible.
A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things
that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An
important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of
war, above all from irresponsible state power.
As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so
difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is
technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent
or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has
to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out;
there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is
because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness,
itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size,
such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive
technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small
technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria
for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off:
reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of
operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair
inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs.
15
right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts
as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates,
profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some
specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to
regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather
intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a
range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the
machines of war industry stop.
Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and
ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with
much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent
paradox concerning war and nonviolence:
• War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and
the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an
anachronism.
• Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence
involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the
process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it
could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war.
0 But then war cannot be abolished without war.
Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6
This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far.
For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let
the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that
the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need
be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the
conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the
argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the
6
Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it
- designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative,
thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism,
revolved around the following inconsistent triad:
• capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained.
• capitalism cannot be removed without repression.
• repression is antithetical to liberty.
The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist”
action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing
capitalism.
i
16
second premiss.
4. Standard and moral pacifism.
Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and
accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the
central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart
defensive wars.
• It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance
through the watershed thesis
P2.
It is morally wrong to use violence.
By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is
committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles.
Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism,
notably European forms. Is deep green?
There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the
warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of
contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war.
The most prominent
contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they
claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use.
As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly.
They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to
wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and
cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix).
Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily
in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and
continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire
consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and
important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery
can be thwarted in this way.
Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and
contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component
is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of
warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what
it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation,
arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g.
of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),.... In brief standard pacifism is
opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means.
17
Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military
(using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the
ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent
demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g.
turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident,
then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative
components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise
English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and
of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism
which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise
English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item:
‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any
circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has
many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non
violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest.
Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries,
of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions.
They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and
organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is
very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched
notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which
P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism
(unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being
the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more
problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially
different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim.
Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy
critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a
target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”,
“fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and
treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous
investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism
was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant
violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism
7
In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism:
overcomprehensive might have been better.
18
could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects
envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and
many ordinary women, but much more extensively.
The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of
moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands
the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to
WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances
develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable
wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the
literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist
shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the
literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details
of both see MD p. 10).
Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent
decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such
decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad
faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see
MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however
be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation.
This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by
Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes
pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation
trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ
from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong
one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent
acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the
commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was
supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8
Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is
hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the
commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced
that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace
movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most
people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and
8
JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his
criticism, I don't know.
19
accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle,
pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a
radical doctrine.
As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism
is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter
pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level
of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism
pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is
said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not
generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such
principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A
small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a
principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it.
A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma
situations into purely consequentialist form.
In fact consequential decision theory was
deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic
procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective
vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts
in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS
p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision
making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38).
Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to
reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in
principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where
motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential
calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism,
sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed.
A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to
“second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What
was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist
considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic
principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that
consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The
conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray.
After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon
consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find
... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised
by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152)
There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular.
As well he has
wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes.
There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow
too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153).
This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than
populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed
on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts,
providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153).
Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never
part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly
erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle
free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to
prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is
no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence.
What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially
justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it
remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby
inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent
with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is
‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the
threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence
which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The
‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons
are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would
enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense
stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper
bound on level of force.
As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing
objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far
hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced,
hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally
compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed.
To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non
violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious
difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of
which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world.
Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to
meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage
21
routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that
the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to
vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog
biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and
beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be
somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be
converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of
hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their
own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the
practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable
improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as
alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is
it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in
order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly.
More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended,
be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent
depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and
predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus,
for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of
orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the
“natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral
dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not
separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route:
The natural order is not an immoral order
The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence.
Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly
occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory
carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral
(neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far).
The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was
alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable,
ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical
theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of
modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to
carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to
i
22
peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably
modified
P2
results:
MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9
To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the
proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has
to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modem humans; it sets too high a
moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for
something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace
sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively:
Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for
much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is
supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced.
Richard Sylvan*
Appendix
I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the
American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just
made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much
talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the
modem quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and
again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than
two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke
solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for
peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic?
President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with
many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will
prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be
done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as
on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little
that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to
9
The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of
environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes
MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use
vandolence.
Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in
JWS)
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ON EXTIRPATING WAR:
TAO AND DEEP-GREEN PACIFISM
Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many
issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific
doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress
mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific
purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the
role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to
military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through
Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and
towards deep-green theory.
1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism.
War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally
aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions:
for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military
tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself
right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much
further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no
net benefit at any level (SB p.227).
What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation
practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate
to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB
p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao
Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to
the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’
(Chan, p.154, p.17.)
But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not
assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war,
militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced
from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who
possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils.
Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed
to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among
the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works,
a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism.
The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has
been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) — not so much
however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special
�2
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special
dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given
that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of
universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done.
• Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils
There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices
paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special
paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter
attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the
possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from
all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful)
conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all.
A straightforward
generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some
practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas
assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns thfc
conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a
Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious
and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle
paradox.
Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the
positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable
preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war
and militarism. One key pasage runs:
Fine weapons are instruments of evil
They are hated by creatures
Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ...
Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler.
When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best
principle
Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy,
For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.
He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ...
For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies
(LT p.154).
Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil.
They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes
unavoidable (also p.152).
Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils.
Such discourse,
obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of
dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse
which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of
clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao
�3
does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death.
Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories,
underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where
something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is
excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses),
an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars
have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects.
Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the
military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking:
It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of
taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic
and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita
chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma
whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or
should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17).
‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in
contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible
duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of
one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties.
These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding
war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling
reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps
overlapping, set of reasons).
A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate
treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable
strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or
develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account
of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is
the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic
discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear
inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism
of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements
and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious
feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is
missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism
sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic
dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show:
�4
Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”.
Deep-green chart:
Processing of dilemma,
Arguments to
dilemma
incompatible
input
prescriptions
situational procedures
-»
>
directive
output
■ X.
Corresponding Taoist chart:
Black
directive
Box
output
It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Bok
rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory,
i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is
indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to
deep ecological theory (see UT).
We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes
deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of
Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas.
The
principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality
(or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved
parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account,
see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists
will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued.
So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other
dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior
substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil
(typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of
wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided,
through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained,
through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc.
Through a typology of wars (coming up) that
conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs.
Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an
occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other
types of war. But, more generally, try this:-
�5
Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor
could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore,
every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable.
Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events
unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor,
an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such
examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for
instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions.
The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided
perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely
averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when
there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is
unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant
features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive
action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may b£
unavoidable z/ unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided.
Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For
whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur
before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is
“unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like
survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds.
An important type of
unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within
range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes.
State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably
high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example,
be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose
that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith
which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday
machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine
be unavoidable?1
In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate.
Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But
deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the
human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically
1
Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that
such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received
doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter;
coherence requires relativization to ‘just wxfor party d’.)
�6
unavoidable.
Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves
illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e.
excessive ethical costs such as extermination.
Let us explain deontic unavoidability
analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical
costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of
war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then
that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined
towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is
also justifiable, on pacific grounds.
Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable
require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of
standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken
to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition.
The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized:
Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow.
Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152).
And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition
of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very
early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not
however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And
only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a
military objective, with environmental security.
The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and
roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should
exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing
of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and
similar.
This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing
kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What
the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters.
But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that
should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than
being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”).
But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in
confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for
what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT.
�7
2.
On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism.
Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though
generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about
how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the
damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature
of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep
green theory begins to diverge from Taoism.
In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections
to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in
its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by
force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the
generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the
contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set
up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several
analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object,
construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These
we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities.
Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include
surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life
style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently
military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns.
An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as
reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not
quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures,
races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably
abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or,
perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang
wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and
virtually all the worst wars.
While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token
wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams
representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are
hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should
not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial
contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much
larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us
distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the
�8
technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure
(indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to
this effort).
Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An
offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading"
that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded.
Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not
strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can
easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless
they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor,
which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars
between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory,
e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were
defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken
(LTp.152).3
The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the
subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If
they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.)
Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as
redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or
allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence" of a third party or place
(whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is
engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part
of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy)
democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive.
Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to
resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is
represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones,
such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and
so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market
3
There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For
deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be
appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability
or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation:
I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive:
I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222).
These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting.
�9
capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion.
The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the
advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for
economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without
war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without
expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars
were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy
meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of
political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit
repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons
economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed
economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in
effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu:
When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to
fertilize (the fields ...),.
When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs.
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181).
But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for
cessation of such practices.
The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is
reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the
Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15
years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth,
the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years
(the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a
favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite
targets.
Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and
abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military
practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism.
A main distinction is between
• conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals,
and
• social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is
carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4
4
Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin.
�10
It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will
have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No
doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in
secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark
about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies
of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons
of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should
retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more
generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether.
Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily
acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism.
For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations
frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and
authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep
green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important
preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of
state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has
no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an
elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference.
A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the
means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include
• elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and
• force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed
very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in
• contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in
• elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social
defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation.
Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by
considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp
curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been
primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social
fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a
matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars
should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline
and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon
endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize
just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust
facts.
�11
Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive
perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also
facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long
and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into
long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all
this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and
glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally
shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities)
and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means
vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the
practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components
into the industrial engine.
With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the
dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength.
Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly
worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The
opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women
in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs;
likewise conquest.
Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further
strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be
strengthened, through the following syllogism:
All wars should be fully just wars.
Modem wars cannot be fully just wars.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast
in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that
available this century.
The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much
information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is
always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial
requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation
or chemical or biological weapons around.
From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just
defensive vjsi, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features
introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant
cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the
chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or
environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf
�Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow
a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of
value, of what counts.
The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension,
neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars
are typically environmental atrocities.
Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply
backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama.
Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental
ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no
similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any
such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological
wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological
disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even
less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species
than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity.
Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism:
All wars should be environmentally sound wars.
Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information
accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars
both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them.
The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There
are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the
technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As
well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that
make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity
and cruelty.
3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence
‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which
strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’
strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism?
Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does
not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the
emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling.
The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include
• seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222)
�13
• surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201).
The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics:
marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting
enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of
the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel
the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing
smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’
(p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous
consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194).
• advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will
overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233).
• coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies
are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices
the charge of deviousness looks feeble.
The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For
the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and
elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general,
unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to
meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the
legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving
‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But
in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give
my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of
benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary
first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to
bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured
natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly
illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and
weakness turned hardness and strength.
The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp
weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we
have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted
(p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained
unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons
deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there
are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and
other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices
�14
paradox).5
The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition
to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an
ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an
unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may
occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence.
To force the growth of life means ill omen.
For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence
(LT p. 197).
One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing
requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-
wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony.
To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and
violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is
condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice
violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non
interference that are excluded.
However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite
Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of
quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and
very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible.
A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things
that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An
important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of
war, above all from irresponsible state power.
As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so
difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is
technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent
or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has
to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out;
there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is
because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness,
itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size,
such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive
technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small
technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria
for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off:
reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of
operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair
inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs.
�15
right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts
as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates,
profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some
specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to
regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather
intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a
range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the
machines of war industry stop.
Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and
ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with
much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent
paradox concerning war and nonviolence:
• War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and
the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an
anachronism.
• Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence
involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the
process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it
could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war.
° But then war cannot be abolished without war.
Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6
This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far.
For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let
the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that
the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need
be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the
conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the
argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the
6
Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it
- designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative,
thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism,
revolved around the following inconsistent triad:
• capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained.
• capitalism cannot be removed without repression.
• repression is antithetical to liberty.
The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist”
action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing
capitalism.
�16
second premiss.
4. Standard and moral pacifism.
Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and
accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the
central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons: • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart
defensive wars.
• It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance
through the watershed thesis
P2.
It is morally wrong to use violence.
By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is
committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles.
Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism,
notably European forms. Is deep green?
There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the
warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of
contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war.
The most prominent
contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they
claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use.
As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly.
They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to
wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and
cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix).
Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily
in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and
continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire
consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and
important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery
can be thwarted in this way.
Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and
contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component
is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of
warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what
it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation,
arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g.
of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is
opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means.
�17
Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military
(using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the
ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent
demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g.
turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident,
then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative
components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise
English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and
of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism
which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise
English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item:
‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any
circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has
many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non
violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest.
Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries,
of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions.
They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and
organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is
very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched
notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which
P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism
(unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being
the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more
problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially
different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim.
Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy
critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a
target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”,
“fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and
treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous
investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism
was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant
violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism
7
In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism:
overcomprehensive might have been better.
�18
could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects
envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and
many ordinary women, but much more extensively.
The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of
moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands
the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to
WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances
develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable
wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the
literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist
shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p. 13). Interestingly, another stock example from the
literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details
of both see MD p. 10).
Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent
decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such
decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad
faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see
MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however
be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation.
This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by
Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes
pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation
trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ
from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong
one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent
acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the
commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was
supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8
Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is
hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the
commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced
that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace
movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most
people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and
8
JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his
criticism, I don't know.
�19
accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle,
pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a
radical doctrine.
As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism
is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter
pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level
of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism
pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is
said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not
generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such
principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A
small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a
principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it.
A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma
situations into purely consequentialist form.
In fact consequential decision theory was
deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic
procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective
vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts
in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS
p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision
making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38).
Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to
reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in
principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where
motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential
calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism,
sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed.
A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to
“second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What
was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist
considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic
principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that
consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The
conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray.
After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon
consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find
... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised
by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p. 152)
�20
There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has
wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes.
There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow
too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153).
This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than
populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed
on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts,
providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153).
Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never
part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly
erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle
free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to
prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is
no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence.
What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially
justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it
remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby
inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent
with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is
‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the
threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence
which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The
‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons
are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would
enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense
stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper
bound on level of force.
As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing
objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far
hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced,
hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally
compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed.
To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non
violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious
difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of
which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world.
Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to
meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage
�21
routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that
the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to
vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog
biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and
beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be
somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be
converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of
hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their
own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the
practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable
improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as
alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is
it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in
order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly.
More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended,
be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent
depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and
predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus,
for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of
orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the
natural order is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral
dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not
separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route:
The natural order is not an immoral order
The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence.
Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral -
in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly
occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory
carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral
(neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far).
The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was
alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable,
ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical
theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of
modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to
carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to
�22
peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably
modified
P2
results:
MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9
To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the
proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has
to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a
moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for
something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace
sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively:
Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for
much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is
supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced.
Richard Sylvan*
Appendix
I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the
American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just
made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much
talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the
modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and
again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than
two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke
solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for
peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic?
President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with
many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will
prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be
done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as
on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little
that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to
9
The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of
environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes
MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use
vandolence.
Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in
JWS)
�I
23
followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now
supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world
order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one,
enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox
hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that
‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted;
practice has scarcely changed at all.
REFERENCES
W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963;
referred to as ST.
W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963;
referred to as LT.
B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984.
A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK,
1989.
R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1967.
R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism
of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of
Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al.
R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion
papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian
National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)’, referred to as MD.
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, Research
School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984.
G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980.
J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University,
1989.
R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear
Conference, University of Queensland, 1985.
R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in
environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National
University, 1990; referred to as UT.
��2
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special
dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given
that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of
universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done.
• Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils
There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices
paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special
paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter
attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the
possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from
all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful)
conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward
generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some
practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas
assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the
conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a
Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious
and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle
paradox.
Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the
positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable
preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war
and militarism. One key pasage runs:
Fine weapons are instruments of evil
They are hated by creatures
Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them....
Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler.
When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best
principle
Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy,
For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.
He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ...
For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies
(LT p.154).
Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil.
They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes
unavoidable (also p.152).
Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils.
Such discourse,
obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of
dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse
which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of
clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao
�3
does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death.
Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories,
underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where
something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is
excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses),
an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars
have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects.
Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the
military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking:
It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of
taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic
and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita
chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma
whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or
should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17).
‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in
contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible
duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of
one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties.
These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding
war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling
reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps
overlapping, set of reasons).
A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate
treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable
strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or
develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account
of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is
the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic
discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear
inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism
of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements
and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious
feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is
missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism
sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic
dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show:
�4
Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”.
Deep-green chart:
Arguments to
Processing of dilemma,
directive
dilemma
incompatible
situational procedures
output
input
prescriptions
Corresponding Taoist chart:
Black
directive
Box
output
It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Box
rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory,
i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is
indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to
deep ecological theory (see UT).
We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes
deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of
Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The
principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality
(or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved
parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account,
see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists
will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued.
So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other
dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior
substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil
(typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of
wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided,
through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained,
through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc.
Through a typology of wars (coming up) that
conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs.
Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an
occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other
types of war. But, more generally, try this:-
�5
Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor
could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore,
every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable.
Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events
unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor,
an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such
examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for
instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions.
The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided
perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely
averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even z/that should be so sometimes, when
there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is
unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant
features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive
action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be
unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided.
Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For
whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur
before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is
“unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like
survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of
unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within
range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes.
State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably
high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example,
be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose
that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith
which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday
machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine
be unavoidable?1
In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate.
Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But
deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the
human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically
1
Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that
such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received
doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter;
coherence requires relativization to ‘just vwcfor party d’.)
�6
unavoidable.
Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves
illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e.
excessive ethical costs such as extermination.
Let us explain deontic unavoidability
analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical
costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of
war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then
that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined
towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is
also justifiable, on pacific grounds.
Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable
require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of
standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken
to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition.
The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized:
Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow.
Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152).
And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition
of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very
early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not
however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And
only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a
military objective, with environmental security.
The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and
roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should
exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing
of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and
similar.
This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing
kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What
the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters.
But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that
should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than
being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”).
2
But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in
confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for
what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT.
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2.
On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism.
Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though
generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about
how they — those of the theoretical residue — are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the
damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature
of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep
green theory begins to diverge from Taoism.
In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections
to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in
its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by
force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the
generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the
contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set
up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several
analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object,
construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These
we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities.
Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include
surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life
style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently
military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns.
An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as
reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not
quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures,
races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably
abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or,
perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang
wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and
virtually all the worst wars.
While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token
wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams
representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are
hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should
not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial
contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much
larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us
distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the
�8
technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure
(indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to
this effort).
Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An
offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading”
that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded.
Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not
strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can
easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless
they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor,
which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars
between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory,
e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were
defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken
(LT p.152).3
The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the
subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If
they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.)
Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinition al strategems, such as
redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or
allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place
(whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is
engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part
of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy)
democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive.
Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to
resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is
represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones,
such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and
so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market
There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For
deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be
appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability
or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation:
I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive:
I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222).
These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting.
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capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion.
The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the
advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for
economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without
war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without
expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars
were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy
meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of
political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit
repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons
economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed
economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in
effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu:
When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to
fertilize (the fields ...).
When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs.
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p. 181).
But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessaTy, for
cessation of such practices.
The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is
reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the
Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15
years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth,
the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years
(the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a
favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite
targets.
Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and
abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military
practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism.
A main distinction is between
• conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals,
and
• social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is
carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4
4
Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin.
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It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will
have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No
doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in
secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark
about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies
of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons
of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should
retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more
generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether.
Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily
acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism.
For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations
frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and
authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep
green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important
preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of
state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has
no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an
elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference.
A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the
means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include
• elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and
• force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed
very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in
• contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in
• elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social
defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation.
Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by
considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp
curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been
primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social
fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a
matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars
should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline
and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon
endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize
just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust
facts.
�11
Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive
perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also
facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long
and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into
long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all
this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and
glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally
shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities)
and subsequent technological wars — though no longer in ascendency, have by no means
vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the
practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components
into the industrial engine.
With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the
dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength.
Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly
worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The
opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women
in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs;
likewise conquest.
Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further
strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be
strengthened, through the following syllogism:
All wars should be fully just wars.
Modem wars cannot be fully just wars.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast
in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that
available this century.
The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much
information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is
always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial
requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation
or chemical or biological weapons around.
From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just
defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features
introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant
cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the
chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or
environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf
�12
Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow
a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of
value, of what counts.
The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension,
neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars
are typically environmental atrocities.
Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply
backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama.
Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental
ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no
similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any
such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological
wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological
disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even
less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species
than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity.
Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism:
All wars should be environmentally sound wars.
Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information
accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars
both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them.
The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There
are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the
technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As
well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that
make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity
and cruelty.
3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence
‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which
strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’
strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism?
Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does
not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the
emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling.
The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include
• seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222)
�13
• surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201).
The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics:
marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting
enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of
the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel
the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing
smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’
(p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous
consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p.194).
• advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will
overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233).
• coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies
are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices
the charge of deviousness looks feeble.
The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For
the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and
elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general,
unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to
meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the
legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving
‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But
in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give
my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of
benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary
first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to
bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured
natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly
illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and
weakness turned hardness and strength.
The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp
weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we
have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted
(p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained
unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons
deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there
are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and
other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices
�14
paradox).5
The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition
to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an
ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an
unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may
occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence.
To force the growth of life means ill omen.
For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence
(LT p. 197).
One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing
requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-
wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony.
To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and
violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is
condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice
violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non
interference that are excluded.
However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite
5
Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of
quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and
very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible.
A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things
that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An
important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of
war, above all from irresponsible state power.
As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so
difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is
technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent
or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has
to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out;
there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is
because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness,
itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size,
such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive
technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small
technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria
for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off:
reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of
operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair
inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs.
�15
right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts
as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates,
profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some
specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to
regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather
intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a
range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the
machines of war industry stop.
Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and
ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with
much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent
paradox concerning war and nonviolence:
• War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and
the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an
anachronism.
• Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence
involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the
process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it
could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war.
° But then war cannot be abolished without war.
Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6
This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far.
For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let
the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that
the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need
be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the
conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the
argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the
6
Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it
- designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative,
thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism,
revolved around the following inconsistent triad:
• capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained.
• capitalism cannot be removed without repression.
• repression is antithetical to liberty.
The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist”
action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing
capitalism.
�16
second premiss.
4. Standard and moral pacifism.
Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and
accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the
central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart
defensive wars.
• It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance
through the watershed thesis
P2.
It is morally wrong to use violence.
By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is
committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles.
Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism,
notably European forms. Is deep green?
There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the
warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of
contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war.
The most prominent
contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they
claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use.
As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly.
They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to
wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and
cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix).
Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily
in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and
continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire
consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and
important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery
can be thwarted in this way.
Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and
contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component
is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of
warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what
it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation,
arbitration,... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g.
of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),... . In brief standard pacifism is
opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means.
�17
Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military
(using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the
ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent
demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g.
turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident,
then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative
components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise
English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and
of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism
which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise
English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item:
‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any
circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has
many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non
violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest.
Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries,
of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions.
They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and
organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is
very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched
notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which
P2 holds, stretched pacifism.^ While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism
(unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being
the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more
problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially
different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim.
Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy
critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a
target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”,
“fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and
treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous
investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism
was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant
violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism
7
In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism:
overcomprehensive might have been better.
�18
could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects
envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and
many ordinary women, but much more extensively.
The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of
moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands
the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to
WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances
develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable
wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the
literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist
shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the
literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details
of both see MD p.10).
Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent
decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such
decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad
faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see
MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however
be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation.
This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by
Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes
pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation
trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ
from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong
one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent
acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the
commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was
supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8
Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is
hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the
commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced
that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace
movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most
people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and
8
JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his
criticism, I don't know.
�19
accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle,
pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a
radical doctrine.
As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism
is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter
pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level
of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism
pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is
said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not
generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such
principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A
small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a
principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it.
A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma
situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was
deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic
procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective
vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts
in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS
P-152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision
making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38).
Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to
reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in
principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where
motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential
calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism,
sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed.
A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to
“second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What
was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist
considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic
principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that
consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The
conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray.
After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon
consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find
... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised
by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152)
�20
There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has
wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes.
There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow
too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153).
This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than
populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed
on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts,
providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153).
Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never
part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly
erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle
free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to
prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is
no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence.
What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially
justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it
remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby
inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent
with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is
‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the
threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence
which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The
‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons
are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would
enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense
stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper
bound on level of force.
As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing
objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far
hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced,
hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally
compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed.
To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non
violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious
difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of
which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world.
Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to
meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage
�21
routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that
the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to
vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog
biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and
beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be
somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be
converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of
hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their
own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the
practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable
improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as
alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is
it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in
order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly.
More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended,
be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent
depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and
predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus,
for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of
orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the
“natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral
dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not
separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route:
The natural order is not an immoral order
The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence.
Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly
occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory
carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral
(neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far).
The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was
alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable,
ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical
theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of
modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to
carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to
�22
peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably
modified
P2
results:
MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9
To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the
proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has
to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a
moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for
something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace
sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively:
Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for
much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is
supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced.
Richard Sylvan*
Appendix
I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the
American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just
made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much
talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the
modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and
again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than
two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke
solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for
peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic?
President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with
many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will
prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be
done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as
on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little
that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to
The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of
environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes
MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use
vandolence.
Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in
JWS)
�23
followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now
supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world
order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one,
enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox
hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that
‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted;
practice has scarcely changed at all.
REFERENCES
W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963;
referred to as ST.
W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963;
referred to as LT.
B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984.
A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK,
1989.
R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1967.
R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism
of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of
Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al.
R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion
papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian
National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)', referred to as MD.
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, Research
School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984.
G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980.
J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University,
1989.
R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, SoczaZ Philosophy, for Nuclear
Conference, University of Queensland, 1985.
R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in
environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National
University, 1990; referred to as UT.
�
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ON EXTIRPATING WAR:
TAO AND DEEP-GREEN PACIFISM
Taoism and deep-green environmental theory, although closely aligned on very many
issues, diverge over war. For Taoism, by contrast for instance with Buddhism, is not a pacific
doctrine, but is committed to skilful defensive militarism. While it does not espouse a fortress
mentality, Taoism certainly condones limited defensive military operations for specific
purposes, a sort of guerilla warfare. By contrast, deep-green theory, while acknowledging the
role of organised social defence, stands opposed to professional militarism, and thereby to
military defence, and is committed to a principled pacifism. Conveniently a route through
Taoism, philosophically fascinating in its own right, will lead us to problems of pacifism and
towards deep-green theory.
1. Features of a Taoist critique of war and militarism.
War did not receive a favourable press in ancient Chinese philosophy. Generally
aggression and war were to be avoided. Even Confucius imposed very demanding conditions:
for example, ‘when good men have instructed the people [in morals, agriculture, military
tactics] for seven years, they may be allowed to bear arms,’ ‘If a ruler ... does not set himself
right, even his commands will not be obeyed’ (SB p.41, italics added). Mo Tzu went much
further than Confucius, roundly condemning war - on utilitarian grounds, that war yields no
net benefit at any level (SB p.227).
What is more, he backed his heavy condemnation
practically (unlike some conspicuous contemporary theoretical utilitarians); ‘he did not hesitate
to walk for ten days and ten nights in an effort to dissuade a ruler from making war’ (SB
p.212). But none, it is said, went as far, in a detailed and sophisticated criticism of war, as Lao
Tzu; ‘none has condemned war more strongly than Lao Tzu’. ‘[T]he opposition of Taoism to
the use of force is well-known, and the most bitter attack on militarism if found in the Lao Tzu’
(Chan, p.154, p.17.)
But, after that splendid build-up, the text is slightly disappointing. Lao Tzu does not
assert outright that war is an abomination, or even roundly condemn it. His critique of war,
militarism, and military technology, is subtle and oblique, and, on the surface, far distanced
from pacifism. For he does not recommend an end to war - in that genuine Taoists, those who
possess Tao, will never participate in them - but expects wars to continue as unavoidable evils.
Worse, he even goes so far as to outline proper attitudes to war and conduct in war, and indeed
to suggest military techniques and strategies, some of which look decidedly devious. Among
the classical works of Taoism, we focus on the Lao Tzu because, by contrast with other works,
a remarkable component of that book is devoted to war and militarism.
The apparent deviousness of the tactics Lao Tzu allocates serves to highlight what has
been seen as ‘the most troublesome element’ in his philosophy (Chan p.17) — not so much
however because they concern military operations, but because they are taken to apply much
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p.17). But why should military activity obtain some special
2
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special
dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given
that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of
universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done.
• Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils
There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices
paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special
paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter
attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p. 17) and to the
possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from
all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful)
conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all.
A straightforward
generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some
practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas
assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns thfc
conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a
Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious
and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle
paradox.
Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the
positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable
preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war
and militarism. One key pasage runs:
Fine weapons are instruments of evil
They are hated by creatures
Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them. ...
Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler.
When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best
principle
Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy,
For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.
He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ...
For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies
(LT p.154).
Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil.
They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes
unavoidable (also p.152).
Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils.
Such discourse,
obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of
dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse
which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of
clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao
3
does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death.
Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories,
underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where
something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is
excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses),
an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars
have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects.
Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the
military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking:
It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of
taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic
and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita
chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma
whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or
should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17).
‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in
contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible
duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of
one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties.
These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding
war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling
reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps
overlapping, set of reasons).
A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate
treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable
strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or
develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account
of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is
the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic
discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear
inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism
of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements
and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious
feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is
missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism
sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic
dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show:
4
Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”.
Deep-green chart:
Processing of dilemma,
Arguments to
dilemma
incompatible
input
prescriptions
situational procedures
-»
>
directive
output
■ X.
Corresponding Taoist chart:
Black
directive
Box
output
It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Bok
rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory,
i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is
indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to
deep ecological theory (see UT).
We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes
deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of
Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas.
The
principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality
(or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved
parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account,
see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists
will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued.
So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other
dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior
substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil
(typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of
wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided,
through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained,
through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc.
Through a typology of wars (coming up) that
conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs.
Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an
occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other
types of war. But, more generally, try this:-
5
Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor
could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore,
every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable.
Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events
unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor,
an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such
examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for
instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions.
The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided
perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely
averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even if that should be so sometimes, when
there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is
unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant
features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive
action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may b£
unavoidable z/ unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided.
Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For
whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur
before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is
“unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like
survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds.
An important type of
unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within
range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes.
State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably
high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example,
be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose
that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith
which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday
machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine
be unavoidable?1
In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate.
Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But
deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the
human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically
1
Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that
such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received
doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter;
coherence requires relativization to ‘just wxfor party d’.)
6
unavoidable.
Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves
illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e.
excessive ethical costs such as extermination.
Let us explain deontic unavoidability
analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical
costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of
war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then
that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined
towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is
also justifiable, on pacific grounds.
Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable
require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of
standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken
to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition.
The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized:
Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow.
Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152).
And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition
of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very
early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not
however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And
only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a
military objective, with environmental security.
The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and
roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should
exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing
of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and
similar.
This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing
kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What
the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters.
But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that
should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than
being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”).
But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in
confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for
what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT.
7
2.
On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism.
Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though
generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about
how they - those of the theoretical residue - are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the
damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature
of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep
green theory begins to diverge from Taoism.
In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections
to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in
its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by
force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the
generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the
contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set
up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several
analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object,
construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These
we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities.
Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include
surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life
style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently
military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns.
An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as
reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not
quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures,
races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably
abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or,
perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang
wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and
virtually all the worst wars.
While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token
wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams
representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are
hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should
not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial
contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much
larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us
distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the
8
technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure
(indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to
this effort).
Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An
offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading"
that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded.
Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not
strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can
easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless
they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor,
which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars
between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory,
e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were
defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken
(LTp.152).3
The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the
subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If
they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.)
Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinitional strategems, such as
redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or
allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence" of a third party or place
(whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is
engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part
of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy)
democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive.
Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to
resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is
represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones,
such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and
so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market
3
There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For
deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be
appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability
or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation:
I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive:
I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222).
These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting.
9
capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion.
The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the
advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for
economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without
war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without
expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars
were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy
meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of
political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit
repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons
economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed
economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in
effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu:
When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to
fertilize (the fields ...),.
When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs.
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p.181).
But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessary, for
cessation of such practices.
The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is
reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the
Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15
years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth,
the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years
(the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a
favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite
targets.
Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and
abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military
practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism.
A main distinction is between
• conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals,
and
• social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is
carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4
4
Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin.
10
It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will
have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No
doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in
secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark
about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies
of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons
of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should
retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more
generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether.
Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily
acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism.
For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations
frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and
authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep
green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important
preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of
state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has
no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an
elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference.
A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the
means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include
• elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and
• force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed
very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in
• contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in
• elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social
defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation.
Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by
considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp
curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been
primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social
fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a
matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars
should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline
and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon
endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize
just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust
facts.
11
Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive
perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also
facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long
and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into
long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all
this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and
glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally
shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities)
and subsequent technological wars - though no longer in ascendency, have by no means
vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the
practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components
into the industrial engine.
With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the
dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength.
Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly
worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The
opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women
in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs;
likewise conquest.
Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further
strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be
strengthened, through the following syllogism:
All wars should be fully just wars.
Modem wars cannot be fully just wars.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast
in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that
available this century.
The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much
information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is
always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial
requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation
or chemical or biological weapons around.
From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just
defensive vjsi, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features
introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modem civilization, with its giant
cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the
chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or
environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf
Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow
a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of
value, of what counts.
The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension,
neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars
are typically environmental atrocities.
Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply
backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama.
Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental
ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no
similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any
such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological
wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological
disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even
less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species
than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity.
Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism:
All wars should be environmentally sound wars.
Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information
accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars
both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them.
The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There
are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the
technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As
well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that
make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity
and cruelty.
3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence
‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which
strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’
strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism?
Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does
not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the
emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling.
The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include
• seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222)
13
• surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201).
The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics:
marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting
enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of
the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel
the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing
smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’
(p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous
consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p. 194).
• advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will
overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233).
• coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies
are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices
the charge of deviousness looks feeble.
The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For
the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and
elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general,
unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to
meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the
legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving
‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But
in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give
my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of
benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary
first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to
bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured
natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly
illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and
weakness turned hardness and strength.
The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp
weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we
have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted
(p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained
unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons
deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there
are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and
other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices
14
paradox).5
The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition
to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an
ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an
unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may
occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence.
To force the growth of life means ill omen.
For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence
(LT p. 197).
One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing
requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-
wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony.
To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and
violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is
condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice
violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non
interference that are excluded.
However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite
Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of
quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and
very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible.
A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things
that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An
important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of
war, above all from irresponsible state power.
As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so
difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is
technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent
or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has
to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out;
there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is
because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness,
itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size,
such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive
technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small
technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria
for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off:
reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of
operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair
inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs.
15
right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts
as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates,
profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some
specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to
regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather
intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a
range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the
machines of war industry stop.
Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and
ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with
much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent
paradox concerning war and nonviolence:
• War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and
the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an
anachronism.
• Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence
involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the
process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it
could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war.
° But then war cannot be abolished without war.
Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6
This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far.
For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let
the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that
the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need
be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the
conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the
argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the
6
Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it
- designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative,
thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism,
revolved around the following inconsistent triad:
• capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained.
• capitalism cannot be removed without repression.
• repression is antithetical to liberty.
The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist”
action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing
capitalism.
16
second premiss.
4. Standard and moral pacifism.
Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and
accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the
central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons: • It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart
defensive wars.
• It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance
through the watershed thesis
P2.
It is morally wrong to use violence.
By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is
committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles.
Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism,
notably European forms. Is deep green?
There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the
warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of
contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war.
The most prominent
contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they
claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use.
As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly.
They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to
wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and
cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix).
Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily
in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and
continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire
consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and
important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery
can be thwarted in this way.
Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and
contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component
is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of
warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what
it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation,
arbitration, ... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g.
of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures), ... . In brief standard pacifism is
opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means.
17
Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military
(using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the
ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent
demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g.
turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident,
then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative
components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise
English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and
of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism
which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise
English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item:
‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any
circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has
many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non
violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest.
Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries,
of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions.
They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and
organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is
very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched
notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which
P2 holds, stretched pacifism? While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism
(unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being
the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more
problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially
different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim.
Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy
critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a
target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”,
“fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and
treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous
investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism
was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant
violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism
7
In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism:
overcomprehensive might have been better.
18
could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects
envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and
many ordinary women, but much more extensively.
The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of
moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands
the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to
WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances
develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable
wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the
literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist
shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p. 13). Interestingly, another stock example from the
literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details
of both see MD p. 10).
Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent
decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such
decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad
faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see
MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however
be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation.
This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by
Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes
pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation
trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ
from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong
one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent
acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the
commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was
supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8
Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is
hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the
commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced
that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace
movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most
people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and
8
JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his
criticism, I don't know.
19
accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle,
pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a
radical doctrine.
As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism
is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter
pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level
of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism
pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is
said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not
generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such
principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A
small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a
principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it.
A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma
situations into purely consequentialist form.
In fact consequential decision theory was
deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic
procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective
vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts
in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS
p.152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision
making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38).
Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to
reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in
principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where
motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential
calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism,
sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed.
A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to
“second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p. 154). What
was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist
considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p. 152), so undercutting other deontic
principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that
consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The
conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray.
After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon
consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find
... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised
by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p. 152)
20
There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has
wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes.
There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow
too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153).
This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than
populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed
on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts,
providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p. 153).
Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never
part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly
erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle
free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to
prevent herself from being raped’ (p. 153 italics added). In the example so far described there is
no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence.
What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially
justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it
remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby
inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent
with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is
‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the
threat’ (p. 150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence
which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The
‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons
are appropriate in response to what attacks, p. 150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would
enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense
stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper
bound on level of force.
As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing
objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far
hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced,
hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally
compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed.
To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non
violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious
difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of
which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world.
Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to
meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage
21
routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that
the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to
vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog
biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and
beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be
somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be
converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of
hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their
own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the
practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable
improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as
alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is
it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in
order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly.
More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended,
be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent
depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and
predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus,
for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of
orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the
natural order is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral
dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not
separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route:
The natural order is not an immoral order
The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence.
Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral -
in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly
occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory
carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral
(neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far).
The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was
alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable,
ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical
theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of
modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to
carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to
22
peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably
modified
P2
results:
MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9
To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the
proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has
to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a
moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for
something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace
sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively:
Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for
much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is
supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced.
Richard Sylvan*
Appendix
I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the
American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just
made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much
talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the
modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and
again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than
two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke
solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for
peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic?
President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with
many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will
prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be
done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as
on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little
that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to
9
The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of
environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes
MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use
vandolence.
Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in
JWS)
I
23
followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now
supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world
order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one,
enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox
hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that
‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted;
practice has scarcely changed at all.
REFERENCES
W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963;
referred to as ST.
W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963;
referred to as LT.
B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984.
A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK,
1989.
R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1967.
R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism
of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of
Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al.
R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion
papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian
National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)’, referred to as MD.
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, Research
School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984.
G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980.
J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University,
1989.
R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, Social Philosophy, for Nuclear
Conference, University of Queensland, 1985.
R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in
environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National
University, 1990; referred to as UT.
2
more widely, ‘to life in general’ (p. 17). But why should military activity obtain some special
dispensation? Why should what is not tolerated more generally be exonerated there? But given
that Taoism has here the virtue of consistency (i.e. uniformity on principles) and of
universalizability, that simply leaves more explaining to be done.
• Puzzles for Taoism, and wars as unavoidable evils
There are two puzzles here in Taoism rather than one. There is the military-practices
paradox, and, varying and generalising on that, there are life-practices paradoxes. The special
paradox is generated by the following incompatible elements: on the one side, ‘the most bitter
attack on militarism’, the well-known opposition of Taoism to the use of force (p.17) and to the
possession and use of smart military weapons and technology - implying that war is far from
all right - and on the other, advocacy of certain (devious) military tactics, outlines of (deceitful)
conduct in war, and so on - implying that war is all right after all. A straightforward
generalisation of this paradox would look at other morally-sensitive parts of life, where some
practice was strongly condemned yet engaged in (for many examples, see the dilemmas
assembled in MD). But the variation of concern to Chan and the neo-Confucians concerns the
conjunction of upright with devious practices in life, in particular in the life of the sage. For a
Taoist sage is presumed to lead an upright straightforward life, yet appears to engage in devious
and even deceitful practices incompatible with such a life-style. Call this the Taoist-lifestyle
paradox.
Evidently a good deal of explaining is required, as to how Taoism can coherently take the
positions it appears to presume, both on war and peace, and on life more generally. A desirable
preliminary would seem to be a little investigation of what position is taken, especially on war
and militarism. One key pasage runs:
Fine weapons are instruments of evil
They are hated by creatures
Therefore those who possess the Tao turn away from them....
Weapons are instruments of evil, not the instruments of a good ruler.
When he uses them unavoidably, he regards calm restraint as the best
principle
Even when he is victorious, he does not regard it as praiseworthy,
For to praise victory is to delight in the slaughter of men.
He who delights in the slaughter of men will not succeed in the empire. ...
For a victory, let us observe the occasion with funeral-ceremonies
(LT p.154).
Wars, which involve the use of weapons, instruments of evil, are accordingly themselves evil.
They are also evil because they involve the slaughter of men. But they are also sometimes
unavoidable (also p.152).
Therefore such wars are unavoidable evils.
Such discourse,
obtained by almost immediate inference from the passage, is within the standard orbit of
dilemma talk. But Taoism lacks, through deliberately eschewing deontic talk, the discourse
which enables direct expression of such dilemmas, or even direct condemnation of wars or of
clever weapons. Instead the points are made by circumlocution, what the possesser of Tao
3
does, how the good ruler conducts himself, or by analogy, of victory in war with death.
Unavoidable evils are the very stuff of deontic dilemmas (though many theories,
underpinned by shonky logic, lack the resources for representing this stuff properly). Where
something is unavoidably evil, it is both bad, because evil, and also not bad, doing it is
excusable, because it is unavoidable. So, given such an argument (which has its weaknesses),
an unavoidable evil is a genuinely dilemmatic object with inconsistent features. Certain wars
have looked, since ancient times, like such dilemmatic objects.
Revealingly, Chan tries to explain that ‘most troublesome element’ in Taoism, the
military-practice paradox, through the following exercise in lateral thinking:
It can ... be argued that Lao Tzu uses warfare to illustrate his principles of
taking no action and weakness because warfare is among the most dynamic
and critical of human experiences, just as the Indian classic, the Bhagavadgita
chooses fighting as the theme on which to discuss the terrible dilemma
whether one should fulfil his duty, as in the case of a soldier, and kill, or
should fail in his duty and refrain from killing (p. 17).
‘Just as’? The Indian classic prevents a classic moral dilemma, a dilemma represented in
contemporary philosophy (following its rediscovery by Sartre), where there are incompatible
duties: the duty to kill, because of one's role as a soldier, and the duty not to kill, because of
one's human condition, and the supervenient dilemma of failing in and fulfilling one's duties.
These dilemmas for an individual (male, as it then was) are replicated in dilemmas regarding
war for group institutions: at bottom, the obligation to engage in war (for one set of compelling
reasons) as contraposed with the obligation not to engage in war (for another, perhaps
overlapping, set of reasons).
A theory of moral dilemmas (as worked out for example in MD) is crucial for an adequate
treatment of major issues in war and peace, especially (as will become evident) for a viable
strong pacifism. But Taoism, eschewing deontic discourse, lacks the apparatus to state or
develop moral dilemmas. Hence it is logically excluded from giving a full or adequate account
of what is going on conceptually. One of the philosophically fascinating feature of Taoism is
the fashion in which it manages to avoid deontic discourse, and to substitute for direct deontic
discourse or improvise circumlocutions when deontic discourse would otherwise appear
inevitable (cf. UT for examples). But there are costs. One is inability to display the mechanism
of deontic dilemmas, or to show what reasons and argument lie behind Taoist prounouncements
and conclusions (the shortage of Taoism on argument is another philosophically conspicious
feature, also observed in UT). As conceptual apparatus for analysizing moral dilemmas is
missing, most of the machinery involved has to be passed over. Only the outcomes, as Taoism
sees them, are presented, as if from a black box. Taoism blacks out the story on deontic
dilemmas that deep-green theory can tell, as the following diagram tries to show:
4
Diagrams . Charting the processing of deontic dilemmas that are “resolved”.
Deep-green chart:
Arguments to
Processing of dilemma,
directive
dilemma
incompatible
situational procedures
output
input
prescriptions
Corresponding Taoist chart:
Black
directive
Box
output
It is evident that Taoism can be extended', information can be put into the Black Box
rendering it less opaque. That extension can be made so as to conform to deep-green theory,
i.e. so that the extended Taoist chart, a neo-Daoist chart, looks like the deep-green one. That is
indeed essentially how neo-Daoism get characterised, in terms of conformity of the extension to
deep ecological theory (see UT).
We are now placed to explain how to dissolve, or at least neutralize, the paradoxes
deriving from repudiation of militarism, an awkwardly qualified repudiation in the case of
Taoism. In a significant sense there is no resolving of genuine deontic dilemmas. The
principles delineating the fix may stand, incompatible, signalling the persisting suboptimality
(or better, sublimenality) of the dilemmatic situation. Where there is a dilemma, involved
parties should try to do well enough in the sublimenal circumstances (for a much fuller account,
see MD). Thus where there is a war, itself a non-Taoist process, engaged or caught up Taoists
will not abandon Taoism. Taoist methods will be applied, Taoist strategies pursued.
So much for theoretical representation and (non-)resolution of life-practices and other
dilemmas, details of which are readily elaborated in deep-green extensions of Taoism. A prior
substantive issue is whether dilemmas always are generated: not whether wars are evil
(typically they are, an issue we shall come to), but whether wars are unavoidable. Analysis of
wars does not bear that familiar claim out decisively. Many wars could have been avoided,
through conciliation, negotiation, restraint, etc., and no worse results apparently obtained,
through sanctions, exchange, trade, etc.
Through a typology of wars (coming up) that
conjecture can be given some substance. Consider, for instance, what would be walk-overs.
Then there is little point in making a military response. So war can be avoided. Certainly an
occupation, to be met in a different way, may still occur. And so on, perhaps, for various other
types of war. But, more generally, try this:-
5
Every war involves an aggressor, who makes an aggressive move. Such an aggressor
could always avoid that move, taking a different (or a do-nothing) course of action. Therefore,
every war can be avoided. No war is entirely unavoidable.
Setting aside determinism (which renders all actual wars along with all other events
unavoidable), it could be argued that a war sometimes simply boils up, without an aggressor,
an intensification of a conflagatory situation. There are grounds for scepticism regarding such
examples; for such intensification can only occur if provocative military moves are made, for
instance troops are stationed in provocative or risky positions.
The presumption that certain wars are unavoidable typically derives from a one-sided
perspective on war, a defender's perspective. A defender has no option, so it is routinely
averred, but to respond to a determined aggressor. Even z/that should be so sometimes, when
there is no running away or going underground, it does not establish that such a war is
unavoidable; for it neglects the role of the aggressor. By a smarter formulation, relevant
features of unavoidability can be captured. Although wars may not be unavoidable, defensive
action in wars that have been initiated may be unavoidable. At least such action may be
unavoidable if unacceptably high costs (death, enslavement, etc.) are not to be avoided.
Thereupon another highly relevant feature emerges: the linkage of avoidability to costs. For
whether an action is unavoidable then depends upon what costs a party is prepared to incur
before and when insisting on action: but this appears entirely unacceptable. How can what is
“unavoidable” cease to be so when some further costs are absorbed? However with basics like
survival, a certain liberty, and so on, we do reach such bounds. An important type of
unavoidability. We also reach scenarios, unavailable to Lao Tzu but kindly brought within
range by modem technology, which may appear to justify aggressive strikes.
State Z, while not an aggressor, is carrying out practices which will impose unacceptably
high costs upon peoples of other states and implacably refuses to desist. It could, for example,
be poisoning air or water flowing to other states. But ,to make the case vivid, let us suppose
that state Z is constructing, for reasons Zeders find convincing (they are committed to a faith
which depicts all humans as incorrigible sinners and unworthy of life), an effective doomsday
machine. Would an (aggressive) preemptory strike designed to disable or destroy the machine
be unavoidable?1
In a sense, No; in another Yes. For different modalities can operate.
Physically outsiders need to do nothing, but watch Zeders go about their zealous work. But
deontically they are under heavy moral pressure, because of the costs of standing by idly: if the
human race is worth anything very substantial, then they are obliged to act, action is deontically
1
Whether it would be justifiable, or just, are separate issues. But it is evident enought that
such scenarios further damage the obsolescent idea of just war. For, according to received
doctrine, a just war is defensive. (How such a war can be fought at all is another matter;
coherence requires relativization to ‘just vwcfor party d’.)
6
unavoidable.
Here is a situation where a proposed reduction of deontic logic proves
illuminating. Obligation is explicated through not implying, or necessitating, the sanction, i.e.
excessive ethical costs such as extermination.
Let us explain deontic unavoidability
analogously: an action is so unavoidable if not undertaking it would result in excessive ethical
costs. Then if it can be established that there is no other way than a military strike, an act of
war, to ensure that the Zeders desist (and certainly we can envisage scenarios like that), then
that is deontically unavoidable. It is also dilemmatic for those committed to, or inclined
towards pacifism; and it is, for them at least, but paradoxically justifiable, as the negation is
also justifiable, on pacific grounds.
Scenarios like that sketched, that appear to render certain wars deontically unavoidable
require but little or no elaboration to render them evil. Evil indeed is such a standard feature of
standard wars that at least its great presence call for little supporting evidence. But it has taken
to vast stretch of human history to reach this general point of recognition.
The manifold evils of war Lao Tzu very early recognised and emphasized:
Wherever armies are stationed, briars and thorns grow.
Great wars are always followed by famines (p. 152).
And nowadays followed by great tides of refugees. This passage includes not only recognition
of the widely-observed socio-environmental consequences of war, but, more striking, very
early recognition of the severe environmental impact of military forces. That critique is not
however developed in Taoism.2 Only recently has it been pushed substantially further. And
only recently could a new, most significant twist occur, the merging of resource security, long a
military objective, with environmental security.
The appalling idea has recently been floated that the military, in need of new work and
roles with the apparent warming of West-East relations and cooling of the Cold War, should
exchange usual military idleness for meddling in environmental matters: regulation and policing
of environmental resources, ensurance of environmental security of powerful states, and
similar.
This is a bit like reassigning those imprisoned for child abuse to managing
kindergartens; for consider the impressive military record of environmental vandalism. What
the military is alleged to offer is a structure appropriate and available for handling such matters.
But, to the contrary, it is precisely the sort of hierarchical, authoritarian expensive structure that
should be wound down and up as soon as the opportunity appears, as (briefly) now, rather than
being retained and shockingly reoriented (as a state-serving “Greenwar”).
2
But a bridge to deep-green theory can be made through neo-Daoism, an updating of Taoism in
confirmity with deep ecology (which however is somewhat thin and threadbare on war; for
what there is so far, see Naess p.160). On neo-Daoism, see UT.
7
2.
On the divergence of deep-green from Taoism.
Having arrived, by better or worse arguments, at the conclusion that wars, though
generally evil, may be sometimes unavoidable, it is evidently important to say something about
how they — those of the theoretical residue — are to be conducted. By appropriate conduct the
damage they do may be reduced; also the conduct should be appropriate to the funereal nature
of wars (to exceed Taoist resources for stating this sort of point). It is at this stage that deep
green theory begins to diverge from Taoism.
In further explaining the Taoist and deep-green critiques of war, and diverting objections
to them, a rough and preliminary typology of wars is important. It is also of passing interest in
its own philosophical right. War, according to English Dictionaries, is a ‘contest carried on by
force of arms, typically between nations or states’. More exactly, war is a game - in the
generous technical sense of game-theory, with players, rules, goals, strategies, and so on carried on in significant part by military means, normally between states or substates. Call the
contestants, (warring) parties. They typically represent of course larger populations. The set
up between parties resembles the arrangements of players in game theory. There are several
analogical extensions of the term war to cover games where one of the parties is an object,
construed as hostile (an enemy of the state), such as Crime, Drugs, Poverty or Nature. These
we can set aside as analogical wars. Of course wars form only a part of military activities.
Military interests and objectives have always stretched significantly further than war, to include
surveillence and security, easily extended to resource security, environmental security and life
style security, and beyond that to political stability and other political matters. Evidently
military ambitions have far over-extended themselves in bagging such democratic concerns.
An anarchist solution to the whole problem of war, which some have seen Taoism as
reaching towards, is immediate: eliminate the source of war, states. Unfortunately it is not
quite that simple (and that's not simple). For wars can also occur between nations, cultures,
races or tribes (which are not such artifices as states, and not always so readily or desirably
abolished), between inhabited regions, and between factions within states (thus civil wars) or,
perhaps by extension, between factions within other social structures (thus, for instance, gang
wars). But undoubtedly eliminating states and aspiring states would abolish most wars and
virtually all the worst wars.
While “nonviolent wars” are excluded by definition, by virtue of ‘force of arms’, token
wars, limited wars, and so on, are not: for instance, wars fought by small armed teams
representing competing sides (cf. medieval and science fiction war games). As wars are
hemmed in by conventions and agreed rules, there is no reason in principle why they should
not be reduced to two person contests, fought under strict rules like boxing or gladiatorial
contests. But in modem times wars have never taken such sensible forms, but have been much
larger affairs, making heavy (though fortunately restricted) use of latest technology. Let us
distinguish such wars as techno-powered wars. They have, directly or indirectly (for the
8
technology may be bought or bartered), a heavy research and development support structure
(indeed the bulk of contemporary science is devoted - misdirected - in one way or another to
this effort).
Among wars, an important distinction is that between offensive and defensive wars. An
offensive war is one which ventures off a given party's territory or recognised pad, “invading”
that of another party or parties; correlatively defensive parties, if they have not also invaded.
Force projection typifies offensive practice. Plainly, offensiveness and defensiveness are not
strictly features of a war, but of parties to a war. In a two-party war, while both parties can
easily act offensively, the possibility of both parties proceeding defensively is excluded, unless
they share territory. (Even then issues may arise as to which party, if any, was the aggressor,
which started it, was responsible for starting it, and so on.) Thus mutually defensive wars
between contemporary states are impossible (but would be possible if states shared territory,
e.g. if Eire and Britain shared the territory of Northern Ireland). Tao-accredited wars were
defensive wars, never wars aiming at domination: last-resort wars, in which no pride was taken
(LT p.152).3
The pretence that offensive wars are defensive is widespread, and reflected in the
subterfuge that departments or ministries of war are those of defence, security or whatever. (If
they really were what they purport to be, we should be well on the way to an end to war.)
Offensive practices are rendered defensive ones by shabby redefinition al strategems, such as
redefining ‘defensive’ to include defence of ideals like democracy or liberty, infringed (or
allegedly infringed) on territories abroad, or to include “defence” of a third party or place
(whence every offensive war is “defensive”). In the present war in which part of Arabia is
engulfed (February 1991), one party claims to be defending what really was (or should be) part
of its territory, namely Kuwait, another party to be defending (what Kuwait did not enjoy)
democracy. It is a doubly offensive war presented in this guise as jointly defensive.
Aggressive wars are waged for a variety of reasons, but usually for resources or access to
resources or markets, a matter often disguised by appeal to ideology (thus a war for oil is
represented as a war of liberation). But there are other reasons than narrowly economic ones,
such as religion (as with crusades), power and aggrandisement (as in building an empire), and
so on. Nor are those reasons necessarily far separated; ideologies like Marxism and market
There is one line in LT that may suggest that attack was sometimes justifiable, namely ‘For
deep love helps one to win in the case of attack’ (p.219). But how can compassion be
appropriate unless this attack is within a defensive setting, a larger context of unavoidability
or such like. A passage shortly below confirms this interpretation:
I dare not take the offensive but I take the defensive:
I dare not advance an inch but I retreat a foot (p.222).
These are advances and attacks within a defensive setting.
9
capitalism, for example, exhibit many of the features of religion.
The economic reasons for war appear to have become much more complex with the
advent of an integrated world economy. At the same time many of the independent reasons for
economic wars are now obsolete. For to powerful states accrue the advantages of war without
war. At least most of the former economic advantages of war can be obtained without
expensive wars, through trade, institution of economic dependence, etc. Small medieval wars
were sometimes instituted for the collection of neighbouring riches and booty, a kind of piracy
meeting conditions of war. “Small” contemporary wars can be waged for a remarkable mix of
political-economy ends: to establish a regime favourable to economic penetration and profit
repatriation, to subjugate markets and to remove competition, to boost a sagging weapons
economy by using up old stocks and also testing new equipment, to restart a depressed
economy, and so on. Such wars, along with the economic aims which motivate them, are in
effect heavily castigated by Lao Tzu:
When Tao prevails in the world, galloping horses are turned back to
fertilize (the fields ...).
When Tao does not prevail in the world, war horses thrive in the suburbs.
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. (LT p. 181).
But it does exceed evidential warrant to claim that Tao is not only sufficient, but necessaTy, for
cessation of such practices.
The practice of regularly stimulating complex military-saturated economies through war is
reminiscent of older, much ridiculed practices in simpler societies. They now ridicule the
Tsembaga, who proceeded to destroy much of their surplus product by going to war every 5-15
years (cf Rapaport). But they do not similarly ridicule the most powerful nation on the Earth,
the USA, which proceeds to write off a colossal amount of surplus in war every 10-20 years
(the Gulf war liquidated some $1.7 billion per day). Taoists would. For ridicule was a
favoured method, an important rhetorical strategem, and war and its idiocy were favourite
targets.
Some classification of defensive wars is also important, for various reasons: reducing and
abolishing wars, their costs and damage, restructuring societies away from war and military
practices, and, not least, for appreciating Taoism.
A main distinction is between
• conventional defence, maintained by armies of armed soldiers, many of them professionals,
and
• social defence, where there are no such armies or but fragments of them, and defence is
carried out through social networks of a significant part of society.4
4
Details of social defence are presented in Sharp and in Martin.
10
It is here that Taoism and deep-green theory part company. Under Taoism, the state will
have a standing army, but a defensive army operating by strange, surprise tactics (p.201). No
doubt defensive wars are to remain last resort action. Nonetheless the state will operate in
secrecy, in a way incompatible with decentralised social defence; people will be kept in the dark
about smart weapons of the state; and they too will be surprised, along with presumed enemies
of the state. By contrast, under deep-green theory, there should be no hidden smart weapons
of state; information would flow more freely and not be hidden from the people (who should
retain influence in informed decision making). Under deep-green, standing armies, and more
generally military organisation, will be wound down altogether.
Taoism should have pushed its searching criticism further. For military objectives, easily
acquired by standing armies with time on their hands, are frequently incompatible with Taoism.
For example, Taoism is opposed to domination (LT p.152), whereas military operations
frequently seek or involve domination; and military structure is invariably hierarchical and
authoritarian. Taoism aims for self-regulation, wherever feasible (cf. p.201); so does deep
green theory, which is one reasons why it aims to dispose of standing armies, as an important
preliminary to the withering away of states themselves (military forces being major props of
state control and power, and often maintained primarily for internal state security). Taoism has
no project for ending the era of wars; deep-green theory does. That project involves an
elimination of standing armies, too often poised for fighting or political interference.
A recommended route to end war consists in progressive scaling down: reduction of the
means and manpower. The initial stages are well-known, and include
• elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weaponry, and
• force reduction. It can hardly be pretended that the Earth's states have managed to proceed
very far on even this complex of stages. The next stage consists in
• contraction to defensive capacities only, and the final stage consists in
• elimination of remaining military defensive forces, and adoption, so far as required, of social
defence practices. The complete route thus involves complete demilitarisation.
Reasons why deep-green aims to proceed the full distance are readily grasped by
considering the environmental shallowness of an otherwise cogent traditional case for the sharp
curtailment of wars and militarism. The traditional Western case against wars has been
primarily along two dimensions: social and moral. Wars are highly disruptive of the social
fabric; wars may be unjust. From these joint features, it was argued that wars should be a
matter of last resort, to be fought to ensure peace. It was argued further that only just wars
should be fought. Just wars were rare objects. But as there was little evidence of the decline
and fall of wars, much effort was expended, more practically and unsuccessfully, upon
endeavouring to improve the calibre of wars, and more theoretically, upon trying to characterize
just war satisfactorily, or rather to bend the notion in an effort to approximate the gory unjust
facts.
11
Progress was long hindered, furthermore, because there was always a rival positive
perspective on wars, which encouraged the exaltation of wars and military feats. It also
facilitated the transfer of the favourable image of war to other problem areas, whence the long
and apparently successful war against Nature (but the short-term successes are turning into
long-term problems), the short and unsuccessful war against Poverty, and so on. Behind all
this is the complex idea of war as rejuvenating, even cleansing, like fire; of war as heroic, and
glorious, of war as the supreme testing ground of men. These pictures of war - finally
shattered by the first World War (where even the poets began to tell of horrors and atrocities)
and subsequent technological wars — though no longer in ascendency, have by no means
vanished. The notion of war as rejuvenating a flagging economy persists, along with the
practice of keeping capitalism running smoothly by integrating substantial military components
into the industrial engine.
With the development of highly technological wars - the celebrated development of the
dirty industrial age is substantially military - the traditional negative case has grown in strength.
Wars have become much more damaging, with the potential for much more that is significantly
worse, and the possibility of a just war has correspondingly contracted, virtually to zero. The
opposition to war has likewise grown, but more than correspondingly with the rise of women
in social and political influence. Wars have almost always and everywhere been Men's affairs;
likewise conquest.
Deep-green theory accepts much of the traditional negative case, but would further
strengthen it. For example, the stricture against unjust wars, as out and out immoral, can be
strengthened, through the following syllogism:
All wars should be fully just wars.
Modem wars cannot be fully just wars.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
A fully just war is not merely a just war, but a war those just character can be reliably forecast
in advance. A modern war is of course a war that deploys modern technology, at least that
available this century.
The evidential basis for the second premiss derives from much
information that collateral damage, damage to innocent bystanders and involved citizens is
always likely and cannot be excluded. Such wars are always liable to violate uncontroversial
requirements for a just war, even if they are purely “conventional” wars, not throwing radiation
or chemical or biological weapons around.
From a contemporary viewpoint the traditional doctrine of a just war, really of a just
defensive war, is seriously out of date. The reasons for this reach wider than the new features
introduced by modem technological wars and the character of modern civilization, with its giant
cities littered with dangerous and vulnerable military targets. They have also to do with the
chauvinism of the justice proposed, which is shallow human justice, not natural or
environmental justice. There is no consideration of justice to other creatures or to the Earth (cf
12
Naess p.160). Two troubles are really intertwined here: conceptual difficulties with too narrow
a notion of justice, and ideological difficulties with too narrow a vision of what is an object of
value, of what counts.
The deep-green case against war adds to the traditional case a further dimension,
neglected until very recently: the environmental dimension. It has suddenly been seen that wars
are typically environmental atrocities.
Earlier, of course, “environments” were simply
backgrounds, backdrops in paintings and plays, to the real drama.
Contemporary technological wars tend to be not merely social tragedies but environmental
ones as well. There is a doctrine of just war, but it is a human chauvinistic affair. There is no
similarly developed doctrine of an ecologically sound war, a deep ecological war. Unless any
such war were literally different from modern wars, that is from contemporary technological
wars, it would overstep permitted bounds. For such wars are characteristically ecological
disasters. Hardened military people, desensitized by a rigorous unethical training, feel even
less compunction about degrading or destroying environments or members of other species
than they do of maiming or killing civilians through “collateral” activity.
Matching the no-just-war syllogism is a no-sound-war syllogism:
All wars should be environmentally sound wars.
Modern wars cannot be environmentally sound.
Therefore, there should be no modern wars.
The argument for the second premiss has of course to be different. It looks to the information
accumulating on what wars do to natural and built environments. The Vietnam and Gulf wars
both inflicted immense damage on natural environments or what was left of them.
The environmental effects of war are not confined to direct and collateral damage. There
are indirect effects also. Thus, for instance, war also supplied the mechanism of, and the
technology for, modern environmental destruction: explosives, bulldozers from tanks, etc. As
well, training for war and engagement in war have much fostered, along with attitudes that
make for social callousness or ruthlessness, those that contribute to environmental insensitivity
and cruelty.
3. Puzzles about Taoist strategy and its critiques of technology and violence
‘It is surprising how much of the Lao Tzu is devoted to military strategy’. Which
strategies? Surprise, above all. But why such strategies? ‘Do they not contradict the Taoists’
strong opposition to the use of force’ (Chan p.222), the implied commitment to quietism?
Briefly, Taoism is not committed to quietism, and while certainly antagonistic to violence, does
not oppose certain uses of force (only really ///-forcing, as will be explained). Even so, the
emphasis on military strategy remains puzzling.
The strategies, many of them relevant to social defence, include
• seriousness, not ‘making light of the enemy’ (p.222)
13
• surprise, and nonvisibility (p.201).
The defensive strategy involves guerilla tactics:
marching without formation, holding weapons without seeming to have them, confronting
enemies without seeming to meet them (p.222). But even in times of peace, ‘smart weapons of
the state should not be displayed to the people’ (p.164). Such recommendations helped to fuel
the charge of deviousness lodged against Lao Tzu. But look at part of the reason for concealing
smart weapons: ‘The more smart weapons the people have, the more troubled the state will be’
(p.201). Smart weapons are carried in corrupt states, where the rich engage in conspicuous
consumption and the people are suppressed, not where Tao is practiced (LT p.194).
• advance from weakness, flexibility but firmness. Weakness is the principle of life and will
overcome strength (LT p.164, p.233).
• coolness and non-competition (LT p.233, p.164). Like these, most of the general strategies
are standard Taoist practices simply applied to military conduct. For these standard practices
the charge of deviousness looks feeble.
The response applies more generally to other allegedly devious political strategies. For
the strategies are but application of Taoist principles and techniques to warfare, politics and
elsewhere. Nothing excludes application of these techniques to what are accounted, in general,
unnecessary evils (which must sometimes, on other Taoist grounds, be countered). Nor, to
meet the main criticism, need any deceit or deviousness be involved; nor is it. In particular, the
legalist tactic, Tn order to grasp, it is necessary first to give’ (LT p.164), is cited as involving
‘an element of deceit’ ‘undeniably’, and ‘worse’ it is ‘morally questionable’ (Chan p.17). But
in order for me to grasp your hand in a normal handshake, it is necessary first for me to give
my hand. There is no deceit here, nothing morally questionable. All the tactics permit of
benign construals, of a Taoist kind. Consider, for instance, Tn order to contract, it is necessary
first to expand’ (LT p.164). In order to bend a copper pipe to the intended angle, it is better to
bend it first a little further than required. The transformation of water to ice (both favoured
natural items for symbolic purposes: natural processes which may look devious!) neatly
illustrates the Taoist principle (which is however hardly necessary), and shows softness and
weakness turned hardness and strength.
The Taoist critique of militarism is as much a critique of technology as of war. Sharp
weapons, ‘smart weapons’ as we might now say, come in for much critical attention, as we
have already noticed. Only in corrupt and degenerate states are they displayed or flaunted
(p.194, p.164); in deep-green regions smart weapons of state’ would not be retained
unexhibited. The people will not have them for they mean trouble (p.201); for similar reasons
deep-green regions will be free of them. So, it seems, will ideal Taoist regions: ‘Even if there
are arrows and weapons, none will display them’ (LT p.238). Much technology, military and
other, is excluded under the Taoist edict against violence (a further facet of the military-practices
14
paradox).5
The powerful critique of militarism in the Tao-te Ching is coupled with strong opposition
to violence. Some of the linkage is evident enough. Militarism as practised represents an
ultimate form of state (or party) violence. A basic theme is that violent practices will come to an
unnatural end, and accordingly to a non-Taoist end (generalising LT p.176). While force may
occur in spectacular, but satisfactory, natural forms, force is duly distinguished from violence.
To force the growth of life means ill omen.
For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint means violence
(LT p. 197).
One who follows Tao does not apply dominating force, which usually has had results bringing
requital (p.152). Dominating force, like power, is in general castigated, under doctrine of wu-
wei, no forced actions, no violence. To force natural growth is deviant, destroying harmony.
To stop natural growth is deviant. But there is a significant difference between force and
violence. To intentionally employ destructive force is to do violence. To so force things is
condemned. To remain in harmony with things one does not so force things or practice
violence. There is a non-interference principle at work, which also indicates types of non
interference that are excluded.
However Taoism does not always get the distinction between force and violence quite
5
Under contemporary technology and technological arrangements, such as the storage of
quantities of oil and nuclear and chemical materials in great cities, wars have assumed new and
very destructive dimensions, to the point of being utterly irresponsible.
A different approach to technology, as to war, is now mandatory. These are no longer things
that can in principle be nicely confined and need not touch parties outside the fray. An
important part of ending wars, “winning the war against wars”, is removing the technology of
war, above all from irresponsible state power.
As for which technology to try to jettison and which to try to retain or improve, it is not so
difficult to indicate, provided evaluative terminology is not outlawed. What is wanted is
technology that is good in its place, what should be excluded is technology that is indifferent
or bad or potentially so. Technology to be justified has to do something worthwhile, it has
to address identifiable respectable needs. That is why merely indifferent technology is out;
there is no virtue in technology for technology's sake, as it is a mere means technique. It is
because of the crucial evaluative component in choice of technology that appropriateness,
itself evaluative, comes closer to encapsulating the criterion than other recent efforts. Size,
such as smallness, or intermediateness, are not what matter, though modest and not excessive
technologies are likely to fare better in satisfying appropriateness. In simpler societies, small
technology is of course more appropriate; for that is what is good there. From known criteria
for what is good these other features for locally appropriate technology can be read off:
reliability, esp. in maintenance, functioning well and safely under the expected range of
operating conditions (which may be difficult), ease of repair, capital cheapness and repair
inexpensiveness, environmental benignness, and meeting sound social needs.
15
right. ‘Vital force without restraint’, intentionally excessive force, is only part of what counts
as violence, which is more generally force which violates, i.e. transgresses, descrecrates,
profanes, injures, outrages, etc. It is thus a negatively connoted force, an evil force in some
specified intentional respect. There is a tendency for Taoist commentators, not Taoists, to
regard Taoism as condemning all uses, or even occurrences, of force, but this is not so. Rather
intentional ill-forcing is what is castigated, what is deviant. Thus Taoism does not exclude a
range of defensive practices, which make satisfactory use of natural forces, like letting the
machines of war industry stop.
Those who would abolish war and its machinery, substituting for it nonwarlike and
ideally nonviolent methods, technology, and strategies, have been confronted not merely with
much sub-rational abuse but with plenty of criticism and even some paradoxes. Here is a recent
paradox concerning war and nonviolence:
• War must be abolished. One reason is simply economic. We can no longer afford it, and
the opportunity costs are enormous. Along with other extraordinarily wasteful activities, it is an
anachronism.
• Doing so cannot be accomplished without violence, i.e. in effect, given the types of violence
involved, without what amounts to war. According to a fuller version of this premiss, the
process of abolishing a war would only be achieved through a revolution so profound that it
could not succeed without extensive and extreme violence, amounting to (civil) war.
° But then war cannot be abolished without war.
Therefore, war which must be abolished cannot be abolished.6
This “paradox” has been compared with the Liar paradox, but the parallel does not persist far.
For this paradox does not involve self-referential features, and is easily broken, as follows. Let
the “last war” be not the last standard war but the revolution abolishing war. Then, given that
the revolution is successful, war will be abolished therewith, i.e. with that last war. There need
be no regress, given again a successful outcome. All the premisses stand intact, but the
conclusion, following the ‘therefore’ is a nonsequitur. However, while the dissolution of the
argument is accordingly logically fine, the route is repugnant. Standard pacifism challenges the
6
Brian Medlin, who forcefully propounded this puzzle, set other analogous puzzles alongside it
- designed to reveal deep difficulties in contemporary political, and especially alternative,
thought. Another puzzle, concerning liberty and repression in the context of capitalism,
revolved around the following inconsistent triad:
• capitalism must be removed, but liberty retained.
• capitalism cannot be removed without repression.
• repression is antithetical to liberty.
The puzzle is resolved as with the analogous puzzle of abolishing. Let the “last capitalist”
action before the days of liberty be the repressive but liberating revolution overthrowing
capitalism.
16
second premiss.
4. Standard and moral pacifism.
Although Taoism is strongly opposed to war, and much in favour of peace - and
accordingly by prevailing standards a substantially pacific position - it is not (nowhere in the
central texts) committed to pacifism in usual senses, for two different reasons:• It is not, by contrast with pacifism, opposed to all types of warfare, for example smart
defensive wars.
• It eschews deontology in terms of which moral pacifism is commonly stated, for instance
through the watershed thesis
P2.
It is morally wrong to use violence.
By contrast with Taoism, deep environmentalism does not avoid deontic claims, and is
committed in principle to nonviolent technologies and ways and to pacifistic principles.
Moreover, certain forms of deep environmentalism are completely committed to pacifism,
notably European forms. Is deep green?
There is heavy contemporary opposition to pacifism, as there also was to Taoism in the
warring times when Taoism was first being promulgated. Many of the central institutions of
contemporary life are intricated in coercion, violence and war.
The most prominent
contemporary institutions, states, are premissed on these elements of damaging force; they
claim entitlement to use them widely, and even claim a certain territorial monopoly on their use.
As a result they are having constantly to engage in them in attempt to maintain that monopoly.
They are certainly the main perpetrators of wars, and of violence. They are indeed inured to
wars, are in constant preparation for wars, yet propound dialectial (and normally dishonest and
cynical) doctrines of peace through war (for a recent example see the appendix).
Unremarkably then, the extensive propagandistic machinery of state has invested heavily
in “justificatory” exercises in favour of controlled use, its own use, of destructive force, and
continues to inveigh against pacifism. Because a routine trick in this sophistical repetoire
consists in conflating pacifism with extreme, naive and inplausible, forms, an inevitable and
important early task commits in unscrambling senses of ‘pacifism’. Semantical skulduggery
can be thwarted in this way.
Pacifism, as explained by English dictionaries, invariably concerns wars and warfare, and
contains two components, negative and, elaborating on that, positive:- The negative component
is, in Amauld's word, anti-War-ism, opposition (in ways to be further specified) to all forms of
warfare (see OED). The positive component supplies alternative ways of settling disputes (what
it is supposed that wars with some semblance of justification involve), such as negotiation,
arbitration,... - and, adding to too narrow dictionary accounts - sanctions, substitutions (e.g.
of sporting events, operatic contests, cooperative ventures),... . In brief standard pacifism is
opposition to all warfare and resolution of potential wars by other nonmilitary means.
17
Plainly the opposition to warfare, like the sanctions and so on, cannot itself be military
(using soldiers and other devices of war), on pain of some incoherence. But otherwise the
ways of opposition can be many and various: they can certainly be active, as with nonviolent
demonstrations, resistance movements, and so forth, and they may also be devious (e.g.
turning the forces of war upon themselves so they are neutralised). It quickly becomes evident,
then, that some of the dictionaries offer but loaded definitions which, by restricting the negative
components, reduce the initial appeal and plausibility of pacifism. Consider the Concise
English definition of the negative component: ‘the doctrine of non-resistance to hostilities and
of total non-co-operation with any form of warfare’. Thereby excluded are forms of pacifism
which offer active and plausible alternatives to warfare such as social defence. The Concise
English tends to force pacifism into what the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its final item:
‘often, with depreciatory implication, the advocacy of peace at any price’, ‘in any
circumstance’. Pacifism can easily resist being forced into these sorts of circumstances: it has
many resources, as an extensive series of texts on alternatives to war, such as negotiation, non
violent action and social defence, from Taoism to contemporary environmentalism attest.
Academic philosophers have much advanced the semantical strategy of some dictionaries,
of rendering pacifism more difficult from the very outset by narrow and biassed definitions.
They have stretched the term from its restricted setting of warfare, confined to state and
organised gang violence, to cover all forms of violence, from state and interstate to, what is
very different, personal and interpersonal violence. Call the resulting considerably stretched
notion of pacifism, according to which it is morally wrong to use violence, according to which
P2 holds, stretched pacifism.^ While stretched pacifism certainly includes standard pacifism
(unless the notions of war and warfare are tampered with), the converse is very far from being
the case. A pacifist is in no way committed to stretched pacifism, which is a much more
problematic and difficult position than standard pacifism. There are several, substantially
different reasons for this, which will be picked up seriatim.
Stretched pacifism, also misleadingly called moral pacifism, has looked a very easy
critical target to moral philosophers. Many the effusive philosopher who, upon sighting such a
target, has charged, whooping such rhetoric as “incoherent”, “inconsistent”, “insensitive”,
“fanatical”. However, with improved logical technology now available for accommodating and
treating moral dilemmas, it is no great feat to resist such attacks, in the fashion of previous
investigations (see esp. Al, also MD). A main aim was to demonstrate that stretched pacifism
was not so stupid as it was made out to be or appeared to be to these inured to present dominant
violent ways. So far from being stupid, it is viable. In future gentler times stretched pacifism
7
In Al this notion was contrasted with standard pacifism as comprehensive pacifism:
overcomprehensive might have been better.
18
could even be realised for whole communities of creatures (as some genuinely Christian sects
envisaged); whence it will finally be seen to be feasible not merely for sages and supermen, and
many ordinary women, but much more extensively.
The method of philosophical accommodation was through moral dilemmas. The sort of
moral dilemma that stretched pacifism can induce derives as follows. On the one side stands
the theme P2, Wv, in convenient symbols, for Wrong V-ing, violencing. Now this implies to
WB, where B presents a case of of violence. On the other side, particular circumstances
develop which lead to W ~B, because ~B would produce in the circumstances considerable
wrong, for instance extensive violence, mass murder, etc. One stock example from the
literature concerns calling off the firing squad about to shoot several captives if the pacifist
shoots one of them (it is elaborated in Al p.13). Interestingly, another stock example from the
literature concerns standard pacifism (it can also be presented in terms of patriotism; for details
of both see MD p.10).
Resolution of intractable moral dilemmas is, where it is required, situational. The agent
decides in the situation, within the fix, what to do. There are many ways in which such
decision making can proceed, less rational, such as those applying chance or involving bad
faith, or more rational, such as those applying consequentialist decision theory (for details see
MD, pp.32-9). A decision theory taking account of all that should be included will not however
be purely consequential. It would also take account of relevant motivation.
This defence and rehabilitation of moral pacifism has been challenged, in particular by
Smith (hereafter JWS). JWS claims the defence offered is a ‘failure because it trivializes
pacifism’ (p. 153 twice). The rehabilitation
trivializes pacifism because it entails that pacifism doesn't substantially differ
from a form of activism which holds that while violence is always wrong
one is sometimes justified on consequentialist grounds for preferring violent
acts, if these acts are lesser evils than any other real alternatives. This is the
commonsense position which most people hold - yet - pacifism after all was
supposed to be radical moral doctrine - (p.153 rearranged).8
Part of the criticism is, then, not so much that pacifism is trivialized - JWS “activism” is
hardly trivial - as that pacifism is popularised, deflated from a radical position to the
commonsense position most people hold (p.154 also). Yet not a shred of evidence is adduced
that JWS activism is such a populist position. Available evidence, for example from peace
movements and oppositional opinion polls, suggests the very opposite: that, for instance, most
people support state-justified conventional wars with the military violence they incur, and
8
JWS now informs me that he has changed his position. Whether the move effects his
criticism, I don't know.
19
accordingly do not hold that violence is always wrong. From such a commonsense angle,
pacifism with its condemnation of conventional wars and the violence they involve remains a
radical doctrine.
As regards wars and other violence-incurring social authorities, contemporary pacificism
is, as previous explained (e.g. Al p.3), a form of activism. Pacifism does not imply utter
pacifity, but may actively involve social defence, resistance and so on. However a certain level
of misrepresentation enters into the JWS challenge in the details of what forms of activism
pacifism may include. That misrepresentation begins in the second clause concerning what is
said to be sometimes justified. For the situational procedure where dilemmas arise will not
generally be consequential applying a principle of lesser evil. In dilemmatic situations such
principles are suspended, and such a principle is in any case unacceptable to moral pacifists. A
small amount of violence may be less bad in its consequences than verbal offence, but a
principled pacifist will choose the slightly greater evil where other obligations do not exclude it.
A more serious distortion occurs in JWS's effort to force procedures in dilemma
situations into purely consequentialist form. In fact consequential decision theory was
deployed as a model only for how to proceed rationally in a situational setting where deontic
procedures were suspended (see MD p.38). What was said, still misleadingly retrospective
vision reveals, was this: ‘what is done is a very consequentialist thing’ (Al p.13), not ‘one acts
in a consequentialist fashion to do the sufficiently good thing in the circumstances’ (JWS
P-152). Situationally other procedures than those resembling orthodox rational decision
making (modified from maximizing to satisizing objectives) may be adopted (MD p.38).
Further the orthodox consequentialist theory is inadequate because it leaves out, or tries to
reduce to consequences, nonconsequential elements, notably motives. It is not difficult, in
principle (in advance of attempted consequentialization of motives), to design situations where
motives, such as integrity or maintaining faith, enter to yield outcomes upsetting consequential
calculations. More elaborate decision making procedures than those of consequentialism,
sometimes at variance with consequentialism, are thus presupposed.
A further part of JWS's criticism accordingly goes by the board, the alleged appeal ‘to
“second best” consequentialist considerations,... already explicitly condemned’ (p.154). What
was condemned was stock universal consequentialism, ‘that only consequentialist
considerations carry argumentative weight’ (quoted on p.152), so undercutting other deontic
principles, such as those of pacifism. It was not claimed, what is utterly different, that
consequentialist considerations can nowhere enter into deliberation and decision making. The
conclusion JWS arrives at is therefore substantially astray.
After criticising modern moral philosophy for its reliance upon
consequentialist modes of thought, it is surprising, and inconsistent, to find
... [reliance] upon such modes of thought to escape logical difficulties raised
by moral dilemmas facing ... pacifis[m] (p.152)
20
There is no inconsistency. JWS has confused universal with particular. As well he has
wrongly contracted all situational decision making to consequentialist modes.
There is a third part to the criticism, that the defence is too easy; the ‘strategy will allow
too much violence to be (perpetrated and) justified to suit the tastes of any real pacifist’ (p. 153).
This another part of the so-called trivialization, this time however dilution rather than
populatization, weakening the moral stand against violence. This third contention is premissed
on a mistake: that one can ‘justify on consequentialist grounds any number of violent acts,
providing that such acts are lesser evils than other real alternatives facing social agents’ (p.153).
Moral pacifism offers no such licence; allowing such consequentialism to take over was never
part of the position. The slide to such consequentialism is made on the strength of a similarly
erroneous example. The potential victim of an aspiring rapist ‘is supposed to flee or wriggle
free if possible. But it is easy to consequentially justify the use of violence by the woman to
prevent herself from being raped’ (p.153 italics added). In the example so far described there is
no dilemma, and no such easy resort to consequentially ‘justified’ violence.
What allows too much violence is the lesser evil JWS assumes is easily consequentially
justified; for example that the woman is entitled to inflict, and escalate, violence so long as it
remains ‘a lesser evil than the violence of attempted rape’ (p. 153). Since she may thereby
inflict quite unreasonable damage (esp. if she is a Kung Fu expert), the result is inconsistent
with ‘the basic principle of self-defence’ which JWS earlier adduced according to which what is
‘appropriate, in response is only that level of force necessary to defend oneself against the
threat’ (p.150). There is evidence in JWS's work of some enthusiasm for levels of violence
which exceed his ‘basic principle’, his appeal to ‘lesser evil’ generates some instances. The
‘basic principle’, itself fraught with difficulties (cf. the contorted discussion of what weapons
are appropriate in response to what attacks, p.150), still exceeds what stretched pacifism would
enjoin; for instance, it may not be appropriate to respond with force. But in a technical sense
stretched pacifism is compatible with the ‘basic principle’, since it only imposes the upper
bound on level of force.
As for easiness, moral pacifism is not an easy position to live by, or to justify. Removing
objections to pacifism is one thing; solidifying a positive case for it is quite another, and so far
hardly conclusive (as Al tried to explain, pp 29-31). Stretched pacifism was advanced,
hypothesized to put it more precisely, as a still viable option. It was not presented as a morally
compulsory position, or, for that matter, as one that this defender adhered to or affirmed.
To reiterate, while a cumulative case can be made for stetched pacifism as principled non
violence, that case was not conclusive, and is hard to improve. For, further, some serious
difficulties standing in the way of stretched pacifism were assembled, the most important of
which derives from the extent of violence apparent in transactions within the natural world.
Simply consider the practices of carnivores, essential to their natural way of life. In order to
meet their life needs for sustenance, these creatures do, and are often obliged to, engage
21
routinely in violent activity. While it can no doubt be argued, as some vegetarians may do, that
the natural order is an immoral order, and that remaining carnivores should be converted to
vegetarianism as rapidly as proves possible (in the way domestic dogs are converted to dog
biscuits), the difficulties with such proposals are immense. The task envisaged is gigantic, and
beyond human capacities - even if it were desirable. For there are millions of species to be
somehow converted to proper vegetarianism. Then there are millions of other species to be
converted to proper and well regulated contraceptive practices, else their numbers will get out of
hand (uncontrollably) with predation removed. Given humans lack of success in limiting their
own excessive numbers, such regulation appears entirely remote. Aside however from the
practical difficulties, is such a fully vegetarian order, with evolution further derailed, a desirable
improvement on the natural order? Is it morally obligatory? It is certainly not obligatory, as
alternative systems of morality in harmony with the prevailing natural order are feasible. Nor is
it desirable, for (to appeal to such alternative value systems) the natural order is more or less in
order as it is. Full vegetarianization would only reduce its value, vastly.
More generally, a defensible ethical framework should not, it would be rightly contended,
be right out of step with the natural order of other creatures, decently depicted. Decent
depiction is important, for some features of the natural order, such as competition, combat and
predation, so far from escaping attention, have been grossly exaggerated and exploited. Thus,
for instance, the ludicrous picture of nature red in truth and claw, so beloved of descendents of
orthodox Victorians and of orthodox economists. However, even under decent depiction, the
“natural order” is often not benign. That appears to be enough to induce a supervenient moral
dilemma for any stretched pacifism which is coupled to a deep ethic (e.g. which does not
separate humans out from the natural order) and which eschews the desperate vegetarian route:
The natural order is not an immoral order
The natural order contains (regular) instances of violence.
Therefore, instances of violence are not immoral in apparent defiance of P2 Moreover, there are too many instances of violence, too regularly
occurring, for them all to be plausibly shunted into the moral dilemma category (and predatory
carnivores face no dilemmas). Raptors that practice violence every week are not immoral
(neither are they clearly moral; the category of morality only significantly extends so far).
The main trouble lies however with P2 (which needs some finer adjustment, as was
alrady indicated in Al). While P2 is alright in context, within a particular, perfectly viable,
ethical framework, designed for the usual human round, the conventional setting for ethical
theories, it stands in need of modification outside that setting. It is time to suggest the sort of
modification envisaged. Evidently P2 was addressed to moral agents. Which agents? Not to
carnivores that supply their own livelihood, nor really to morally degenerate humans, but to
22
peace-sensitive agents. With that semi-technical form, yet to be characterised, a suitably
modified
P2
results:
MP2. It is morally wrong, for a peace-sensitive agent, to use violence.9
To recover what amounts, in the previous discussive context, to P2, it suffices to add the
proposition that every human agent ought to be peace-sensitive. Much as that proposition has
to recommend it, it appears too ethically advanced for many modern humans; it sets too high a
moral standard to be taken as a serious guide to practice. It seems wise to settle presently for
something less demanding, such as that every advanced moral agent ought to be peace
sensitive. To put essentially the same proposition alternatively:
Stretched pacifism (as modified) is supererogatory. While it is perhaps too late to hope for
much moral progress in humans, it is pleasant to contemplate alternative futures where what is
supererogatory became obligatory, and widely practiced.
Richard Sylvan*
Appendix
I began drafting this essay at the time (January 17, midday Australian time) of the
American attacks upon Iraq. The optly named Prime Minister Hawke of Australia had just
made a statement to the nation-state, announcing (the) war. In this statement there was much
talk of peace. There was even - in what was effectively a declaration of war - reiteration of the
modern quest for ‘a new world order of peace’. Peace through war; so it rings out again and
again, through the centuries. ‘War must be for the sake of peace’ (Aristotle p.220). More than
two thousand years later, we have fought those wars to end all wars. But it is no use, Hawke
solemely pronounced, just talking about peace, and thinking about peace; we must work for
peace, fight for it - through war. Impeccable logic?
President Bush, supreme commander, convinced us with similar logic, speaking too with
many tongues. Of how he ‘preferred to think of peace, not war’. But now ‘only force will
prevail’, as ‘all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful solution are exhausted’. ‘What must be
done’ must be done, or will be anyway. With God on side with the US offensive (as well as
on the other side), it will go well. As it was said to have, though it achieved comparatively little
that other efforts may not have yielded more satisfactorily, and thought it may now have to
The generalization of P2, suggested in Al, to cover also the parallel situation of
environmental vandalism, can be similarly modified. The anti-vandolence principle becomes
MP2°. It is morally wrong, for a peace- and environmentally-sensitive agent, to use
vandolence.
Thank to David Bennett for joint contributions (from UT) and to JWS for opposition (in
JWS)
23
followed with another invasion. Nor have we ever managed to glimpse much of what is now
supposed, when we are no longer engaged, to come ‘out of the horror of war’: a ‘new world
order ... which governs the conflict of nations’; a ‘rule of law’, not war. How the one,
enforcable law, is achieved, unless backed by the the other, is not explained (Medlin's paradox
hits back). Similarly what we now hear from many militarists, as they rush to war, is that
‘peace is a great good, war a great evil’. But, for the most part, only the rhetoric has shifted;
practice has scarcely changed at all.
REFERENCES
W.-T. Chan, A Source Book on Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963;
referred to as ST.
W.-T. Chan (ed.), The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1963;
referred to as LT.
B. Martin, Uprooting War, Freedom Press, London, 1984.
A. Naess, Ecology, community and lifestyle, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK,
1989.
R.A. Rapaport, Pigs for the Ancestors : ritual in the ecology of a New Guinea People, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1967.
R. Routley, ‘War and Peace II. On the alleged inconsistency, moral insensitivity and fanaticism
of pacifism’, Discussion papers in environmental philosophy #9, Research School of
Social Science, Australian National University, 1983 (also in Inquiry ); referred to as Al.
R. Routley and V. Plumwood, ‘Moral dilemmas and the logic of deontic notions’, Discussion
papers in environmental philosophy #6, Research School of Social Science, Australian
National University, 1984 (also in Paraconsistent Logic)', referred to as MD.
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, Research
School Of Social Science, Australian National University, 1984.
G. Sharp, Social Power and Political Freedom, Porter Sargent, Boston, 1980.
J.W. Smith, The Worms at the Heart of Things , Public Relations Unit, Flinders University,
1989.
R. Sylvan, ‘War and Peace III, Australia's defence philosophy’, SoczaZ Philosophy, for Nuclear
Conference, University of Queensland, 1985.
R. Sylvan and D. Bennett, ‘Of Utopias, Tao and Deep Ecology’, Discussion papers in
environmental philosophy #19, Research School of Social Science, Australian National
University, 1990; referred to as UT.
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<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org/items/browse?search=Richard+Sylvan&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bjoiner%5D=and&advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=39&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=&range=&collection=&type=&user=&tags=&public=&featured=&exhibit=&geolocation-mapped=&geolocation-address=&geolocation-latitude=&geolocation-longitude=&geolocation-radius=10&submit_search=Search+for+items">Richard Sylvan</a>
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<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&pageSize=20&sortBy=score&sortDirection=Desc&searchQueryParams%5Brek_series%5D%5Bvalue%5D=Richard+Sylvan+Papers%2C+UQFL291&searchMode=advanced">Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291</a></span><span>,</span> Box 60, Item 1883
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<a href="https://antipodean-antinuclearism.org">Antipodean Antinuclearism: (Re)constructing Richard Routley/Sylvan's Nuclear Philosophy</a>
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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>.
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For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library.
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[12] leaves. 21.61 MB.
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Manuscript
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<a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:78f73ce">https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:78f73ce</a>
Australian National University Office
Australian National University Office > Far Bookshelf > Second Bay > Top Shelf > Pile 3
Box 59: Nuclear